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23592_VR4F2QJE_4

How does the author characterize the mood of the pre-launch location, prior to Phil's arrival?

Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Astounding Science Fiction December 1955. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. BREAKAWAY BY STANLEY GIMBLE Illustrated by Freas She surely got her wish ... but there was some question about getting what she wanted. Phil Conover pulled the zipper of his flight suit up the front of his long, thin body and came into the living room. His face, usually serious and quietly handsome, had an alive, excited look. And the faint lines around his dark, deep-set eyes were accentuated when he smiled at his wife. "All set, honey. How do I look in my monkey suit?" His wife was sitting stiffly on the flowered couch that was still not theirs completely. In her fingers she held a cigarette burned down too far. She said, "You look fine, Phil. You look just right." She managed a smile. Then she leaned forward and crushed the cigarette in the ash tray on the maple coffee table and took another from the pack. He came to her and touched his hands to her soft blond hair, raising her face until she was looking into his eyes. "You're the most beautiful girl I know. Did I ever tell you that?" "Yes, I think so. Yes, I'm sure you did," she said, finishing the ritual; but her voice broke, and she turned her head away. Phil sat beside her and put his arm around her small shoulders. He had stopped smiling. "Honey, look at me," he said. "It isn't going to be bad. Honestly it isn't. We know exactly how it will be. If anything could go wrong, they wouldn't be sending me; you know that. I told you that we've sent five un-manned ships up and everyone came back without a hitch." She turned, facing him. There were tears starting in the corners of her wide, brown eyes, and she brushed them away with her hand. "Phil, don't go. Please don't. They can send Sammy. Sammy doesn't have a wife. Can't he go? They'd understand, Phil. Please!" She was holding his arms tightly with her hands, and the color had drained from her cheeks. "Mary, you know I can't back out now. How could I? It's been three years. You know how much I've wanted to be the first man to go. Nothing would ever be right with me again if I didn't go. Please don't make it hard." He stopped talking and held her to him and stroked the back of her head. He could feel her shoulders shaking with quiet sobs. He released her and stood up. "I've got to get started, Mary. Will you come to the field with me?" "Yes, I'll come to say good-by." She paused and dropped her eyes. "Phil, if you go, I won't be here when you get back—if you get back. I won't be here because I won't be the wife of a space pilot for the rest of my life. It isn't the kind of life I bargained for. No matter how much I love you, I just couldn't take that, Phil. I'm sorry. I guess I'm not the noble sort of wife." She finished and took another cigarette from the pack on the coffee table and put it to her lips. Her hand was trembling as she touched the lighter to the end of the cigarette and drew deeply. Phil stood watching her, the excitement completely gone from his eyes. "I wish you had told me this a long time ago, Mary," Phil said. His voice was dry and low. "I didn't know you felt this way about it." "Yes, you did. I told you how I felt. I told you I could never be the wife of a space pilot. But I don't think I ever really believed it was possible—not until this morning when you said tonight was the take-off. It's so stupid to jeopardize everything we've got for a ridiculous dream!" He sat down on the edge of the couch and took her hands between his. "Mary, listen to me," he said. "It isn't a dream. It's real. There's nothing means anything more to me than you do—you know that. But no man ever had the chance to do what I'm going to do tonight—no man ever. If I backed out now for any reason, I'd never be able to look at the sky again. I'd be through." She looked at him without seeing him, and there was nothing at all in her eyes. "Let's go, if you're still going," she finally said. They drove through the streets of the small town with its small bungalows, each alike. There were no trees and very little grass. It was a new town, a government built town, and it had no personality yet. It existed only because of the huge ship standing poised in the take-off zone five miles away in the desert. Its future as a town rested with the ship, and the town seemed to feel the uncertainty of its future, seemed ready to stop existing as a town and to give itself back to the desert, if such was its destiny. Phil turned the car off the highway onto the rutted dirt road that led across the sand to the field where the ship waited. In the distance they could see the beams of the searchlights as they played across the take-off zone and swept along the top of the high wire fence stretching out of sight to right and left. At the gate they were stopped by the guard. He read Phil's pass, shined his flashlight in their faces, and then saluted. "Good luck, colonel," he said, and shook Phil's hand. "Thanks, sergeant. I'll be seeing you next week," Phil said, and smiled. They drove between the rows of wooden buildings that lined the field, and he parked near the low barbed fence ringing the take-off zone. He turned off the ignition, and sat quietly for a moment before lighting a cigarette. Then he looked at his wife. She was staring through the windshield at the rocket two hundred yards away. Its smooth polished surface gleamed in the spotlight glare, and it sloped up and up until the eye lost the tip against the stars. "She's beautiful, Mary. You've never seen her before, have you?" "No, I've never seen her before," she said. "Hadn't you better go?" Her voice was strained and she held her hands closed tightly in her lap. "Please go now, Phil," she said. He leaned toward her and touched her cheek. Then she was in his arms, her head buried against his shoulder. "Good-by, darling," she said. "Wish me luck, Mary?" he asked. "Yes, good luck, Phil," she said. He opened the car door and got out. The noise of men and machines scurrying around the ship broke the spell of the rocket waiting silently for flight. "Mary, I—" he began, and then turned and strode toward the administration building without looking back. Inside the building it was like a locker room before the big game. The tension stood alone, and each man had the same happy, excited look that Phil had worn earlier. When he came into the room, the noise and bustle stopped. They turned as one man toward him, and General Small came up to him and took his hand. "Hello, Phil. We were beginning to think you weren't coming. You all set, son?" "Yes, sir, I'm all set, I guess," Phil said. "I'd like you to meet the Secretary of Defense, Phil. He's over here by the radar." As they crossed the room, familiar faces smiled, and each man shook his hand or touched his arm. He saw Sammy, alone, by the coffee urn. Sammy waved to him, but he didn't smile. Phil wanted to talk to him, to say something; but there was nothing to be said now. Sammy's turn would come later. "Mr. Secretary," the general said, "this is Colonel Conover. He'll be the first man in history to see the other side of the Moon. Colonel—the Secretary of Defense." "How do you do, sir. I'm very proud to meet you," Phil said. "On the contrary, colonel. I'm very proud to meet you. I've been looking at that ship out there and wondering. I almost wish I were a young man again. I'd like to be going. It's a thrilling thought—man's first adventure into the universe. You're lighting a new dawn of history, colonel. It's a privilege few men have ever had; and those who have had it didn't realize it at the time. Good luck, and God be with you." "Thank you, sir. I'm aware of all you say. It frightens me a little." The general took Phil's arm and they walked to the briefing room. There were chairs set up for the scientists and Air Force officers directly connected with the take-off. They were seated now in a semicircle in front of a huge chart of the solar system. Phil took his seat, and the last minute briefing began. It was a routine he knew by heart. He had gone over and over it a thousand times, and he only half listened now. He kept thinking of Mary outside, alone by the fence. The voice of the briefing officer was a dull hum in his ears. "... And orbit at 18,000-mph. You will then accelerate for the breakaway to 24,900-mph for five minutes and then free-coast for 116 hours until—" Phil asked a few questions about weather and solar conditions. And then the session was done. They rose and looked at each other, the same unanswered questions on each man's face. There were forced smiles and handshakes. They were ready now. "Phil," the general said, and took him aside. "Sir?" "Phil, you're ... you feel all right, don't you, son?" "Yes, sir. I feel fine. Why?" "Phil, I've spent nearly every day with you for three years. I know you better than I know myself in many ways. And I've studied the psychologist's reports on you carefully. Maybe it's just nervousness, Phil, but I think there's something wrong. Is there?" "No, sir. There's nothing wrong," Phil said, but his voice didn't carry conviction. He reached for a cigarette. "Phil, if there is anything—anything at all—you know what it might mean. You've got to be in the best mental and physical condition of your life tonight. You know better than any man here what that means to our success. I think there is something more than just natural apprehension wrong with you. Want to tell me?" Outside, the take-off zone crawled with men and machines at the base of the rocket. For ten hours, the final check-outs had been in progress; and now the men were checking again, on their own time. The thing they had worked toward for six years was ready to happen, and each one felt that he was sending just a little bit of himself into the sky. Beyond the ring of lights and moving men, on the edge of the field, Mary stood. Her hands moved slowly over the top of the fence, twisting the barbs of wire. But her eyes were on the ship. And then they were ready. A small group of excited men came out from the administration building and moved forward. The check-out crews climbed into their machines and drove back outside the take-off zone. And, alone, one man climbed the steel ladder up the side of the rocket—ninety feet into the air. At the top he waved to the men on the ground and then disappeared through a small port. Mary waved to him. "Good-by," she said to herself, but the words stuck tight in her throat. The small group at the base of the ship turned and walked back to the fence. And for an eternity the great ship stood alone, waiting. Then, from deep inside, a rumble came, increasing in volume to a gigantic roar that shook the earth and tore at the ears. Slowly, the first manned rocket to the Moon lifted up and up to the sky. For a long time after the rocket had become a tiny speck of light in the heavens, she stood holding her face in her hands and crying softly to herself. And then she felt the touch of a hand on her arm. She turned. "Phil! Oh, Phil." She held tightly to him and repeated his name over and over. "They wouldn't let me go, Mary," he said finally. "The general would not let me go." She looked at him. His face was drawn tight, and there were tears on his cheeks. "Thank, God," she said. "It doesn't matter, darling. The only thing that matters is you didn't go." "You're right, Mary," he said. His voice was low—so low she could hardly hear him. "It doesn't matter. Nothing matters now." He stood with his hands at his sides, watching her. And then turned away and walked toward the car. THE END

Apprehensive

Monotonous

Frightening

Energized

23592_VR4F2QJE_5

How does Phil respond to Mary's concerns regarding the space mission?

Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Astounding Science Fiction December 1955. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. BREAKAWAY BY STANLEY GIMBLE Illustrated by Freas She surely got her wish ... but there was some question about getting what she wanted. Phil Conover pulled the zipper of his flight suit up the front of his long, thin body and came into the living room. His face, usually serious and quietly handsome, had an alive, excited look. And the faint lines around his dark, deep-set eyes were accentuated when he smiled at his wife. "All set, honey. How do I look in my monkey suit?" His wife was sitting stiffly on the flowered couch that was still not theirs completely. In her fingers she held a cigarette burned down too far. She said, "You look fine, Phil. You look just right." She managed a smile. Then she leaned forward and crushed the cigarette in the ash tray on the maple coffee table and took another from the pack. He came to her and touched his hands to her soft blond hair, raising her face until she was looking into his eyes. "You're the most beautiful girl I know. Did I ever tell you that?" "Yes, I think so. Yes, I'm sure you did," she said, finishing the ritual; but her voice broke, and she turned her head away. Phil sat beside her and put his arm around her small shoulders. He had stopped smiling. "Honey, look at me," he said. "It isn't going to be bad. Honestly it isn't. We know exactly how it will be. If anything could go wrong, they wouldn't be sending me; you know that. I told you that we've sent five un-manned ships up and everyone came back without a hitch." She turned, facing him. There were tears starting in the corners of her wide, brown eyes, and she brushed them away with her hand. "Phil, don't go. Please don't. They can send Sammy. Sammy doesn't have a wife. Can't he go? They'd understand, Phil. Please!" She was holding his arms tightly with her hands, and the color had drained from her cheeks. "Mary, you know I can't back out now. How could I? It's been three years. You know how much I've wanted to be the first man to go. Nothing would ever be right with me again if I didn't go. Please don't make it hard." He stopped talking and held her to him and stroked the back of her head. He could feel her shoulders shaking with quiet sobs. He released her and stood up. "I've got to get started, Mary. Will you come to the field with me?" "Yes, I'll come to say good-by." She paused and dropped her eyes. "Phil, if you go, I won't be here when you get back—if you get back. I won't be here because I won't be the wife of a space pilot for the rest of my life. It isn't the kind of life I bargained for. No matter how much I love you, I just couldn't take that, Phil. I'm sorry. I guess I'm not the noble sort of wife." She finished and took another cigarette from the pack on the coffee table and put it to her lips. Her hand was trembling as she touched the lighter to the end of the cigarette and drew deeply. Phil stood watching her, the excitement completely gone from his eyes. "I wish you had told me this a long time ago, Mary," Phil said. His voice was dry and low. "I didn't know you felt this way about it." "Yes, you did. I told you how I felt. I told you I could never be the wife of a space pilot. But I don't think I ever really believed it was possible—not until this morning when you said tonight was the take-off. It's so stupid to jeopardize everything we've got for a ridiculous dream!" He sat down on the edge of the couch and took her hands between his. "Mary, listen to me," he said. "It isn't a dream. It's real. There's nothing means anything more to me than you do—you know that. But no man ever had the chance to do what I'm going to do tonight—no man ever. If I backed out now for any reason, I'd never be able to look at the sky again. I'd be through." She looked at him without seeing him, and there was nothing at all in her eyes. "Let's go, if you're still going," she finally said. They drove through the streets of the small town with its small bungalows, each alike. There were no trees and very little grass. It was a new town, a government built town, and it had no personality yet. It existed only because of the huge ship standing poised in the take-off zone five miles away in the desert. Its future as a town rested with the ship, and the town seemed to feel the uncertainty of its future, seemed ready to stop existing as a town and to give itself back to the desert, if such was its destiny. Phil turned the car off the highway onto the rutted dirt road that led across the sand to the field where the ship waited. In the distance they could see the beams of the searchlights as they played across the take-off zone and swept along the top of the high wire fence stretching out of sight to right and left. At the gate they were stopped by the guard. He read Phil's pass, shined his flashlight in their faces, and then saluted. "Good luck, colonel," he said, and shook Phil's hand. "Thanks, sergeant. I'll be seeing you next week," Phil said, and smiled. They drove between the rows of wooden buildings that lined the field, and he parked near the low barbed fence ringing the take-off zone. He turned off the ignition, and sat quietly for a moment before lighting a cigarette. Then he looked at his wife. She was staring through the windshield at the rocket two hundred yards away. Its smooth polished surface gleamed in the spotlight glare, and it sloped up and up until the eye lost the tip against the stars. "She's beautiful, Mary. You've never seen her before, have you?" "No, I've never seen her before," she said. "Hadn't you better go?" Her voice was strained and she held her hands closed tightly in her lap. "Please go now, Phil," she said. He leaned toward her and touched her cheek. Then she was in his arms, her head buried against his shoulder. "Good-by, darling," she said. "Wish me luck, Mary?" he asked. "Yes, good luck, Phil," she said. He opened the car door and got out. The noise of men and machines scurrying around the ship broke the spell of the rocket waiting silently for flight. "Mary, I—" he began, and then turned and strode toward the administration building without looking back. Inside the building it was like a locker room before the big game. The tension stood alone, and each man had the same happy, excited look that Phil had worn earlier. When he came into the room, the noise and bustle stopped. They turned as one man toward him, and General Small came up to him and took his hand. "Hello, Phil. We were beginning to think you weren't coming. You all set, son?" "Yes, sir, I'm all set, I guess," Phil said. "I'd like you to meet the Secretary of Defense, Phil. He's over here by the radar." As they crossed the room, familiar faces smiled, and each man shook his hand or touched his arm. He saw Sammy, alone, by the coffee urn. Sammy waved to him, but he didn't smile. Phil wanted to talk to him, to say something; but there was nothing to be said now. Sammy's turn would come later. "Mr. Secretary," the general said, "this is Colonel Conover. He'll be the first man in history to see the other side of the Moon. Colonel—the Secretary of Defense." "How do you do, sir. I'm very proud to meet you," Phil said. "On the contrary, colonel. I'm very proud to meet you. I've been looking at that ship out there and wondering. I almost wish I were a young man again. I'd like to be going. It's a thrilling thought—man's first adventure into the universe. You're lighting a new dawn of history, colonel. It's a privilege few men have ever had; and those who have had it didn't realize it at the time. Good luck, and God be with you." "Thank you, sir. I'm aware of all you say. It frightens me a little." The general took Phil's arm and they walked to the briefing room. There were chairs set up for the scientists and Air Force officers directly connected with the take-off. They were seated now in a semicircle in front of a huge chart of the solar system. Phil took his seat, and the last minute briefing began. It was a routine he knew by heart. He had gone over and over it a thousand times, and he only half listened now. He kept thinking of Mary outside, alone by the fence. The voice of the briefing officer was a dull hum in his ears. "... And orbit at 18,000-mph. You will then accelerate for the breakaway to 24,900-mph for five minutes and then free-coast for 116 hours until—" Phil asked a few questions about weather and solar conditions. And then the session was done. They rose and looked at each other, the same unanswered questions on each man's face. There were forced smiles and handshakes. They were ready now. "Phil," the general said, and took him aside. "Sir?" "Phil, you're ... you feel all right, don't you, son?" "Yes, sir. I feel fine. Why?" "Phil, I've spent nearly every day with you for three years. I know you better than I know myself in many ways. And I've studied the psychologist's reports on you carefully. Maybe it's just nervousness, Phil, but I think there's something wrong. Is there?" "No, sir. There's nothing wrong," Phil said, but his voice didn't carry conviction. He reached for a cigarette. "Phil, if there is anything—anything at all—you know what it might mean. You've got to be in the best mental and physical condition of your life tonight. You know better than any man here what that means to our success. I think there is something more than just natural apprehension wrong with you. Want to tell me?" Outside, the take-off zone crawled with men and machines at the base of the rocket. For ten hours, the final check-outs had been in progress; and now the men were checking again, on their own time. The thing they had worked toward for six years was ready to happen, and each one felt that he was sending just a little bit of himself into the sky. Beyond the ring of lights and moving men, on the edge of the field, Mary stood. Her hands moved slowly over the top of the fence, twisting the barbs of wire. But her eyes were on the ship. And then they were ready. A small group of excited men came out from the administration building and moved forward. The check-out crews climbed into their machines and drove back outside the take-off zone. And, alone, one man climbed the steel ladder up the side of the rocket—ninety feet into the air. At the top he waved to the men on the ground and then disappeared through a small port. Mary waved to him. "Good-by," she said to herself, but the words stuck tight in her throat. The small group at the base of the ship turned and walked back to the fence. And for an eternity the great ship stood alone, waiting. Then, from deep inside, a rumble came, increasing in volume to a gigantic roar that shook the earth and tore at the ears. Slowly, the first manned rocket to the Moon lifted up and up to the sky. For a long time after the rocket had become a tiny speck of light in the heavens, she stood holding her face in her hands and crying softly to herself. And then she felt the touch of a hand on her arm. She turned. "Phil! Oh, Phil." She held tightly to him and repeated his name over and over. "They wouldn't let me go, Mary," he said finally. "The general would not let me go." She looked at him. His face was drawn tight, and there were tears on his cheeks. "Thank, God," she said. "It doesn't matter, darling. The only thing that matters is you didn't go." "You're right, Mary," he said. His voice was low—so low she could hardly hear him. "It doesn't matter. Nothing matters now." He stood with his hands at his sides, watching her. And then turned away and walked toward the car. THE END

He strives to communicate that he should not have to choose between his relationship and his lifelong passion

He lovingly teases her about her emotions, but ultimately them as unfounded and hyperbolic

He tries to present reassuring evidence and be honest about his fears if he is not allowed to fulfill the mission

He insists that she trusts in his competency and readiness for the mission at hand

23592_VR4F2QJE_6

What is most ironic about the conclusion of the story?

Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Astounding Science Fiction December 1955. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. BREAKAWAY BY STANLEY GIMBLE Illustrated by Freas She surely got her wish ... but there was some question about getting what she wanted. Phil Conover pulled the zipper of his flight suit up the front of his long, thin body and came into the living room. His face, usually serious and quietly handsome, had an alive, excited look. And the faint lines around his dark, deep-set eyes were accentuated when he smiled at his wife. "All set, honey. How do I look in my monkey suit?" His wife was sitting stiffly on the flowered couch that was still not theirs completely. In her fingers she held a cigarette burned down too far. She said, "You look fine, Phil. You look just right." She managed a smile. Then she leaned forward and crushed the cigarette in the ash tray on the maple coffee table and took another from the pack. He came to her and touched his hands to her soft blond hair, raising her face until she was looking into his eyes. "You're the most beautiful girl I know. Did I ever tell you that?" "Yes, I think so. Yes, I'm sure you did," she said, finishing the ritual; but her voice broke, and she turned her head away. Phil sat beside her and put his arm around her small shoulders. He had stopped smiling. "Honey, look at me," he said. "It isn't going to be bad. Honestly it isn't. We know exactly how it will be. If anything could go wrong, they wouldn't be sending me; you know that. I told you that we've sent five un-manned ships up and everyone came back without a hitch." She turned, facing him. There were tears starting in the corners of her wide, brown eyes, and she brushed them away with her hand. "Phil, don't go. Please don't. They can send Sammy. Sammy doesn't have a wife. Can't he go? They'd understand, Phil. Please!" She was holding his arms tightly with her hands, and the color had drained from her cheeks. "Mary, you know I can't back out now. How could I? It's been three years. You know how much I've wanted to be the first man to go. Nothing would ever be right with me again if I didn't go. Please don't make it hard." He stopped talking and held her to him and stroked the back of her head. He could feel her shoulders shaking with quiet sobs. He released her and stood up. "I've got to get started, Mary. Will you come to the field with me?" "Yes, I'll come to say good-by." She paused and dropped her eyes. "Phil, if you go, I won't be here when you get back—if you get back. I won't be here because I won't be the wife of a space pilot for the rest of my life. It isn't the kind of life I bargained for. No matter how much I love you, I just couldn't take that, Phil. I'm sorry. I guess I'm not the noble sort of wife." She finished and took another cigarette from the pack on the coffee table and put it to her lips. Her hand was trembling as she touched the lighter to the end of the cigarette and drew deeply. Phil stood watching her, the excitement completely gone from his eyes. "I wish you had told me this a long time ago, Mary," Phil said. His voice was dry and low. "I didn't know you felt this way about it." "Yes, you did. I told you how I felt. I told you I could never be the wife of a space pilot. But I don't think I ever really believed it was possible—not until this morning when you said tonight was the take-off. It's so stupid to jeopardize everything we've got for a ridiculous dream!" He sat down on the edge of the couch and took her hands between his. "Mary, listen to me," he said. "It isn't a dream. It's real. There's nothing means anything more to me than you do—you know that. But no man ever had the chance to do what I'm going to do tonight—no man ever. If I backed out now for any reason, I'd never be able to look at the sky again. I'd be through." She looked at him without seeing him, and there was nothing at all in her eyes. "Let's go, if you're still going," she finally said. They drove through the streets of the small town with its small bungalows, each alike. There were no trees and very little grass. It was a new town, a government built town, and it had no personality yet. It existed only because of the huge ship standing poised in the take-off zone five miles away in the desert. Its future as a town rested with the ship, and the town seemed to feel the uncertainty of its future, seemed ready to stop existing as a town and to give itself back to the desert, if such was its destiny. Phil turned the car off the highway onto the rutted dirt road that led across the sand to the field where the ship waited. In the distance they could see the beams of the searchlights as they played across the take-off zone and swept along the top of the high wire fence stretching out of sight to right and left. At the gate they were stopped by the guard. He read Phil's pass, shined his flashlight in their faces, and then saluted. "Good luck, colonel," he said, and shook Phil's hand. "Thanks, sergeant. I'll be seeing you next week," Phil said, and smiled. They drove between the rows of wooden buildings that lined the field, and he parked near the low barbed fence ringing the take-off zone. He turned off the ignition, and sat quietly for a moment before lighting a cigarette. Then he looked at his wife. She was staring through the windshield at the rocket two hundred yards away. Its smooth polished surface gleamed in the spotlight glare, and it sloped up and up until the eye lost the tip against the stars. "She's beautiful, Mary. You've never seen her before, have you?" "No, I've never seen her before," she said. "Hadn't you better go?" Her voice was strained and she held her hands closed tightly in her lap. "Please go now, Phil," she said. He leaned toward her and touched her cheek. Then she was in his arms, her head buried against his shoulder. "Good-by, darling," she said. "Wish me luck, Mary?" he asked. "Yes, good luck, Phil," she said. He opened the car door and got out. The noise of men and machines scurrying around the ship broke the spell of the rocket waiting silently for flight. "Mary, I—" he began, and then turned and strode toward the administration building without looking back. Inside the building it was like a locker room before the big game. The tension stood alone, and each man had the same happy, excited look that Phil had worn earlier. When he came into the room, the noise and bustle stopped. They turned as one man toward him, and General Small came up to him and took his hand. "Hello, Phil. We were beginning to think you weren't coming. You all set, son?" "Yes, sir, I'm all set, I guess," Phil said. "I'd like you to meet the Secretary of Defense, Phil. He's over here by the radar." As they crossed the room, familiar faces smiled, and each man shook his hand or touched his arm. He saw Sammy, alone, by the coffee urn. Sammy waved to him, but he didn't smile. Phil wanted to talk to him, to say something; but there was nothing to be said now. Sammy's turn would come later. "Mr. Secretary," the general said, "this is Colonel Conover. He'll be the first man in history to see the other side of the Moon. Colonel—the Secretary of Defense." "How do you do, sir. I'm very proud to meet you," Phil said. "On the contrary, colonel. I'm very proud to meet you. I've been looking at that ship out there and wondering. I almost wish I were a young man again. I'd like to be going. It's a thrilling thought—man's first adventure into the universe. You're lighting a new dawn of history, colonel. It's a privilege few men have ever had; and those who have had it didn't realize it at the time. Good luck, and God be with you." "Thank you, sir. I'm aware of all you say. It frightens me a little." The general took Phil's arm and they walked to the briefing room. There were chairs set up for the scientists and Air Force officers directly connected with the take-off. They were seated now in a semicircle in front of a huge chart of the solar system. Phil took his seat, and the last minute briefing began. It was a routine he knew by heart. He had gone over and over it a thousand times, and he only half listened now. He kept thinking of Mary outside, alone by the fence. The voice of the briefing officer was a dull hum in his ears. "... And orbit at 18,000-mph. You will then accelerate for the breakaway to 24,900-mph for five minutes and then free-coast for 116 hours until—" Phil asked a few questions about weather and solar conditions. And then the session was done. They rose and looked at each other, the same unanswered questions on each man's face. There were forced smiles and handshakes. They were ready now. "Phil," the general said, and took him aside. "Sir?" "Phil, you're ... you feel all right, don't you, son?" "Yes, sir. I feel fine. Why?" "Phil, I've spent nearly every day with you for three years. I know you better than I know myself in many ways. And I've studied the psychologist's reports on you carefully. Maybe it's just nervousness, Phil, but I think there's something wrong. Is there?" "No, sir. There's nothing wrong," Phil said, but his voice didn't carry conviction. He reached for a cigarette. "Phil, if there is anything—anything at all—you know what it might mean. You've got to be in the best mental and physical condition of your life tonight. You know better than any man here what that means to our success. I think there is something more than just natural apprehension wrong with you. Want to tell me?" Outside, the take-off zone crawled with men and machines at the base of the rocket. For ten hours, the final check-outs had been in progress; and now the men were checking again, on their own time. The thing they had worked toward for six years was ready to happen, and each one felt that he was sending just a little bit of himself into the sky. Beyond the ring of lights and moving men, on the edge of the field, Mary stood. Her hands moved slowly over the top of the fence, twisting the barbs of wire. But her eyes were on the ship. And then they were ready. A small group of excited men came out from the administration building and moved forward. The check-out crews climbed into their machines and drove back outside the take-off zone. And, alone, one man climbed the steel ladder up the side of the rocket—ninety feet into the air. At the top he waved to the men on the ground and then disappeared through a small port. Mary waved to him. "Good-by," she said to herself, but the words stuck tight in her throat. The small group at the base of the ship turned and walked back to the fence. And for an eternity the great ship stood alone, waiting. Then, from deep inside, a rumble came, increasing in volume to a gigantic roar that shook the earth and tore at the ears. Slowly, the first manned rocket to the Moon lifted up and up to the sky. For a long time after the rocket had become a tiny speck of light in the heavens, she stood holding her face in her hands and crying softly to herself. And then she felt the touch of a hand on her arm. She turned. "Phil! Oh, Phil." She held tightly to him and repeated his name over and over. "They wouldn't let me go, Mary," he said finally. "The general would not let me go." She looked at him. His face was drawn tight, and there were tears on his cheeks. "Thank, God," she said. "It doesn't matter, darling. The only thing that matters is you didn't go." "You're right, Mary," he said. His voice was low—so low she could hardly hear him. "It doesn't matter. Nothing matters now." He stood with his hands at his sides, watching her. And then turned away and walked toward the car. THE END

While Sammy is the least qualified to go into space, he was the only replacement for Phil

Everything that used to give Phil joy will now represent pain and suffering

Mary's fear of losing Phil became a self-fulfilling prophecy

Phil trained all of his life for one moment, and gave it all up within the period of one day

23592_VR4F2QJE_7

What is the general's primary concern regarding the leader of the mission?

Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Astounding Science Fiction December 1955. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. BREAKAWAY BY STANLEY GIMBLE Illustrated by Freas She surely got her wish ... but there was some question about getting what she wanted. Phil Conover pulled the zipper of his flight suit up the front of his long, thin body and came into the living room. His face, usually serious and quietly handsome, had an alive, excited look. And the faint lines around his dark, deep-set eyes were accentuated when he smiled at his wife. "All set, honey. How do I look in my monkey suit?" His wife was sitting stiffly on the flowered couch that was still not theirs completely. In her fingers she held a cigarette burned down too far. She said, "You look fine, Phil. You look just right." She managed a smile. Then she leaned forward and crushed the cigarette in the ash tray on the maple coffee table and took another from the pack. He came to her and touched his hands to her soft blond hair, raising her face until she was looking into his eyes. "You're the most beautiful girl I know. Did I ever tell you that?" "Yes, I think so. Yes, I'm sure you did," she said, finishing the ritual; but her voice broke, and she turned her head away. Phil sat beside her and put his arm around her small shoulders. He had stopped smiling. "Honey, look at me," he said. "It isn't going to be bad. Honestly it isn't. We know exactly how it will be. If anything could go wrong, they wouldn't be sending me; you know that. I told you that we've sent five un-manned ships up and everyone came back without a hitch." She turned, facing him. There were tears starting in the corners of her wide, brown eyes, and she brushed them away with her hand. "Phil, don't go. Please don't. They can send Sammy. Sammy doesn't have a wife. Can't he go? They'd understand, Phil. Please!" She was holding his arms tightly with her hands, and the color had drained from her cheeks. "Mary, you know I can't back out now. How could I? It's been three years. You know how much I've wanted to be the first man to go. Nothing would ever be right with me again if I didn't go. Please don't make it hard." He stopped talking and held her to him and stroked the back of her head. He could feel her shoulders shaking with quiet sobs. He released her and stood up. "I've got to get started, Mary. Will you come to the field with me?" "Yes, I'll come to say good-by." She paused and dropped her eyes. "Phil, if you go, I won't be here when you get back—if you get back. I won't be here because I won't be the wife of a space pilot for the rest of my life. It isn't the kind of life I bargained for. No matter how much I love you, I just couldn't take that, Phil. I'm sorry. I guess I'm not the noble sort of wife." She finished and took another cigarette from the pack on the coffee table and put it to her lips. Her hand was trembling as she touched the lighter to the end of the cigarette and drew deeply. Phil stood watching her, the excitement completely gone from his eyes. "I wish you had told me this a long time ago, Mary," Phil said. His voice was dry and low. "I didn't know you felt this way about it." "Yes, you did. I told you how I felt. I told you I could never be the wife of a space pilot. But I don't think I ever really believed it was possible—not until this morning when you said tonight was the take-off. It's so stupid to jeopardize everything we've got for a ridiculous dream!" He sat down on the edge of the couch and took her hands between his. "Mary, listen to me," he said. "It isn't a dream. It's real. There's nothing means anything more to me than you do—you know that. But no man ever had the chance to do what I'm going to do tonight—no man ever. If I backed out now for any reason, I'd never be able to look at the sky again. I'd be through." She looked at him without seeing him, and there was nothing at all in her eyes. "Let's go, if you're still going," she finally said. They drove through the streets of the small town with its small bungalows, each alike. There were no trees and very little grass. It was a new town, a government built town, and it had no personality yet. It existed only because of the huge ship standing poised in the take-off zone five miles away in the desert. Its future as a town rested with the ship, and the town seemed to feel the uncertainty of its future, seemed ready to stop existing as a town and to give itself back to the desert, if such was its destiny. Phil turned the car off the highway onto the rutted dirt road that led across the sand to the field where the ship waited. In the distance they could see the beams of the searchlights as they played across the take-off zone and swept along the top of the high wire fence stretching out of sight to right and left. At the gate they were stopped by the guard. He read Phil's pass, shined his flashlight in their faces, and then saluted. "Good luck, colonel," he said, and shook Phil's hand. "Thanks, sergeant. I'll be seeing you next week," Phil said, and smiled. They drove between the rows of wooden buildings that lined the field, and he parked near the low barbed fence ringing the take-off zone. He turned off the ignition, and sat quietly for a moment before lighting a cigarette. Then he looked at his wife. She was staring through the windshield at the rocket two hundred yards away. Its smooth polished surface gleamed in the spotlight glare, and it sloped up and up until the eye lost the tip against the stars. "She's beautiful, Mary. You've never seen her before, have you?" "No, I've never seen her before," she said. "Hadn't you better go?" Her voice was strained and she held her hands closed tightly in her lap. "Please go now, Phil," she said. He leaned toward her and touched her cheek. Then she was in his arms, her head buried against his shoulder. "Good-by, darling," she said. "Wish me luck, Mary?" he asked. "Yes, good luck, Phil," she said. He opened the car door and got out. The noise of men and machines scurrying around the ship broke the spell of the rocket waiting silently for flight. "Mary, I—" he began, and then turned and strode toward the administration building without looking back. Inside the building it was like a locker room before the big game. The tension stood alone, and each man had the same happy, excited look that Phil had worn earlier. When he came into the room, the noise and bustle stopped. They turned as one man toward him, and General Small came up to him and took his hand. "Hello, Phil. We were beginning to think you weren't coming. You all set, son?" "Yes, sir, I'm all set, I guess," Phil said. "I'd like you to meet the Secretary of Defense, Phil. He's over here by the radar." As they crossed the room, familiar faces smiled, and each man shook his hand or touched his arm. He saw Sammy, alone, by the coffee urn. Sammy waved to him, but he didn't smile. Phil wanted to talk to him, to say something; but there was nothing to be said now. Sammy's turn would come later. "Mr. Secretary," the general said, "this is Colonel Conover. He'll be the first man in history to see the other side of the Moon. Colonel—the Secretary of Defense." "How do you do, sir. I'm very proud to meet you," Phil said. "On the contrary, colonel. I'm very proud to meet you. I've been looking at that ship out there and wondering. I almost wish I were a young man again. I'd like to be going. It's a thrilling thought—man's first adventure into the universe. You're lighting a new dawn of history, colonel. It's a privilege few men have ever had; and those who have had it didn't realize it at the time. Good luck, and God be with you." "Thank you, sir. I'm aware of all you say. It frightens me a little." The general took Phil's arm and they walked to the briefing room. There were chairs set up for the scientists and Air Force officers directly connected with the take-off. They were seated now in a semicircle in front of a huge chart of the solar system. Phil took his seat, and the last minute briefing began. It was a routine he knew by heart. He had gone over and over it a thousand times, and he only half listened now. He kept thinking of Mary outside, alone by the fence. The voice of the briefing officer was a dull hum in his ears. "... And orbit at 18,000-mph. You will then accelerate for the breakaway to 24,900-mph for five minutes and then free-coast for 116 hours until—" Phil asked a few questions about weather and solar conditions. And then the session was done. They rose and looked at each other, the same unanswered questions on each man's face. There were forced smiles and handshakes. They were ready now. "Phil," the general said, and took him aside. "Sir?" "Phil, you're ... you feel all right, don't you, son?" "Yes, sir. I feel fine. Why?" "Phil, I've spent nearly every day with you for three years. I know you better than I know myself in many ways. And I've studied the psychologist's reports on you carefully. Maybe it's just nervousness, Phil, but I think there's something wrong. Is there?" "No, sir. There's nothing wrong," Phil said, but his voice didn't carry conviction. He reached for a cigarette. "Phil, if there is anything—anything at all—you know what it might mean. You've got to be in the best mental and physical condition of your life tonight. You know better than any man here what that means to our success. I think there is something more than just natural apprehension wrong with you. Want to tell me?" Outside, the take-off zone crawled with men and machines at the base of the rocket. For ten hours, the final check-outs had been in progress; and now the men were checking again, on their own time. The thing they had worked toward for six years was ready to happen, and each one felt that he was sending just a little bit of himself into the sky. Beyond the ring of lights and moving men, on the edge of the field, Mary stood. Her hands moved slowly over the top of the fence, twisting the barbs of wire. But her eyes were on the ship. And then they were ready. A small group of excited men came out from the administration building and moved forward. The check-out crews climbed into their machines and drove back outside the take-off zone. And, alone, one man climbed the steel ladder up the side of the rocket—ninety feet into the air. At the top he waved to the men on the ground and then disappeared through a small port. Mary waved to him. "Good-by," she said to herself, but the words stuck tight in her throat. The small group at the base of the ship turned and walked back to the fence. And for an eternity the great ship stood alone, waiting. Then, from deep inside, a rumble came, increasing in volume to a gigantic roar that shook the earth and tore at the ears. Slowly, the first manned rocket to the Moon lifted up and up to the sky. For a long time after the rocket had become a tiny speck of light in the heavens, she stood holding her face in her hands and crying softly to herself. And then she felt the touch of a hand on her arm. She turned. "Phil! Oh, Phil." She held tightly to him and repeated his name over and over. "They wouldn't let me go, Mary," he said finally. "The general would not let me go." She looked at him. His face was drawn tight, and there were tears on his cheeks. "Thank, God," she said. "It doesn't matter, darling. The only thing that matters is you didn't go." "You're right, Mary," he said. His voice was low—so low she could hardly hear him. "It doesn't matter. Nothing matters now." He stood with his hands at his sides, watching her. And then turned away and walked toward the car. THE END

Exceptional leadership skills

Strongest intellectual quotient

Peak body and brain function

Unwavering belief in the mission

23592_VR4F2QJE_8

Which of the following best serves as a metaphor for Phil and Mary's relationship, by the end of the story?

Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Astounding Science Fiction December 1955. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. BREAKAWAY BY STANLEY GIMBLE Illustrated by Freas She surely got her wish ... but there was some question about getting what she wanted. Phil Conover pulled the zipper of his flight suit up the front of his long, thin body and came into the living room. His face, usually serious and quietly handsome, had an alive, excited look. And the faint lines around his dark, deep-set eyes were accentuated when he smiled at his wife. "All set, honey. How do I look in my monkey suit?" His wife was sitting stiffly on the flowered couch that was still not theirs completely. In her fingers she held a cigarette burned down too far. She said, "You look fine, Phil. You look just right." She managed a smile. Then she leaned forward and crushed the cigarette in the ash tray on the maple coffee table and took another from the pack. He came to her and touched his hands to her soft blond hair, raising her face until she was looking into his eyes. "You're the most beautiful girl I know. Did I ever tell you that?" "Yes, I think so. Yes, I'm sure you did," she said, finishing the ritual; but her voice broke, and she turned her head away. Phil sat beside her and put his arm around her small shoulders. He had stopped smiling. "Honey, look at me," he said. "It isn't going to be bad. Honestly it isn't. We know exactly how it will be. If anything could go wrong, they wouldn't be sending me; you know that. I told you that we've sent five un-manned ships up and everyone came back without a hitch." She turned, facing him. There were tears starting in the corners of her wide, brown eyes, and she brushed them away with her hand. "Phil, don't go. Please don't. They can send Sammy. Sammy doesn't have a wife. Can't he go? They'd understand, Phil. Please!" She was holding his arms tightly with her hands, and the color had drained from her cheeks. "Mary, you know I can't back out now. How could I? It's been three years. You know how much I've wanted to be the first man to go. Nothing would ever be right with me again if I didn't go. Please don't make it hard." He stopped talking and held her to him and stroked the back of her head. He could feel her shoulders shaking with quiet sobs. He released her and stood up. "I've got to get started, Mary. Will you come to the field with me?" "Yes, I'll come to say good-by." She paused and dropped her eyes. "Phil, if you go, I won't be here when you get back—if you get back. I won't be here because I won't be the wife of a space pilot for the rest of my life. It isn't the kind of life I bargained for. No matter how much I love you, I just couldn't take that, Phil. I'm sorry. I guess I'm not the noble sort of wife." She finished and took another cigarette from the pack on the coffee table and put it to her lips. Her hand was trembling as she touched the lighter to the end of the cigarette and drew deeply. Phil stood watching her, the excitement completely gone from his eyes. "I wish you had told me this a long time ago, Mary," Phil said. His voice was dry and low. "I didn't know you felt this way about it." "Yes, you did. I told you how I felt. I told you I could never be the wife of a space pilot. But I don't think I ever really believed it was possible—not until this morning when you said tonight was the take-off. It's so stupid to jeopardize everything we've got for a ridiculous dream!" He sat down on the edge of the couch and took her hands between his. "Mary, listen to me," he said. "It isn't a dream. It's real. There's nothing means anything more to me than you do—you know that. But no man ever had the chance to do what I'm going to do tonight—no man ever. If I backed out now for any reason, I'd never be able to look at the sky again. I'd be through." She looked at him without seeing him, and there was nothing at all in her eyes. "Let's go, if you're still going," she finally said. They drove through the streets of the small town with its small bungalows, each alike. There were no trees and very little grass. It was a new town, a government built town, and it had no personality yet. It existed only because of the huge ship standing poised in the take-off zone five miles away in the desert. Its future as a town rested with the ship, and the town seemed to feel the uncertainty of its future, seemed ready to stop existing as a town and to give itself back to the desert, if such was its destiny. Phil turned the car off the highway onto the rutted dirt road that led across the sand to the field where the ship waited. In the distance they could see the beams of the searchlights as they played across the take-off zone and swept along the top of the high wire fence stretching out of sight to right and left. At the gate they were stopped by the guard. He read Phil's pass, shined his flashlight in their faces, and then saluted. "Good luck, colonel," he said, and shook Phil's hand. "Thanks, sergeant. I'll be seeing you next week," Phil said, and smiled. They drove between the rows of wooden buildings that lined the field, and he parked near the low barbed fence ringing the take-off zone. He turned off the ignition, and sat quietly for a moment before lighting a cigarette. Then he looked at his wife. She was staring through the windshield at the rocket two hundred yards away. Its smooth polished surface gleamed in the spotlight glare, and it sloped up and up until the eye lost the tip against the stars. "She's beautiful, Mary. You've never seen her before, have you?" "No, I've never seen her before," she said. "Hadn't you better go?" Her voice was strained and she held her hands closed tightly in her lap. "Please go now, Phil," she said. He leaned toward her and touched her cheek. Then she was in his arms, her head buried against his shoulder. "Good-by, darling," she said. "Wish me luck, Mary?" he asked. "Yes, good luck, Phil," she said. He opened the car door and got out. The noise of men and machines scurrying around the ship broke the spell of the rocket waiting silently for flight. "Mary, I—" he began, and then turned and strode toward the administration building without looking back. Inside the building it was like a locker room before the big game. The tension stood alone, and each man had the same happy, excited look that Phil had worn earlier. When he came into the room, the noise and bustle stopped. They turned as one man toward him, and General Small came up to him and took his hand. "Hello, Phil. We were beginning to think you weren't coming. You all set, son?" "Yes, sir, I'm all set, I guess," Phil said. "I'd like you to meet the Secretary of Defense, Phil. He's over here by the radar." As they crossed the room, familiar faces smiled, and each man shook his hand or touched his arm. He saw Sammy, alone, by the coffee urn. Sammy waved to him, but he didn't smile. Phil wanted to talk to him, to say something; but there was nothing to be said now. Sammy's turn would come later. "Mr. Secretary," the general said, "this is Colonel Conover. He'll be the first man in history to see the other side of the Moon. Colonel—the Secretary of Defense." "How do you do, sir. I'm very proud to meet you," Phil said. "On the contrary, colonel. I'm very proud to meet you. I've been looking at that ship out there and wondering. I almost wish I were a young man again. I'd like to be going. It's a thrilling thought—man's first adventure into the universe. You're lighting a new dawn of history, colonel. It's a privilege few men have ever had; and those who have had it didn't realize it at the time. Good luck, and God be with you." "Thank you, sir. I'm aware of all you say. It frightens me a little." The general took Phil's arm and they walked to the briefing room. There were chairs set up for the scientists and Air Force officers directly connected with the take-off. They were seated now in a semicircle in front of a huge chart of the solar system. Phil took his seat, and the last minute briefing began. It was a routine he knew by heart. He had gone over and over it a thousand times, and he only half listened now. He kept thinking of Mary outside, alone by the fence. The voice of the briefing officer was a dull hum in his ears. "... And orbit at 18,000-mph. You will then accelerate for the breakaway to 24,900-mph for five minutes and then free-coast for 116 hours until—" Phil asked a few questions about weather and solar conditions. And then the session was done. They rose and looked at each other, the same unanswered questions on each man's face. There were forced smiles and handshakes. They were ready now. "Phil," the general said, and took him aside. "Sir?" "Phil, you're ... you feel all right, don't you, son?" "Yes, sir. I feel fine. Why?" "Phil, I've spent nearly every day with you for three years. I know you better than I know myself in many ways. And I've studied the psychologist's reports on you carefully. Maybe it's just nervousness, Phil, but I think there's something wrong. Is there?" "No, sir. There's nothing wrong," Phil said, but his voice didn't carry conviction. He reached for a cigarette. "Phil, if there is anything—anything at all—you know what it might mean. You've got to be in the best mental and physical condition of your life tonight. You know better than any man here what that means to our success. I think there is something more than just natural apprehension wrong with you. Want to tell me?" Outside, the take-off zone crawled with men and machines at the base of the rocket. For ten hours, the final check-outs had been in progress; and now the men were checking again, on their own time. The thing they had worked toward for six years was ready to happen, and each one felt that he was sending just a little bit of himself into the sky. Beyond the ring of lights and moving men, on the edge of the field, Mary stood. Her hands moved slowly over the top of the fence, twisting the barbs of wire. But her eyes were on the ship. And then they were ready. A small group of excited men came out from the administration building and moved forward. The check-out crews climbed into their machines and drove back outside the take-off zone. And, alone, one man climbed the steel ladder up the side of the rocket—ninety feet into the air. At the top he waved to the men on the ground and then disappeared through a small port. Mary waved to him. "Good-by," she said to herself, but the words stuck tight in her throat. The small group at the base of the ship turned and walked back to the fence. And for an eternity the great ship stood alone, waiting. Then, from deep inside, a rumble came, increasing in volume to a gigantic roar that shook the earth and tore at the ears. Slowly, the first manned rocket to the Moon lifted up and up to the sky. For a long time after the rocket had become a tiny speck of light in the heavens, she stood holding her face in her hands and crying softly to herself. And then she felt the touch of a hand on her arm. She turned. "Phil! Oh, Phil." She held tightly to him and repeated his name over and over. "They wouldn't let me go, Mary," he said finally. "The general would not let me go." She looked at him. His face was drawn tight, and there were tears on his cheeks. "Thank, God," she said. "It doesn't matter, darling. The only thing that matters is you didn't go." "You're right, Mary," he said. His voice was low—so low she could hardly hear him. "It doesn't matter. Nothing matters now." He stood with his hands at his sides, watching her. And then turned away and walked toward the car. THE END

Mary's cigarette burned down too far

The new, government-built town

The barbed wire fence

The broken zipper on Phil's space suit

23592_VR4F2QJE_9

What best represents the theme of the story?

Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Astounding Science Fiction December 1955. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. BREAKAWAY BY STANLEY GIMBLE Illustrated by Freas She surely got her wish ... but there was some question about getting what she wanted. Phil Conover pulled the zipper of his flight suit up the front of his long, thin body and came into the living room. His face, usually serious and quietly handsome, had an alive, excited look. And the faint lines around his dark, deep-set eyes were accentuated when he smiled at his wife. "All set, honey. How do I look in my monkey suit?" His wife was sitting stiffly on the flowered couch that was still not theirs completely. In her fingers she held a cigarette burned down too far. She said, "You look fine, Phil. You look just right." She managed a smile. Then she leaned forward and crushed the cigarette in the ash tray on the maple coffee table and took another from the pack. He came to her and touched his hands to her soft blond hair, raising her face until she was looking into his eyes. "You're the most beautiful girl I know. Did I ever tell you that?" "Yes, I think so. Yes, I'm sure you did," she said, finishing the ritual; but her voice broke, and she turned her head away. Phil sat beside her and put his arm around her small shoulders. He had stopped smiling. "Honey, look at me," he said. "It isn't going to be bad. Honestly it isn't. We know exactly how it will be. If anything could go wrong, they wouldn't be sending me; you know that. I told you that we've sent five un-manned ships up and everyone came back without a hitch." She turned, facing him. There were tears starting in the corners of her wide, brown eyes, and she brushed them away with her hand. "Phil, don't go. Please don't. They can send Sammy. Sammy doesn't have a wife. Can't he go? They'd understand, Phil. Please!" She was holding his arms tightly with her hands, and the color had drained from her cheeks. "Mary, you know I can't back out now. How could I? It's been three years. You know how much I've wanted to be the first man to go. Nothing would ever be right with me again if I didn't go. Please don't make it hard." He stopped talking and held her to him and stroked the back of her head. He could feel her shoulders shaking with quiet sobs. He released her and stood up. "I've got to get started, Mary. Will you come to the field with me?" "Yes, I'll come to say good-by." She paused and dropped her eyes. "Phil, if you go, I won't be here when you get back—if you get back. I won't be here because I won't be the wife of a space pilot for the rest of my life. It isn't the kind of life I bargained for. No matter how much I love you, I just couldn't take that, Phil. I'm sorry. I guess I'm not the noble sort of wife." She finished and took another cigarette from the pack on the coffee table and put it to her lips. Her hand was trembling as she touched the lighter to the end of the cigarette and drew deeply. Phil stood watching her, the excitement completely gone from his eyes. "I wish you had told me this a long time ago, Mary," Phil said. His voice was dry and low. "I didn't know you felt this way about it." "Yes, you did. I told you how I felt. I told you I could never be the wife of a space pilot. But I don't think I ever really believed it was possible—not until this morning when you said tonight was the take-off. It's so stupid to jeopardize everything we've got for a ridiculous dream!" He sat down on the edge of the couch and took her hands between his. "Mary, listen to me," he said. "It isn't a dream. It's real. There's nothing means anything more to me than you do—you know that. But no man ever had the chance to do what I'm going to do tonight—no man ever. If I backed out now for any reason, I'd never be able to look at the sky again. I'd be through." She looked at him without seeing him, and there was nothing at all in her eyes. "Let's go, if you're still going," she finally said. They drove through the streets of the small town with its small bungalows, each alike. There were no trees and very little grass. It was a new town, a government built town, and it had no personality yet. It existed only because of the huge ship standing poised in the take-off zone five miles away in the desert. Its future as a town rested with the ship, and the town seemed to feel the uncertainty of its future, seemed ready to stop existing as a town and to give itself back to the desert, if such was its destiny. Phil turned the car off the highway onto the rutted dirt road that led across the sand to the field where the ship waited. In the distance they could see the beams of the searchlights as they played across the take-off zone and swept along the top of the high wire fence stretching out of sight to right and left. At the gate they were stopped by the guard. He read Phil's pass, shined his flashlight in their faces, and then saluted. "Good luck, colonel," he said, and shook Phil's hand. "Thanks, sergeant. I'll be seeing you next week," Phil said, and smiled. They drove between the rows of wooden buildings that lined the field, and he parked near the low barbed fence ringing the take-off zone. He turned off the ignition, and sat quietly for a moment before lighting a cigarette. Then he looked at his wife. She was staring through the windshield at the rocket two hundred yards away. Its smooth polished surface gleamed in the spotlight glare, and it sloped up and up until the eye lost the tip against the stars. "She's beautiful, Mary. You've never seen her before, have you?" "No, I've never seen her before," she said. "Hadn't you better go?" Her voice was strained and she held her hands closed tightly in her lap. "Please go now, Phil," she said. He leaned toward her and touched her cheek. Then she was in his arms, her head buried against his shoulder. "Good-by, darling," she said. "Wish me luck, Mary?" he asked. "Yes, good luck, Phil," she said. He opened the car door and got out. The noise of men and machines scurrying around the ship broke the spell of the rocket waiting silently for flight. "Mary, I—" he began, and then turned and strode toward the administration building without looking back. Inside the building it was like a locker room before the big game. The tension stood alone, and each man had the same happy, excited look that Phil had worn earlier. When he came into the room, the noise and bustle stopped. They turned as one man toward him, and General Small came up to him and took his hand. "Hello, Phil. We were beginning to think you weren't coming. You all set, son?" "Yes, sir, I'm all set, I guess," Phil said. "I'd like you to meet the Secretary of Defense, Phil. He's over here by the radar." As they crossed the room, familiar faces smiled, and each man shook his hand or touched his arm. He saw Sammy, alone, by the coffee urn. Sammy waved to him, but he didn't smile. Phil wanted to talk to him, to say something; but there was nothing to be said now. Sammy's turn would come later. "Mr. Secretary," the general said, "this is Colonel Conover. He'll be the first man in history to see the other side of the Moon. Colonel—the Secretary of Defense." "How do you do, sir. I'm very proud to meet you," Phil said. "On the contrary, colonel. I'm very proud to meet you. I've been looking at that ship out there and wondering. I almost wish I were a young man again. I'd like to be going. It's a thrilling thought—man's first adventure into the universe. You're lighting a new dawn of history, colonel. It's a privilege few men have ever had; and those who have had it didn't realize it at the time. Good luck, and God be with you." "Thank you, sir. I'm aware of all you say. It frightens me a little." The general took Phil's arm and they walked to the briefing room. There were chairs set up for the scientists and Air Force officers directly connected with the take-off. They were seated now in a semicircle in front of a huge chart of the solar system. Phil took his seat, and the last minute briefing began. It was a routine he knew by heart. He had gone over and over it a thousand times, and he only half listened now. He kept thinking of Mary outside, alone by the fence. The voice of the briefing officer was a dull hum in his ears. "... And orbit at 18,000-mph. You will then accelerate for the breakaway to 24,900-mph for five minutes and then free-coast for 116 hours until—" Phil asked a few questions about weather and solar conditions. And then the session was done. They rose and looked at each other, the same unanswered questions on each man's face. There were forced smiles and handshakes. They were ready now. "Phil," the general said, and took him aside. "Sir?" "Phil, you're ... you feel all right, don't you, son?" "Yes, sir. I feel fine. Why?" "Phil, I've spent nearly every day with you for three years. I know you better than I know myself in many ways. And I've studied the psychologist's reports on you carefully. Maybe it's just nervousness, Phil, but I think there's something wrong. Is there?" "No, sir. There's nothing wrong," Phil said, but his voice didn't carry conviction. He reached for a cigarette. "Phil, if there is anything—anything at all—you know what it might mean. You've got to be in the best mental and physical condition of your life tonight. You know better than any man here what that means to our success. I think there is something more than just natural apprehension wrong with you. Want to tell me?" Outside, the take-off zone crawled with men and machines at the base of the rocket. For ten hours, the final check-outs had been in progress; and now the men were checking again, on their own time. The thing they had worked toward for six years was ready to happen, and each one felt that he was sending just a little bit of himself into the sky. Beyond the ring of lights and moving men, on the edge of the field, Mary stood. Her hands moved slowly over the top of the fence, twisting the barbs of wire. But her eyes were on the ship. And then they were ready. A small group of excited men came out from the administration building and moved forward. The check-out crews climbed into their machines and drove back outside the take-off zone. And, alone, one man climbed the steel ladder up the side of the rocket—ninety feet into the air. At the top he waved to the men on the ground and then disappeared through a small port. Mary waved to him. "Good-by," she said to herself, but the words stuck tight in her throat. The small group at the base of the ship turned and walked back to the fence. And for an eternity the great ship stood alone, waiting. Then, from deep inside, a rumble came, increasing in volume to a gigantic roar that shook the earth and tore at the ears. Slowly, the first manned rocket to the Moon lifted up and up to the sky. For a long time after the rocket had become a tiny speck of light in the heavens, she stood holding her face in her hands and crying softly to herself. And then she felt the touch of a hand on her arm. She turned. "Phil! Oh, Phil." She held tightly to him and repeated his name over and over. "They wouldn't let me go, Mary," he said finally. "The general would not let me go." She looked at him. His face was drawn tight, and there were tears on his cheeks. "Thank, God," she said. "It doesn't matter, darling. The only thing that matters is you didn't go." "You're right, Mary," he said. His voice was low—so low she could hardly hear him. "It doesn't matter. Nothing matters now." He stood with his hands at his sides, watching her. And then turned away and walked toward the car. THE END

Compromise is essential to long-lasting, happy successful relationships

It is better to be honest about something bothering you than to withhold it and possibly cause a shared goal to fail

Keeping one's family happy and intact is ultimately more important than any personal or professional goal

Rigid thinking and ultimatums in relationships rarely result in desired outcomes

23767_R1Y5NII5_1

Which term best represents Kolin's feelings toward Slichow?

By H. B. Fyfe THE TALKATIVE TREE Dang vines! Beats all how some plants have no manners—but what do you expect, when they used to be men! All things considered—the obscure star, the undetermined damage to the stellar drive and the way the small planet's murky atmosphere defied precision scanners—the pilot made a reasonably good landing. Despite sour feelings for the space service of Haurtoz, steward Peter Kolin had to admit that casualties might have been far worse. Chief Steward Slichow led his little command, less two third-class ration keepers thought to have been trapped in the lower hold, to a point two hundred meters from the steaming hull of the Peace State . He lined them up as if on parade. Kolin made himself inconspicuous. "Since the crew will be on emergency watches repairing the damage," announced the Chief in clipped, aggressive tones, "I have volunteered my section for preliminary scouting, as is suitable. It may be useful to discover temporary sources in this area of natural foods." Volunteered HIS section! thought Kolin rebelliously. Like the Supreme Director of Haurtoz! Being conscripted into this idiotic space fleet that never fights is bad enough without a tin god on jets like Slichow! Prudently, he did not express this resentment overtly. His well-schooled features revealed no trace of the idea—or of any other idea. The Planetary State of Haurtoz had been organized some fifteen light-years from old Earth, but many of the home world's less kindly techniques had been employed. Lack of complete loyalty to the state was likely to result in a siege of treatment that left the subject suitably "re-personalized." Kolin had heard of instances wherein mere unenthusiastic posture had betrayed intentions to harbor treasonable thoughts. "You will scout in five details of three persons each," Chief Slichow said. "Every hour, each detail will send one person in to report, and he will be replaced by one of the five I shall keep here to issue rations." Kolin permitted himself to wonder when anyone might get some rest, but assumed a mildly willing look. (Too eager an attitude could arouse suspicion of disguising an improper viewpoint.) The maintenance of a proper viewpoint was a necessity if the Planetary State were to survive the hostile plots of Earth and the latter's decadent colonies. That, at least, was the official line. Kolin found himself in a group with Jak Ammet, a third cook, and Eva Yrtok, powdered foods storekeeper. Since the crew would be eating packaged rations during repairs, Yrtok could be spared to command a scout detail. Each scout was issued a rocket pistol and a plastic water tube. Chief Slichow emphasized that the keepers of rations could hardly, in an emergency, give even the appearance of favoring themselves in regard to food. They would go without. Kolin maintained a standard expression as the Chief's sharp stare measured them. Yrtok, a dark, lean-faced girl, led the way with a quiet monosyllable. She carried the small radio they would be permitted to use for messages of utmost urgency. Ammet followed, and Kolin brought up the rear. To reach their assigned sector, they had to climb a forbidding ridge of rock within half a kilometer. Only a sparse creeper grew along their way, its elongated leaves shimmering with bronze-green reflections against a stony surface; but when they topped the ridge a thick forest was in sight. Yrtok and Ammet paused momentarily before descending. Kolin shared their sense of isolation. They would be out of sight of authority and responsible for their own actions. It was a strange sensation. They marched down into the valley at a brisk pace, becoming more aware of the clouds and atmospheric haze. Distant objects seemed blurred by the mist, taking on a somber, brooding grayness. For all Kolin could tell, he and the others were isolated in a world bounded by the rocky ridge behind them and a semi-circle of damp trees and bushes several hundred meters away. He suspected that the hills rising mistily ahead were part of a continuous slope, but could not be sure. Yrtok led the way along the most nearly level ground. Low creepers became more plentiful, interspersed with scrubby thickets of tangled, spike-armored bushes. Occasionally, small flying things flickered among the foliage. Once, a shrub puffed out an enormous cloud of tiny spores. "Be a job to find anything edible here," grunted Ammet, and Kolin agreed. Finally, after a longer hike than he had anticipated, they approached the edge of the deceptively distant forest. Yrtok paused to examine some purple berries glistening dangerously on a low shrub. Kolin regarded the trees with misgiving. "Looks as tough to get through as a tropical jungle," he remarked. "I think the stuff puts out shoots that grow back into the ground to root as they spread," said the woman. "Maybe we can find a way through." In two or three minutes, they reached the abrupt border of the odd-looking trees. Except for one thick trunked giant, all of them were about the same height. They craned their necks to estimate the altitude of the monster, but the top was hidden by the wide spread of branches. The depths behind it looked dark and impenetrable. "We'd better explore along the edge," decided Yrtok. "Ammet, now is the time to go back and tell the Chief which way we're— Ammet! " Kolin looked over his shoulder. Fifty meters away, Ammet sat beside the bush with the purple berries, utterly relaxed. "He must have tasted some!" exclaimed Kolin. "I'll see how he is." He ran back to the cook and shook him by the shoulder. Ammet's head lolled loosely to one side. His rather heavy features were vacant, lending him a doped appearance. Kolin straightened up and beckoned to Yrtok. For some reason, he had trouble attracting her attention. Then he noticed that she was kneeling. "Hope she didn't eat some stupid thing too!" he grumbled, trotting back. As he reached her, whatever Yrtok was examining came to life and scooted into the underbrush with a flash of greenish fur. All Kolin saw was that it had several legs too many. He pulled Yrtok to her feet. She pawed at him weakly, eyes as vacant as Ammet's. When he let go in sudden horror, she folded gently to the ground. She lay comfortably on her side, twitching one hand as if to brush something away. When she began to smile dreamily, Kolin backed away. The corners of his mouth felt oddly stiff; they had involuntarily drawn back to expose his clenched teeth. He glanced warily about, but nothing appeared to threaten him. "It's time to end this scout," he told himself. "It's dangerous. One good look and I'm jetting off! What I need is an easy tree to climb." He considered the massive giant. Soaring thirty or forty meters into the thin fog and dwarfing other growth, it seemed the most promising choice. At first, Kolin saw no way, but then the network of vines clinging to the rugged trunk suggested a route. He tried his weight gingerly, then began to climb. "I should have brought Yrtok's radio," he muttered. "Oh, well, I can take it when I come down, if she hasn't snapped out of her spell by then. Funny … I wonder if that green thing bit her." Footholds were plentiful among the interlaced lianas. Kolin progressed rapidly. When he reached the first thick limbs, twice head height, he felt safer. Later, at what he hoped was the halfway mark, he hooked one knee over a branch and paused to wipe sweat from his eyes. Peering down, he discovered the ground to be obscured by foliage. "I should have checked from down there to see how open the top is," he mused. "I wonder how the view will be from up there?" "Depends on what you're looking for, Sonny!" something remarked in a soughing wheeze. Kolin, slipping, grabbed desperately for the branch. His fingers clutched a handful of twigs and leaves, which just barely supported him until he regained a grip with the other hand. The branch quivered resentfully under him. "Careful, there!" whooshed the eerie voice. "It took me all summer to grow those!" Kolin could feel the skin crawling along his backbone. "Who are you?" he gasped. The answering sigh of laughter gave him a distinct chill despite its suggestion of amiability. "Name's Johnny Ashlew. Kinda thought you'd start with what I am. Didn't figure you'd ever seen a man grown into a tree before." Kolin looked about, seeing little but leaves and fog. "I have to climb down," he told himself in a reasonable tone. "It's bad enough that the other two passed out without me going space happy too." "What's your hurry?" demanded the voice. "I can talk to you just as easy all the way down, you know. Airholes in my bark—I'm not like an Earth tree." Kolin examined the bark of the crotch in which he sat. It did seem to have assorted holes and hollows in its rough surface. "I never saw an Earth tree," he admitted. "We came from Haurtoz." "Where's that? Oh, never mind—some little planet. I don't bother with them all, since I came here and found out I could be anything I wanted." "What do you mean, anything you wanted?" asked Kolin, testing the firmness of a vertical vine. "Just what I said," continued the voice, sounding closer in his ear as his cheek brushed the ridged bark of the tree trunk. "And, if I do have to remind you, it would be nicer if you said 'Mr. Ashlew,' considering my age." "Your age? How old—?" "Can't really count it in Earth years any more. Lost track. I always figured bein' a tree was a nice, peaceful life; and when I remembered how long some of them live, that settled it. Sonny, this world ain't all it looks like." "It isn't, Mr. Ashlew?" asked Kolin, twisting about in an effort to see what the higher branches might hide. "Nope. Most everything here is run by the Life—that is, by the thing that first grew big enough to do some thinking, and set its roots down all over until it had control. That's the outskirts of it down below." "The other trees? That jungle?" "It's more'n a jungle, Sonny. When I landed here, along with the others from the Arcturan Spark , the planet looked pretty empty to me, just like it must have to—Watch it, there, Boy! If I didn't twist that branch over in time, you'd be bouncing off my roots right now!" "Th-thanks!" grunted Kolin, hanging on grimly. "Doggone vine!" commented the windy whisper. " He ain't one of my crowd. Landed years later in a ship from some star towards the center of the galaxy. You should have seen his looks before the Life got in touch with his mind and set up a mental field to help him change form. He looks twice as good as a vine!" "He's very handy," agreed Kolin politely. He groped for a foothold. "Well … matter of fact, I can't get through to him much, even with the Life's mental field helping. Guess he started living with a different way of thinking. It burns me. I thought of being a tree, and then he came along to take advantage of it!" Kolin braced himself securely to stretch tiring muscles. "Maybe I'd better stay a while," he muttered. "I don't know where I am." "You're about fifty feet up," the sighing voice informed him. "You ought to let me tell you how the Life helps you change form. You don't have to be a tree." "No?" " Uh -uh! Some of the boys that landed with me wanted to get around and see things. Lots changed to animals or birds. One even stayed a man—on the outside anyway. Most of them have to change as the bodies wear out, which I don't, and some made bad mistakes tryin' to be things they saw on other planets." "I wouldn't want to do that, Mr. Ashlew." "There's just one thing. The Life don't like taking chances on word about this place gettin' around. It sorta believes in peace and quiet. You might not get back to your ship in any form that could tell tales." "Listen!" Kolin blurted out. "I wasn't so much enjoying being what I was that getting back matters to me!" "Don't like your home planet, whatever the name was?" "Haurtoz. It's a rotten place. A Planetary State! You have to think and even look the way that's standard thirty hours a day, asleep or awake. You get scared to sleep for fear you might dream treason and they'd find out somehow." "Whooeee! Heard about them places. Must be tough just to live." Suddenly, Kolin found himself telling the tree about life on Haurtoz, and of the officially announced threats to the Planetary State's planned expansion. He dwelt upon the desperation of having no place to hide in case of trouble with the authorities. A multiple system of such worlds was agonizing to imagine. Somehow, the oddity of talking to a tree wore off. Kolin heard opinions spouting out which he had prudently kept bottled up for years. The more he talked and stormed and complained, the more relaxed he felt. "If there was ever a fellow ready for this planet," decided the tree named Ashlew, "you're it, Sonny! Hang on there while I signal the Life by root!" Kolin sensed a lack of direct attention. The rustle about him was natural, caused by an ordinary breeze. He noticed his hands shaking. "Don't know what got into me, talking that way to a tree," he muttered. "If Yrtok snapped out of it and heard, I'm as good as re-personalized right now." As he brooded upon the sorry choice of arousing a search by hiding where he was or going back to bluff things out, the tree spoke. "Maybe you're all set, Sonny. The Life has been thinkin' of learning about other worlds. If you can think of a safe form to jet off in, you might make yourself a deal. How'd you like to stay here?" "I don't know," said Kolin. "The penalty for desertion—" "Whoosh! Who'd find you? You could be a bird, a tree, even a cloud." Silenced but doubting, Kolin permitted himself to try the dream on for size. He considered what form might most easily escape the notice of search parties and still be tough enough to live a long time without renewal. Another factor slipped into his musings: mere hope of escape was unsatisfying after the outburst that had defined his fuming hatred for Haurtoz. I'd better watch myself! he thought. Don't drop diamonds to grab at stars! "What I wish I could do is not just get away but get even for the way they make us live … the whole damn set-up. They could just as easy make peace with the Earth colonies. You know why they don't?" "Why?" wheezed Ashlew. "They're scared that without talk of war, and scouting for Earth fleets that never come, people would have time to think about the way they have to live and who's running things in the Planetary State. Then the gravy train would get blown up—and I mean blown up!" The tree was silent for a moment. Kolin felt the branches stir meditatively. Then Ashlew offered a suggestion. "I could tell the Life your side of it," he hissed. "Once in with us, you can always make thinking connections, no matter how far away. Maybe you could make a deal to kill two birds with one stone, as they used to say on Earth…." Chief Steward Slichow paced up and down beside the ration crate turned up to serve him as a field desk. He scowled in turn, impartially, at his watch and at the weary stewards of his headquarters detail. The latter stumbled about, stacking and distributing small packets of emergency rations. The line of crewmen released temporarily from repair work was transient as to individuals but immutable as to length. Slichow muttered something profane about disregard of orders as he glared at the rocky ridges surrounding the landing place. He was so intent upon planning greetings with which to favor the tardy scouting parties that he failed to notice the loose cloud drifting over the ridge. It was tenuous, almost a haze. Close examination would have revealed it to be made up of myriads of tiny spores. They resembled those cast forth by one of the bushes Kolin's party had passed. Along the edges, the haze faded raggedly into thin air, but the units evidently formed a cohesive body. They drifted together, approaching the men as if taking intelligent advantage of the breeze. One of Chief Slichow's staggering flunkies, stealing a few seconds of relaxation on the pretext of dumping an armful of light plastic packing, wandered into the haze. He froze. After a few heartbeats, he dropped the trash and stared at ship and men as if he had never seen either. A hail from his master moved him. "Coming, Chief!" he called but, returning at a moderate pace, he murmured, "My name is Frazer. I'm a second assistant steward. I'll think as Unit One." Throughout the cloud of spores, the mind formerly known as Peter Kolin congratulated itself upon its choice of form. Nearer to the original shape of the Life than Ashlew got , he thought. He paused to consider the state of the tree named Ashlew, half immortal but rooted to one spot, unable to float on a breeze or through space itself on the pressure of light. Especially, it was unable to insinuate any part of itself into the control center of another form of life, as a second spore was taking charge of the body of Chief Slichow at that very instant. There are not enough men , thought Kolin. Some of me must drift through the airlock. In space, I can spread through the air system to the command group. Repairs to the Peace State and the return to Haurtoz passed like weeks to some of the crew but like brief moments in infinity to other units. At last, the ship parted the air above Headquarters City and landed. The unit known as Captain Theodor Kessel hesitated before descending the ramp. He surveyed the field, the city and the waiting team of inspecting officers. "Could hardly be better, could it?" he chuckled to the companion unit called Security Officer Tarth. "Hardly, sir. All ready for the liberation of Haurtoz." "Reformation of the Planetary State," mused the captain, smiling dreamily as he grasped the handrail. "And then—formation of the Planetary Mind!" END Transcriber's Note: This e-text was produced from Worlds of If January 1962 . Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.

Indignant

Obedient

Jealous

Inconspicuous

23767_R1Y5NII5_2

Of what does Kolin and his peers need to be most careful of managing, lest they be perceived as treasonous?

By H. B. Fyfe THE TALKATIVE TREE Dang vines! Beats all how some plants have no manners—but what do you expect, when they used to be men! All things considered—the obscure star, the undetermined damage to the stellar drive and the way the small planet's murky atmosphere defied precision scanners—the pilot made a reasonably good landing. Despite sour feelings for the space service of Haurtoz, steward Peter Kolin had to admit that casualties might have been far worse. Chief Steward Slichow led his little command, less two third-class ration keepers thought to have been trapped in the lower hold, to a point two hundred meters from the steaming hull of the Peace State . He lined them up as if on parade. Kolin made himself inconspicuous. "Since the crew will be on emergency watches repairing the damage," announced the Chief in clipped, aggressive tones, "I have volunteered my section for preliminary scouting, as is suitable. It may be useful to discover temporary sources in this area of natural foods." Volunteered HIS section! thought Kolin rebelliously. Like the Supreme Director of Haurtoz! Being conscripted into this idiotic space fleet that never fights is bad enough without a tin god on jets like Slichow! Prudently, he did not express this resentment overtly. His well-schooled features revealed no trace of the idea—or of any other idea. The Planetary State of Haurtoz had been organized some fifteen light-years from old Earth, but many of the home world's less kindly techniques had been employed. Lack of complete loyalty to the state was likely to result in a siege of treatment that left the subject suitably "re-personalized." Kolin had heard of instances wherein mere unenthusiastic posture had betrayed intentions to harbor treasonable thoughts. "You will scout in five details of three persons each," Chief Slichow said. "Every hour, each detail will send one person in to report, and he will be replaced by one of the five I shall keep here to issue rations." Kolin permitted himself to wonder when anyone might get some rest, but assumed a mildly willing look. (Too eager an attitude could arouse suspicion of disguising an improper viewpoint.) The maintenance of a proper viewpoint was a necessity if the Planetary State were to survive the hostile plots of Earth and the latter's decadent colonies. That, at least, was the official line. Kolin found himself in a group with Jak Ammet, a third cook, and Eva Yrtok, powdered foods storekeeper. Since the crew would be eating packaged rations during repairs, Yrtok could be spared to command a scout detail. Each scout was issued a rocket pistol and a plastic water tube. Chief Slichow emphasized that the keepers of rations could hardly, in an emergency, give even the appearance of favoring themselves in regard to food. They would go without. Kolin maintained a standard expression as the Chief's sharp stare measured them. Yrtok, a dark, lean-faced girl, led the way with a quiet monosyllable. She carried the small radio they would be permitted to use for messages of utmost urgency. Ammet followed, and Kolin brought up the rear. To reach their assigned sector, they had to climb a forbidding ridge of rock within half a kilometer. Only a sparse creeper grew along their way, its elongated leaves shimmering with bronze-green reflections against a stony surface; but when they topped the ridge a thick forest was in sight. Yrtok and Ammet paused momentarily before descending. Kolin shared their sense of isolation. They would be out of sight of authority and responsible for their own actions. It was a strange sensation. They marched down into the valley at a brisk pace, becoming more aware of the clouds and atmospheric haze. Distant objects seemed blurred by the mist, taking on a somber, brooding grayness. For all Kolin could tell, he and the others were isolated in a world bounded by the rocky ridge behind them and a semi-circle of damp trees and bushes several hundred meters away. He suspected that the hills rising mistily ahead were part of a continuous slope, but could not be sure. Yrtok led the way along the most nearly level ground. Low creepers became more plentiful, interspersed with scrubby thickets of tangled, spike-armored bushes. Occasionally, small flying things flickered among the foliage. Once, a shrub puffed out an enormous cloud of tiny spores. "Be a job to find anything edible here," grunted Ammet, and Kolin agreed. Finally, after a longer hike than he had anticipated, they approached the edge of the deceptively distant forest. Yrtok paused to examine some purple berries glistening dangerously on a low shrub. Kolin regarded the trees with misgiving. "Looks as tough to get through as a tropical jungle," he remarked. "I think the stuff puts out shoots that grow back into the ground to root as they spread," said the woman. "Maybe we can find a way through." In two or three minutes, they reached the abrupt border of the odd-looking trees. Except for one thick trunked giant, all of them were about the same height. They craned their necks to estimate the altitude of the monster, but the top was hidden by the wide spread of branches. The depths behind it looked dark and impenetrable. "We'd better explore along the edge," decided Yrtok. "Ammet, now is the time to go back and tell the Chief which way we're— Ammet! " Kolin looked over his shoulder. Fifty meters away, Ammet sat beside the bush with the purple berries, utterly relaxed. "He must have tasted some!" exclaimed Kolin. "I'll see how he is." He ran back to the cook and shook him by the shoulder. Ammet's head lolled loosely to one side. His rather heavy features were vacant, lending him a doped appearance. Kolin straightened up and beckoned to Yrtok. For some reason, he had trouble attracting her attention. Then he noticed that she was kneeling. "Hope she didn't eat some stupid thing too!" he grumbled, trotting back. As he reached her, whatever Yrtok was examining came to life and scooted into the underbrush with a flash of greenish fur. All Kolin saw was that it had several legs too many. He pulled Yrtok to her feet. She pawed at him weakly, eyes as vacant as Ammet's. When he let go in sudden horror, she folded gently to the ground. She lay comfortably on her side, twitching one hand as if to brush something away. When she began to smile dreamily, Kolin backed away. The corners of his mouth felt oddly stiff; they had involuntarily drawn back to expose his clenched teeth. He glanced warily about, but nothing appeared to threaten him. "It's time to end this scout," he told himself. "It's dangerous. One good look and I'm jetting off! What I need is an easy tree to climb." He considered the massive giant. Soaring thirty or forty meters into the thin fog and dwarfing other growth, it seemed the most promising choice. At first, Kolin saw no way, but then the network of vines clinging to the rugged trunk suggested a route. He tried his weight gingerly, then began to climb. "I should have brought Yrtok's radio," he muttered. "Oh, well, I can take it when I come down, if she hasn't snapped out of her spell by then. Funny … I wonder if that green thing bit her." Footholds were plentiful among the interlaced lianas. Kolin progressed rapidly. When he reached the first thick limbs, twice head height, he felt safer. Later, at what he hoped was the halfway mark, he hooked one knee over a branch and paused to wipe sweat from his eyes. Peering down, he discovered the ground to be obscured by foliage. "I should have checked from down there to see how open the top is," he mused. "I wonder how the view will be from up there?" "Depends on what you're looking for, Sonny!" something remarked in a soughing wheeze. Kolin, slipping, grabbed desperately for the branch. His fingers clutched a handful of twigs and leaves, which just barely supported him until he regained a grip with the other hand. The branch quivered resentfully under him. "Careful, there!" whooshed the eerie voice. "It took me all summer to grow those!" Kolin could feel the skin crawling along his backbone. "Who are you?" he gasped. The answering sigh of laughter gave him a distinct chill despite its suggestion of amiability. "Name's Johnny Ashlew. Kinda thought you'd start with what I am. Didn't figure you'd ever seen a man grown into a tree before." Kolin looked about, seeing little but leaves and fog. "I have to climb down," he told himself in a reasonable tone. "It's bad enough that the other two passed out without me going space happy too." "What's your hurry?" demanded the voice. "I can talk to you just as easy all the way down, you know. Airholes in my bark—I'm not like an Earth tree." Kolin examined the bark of the crotch in which he sat. It did seem to have assorted holes and hollows in its rough surface. "I never saw an Earth tree," he admitted. "We came from Haurtoz." "Where's that? Oh, never mind—some little planet. I don't bother with them all, since I came here and found out I could be anything I wanted." "What do you mean, anything you wanted?" asked Kolin, testing the firmness of a vertical vine. "Just what I said," continued the voice, sounding closer in his ear as his cheek brushed the ridged bark of the tree trunk. "And, if I do have to remind you, it would be nicer if you said 'Mr. Ashlew,' considering my age." "Your age? How old—?" "Can't really count it in Earth years any more. Lost track. I always figured bein' a tree was a nice, peaceful life; and when I remembered how long some of them live, that settled it. Sonny, this world ain't all it looks like." "It isn't, Mr. Ashlew?" asked Kolin, twisting about in an effort to see what the higher branches might hide. "Nope. Most everything here is run by the Life—that is, by the thing that first grew big enough to do some thinking, and set its roots down all over until it had control. That's the outskirts of it down below." "The other trees? That jungle?" "It's more'n a jungle, Sonny. When I landed here, along with the others from the Arcturan Spark , the planet looked pretty empty to me, just like it must have to—Watch it, there, Boy! If I didn't twist that branch over in time, you'd be bouncing off my roots right now!" "Th-thanks!" grunted Kolin, hanging on grimly. "Doggone vine!" commented the windy whisper. " He ain't one of my crowd. Landed years later in a ship from some star towards the center of the galaxy. You should have seen his looks before the Life got in touch with his mind and set up a mental field to help him change form. He looks twice as good as a vine!" "He's very handy," agreed Kolin politely. He groped for a foothold. "Well … matter of fact, I can't get through to him much, even with the Life's mental field helping. Guess he started living with a different way of thinking. It burns me. I thought of being a tree, and then he came along to take advantage of it!" Kolin braced himself securely to stretch tiring muscles. "Maybe I'd better stay a while," he muttered. "I don't know where I am." "You're about fifty feet up," the sighing voice informed him. "You ought to let me tell you how the Life helps you change form. You don't have to be a tree." "No?" " Uh -uh! Some of the boys that landed with me wanted to get around and see things. Lots changed to animals or birds. One even stayed a man—on the outside anyway. Most of them have to change as the bodies wear out, which I don't, and some made bad mistakes tryin' to be things they saw on other planets." "I wouldn't want to do that, Mr. Ashlew." "There's just one thing. The Life don't like taking chances on word about this place gettin' around. It sorta believes in peace and quiet. You might not get back to your ship in any form that could tell tales." "Listen!" Kolin blurted out. "I wasn't so much enjoying being what I was that getting back matters to me!" "Don't like your home planet, whatever the name was?" "Haurtoz. It's a rotten place. A Planetary State! You have to think and even look the way that's standard thirty hours a day, asleep or awake. You get scared to sleep for fear you might dream treason and they'd find out somehow." "Whooeee! Heard about them places. Must be tough just to live." Suddenly, Kolin found himself telling the tree about life on Haurtoz, and of the officially announced threats to the Planetary State's planned expansion. He dwelt upon the desperation of having no place to hide in case of trouble with the authorities. A multiple system of such worlds was agonizing to imagine. Somehow, the oddity of talking to a tree wore off. Kolin heard opinions spouting out which he had prudently kept bottled up for years. The more he talked and stormed and complained, the more relaxed he felt. "If there was ever a fellow ready for this planet," decided the tree named Ashlew, "you're it, Sonny! Hang on there while I signal the Life by root!" Kolin sensed a lack of direct attention. The rustle about him was natural, caused by an ordinary breeze. He noticed his hands shaking. "Don't know what got into me, talking that way to a tree," he muttered. "If Yrtok snapped out of it and heard, I'm as good as re-personalized right now." As he brooded upon the sorry choice of arousing a search by hiding where he was or going back to bluff things out, the tree spoke. "Maybe you're all set, Sonny. The Life has been thinkin' of learning about other worlds. If you can think of a safe form to jet off in, you might make yourself a deal. How'd you like to stay here?" "I don't know," said Kolin. "The penalty for desertion—" "Whoosh! Who'd find you? You could be a bird, a tree, even a cloud." Silenced but doubting, Kolin permitted himself to try the dream on for size. He considered what form might most easily escape the notice of search parties and still be tough enough to live a long time without renewal. Another factor slipped into his musings: mere hope of escape was unsatisfying after the outburst that had defined his fuming hatred for Haurtoz. I'd better watch myself! he thought. Don't drop diamonds to grab at stars! "What I wish I could do is not just get away but get even for the way they make us live … the whole damn set-up. They could just as easy make peace with the Earth colonies. You know why they don't?" "Why?" wheezed Ashlew. "They're scared that without talk of war, and scouting for Earth fleets that never come, people would have time to think about the way they have to live and who's running things in the Planetary State. Then the gravy train would get blown up—and I mean blown up!" The tree was silent for a moment. Kolin felt the branches stir meditatively. Then Ashlew offered a suggestion. "I could tell the Life your side of it," he hissed. "Once in with us, you can always make thinking connections, no matter how far away. Maybe you could make a deal to kill two birds with one stone, as they used to say on Earth…." Chief Steward Slichow paced up and down beside the ration crate turned up to serve him as a field desk. He scowled in turn, impartially, at his watch and at the weary stewards of his headquarters detail. The latter stumbled about, stacking and distributing small packets of emergency rations. The line of crewmen released temporarily from repair work was transient as to individuals but immutable as to length. Slichow muttered something profane about disregard of orders as he glared at the rocky ridges surrounding the landing place. He was so intent upon planning greetings with which to favor the tardy scouting parties that he failed to notice the loose cloud drifting over the ridge. It was tenuous, almost a haze. Close examination would have revealed it to be made up of myriads of tiny spores. They resembled those cast forth by one of the bushes Kolin's party had passed. Along the edges, the haze faded raggedly into thin air, but the units evidently formed a cohesive body. They drifted together, approaching the men as if taking intelligent advantage of the breeze. One of Chief Slichow's staggering flunkies, stealing a few seconds of relaxation on the pretext of dumping an armful of light plastic packing, wandered into the haze. He froze. After a few heartbeats, he dropped the trash and stared at ship and men as if he had never seen either. A hail from his master moved him. "Coming, Chief!" he called but, returning at a moderate pace, he murmured, "My name is Frazer. I'm a second assistant steward. I'll think as Unit One." Throughout the cloud of spores, the mind formerly known as Peter Kolin congratulated itself upon its choice of form. Nearer to the original shape of the Life than Ashlew got , he thought. He paused to consider the state of the tree named Ashlew, half immortal but rooted to one spot, unable to float on a breeze or through space itself on the pressure of light. Especially, it was unable to insinuate any part of itself into the control center of another form of life, as a second spore was taking charge of the body of Chief Slichow at that very instant. There are not enough men , thought Kolin. Some of me must drift through the airlock. In space, I can spread through the air system to the command group. Repairs to the Peace State and the return to Haurtoz passed like weeks to some of the crew but like brief moments in infinity to other units. At last, the ship parted the air above Headquarters City and landed. The unit known as Captain Theodor Kessel hesitated before descending the ramp. He surveyed the field, the city and the waiting team of inspecting officers. "Could hardly be better, could it?" he chuckled to the companion unit called Security Officer Tarth. "Hardly, sir. All ready for the liberation of Haurtoz." "Reformation of the Planetary State," mused the captain, smiling dreamily as he grasped the handrail. "And then—formation of the Planetary Mind!" END Transcriber's Note: This e-text was produced from Worlds of If January 1962 . Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.

Their language

Their guise

Their rations

Their thoughts

23767_R1Y5NII5_3

What component of being the first to venture out into the unknown, dangerous planet is slightly exciting to Kolin and his peers? (being out of authority's watch)

By H. B. Fyfe THE TALKATIVE TREE Dang vines! Beats all how some plants have no manners—but what do you expect, when they used to be men! All things considered—the obscure star, the undetermined damage to the stellar drive and the way the small planet's murky atmosphere defied precision scanners—the pilot made a reasonably good landing. Despite sour feelings for the space service of Haurtoz, steward Peter Kolin had to admit that casualties might have been far worse. Chief Steward Slichow led his little command, less two third-class ration keepers thought to have been trapped in the lower hold, to a point two hundred meters from the steaming hull of the Peace State . He lined them up as if on parade. Kolin made himself inconspicuous. "Since the crew will be on emergency watches repairing the damage," announced the Chief in clipped, aggressive tones, "I have volunteered my section for preliminary scouting, as is suitable. It may be useful to discover temporary sources in this area of natural foods." Volunteered HIS section! thought Kolin rebelliously. Like the Supreme Director of Haurtoz! Being conscripted into this idiotic space fleet that never fights is bad enough without a tin god on jets like Slichow! Prudently, he did not express this resentment overtly. His well-schooled features revealed no trace of the idea—or of any other idea. The Planetary State of Haurtoz had been organized some fifteen light-years from old Earth, but many of the home world's less kindly techniques had been employed. Lack of complete loyalty to the state was likely to result in a siege of treatment that left the subject suitably "re-personalized." Kolin had heard of instances wherein mere unenthusiastic posture had betrayed intentions to harbor treasonable thoughts. "You will scout in five details of three persons each," Chief Slichow said. "Every hour, each detail will send one person in to report, and he will be replaced by one of the five I shall keep here to issue rations." Kolin permitted himself to wonder when anyone might get some rest, but assumed a mildly willing look. (Too eager an attitude could arouse suspicion of disguising an improper viewpoint.) The maintenance of a proper viewpoint was a necessity if the Planetary State were to survive the hostile plots of Earth and the latter's decadent colonies. That, at least, was the official line. Kolin found himself in a group with Jak Ammet, a third cook, and Eva Yrtok, powdered foods storekeeper. Since the crew would be eating packaged rations during repairs, Yrtok could be spared to command a scout detail. Each scout was issued a rocket pistol and a plastic water tube. Chief Slichow emphasized that the keepers of rations could hardly, in an emergency, give even the appearance of favoring themselves in regard to food. They would go without. Kolin maintained a standard expression as the Chief's sharp stare measured them. Yrtok, a dark, lean-faced girl, led the way with a quiet monosyllable. She carried the small radio they would be permitted to use for messages of utmost urgency. Ammet followed, and Kolin brought up the rear. To reach their assigned sector, they had to climb a forbidding ridge of rock within half a kilometer. Only a sparse creeper grew along their way, its elongated leaves shimmering with bronze-green reflections against a stony surface; but when they topped the ridge a thick forest was in sight. Yrtok and Ammet paused momentarily before descending. Kolin shared their sense of isolation. They would be out of sight of authority and responsible for their own actions. It was a strange sensation. They marched down into the valley at a brisk pace, becoming more aware of the clouds and atmospheric haze. Distant objects seemed blurred by the mist, taking on a somber, brooding grayness. For all Kolin could tell, he and the others were isolated in a world bounded by the rocky ridge behind them and a semi-circle of damp trees and bushes several hundred meters away. He suspected that the hills rising mistily ahead were part of a continuous slope, but could not be sure. Yrtok led the way along the most nearly level ground. Low creepers became more plentiful, interspersed with scrubby thickets of tangled, spike-armored bushes. Occasionally, small flying things flickered among the foliage. Once, a shrub puffed out an enormous cloud of tiny spores. "Be a job to find anything edible here," grunted Ammet, and Kolin agreed. Finally, after a longer hike than he had anticipated, they approached the edge of the deceptively distant forest. Yrtok paused to examine some purple berries glistening dangerously on a low shrub. Kolin regarded the trees with misgiving. "Looks as tough to get through as a tropical jungle," he remarked. "I think the stuff puts out shoots that grow back into the ground to root as they spread," said the woman. "Maybe we can find a way through." In two or three minutes, they reached the abrupt border of the odd-looking trees. Except for one thick trunked giant, all of them were about the same height. They craned their necks to estimate the altitude of the monster, but the top was hidden by the wide spread of branches. The depths behind it looked dark and impenetrable. "We'd better explore along the edge," decided Yrtok. "Ammet, now is the time to go back and tell the Chief which way we're— Ammet! " Kolin looked over his shoulder. Fifty meters away, Ammet sat beside the bush with the purple berries, utterly relaxed. "He must have tasted some!" exclaimed Kolin. "I'll see how he is." He ran back to the cook and shook him by the shoulder. Ammet's head lolled loosely to one side. His rather heavy features were vacant, lending him a doped appearance. Kolin straightened up and beckoned to Yrtok. For some reason, he had trouble attracting her attention. Then he noticed that she was kneeling. "Hope she didn't eat some stupid thing too!" he grumbled, trotting back. As he reached her, whatever Yrtok was examining came to life and scooted into the underbrush with a flash of greenish fur. All Kolin saw was that it had several legs too many. He pulled Yrtok to her feet. She pawed at him weakly, eyes as vacant as Ammet's. When he let go in sudden horror, she folded gently to the ground. She lay comfortably on her side, twitching one hand as if to brush something away. When she began to smile dreamily, Kolin backed away. The corners of his mouth felt oddly stiff; they had involuntarily drawn back to expose his clenched teeth. He glanced warily about, but nothing appeared to threaten him. "It's time to end this scout," he told himself. "It's dangerous. One good look and I'm jetting off! What I need is an easy tree to climb." He considered the massive giant. Soaring thirty or forty meters into the thin fog and dwarfing other growth, it seemed the most promising choice. At first, Kolin saw no way, but then the network of vines clinging to the rugged trunk suggested a route. He tried his weight gingerly, then began to climb. "I should have brought Yrtok's radio," he muttered. "Oh, well, I can take it when I come down, if she hasn't snapped out of her spell by then. Funny … I wonder if that green thing bit her." Footholds were plentiful among the interlaced lianas. Kolin progressed rapidly. When he reached the first thick limbs, twice head height, he felt safer. Later, at what he hoped was the halfway mark, he hooked one knee over a branch and paused to wipe sweat from his eyes. Peering down, he discovered the ground to be obscured by foliage. "I should have checked from down there to see how open the top is," he mused. "I wonder how the view will be from up there?" "Depends on what you're looking for, Sonny!" something remarked in a soughing wheeze. Kolin, slipping, grabbed desperately for the branch. His fingers clutched a handful of twigs and leaves, which just barely supported him until he regained a grip with the other hand. The branch quivered resentfully under him. "Careful, there!" whooshed the eerie voice. "It took me all summer to grow those!" Kolin could feel the skin crawling along his backbone. "Who are you?" he gasped. The answering sigh of laughter gave him a distinct chill despite its suggestion of amiability. "Name's Johnny Ashlew. Kinda thought you'd start with what I am. Didn't figure you'd ever seen a man grown into a tree before." Kolin looked about, seeing little but leaves and fog. "I have to climb down," he told himself in a reasonable tone. "It's bad enough that the other two passed out without me going space happy too." "What's your hurry?" demanded the voice. "I can talk to you just as easy all the way down, you know. Airholes in my bark—I'm not like an Earth tree." Kolin examined the bark of the crotch in which he sat. It did seem to have assorted holes and hollows in its rough surface. "I never saw an Earth tree," he admitted. "We came from Haurtoz." "Where's that? Oh, never mind—some little planet. I don't bother with them all, since I came here and found out I could be anything I wanted." "What do you mean, anything you wanted?" asked Kolin, testing the firmness of a vertical vine. "Just what I said," continued the voice, sounding closer in his ear as his cheek brushed the ridged bark of the tree trunk. "And, if I do have to remind you, it would be nicer if you said 'Mr. Ashlew,' considering my age." "Your age? How old—?" "Can't really count it in Earth years any more. Lost track. I always figured bein' a tree was a nice, peaceful life; and when I remembered how long some of them live, that settled it. Sonny, this world ain't all it looks like." "It isn't, Mr. Ashlew?" asked Kolin, twisting about in an effort to see what the higher branches might hide. "Nope. Most everything here is run by the Life—that is, by the thing that first grew big enough to do some thinking, and set its roots down all over until it had control. That's the outskirts of it down below." "The other trees? That jungle?" "It's more'n a jungle, Sonny. When I landed here, along with the others from the Arcturan Spark , the planet looked pretty empty to me, just like it must have to—Watch it, there, Boy! If I didn't twist that branch over in time, you'd be bouncing off my roots right now!" "Th-thanks!" grunted Kolin, hanging on grimly. "Doggone vine!" commented the windy whisper. " He ain't one of my crowd. Landed years later in a ship from some star towards the center of the galaxy. You should have seen his looks before the Life got in touch with his mind and set up a mental field to help him change form. He looks twice as good as a vine!" "He's very handy," agreed Kolin politely. He groped for a foothold. "Well … matter of fact, I can't get through to him much, even with the Life's mental field helping. Guess he started living with a different way of thinking. It burns me. I thought of being a tree, and then he came along to take advantage of it!" Kolin braced himself securely to stretch tiring muscles. "Maybe I'd better stay a while," he muttered. "I don't know where I am." "You're about fifty feet up," the sighing voice informed him. "You ought to let me tell you how the Life helps you change form. You don't have to be a tree." "No?" " Uh -uh! Some of the boys that landed with me wanted to get around and see things. Lots changed to animals or birds. One even stayed a man—on the outside anyway. Most of them have to change as the bodies wear out, which I don't, and some made bad mistakes tryin' to be things they saw on other planets." "I wouldn't want to do that, Mr. Ashlew." "There's just one thing. The Life don't like taking chances on word about this place gettin' around. It sorta believes in peace and quiet. You might not get back to your ship in any form that could tell tales." "Listen!" Kolin blurted out. "I wasn't so much enjoying being what I was that getting back matters to me!" "Don't like your home planet, whatever the name was?" "Haurtoz. It's a rotten place. A Planetary State! You have to think and even look the way that's standard thirty hours a day, asleep or awake. You get scared to sleep for fear you might dream treason and they'd find out somehow." "Whooeee! Heard about them places. Must be tough just to live." Suddenly, Kolin found himself telling the tree about life on Haurtoz, and of the officially announced threats to the Planetary State's planned expansion. He dwelt upon the desperation of having no place to hide in case of trouble with the authorities. A multiple system of such worlds was agonizing to imagine. Somehow, the oddity of talking to a tree wore off. Kolin heard opinions spouting out which he had prudently kept bottled up for years. The more he talked and stormed and complained, the more relaxed he felt. "If there was ever a fellow ready for this planet," decided the tree named Ashlew, "you're it, Sonny! Hang on there while I signal the Life by root!" Kolin sensed a lack of direct attention. The rustle about him was natural, caused by an ordinary breeze. He noticed his hands shaking. "Don't know what got into me, talking that way to a tree," he muttered. "If Yrtok snapped out of it and heard, I'm as good as re-personalized right now." As he brooded upon the sorry choice of arousing a search by hiding where he was or going back to bluff things out, the tree spoke. "Maybe you're all set, Sonny. The Life has been thinkin' of learning about other worlds. If you can think of a safe form to jet off in, you might make yourself a deal. How'd you like to stay here?" "I don't know," said Kolin. "The penalty for desertion—" "Whoosh! Who'd find you? You could be a bird, a tree, even a cloud." Silenced but doubting, Kolin permitted himself to try the dream on for size. He considered what form might most easily escape the notice of search parties and still be tough enough to live a long time without renewal. Another factor slipped into his musings: mere hope of escape was unsatisfying after the outburst that had defined his fuming hatred for Haurtoz. I'd better watch myself! he thought. Don't drop diamonds to grab at stars! "What I wish I could do is not just get away but get even for the way they make us live … the whole damn set-up. They could just as easy make peace with the Earth colonies. You know why they don't?" "Why?" wheezed Ashlew. "They're scared that without talk of war, and scouting for Earth fleets that never come, people would have time to think about the way they have to live and who's running things in the Planetary State. Then the gravy train would get blown up—and I mean blown up!" The tree was silent for a moment. Kolin felt the branches stir meditatively. Then Ashlew offered a suggestion. "I could tell the Life your side of it," he hissed. "Once in with us, you can always make thinking connections, no matter how far away. Maybe you could make a deal to kill two birds with one stone, as they used to say on Earth…." Chief Steward Slichow paced up and down beside the ration crate turned up to serve him as a field desk. He scowled in turn, impartially, at his watch and at the weary stewards of his headquarters detail. The latter stumbled about, stacking and distributing small packets of emergency rations. The line of crewmen released temporarily from repair work was transient as to individuals but immutable as to length. Slichow muttered something profane about disregard of orders as he glared at the rocky ridges surrounding the landing place. He was so intent upon planning greetings with which to favor the tardy scouting parties that he failed to notice the loose cloud drifting over the ridge. It was tenuous, almost a haze. Close examination would have revealed it to be made up of myriads of tiny spores. They resembled those cast forth by one of the bushes Kolin's party had passed. Along the edges, the haze faded raggedly into thin air, but the units evidently formed a cohesive body. They drifted together, approaching the men as if taking intelligent advantage of the breeze. One of Chief Slichow's staggering flunkies, stealing a few seconds of relaxation on the pretext of dumping an armful of light plastic packing, wandered into the haze. He froze. After a few heartbeats, he dropped the trash and stared at ship and men as if he had never seen either. A hail from his master moved him. "Coming, Chief!" he called but, returning at a moderate pace, he murmured, "My name is Frazer. I'm a second assistant steward. I'll think as Unit One." Throughout the cloud of spores, the mind formerly known as Peter Kolin congratulated itself upon its choice of form. Nearer to the original shape of the Life than Ashlew got , he thought. He paused to consider the state of the tree named Ashlew, half immortal but rooted to one spot, unable to float on a breeze or through space itself on the pressure of light. Especially, it was unable to insinuate any part of itself into the control center of another form of life, as a second spore was taking charge of the body of Chief Slichow at that very instant. There are not enough men , thought Kolin. Some of me must drift through the airlock. In space, I can spread through the air system to the command group. Repairs to the Peace State and the return to Haurtoz passed like weeks to some of the crew but like brief moments in infinity to other units. At last, the ship parted the air above Headquarters City and landed. The unit known as Captain Theodor Kessel hesitated before descending the ramp. He surveyed the field, the city and the waiting team of inspecting officers. "Could hardly be better, could it?" he chuckled to the companion unit called Security Officer Tarth. "Hardly, sir. All ready for the liberation of Haurtoz." "Reformation of the Planetary State," mused the captain, smiling dreamily as he grasped the handrail. "And then—formation of the Planetary Mind!" END Transcriber's Note: This e-text was produced from Worlds of If January 1962 . Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.

Escaping the authoritarian rule of Haurtoz

Experiencing a break from constant supervision

Sabotaging Chief Steward Slichow's plans

Consuming real food without having to share it

23767_R1Y5NII5_4

What effect do the purple berries in the forest LEAST likely produce in humans?

By H. B. Fyfe THE TALKATIVE TREE Dang vines! Beats all how some plants have no manners—but what do you expect, when they used to be men! All things considered—the obscure star, the undetermined damage to the stellar drive and the way the small planet's murky atmosphere defied precision scanners—the pilot made a reasonably good landing. Despite sour feelings for the space service of Haurtoz, steward Peter Kolin had to admit that casualties might have been far worse. Chief Steward Slichow led his little command, less two third-class ration keepers thought to have been trapped in the lower hold, to a point two hundred meters from the steaming hull of the Peace State . He lined them up as if on parade. Kolin made himself inconspicuous. "Since the crew will be on emergency watches repairing the damage," announced the Chief in clipped, aggressive tones, "I have volunteered my section for preliminary scouting, as is suitable. It may be useful to discover temporary sources in this area of natural foods." Volunteered HIS section! thought Kolin rebelliously. Like the Supreme Director of Haurtoz! Being conscripted into this idiotic space fleet that never fights is bad enough without a tin god on jets like Slichow! Prudently, he did not express this resentment overtly. His well-schooled features revealed no trace of the idea—or of any other idea. The Planetary State of Haurtoz had been organized some fifteen light-years from old Earth, but many of the home world's less kindly techniques had been employed. Lack of complete loyalty to the state was likely to result in a siege of treatment that left the subject suitably "re-personalized." Kolin had heard of instances wherein mere unenthusiastic posture had betrayed intentions to harbor treasonable thoughts. "You will scout in five details of three persons each," Chief Slichow said. "Every hour, each detail will send one person in to report, and he will be replaced by one of the five I shall keep here to issue rations." Kolin permitted himself to wonder when anyone might get some rest, but assumed a mildly willing look. (Too eager an attitude could arouse suspicion of disguising an improper viewpoint.) The maintenance of a proper viewpoint was a necessity if the Planetary State were to survive the hostile plots of Earth and the latter's decadent colonies. That, at least, was the official line. Kolin found himself in a group with Jak Ammet, a third cook, and Eva Yrtok, powdered foods storekeeper. Since the crew would be eating packaged rations during repairs, Yrtok could be spared to command a scout detail. Each scout was issued a rocket pistol and a plastic water tube. Chief Slichow emphasized that the keepers of rations could hardly, in an emergency, give even the appearance of favoring themselves in regard to food. They would go without. Kolin maintained a standard expression as the Chief's sharp stare measured them. Yrtok, a dark, lean-faced girl, led the way with a quiet monosyllable. She carried the small radio they would be permitted to use for messages of utmost urgency. Ammet followed, and Kolin brought up the rear. To reach their assigned sector, they had to climb a forbidding ridge of rock within half a kilometer. Only a sparse creeper grew along their way, its elongated leaves shimmering with bronze-green reflections against a stony surface; but when they topped the ridge a thick forest was in sight. Yrtok and Ammet paused momentarily before descending. Kolin shared their sense of isolation. They would be out of sight of authority and responsible for their own actions. It was a strange sensation. They marched down into the valley at a brisk pace, becoming more aware of the clouds and atmospheric haze. Distant objects seemed blurred by the mist, taking on a somber, brooding grayness. For all Kolin could tell, he and the others were isolated in a world bounded by the rocky ridge behind them and a semi-circle of damp trees and bushes several hundred meters away. He suspected that the hills rising mistily ahead were part of a continuous slope, but could not be sure. Yrtok led the way along the most nearly level ground. Low creepers became more plentiful, interspersed with scrubby thickets of tangled, spike-armored bushes. Occasionally, small flying things flickered among the foliage. Once, a shrub puffed out an enormous cloud of tiny spores. "Be a job to find anything edible here," grunted Ammet, and Kolin agreed. Finally, after a longer hike than he had anticipated, they approached the edge of the deceptively distant forest. Yrtok paused to examine some purple berries glistening dangerously on a low shrub. Kolin regarded the trees with misgiving. "Looks as tough to get through as a tropical jungle," he remarked. "I think the stuff puts out shoots that grow back into the ground to root as they spread," said the woman. "Maybe we can find a way through." In two or three minutes, they reached the abrupt border of the odd-looking trees. Except for one thick trunked giant, all of them were about the same height. They craned their necks to estimate the altitude of the monster, but the top was hidden by the wide spread of branches. The depths behind it looked dark and impenetrable. "We'd better explore along the edge," decided Yrtok. "Ammet, now is the time to go back and tell the Chief which way we're— Ammet! " Kolin looked over his shoulder. Fifty meters away, Ammet sat beside the bush with the purple berries, utterly relaxed. "He must have tasted some!" exclaimed Kolin. "I'll see how he is." He ran back to the cook and shook him by the shoulder. Ammet's head lolled loosely to one side. His rather heavy features were vacant, lending him a doped appearance. Kolin straightened up and beckoned to Yrtok. For some reason, he had trouble attracting her attention. Then he noticed that she was kneeling. "Hope she didn't eat some stupid thing too!" he grumbled, trotting back. As he reached her, whatever Yrtok was examining came to life and scooted into the underbrush with a flash of greenish fur. All Kolin saw was that it had several legs too many. He pulled Yrtok to her feet. She pawed at him weakly, eyes as vacant as Ammet's. When he let go in sudden horror, she folded gently to the ground. She lay comfortably on her side, twitching one hand as if to brush something away. When she began to smile dreamily, Kolin backed away. The corners of his mouth felt oddly stiff; they had involuntarily drawn back to expose his clenched teeth. He glanced warily about, but nothing appeared to threaten him. "It's time to end this scout," he told himself. "It's dangerous. One good look and I'm jetting off! What I need is an easy tree to climb." He considered the massive giant. Soaring thirty or forty meters into the thin fog and dwarfing other growth, it seemed the most promising choice. At first, Kolin saw no way, but then the network of vines clinging to the rugged trunk suggested a route. He tried his weight gingerly, then began to climb. "I should have brought Yrtok's radio," he muttered. "Oh, well, I can take it when I come down, if she hasn't snapped out of her spell by then. Funny … I wonder if that green thing bit her." Footholds were plentiful among the interlaced lianas. Kolin progressed rapidly. When he reached the first thick limbs, twice head height, he felt safer. Later, at what he hoped was the halfway mark, he hooked one knee over a branch and paused to wipe sweat from his eyes. Peering down, he discovered the ground to be obscured by foliage. "I should have checked from down there to see how open the top is," he mused. "I wonder how the view will be from up there?" "Depends on what you're looking for, Sonny!" something remarked in a soughing wheeze. Kolin, slipping, grabbed desperately for the branch. His fingers clutched a handful of twigs and leaves, which just barely supported him until he regained a grip with the other hand. The branch quivered resentfully under him. "Careful, there!" whooshed the eerie voice. "It took me all summer to grow those!" Kolin could feel the skin crawling along his backbone. "Who are you?" he gasped. The answering sigh of laughter gave him a distinct chill despite its suggestion of amiability. "Name's Johnny Ashlew. Kinda thought you'd start with what I am. Didn't figure you'd ever seen a man grown into a tree before." Kolin looked about, seeing little but leaves and fog. "I have to climb down," he told himself in a reasonable tone. "It's bad enough that the other two passed out without me going space happy too." "What's your hurry?" demanded the voice. "I can talk to you just as easy all the way down, you know. Airholes in my bark—I'm not like an Earth tree." Kolin examined the bark of the crotch in which he sat. It did seem to have assorted holes and hollows in its rough surface. "I never saw an Earth tree," he admitted. "We came from Haurtoz." "Where's that? Oh, never mind—some little planet. I don't bother with them all, since I came here and found out I could be anything I wanted." "What do you mean, anything you wanted?" asked Kolin, testing the firmness of a vertical vine. "Just what I said," continued the voice, sounding closer in his ear as his cheek brushed the ridged bark of the tree trunk. "And, if I do have to remind you, it would be nicer if you said 'Mr. Ashlew,' considering my age." "Your age? How old—?" "Can't really count it in Earth years any more. Lost track. I always figured bein' a tree was a nice, peaceful life; and when I remembered how long some of them live, that settled it. Sonny, this world ain't all it looks like." "It isn't, Mr. Ashlew?" asked Kolin, twisting about in an effort to see what the higher branches might hide. "Nope. Most everything here is run by the Life—that is, by the thing that first grew big enough to do some thinking, and set its roots down all over until it had control. That's the outskirts of it down below." "The other trees? That jungle?" "It's more'n a jungle, Sonny. When I landed here, along with the others from the Arcturan Spark , the planet looked pretty empty to me, just like it must have to—Watch it, there, Boy! If I didn't twist that branch over in time, you'd be bouncing off my roots right now!" "Th-thanks!" grunted Kolin, hanging on grimly. "Doggone vine!" commented the windy whisper. " He ain't one of my crowd. Landed years later in a ship from some star towards the center of the galaxy. You should have seen his looks before the Life got in touch with his mind and set up a mental field to help him change form. He looks twice as good as a vine!" "He's very handy," agreed Kolin politely. He groped for a foothold. "Well … matter of fact, I can't get through to him much, even with the Life's mental field helping. Guess he started living with a different way of thinking. It burns me. I thought of being a tree, and then he came along to take advantage of it!" Kolin braced himself securely to stretch tiring muscles. "Maybe I'd better stay a while," he muttered. "I don't know where I am." "You're about fifty feet up," the sighing voice informed him. "You ought to let me tell you how the Life helps you change form. You don't have to be a tree." "No?" " Uh -uh! Some of the boys that landed with me wanted to get around and see things. Lots changed to animals or birds. One even stayed a man—on the outside anyway. Most of them have to change as the bodies wear out, which I don't, and some made bad mistakes tryin' to be things they saw on other planets." "I wouldn't want to do that, Mr. Ashlew." "There's just one thing. The Life don't like taking chances on word about this place gettin' around. It sorta believes in peace and quiet. You might not get back to your ship in any form that could tell tales." "Listen!" Kolin blurted out. "I wasn't so much enjoying being what I was that getting back matters to me!" "Don't like your home planet, whatever the name was?" "Haurtoz. It's a rotten place. A Planetary State! You have to think and even look the way that's standard thirty hours a day, asleep or awake. You get scared to sleep for fear you might dream treason and they'd find out somehow." "Whooeee! Heard about them places. Must be tough just to live." Suddenly, Kolin found himself telling the tree about life on Haurtoz, and of the officially announced threats to the Planetary State's planned expansion. He dwelt upon the desperation of having no place to hide in case of trouble with the authorities. A multiple system of such worlds was agonizing to imagine. Somehow, the oddity of talking to a tree wore off. Kolin heard opinions spouting out which he had prudently kept bottled up for years. The more he talked and stormed and complained, the more relaxed he felt. "If there was ever a fellow ready for this planet," decided the tree named Ashlew, "you're it, Sonny! Hang on there while I signal the Life by root!" Kolin sensed a lack of direct attention. The rustle about him was natural, caused by an ordinary breeze. He noticed his hands shaking. "Don't know what got into me, talking that way to a tree," he muttered. "If Yrtok snapped out of it and heard, I'm as good as re-personalized right now." As he brooded upon the sorry choice of arousing a search by hiding where he was or going back to bluff things out, the tree spoke. "Maybe you're all set, Sonny. The Life has been thinkin' of learning about other worlds. If you can think of a safe form to jet off in, you might make yourself a deal. How'd you like to stay here?" "I don't know," said Kolin. "The penalty for desertion—" "Whoosh! Who'd find you? You could be a bird, a tree, even a cloud." Silenced but doubting, Kolin permitted himself to try the dream on for size. He considered what form might most easily escape the notice of search parties and still be tough enough to live a long time without renewal. Another factor slipped into his musings: mere hope of escape was unsatisfying after the outburst that had defined his fuming hatred for Haurtoz. I'd better watch myself! he thought. Don't drop diamonds to grab at stars! "What I wish I could do is not just get away but get even for the way they make us live … the whole damn set-up. They could just as easy make peace with the Earth colonies. You know why they don't?" "Why?" wheezed Ashlew. "They're scared that without talk of war, and scouting for Earth fleets that never come, people would have time to think about the way they have to live and who's running things in the Planetary State. Then the gravy train would get blown up—and I mean blown up!" The tree was silent for a moment. Kolin felt the branches stir meditatively. Then Ashlew offered a suggestion. "I could tell the Life your side of it," he hissed. "Once in with us, you can always make thinking connections, no matter how far away. Maybe you could make a deal to kill two birds with one stone, as they used to say on Earth…." Chief Steward Slichow paced up and down beside the ration crate turned up to serve him as a field desk. He scowled in turn, impartially, at his watch and at the weary stewards of his headquarters detail. The latter stumbled about, stacking and distributing small packets of emergency rations. The line of crewmen released temporarily from repair work was transient as to individuals but immutable as to length. Slichow muttered something profane about disregard of orders as he glared at the rocky ridges surrounding the landing place. He was so intent upon planning greetings with which to favor the tardy scouting parties that he failed to notice the loose cloud drifting over the ridge. It was tenuous, almost a haze. Close examination would have revealed it to be made up of myriads of tiny spores. They resembled those cast forth by one of the bushes Kolin's party had passed. Along the edges, the haze faded raggedly into thin air, but the units evidently formed a cohesive body. They drifted together, approaching the men as if taking intelligent advantage of the breeze. One of Chief Slichow's staggering flunkies, stealing a few seconds of relaxation on the pretext of dumping an armful of light plastic packing, wandered into the haze. He froze. After a few heartbeats, he dropped the trash and stared at ship and men as if he had never seen either. A hail from his master moved him. "Coming, Chief!" he called but, returning at a moderate pace, he murmured, "My name is Frazer. I'm a second assistant steward. I'll think as Unit One." Throughout the cloud of spores, the mind formerly known as Peter Kolin congratulated itself upon its choice of form. Nearer to the original shape of the Life than Ashlew got , he thought. He paused to consider the state of the tree named Ashlew, half immortal but rooted to one spot, unable to float on a breeze or through space itself on the pressure of light. Especially, it was unable to insinuate any part of itself into the control center of another form of life, as a second spore was taking charge of the body of Chief Slichow at that very instant. There are not enough men , thought Kolin. Some of me must drift through the airlock. In space, I can spread through the air system to the command group. Repairs to the Peace State and the return to Haurtoz passed like weeks to some of the crew but like brief moments in infinity to other units. At last, the ship parted the air above Headquarters City and landed. The unit known as Captain Theodor Kessel hesitated before descending the ramp. He surveyed the field, the city and the waiting team of inspecting officers. "Could hardly be better, could it?" he chuckled to the companion unit called Security Officer Tarth. "Hardly, sir. All ready for the liberation of Haurtoz." "Reformation of the Planetary State," mused the captain, smiling dreamily as he grasped the handrail. "And then—formation of the Planetary Mind!" END Transcriber's Note: This e-text was produced from Worlds of If January 1962 . Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.

Creating hallucinations and delusions

Blending in to one's surroundings

Intoxicating the body and mind

Relaxing and letting one's guard down

23767_R1Y5NII5_5

What does Johnny Ashlew best represent?

By H. B. Fyfe THE TALKATIVE TREE Dang vines! Beats all how some plants have no manners—but what do you expect, when they used to be men! All things considered—the obscure star, the undetermined damage to the stellar drive and the way the small planet's murky atmosphere defied precision scanners—the pilot made a reasonably good landing. Despite sour feelings for the space service of Haurtoz, steward Peter Kolin had to admit that casualties might have been far worse. Chief Steward Slichow led his little command, less two third-class ration keepers thought to have been trapped in the lower hold, to a point two hundred meters from the steaming hull of the Peace State . He lined them up as if on parade. Kolin made himself inconspicuous. "Since the crew will be on emergency watches repairing the damage," announced the Chief in clipped, aggressive tones, "I have volunteered my section for preliminary scouting, as is suitable. It may be useful to discover temporary sources in this area of natural foods." Volunteered HIS section! thought Kolin rebelliously. Like the Supreme Director of Haurtoz! Being conscripted into this idiotic space fleet that never fights is bad enough without a tin god on jets like Slichow! Prudently, he did not express this resentment overtly. His well-schooled features revealed no trace of the idea—or of any other idea. The Planetary State of Haurtoz had been organized some fifteen light-years from old Earth, but many of the home world's less kindly techniques had been employed. Lack of complete loyalty to the state was likely to result in a siege of treatment that left the subject suitably "re-personalized." Kolin had heard of instances wherein mere unenthusiastic posture had betrayed intentions to harbor treasonable thoughts. "You will scout in five details of three persons each," Chief Slichow said. "Every hour, each detail will send one person in to report, and he will be replaced by one of the five I shall keep here to issue rations." Kolin permitted himself to wonder when anyone might get some rest, but assumed a mildly willing look. (Too eager an attitude could arouse suspicion of disguising an improper viewpoint.) The maintenance of a proper viewpoint was a necessity if the Planetary State were to survive the hostile plots of Earth and the latter's decadent colonies. That, at least, was the official line. Kolin found himself in a group with Jak Ammet, a third cook, and Eva Yrtok, powdered foods storekeeper. Since the crew would be eating packaged rations during repairs, Yrtok could be spared to command a scout detail. Each scout was issued a rocket pistol and a plastic water tube. Chief Slichow emphasized that the keepers of rations could hardly, in an emergency, give even the appearance of favoring themselves in regard to food. They would go without. Kolin maintained a standard expression as the Chief's sharp stare measured them. Yrtok, a dark, lean-faced girl, led the way with a quiet monosyllable. She carried the small radio they would be permitted to use for messages of utmost urgency. Ammet followed, and Kolin brought up the rear. To reach their assigned sector, they had to climb a forbidding ridge of rock within half a kilometer. Only a sparse creeper grew along their way, its elongated leaves shimmering with bronze-green reflections against a stony surface; but when they topped the ridge a thick forest was in sight. Yrtok and Ammet paused momentarily before descending. Kolin shared their sense of isolation. They would be out of sight of authority and responsible for their own actions. It was a strange sensation. They marched down into the valley at a brisk pace, becoming more aware of the clouds and atmospheric haze. Distant objects seemed blurred by the mist, taking on a somber, brooding grayness. For all Kolin could tell, he and the others were isolated in a world bounded by the rocky ridge behind them and a semi-circle of damp trees and bushes several hundred meters away. He suspected that the hills rising mistily ahead were part of a continuous slope, but could not be sure. Yrtok led the way along the most nearly level ground. Low creepers became more plentiful, interspersed with scrubby thickets of tangled, spike-armored bushes. Occasionally, small flying things flickered among the foliage. Once, a shrub puffed out an enormous cloud of tiny spores. "Be a job to find anything edible here," grunted Ammet, and Kolin agreed. Finally, after a longer hike than he had anticipated, they approached the edge of the deceptively distant forest. Yrtok paused to examine some purple berries glistening dangerously on a low shrub. Kolin regarded the trees with misgiving. "Looks as tough to get through as a tropical jungle," he remarked. "I think the stuff puts out shoots that grow back into the ground to root as they spread," said the woman. "Maybe we can find a way through." In two or three minutes, they reached the abrupt border of the odd-looking trees. Except for one thick trunked giant, all of them were about the same height. They craned their necks to estimate the altitude of the monster, but the top was hidden by the wide spread of branches. The depths behind it looked dark and impenetrable. "We'd better explore along the edge," decided Yrtok. "Ammet, now is the time to go back and tell the Chief which way we're— Ammet! " Kolin looked over his shoulder. Fifty meters away, Ammet sat beside the bush with the purple berries, utterly relaxed. "He must have tasted some!" exclaimed Kolin. "I'll see how he is." He ran back to the cook and shook him by the shoulder. Ammet's head lolled loosely to one side. His rather heavy features were vacant, lending him a doped appearance. Kolin straightened up and beckoned to Yrtok. For some reason, he had trouble attracting her attention. Then he noticed that she was kneeling. "Hope she didn't eat some stupid thing too!" he grumbled, trotting back. As he reached her, whatever Yrtok was examining came to life and scooted into the underbrush with a flash of greenish fur. All Kolin saw was that it had several legs too many. He pulled Yrtok to her feet. She pawed at him weakly, eyes as vacant as Ammet's. When he let go in sudden horror, she folded gently to the ground. She lay comfortably on her side, twitching one hand as if to brush something away. When she began to smile dreamily, Kolin backed away. The corners of his mouth felt oddly stiff; they had involuntarily drawn back to expose his clenched teeth. He glanced warily about, but nothing appeared to threaten him. "It's time to end this scout," he told himself. "It's dangerous. One good look and I'm jetting off! What I need is an easy tree to climb." He considered the massive giant. Soaring thirty or forty meters into the thin fog and dwarfing other growth, it seemed the most promising choice. At first, Kolin saw no way, but then the network of vines clinging to the rugged trunk suggested a route. He tried his weight gingerly, then began to climb. "I should have brought Yrtok's radio," he muttered. "Oh, well, I can take it when I come down, if she hasn't snapped out of her spell by then. Funny … I wonder if that green thing bit her." Footholds were plentiful among the interlaced lianas. Kolin progressed rapidly. When he reached the first thick limbs, twice head height, he felt safer. Later, at what he hoped was the halfway mark, he hooked one knee over a branch and paused to wipe sweat from his eyes. Peering down, he discovered the ground to be obscured by foliage. "I should have checked from down there to see how open the top is," he mused. "I wonder how the view will be from up there?" "Depends on what you're looking for, Sonny!" something remarked in a soughing wheeze. Kolin, slipping, grabbed desperately for the branch. His fingers clutched a handful of twigs and leaves, which just barely supported him until he regained a grip with the other hand. The branch quivered resentfully under him. "Careful, there!" whooshed the eerie voice. "It took me all summer to grow those!" Kolin could feel the skin crawling along his backbone. "Who are you?" he gasped. The answering sigh of laughter gave him a distinct chill despite its suggestion of amiability. "Name's Johnny Ashlew. Kinda thought you'd start with what I am. Didn't figure you'd ever seen a man grown into a tree before." Kolin looked about, seeing little but leaves and fog. "I have to climb down," he told himself in a reasonable tone. "It's bad enough that the other two passed out without me going space happy too." "What's your hurry?" demanded the voice. "I can talk to you just as easy all the way down, you know. Airholes in my bark—I'm not like an Earth tree." Kolin examined the bark of the crotch in which he sat. It did seem to have assorted holes and hollows in its rough surface. "I never saw an Earth tree," he admitted. "We came from Haurtoz." "Where's that? Oh, never mind—some little planet. I don't bother with them all, since I came here and found out I could be anything I wanted." "What do you mean, anything you wanted?" asked Kolin, testing the firmness of a vertical vine. "Just what I said," continued the voice, sounding closer in his ear as his cheek brushed the ridged bark of the tree trunk. "And, if I do have to remind you, it would be nicer if you said 'Mr. Ashlew,' considering my age." "Your age? How old—?" "Can't really count it in Earth years any more. Lost track. I always figured bein' a tree was a nice, peaceful life; and when I remembered how long some of them live, that settled it. Sonny, this world ain't all it looks like." "It isn't, Mr. Ashlew?" asked Kolin, twisting about in an effort to see what the higher branches might hide. "Nope. Most everything here is run by the Life—that is, by the thing that first grew big enough to do some thinking, and set its roots down all over until it had control. That's the outskirts of it down below." "The other trees? That jungle?" "It's more'n a jungle, Sonny. When I landed here, along with the others from the Arcturan Spark , the planet looked pretty empty to me, just like it must have to—Watch it, there, Boy! If I didn't twist that branch over in time, you'd be bouncing off my roots right now!" "Th-thanks!" grunted Kolin, hanging on grimly. "Doggone vine!" commented the windy whisper. " He ain't one of my crowd. Landed years later in a ship from some star towards the center of the galaxy. You should have seen his looks before the Life got in touch with his mind and set up a mental field to help him change form. He looks twice as good as a vine!" "He's very handy," agreed Kolin politely. He groped for a foothold. "Well … matter of fact, I can't get through to him much, even with the Life's mental field helping. Guess he started living with a different way of thinking. It burns me. I thought of being a tree, and then he came along to take advantage of it!" Kolin braced himself securely to stretch tiring muscles. "Maybe I'd better stay a while," he muttered. "I don't know where I am." "You're about fifty feet up," the sighing voice informed him. "You ought to let me tell you how the Life helps you change form. You don't have to be a tree." "No?" " Uh -uh! Some of the boys that landed with me wanted to get around and see things. Lots changed to animals or birds. One even stayed a man—on the outside anyway. Most of them have to change as the bodies wear out, which I don't, and some made bad mistakes tryin' to be things they saw on other planets." "I wouldn't want to do that, Mr. Ashlew." "There's just one thing. The Life don't like taking chances on word about this place gettin' around. It sorta believes in peace and quiet. You might not get back to your ship in any form that could tell tales." "Listen!" Kolin blurted out. "I wasn't so much enjoying being what I was that getting back matters to me!" "Don't like your home planet, whatever the name was?" "Haurtoz. It's a rotten place. A Planetary State! You have to think and even look the way that's standard thirty hours a day, asleep or awake. You get scared to sleep for fear you might dream treason and they'd find out somehow." "Whooeee! Heard about them places. Must be tough just to live." Suddenly, Kolin found himself telling the tree about life on Haurtoz, and of the officially announced threats to the Planetary State's planned expansion. He dwelt upon the desperation of having no place to hide in case of trouble with the authorities. A multiple system of such worlds was agonizing to imagine. Somehow, the oddity of talking to a tree wore off. Kolin heard opinions spouting out which he had prudently kept bottled up for years. The more he talked and stormed and complained, the more relaxed he felt. "If there was ever a fellow ready for this planet," decided the tree named Ashlew, "you're it, Sonny! Hang on there while I signal the Life by root!" Kolin sensed a lack of direct attention. The rustle about him was natural, caused by an ordinary breeze. He noticed his hands shaking. "Don't know what got into me, talking that way to a tree," he muttered. "If Yrtok snapped out of it and heard, I'm as good as re-personalized right now." As he brooded upon the sorry choice of arousing a search by hiding where he was or going back to bluff things out, the tree spoke. "Maybe you're all set, Sonny. The Life has been thinkin' of learning about other worlds. If you can think of a safe form to jet off in, you might make yourself a deal. How'd you like to stay here?" "I don't know," said Kolin. "The penalty for desertion—" "Whoosh! Who'd find you? You could be a bird, a tree, even a cloud." Silenced but doubting, Kolin permitted himself to try the dream on for size. He considered what form might most easily escape the notice of search parties and still be tough enough to live a long time without renewal. Another factor slipped into his musings: mere hope of escape was unsatisfying after the outburst that had defined his fuming hatred for Haurtoz. I'd better watch myself! he thought. Don't drop diamonds to grab at stars! "What I wish I could do is not just get away but get even for the way they make us live … the whole damn set-up. They could just as easy make peace with the Earth colonies. You know why they don't?" "Why?" wheezed Ashlew. "They're scared that without talk of war, and scouting for Earth fleets that never come, people would have time to think about the way they have to live and who's running things in the Planetary State. Then the gravy train would get blown up—and I mean blown up!" The tree was silent for a moment. Kolin felt the branches stir meditatively. Then Ashlew offered a suggestion. "I could tell the Life your side of it," he hissed. "Once in with us, you can always make thinking connections, no matter how far away. Maybe you could make a deal to kill two birds with one stone, as they used to say on Earth…." Chief Steward Slichow paced up and down beside the ration crate turned up to serve him as a field desk. He scowled in turn, impartially, at his watch and at the weary stewards of his headquarters detail. The latter stumbled about, stacking and distributing small packets of emergency rations. The line of crewmen released temporarily from repair work was transient as to individuals but immutable as to length. Slichow muttered something profane about disregard of orders as he glared at the rocky ridges surrounding the landing place. He was so intent upon planning greetings with which to favor the tardy scouting parties that he failed to notice the loose cloud drifting over the ridge. It was tenuous, almost a haze. Close examination would have revealed it to be made up of myriads of tiny spores. They resembled those cast forth by one of the bushes Kolin's party had passed. Along the edges, the haze faded raggedly into thin air, but the units evidently formed a cohesive body. They drifted together, approaching the men as if taking intelligent advantage of the breeze. One of Chief Slichow's staggering flunkies, stealing a few seconds of relaxation on the pretext of dumping an armful of light plastic packing, wandered into the haze. He froze. After a few heartbeats, he dropped the trash and stared at ship and men as if he had never seen either. A hail from his master moved him. "Coming, Chief!" he called but, returning at a moderate pace, he murmured, "My name is Frazer. I'm a second assistant steward. I'll think as Unit One." Throughout the cloud of spores, the mind formerly known as Peter Kolin congratulated itself upon its choice of form. Nearer to the original shape of the Life than Ashlew got , he thought. He paused to consider the state of the tree named Ashlew, half immortal but rooted to one spot, unable to float on a breeze or through space itself on the pressure of light. Especially, it was unable to insinuate any part of itself into the control center of another form of life, as a second spore was taking charge of the body of Chief Slichow at that very instant. There are not enough men , thought Kolin. Some of me must drift through the airlock. In space, I can spread through the air system to the command group. Repairs to the Peace State and the return to Haurtoz passed like weeks to some of the crew but like brief moments in infinity to other units. At last, the ship parted the air above Headquarters City and landed. The unit known as Captain Theodor Kessel hesitated before descending the ramp. He surveyed the field, the city and the waiting team of inspecting officers. "Could hardly be better, could it?" he chuckled to the companion unit called Security Officer Tarth. "Hardly, sir. All ready for the liberation of Haurtoz." "Reformation of the Planetary State," mused the captain, smiling dreamily as he grasped the handrail. "And then—formation of the Planetary Mind!" END Transcriber's Note: This e-text was produced from Worlds of If January 1962 . Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.

Slichow's greatest fear

Kolin's ego speaking its truth

Subtle omniscience

Freedom from conformity

23767_R1Y5NII5_6

What do the vines in the forest represent?

By H. B. Fyfe THE TALKATIVE TREE Dang vines! Beats all how some plants have no manners—but what do you expect, when they used to be men! All things considered—the obscure star, the undetermined damage to the stellar drive and the way the small planet's murky atmosphere defied precision scanners—the pilot made a reasonably good landing. Despite sour feelings for the space service of Haurtoz, steward Peter Kolin had to admit that casualties might have been far worse. Chief Steward Slichow led his little command, less two third-class ration keepers thought to have been trapped in the lower hold, to a point two hundred meters from the steaming hull of the Peace State . He lined them up as if on parade. Kolin made himself inconspicuous. "Since the crew will be on emergency watches repairing the damage," announced the Chief in clipped, aggressive tones, "I have volunteered my section for preliminary scouting, as is suitable. It may be useful to discover temporary sources in this area of natural foods." Volunteered HIS section! thought Kolin rebelliously. Like the Supreme Director of Haurtoz! Being conscripted into this idiotic space fleet that never fights is bad enough without a tin god on jets like Slichow! Prudently, he did not express this resentment overtly. His well-schooled features revealed no trace of the idea—or of any other idea. The Planetary State of Haurtoz had been organized some fifteen light-years from old Earth, but many of the home world's less kindly techniques had been employed. Lack of complete loyalty to the state was likely to result in a siege of treatment that left the subject suitably "re-personalized." Kolin had heard of instances wherein mere unenthusiastic posture had betrayed intentions to harbor treasonable thoughts. "You will scout in five details of three persons each," Chief Slichow said. "Every hour, each detail will send one person in to report, and he will be replaced by one of the five I shall keep here to issue rations." Kolin permitted himself to wonder when anyone might get some rest, but assumed a mildly willing look. (Too eager an attitude could arouse suspicion of disguising an improper viewpoint.) The maintenance of a proper viewpoint was a necessity if the Planetary State were to survive the hostile plots of Earth and the latter's decadent colonies. That, at least, was the official line. Kolin found himself in a group with Jak Ammet, a third cook, and Eva Yrtok, powdered foods storekeeper. Since the crew would be eating packaged rations during repairs, Yrtok could be spared to command a scout detail. Each scout was issued a rocket pistol and a plastic water tube. Chief Slichow emphasized that the keepers of rations could hardly, in an emergency, give even the appearance of favoring themselves in regard to food. They would go without. Kolin maintained a standard expression as the Chief's sharp stare measured them. Yrtok, a dark, lean-faced girl, led the way with a quiet monosyllable. She carried the small radio they would be permitted to use for messages of utmost urgency. Ammet followed, and Kolin brought up the rear. To reach their assigned sector, they had to climb a forbidding ridge of rock within half a kilometer. Only a sparse creeper grew along their way, its elongated leaves shimmering with bronze-green reflections against a stony surface; but when they topped the ridge a thick forest was in sight. Yrtok and Ammet paused momentarily before descending. Kolin shared their sense of isolation. They would be out of sight of authority and responsible for their own actions. It was a strange sensation. They marched down into the valley at a brisk pace, becoming more aware of the clouds and atmospheric haze. Distant objects seemed blurred by the mist, taking on a somber, brooding grayness. For all Kolin could tell, he and the others were isolated in a world bounded by the rocky ridge behind them and a semi-circle of damp trees and bushes several hundred meters away. He suspected that the hills rising mistily ahead were part of a continuous slope, but could not be sure. Yrtok led the way along the most nearly level ground. Low creepers became more plentiful, interspersed with scrubby thickets of tangled, spike-armored bushes. Occasionally, small flying things flickered among the foliage. Once, a shrub puffed out an enormous cloud of tiny spores. "Be a job to find anything edible here," grunted Ammet, and Kolin agreed. Finally, after a longer hike than he had anticipated, they approached the edge of the deceptively distant forest. Yrtok paused to examine some purple berries glistening dangerously on a low shrub. Kolin regarded the trees with misgiving. "Looks as tough to get through as a tropical jungle," he remarked. "I think the stuff puts out shoots that grow back into the ground to root as they spread," said the woman. "Maybe we can find a way through." In two or three minutes, they reached the abrupt border of the odd-looking trees. Except for one thick trunked giant, all of them were about the same height. They craned their necks to estimate the altitude of the monster, but the top was hidden by the wide spread of branches. The depths behind it looked dark and impenetrable. "We'd better explore along the edge," decided Yrtok. "Ammet, now is the time to go back and tell the Chief which way we're— Ammet! " Kolin looked over his shoulder. Fifty meters away, Ammet sat beside the bush with the purple berries, utterly relaxed. "He must have tasted some!" exclaimed Kolin. "I'll see how he is." He ran back to the cook and shook him by the shoulder. Ammet's head lolled loosely to one side. His rather heavy features were vacant, lending him a doped appearance. Kolin straightened up and beckoned to Yrtok. For some reason, he had trouble attracting her attention. Then he noticed that she was kneeling. "Hope she didn't eat some stupid thing too!" he grumbled, trotting back. As he reached her, whatever Yrtok was examining came to life and scooted into the underbrush with a flash of greenish fur. All Kolin saw was that it had several legs too many. He pulled Yrtok to her feet. She pawed at him weakly, eyes as vacant as Ammet's. When he let go in sudden horror, she folded gently to the ground. She lay comfortably on her side, twitching one hand as if to brush something away. When she began to smile dreamily, Kolin backed away. The corners of his mouth felt oddly stiff; they had involuntarily drawn back to expose his clenched teeth. He glanced warily about, but nothing appeared to threaten him. "It's time to end this scout," he told himself. "It's dangerous. One good look and I'm jetting off! What I need is an easy tree to climb." He considered the massive giant. Soaring thirty or forty meters into the thin fog and dwarfing other growth, it seemed the most promising choice. At first, Kolin saw no way, but then the network of vines clinging to the rugged trunk suggested a route. He tried his weight gingerly, then began to climb. "I should have brought Yrtok's radio," he muttered. "Oh, well, I can take it when I come down, if she hasn't snapped out of her spell by then. Funny … I wonder if that green thing bit her." Footholds were plentiful among the interlaced lianas. Kolin progressed rapidly. When he reached the first thick limbs, twice head height, he felt safer. Later, at what he hoped was the halfway mark, he hooked one knee over a branch and paused to wipe sweat from his eyes. Peering down, he discovered the ground to be obscured by foliage. "I should have checked from down there to see how open the top is," he mused. "I wonder how the view will be from up there?" "Depends on what you're looking for, Sonny!" something remarked in a soughing wheeze. Kolin, slipping, grabbed desperately for the branch. His fingers clutched a handful of twigs and leaves, which just barely supported him until he regained a grip with the other hand. The branch quivered resentfully under him. "Careful, there!" whooshed the eerie voice. "It took me all summer to grow those!" Kolin could feel the skin crawling along his backbone. "Who are you?" he gasped. The answering sigh of laughter gave him a distinct chill despite its suggestion of amiability. "Name's Johnny Ashlew. Kinda thought you'd start with what I am. Didn't figure you'd ever seen a man grown into a tree before." Kolin looked about, seeing little but leaves and fog. "I have to climb down," he told himself in a reasonable tone. "It's bad enough that the other two passed out without me going space happy too." "What's your hurry?" demanded the voice. "I can talk to you just as easy all the way down, you know. Airholes in my bark—I'm not like an Earth tree." Kolin examined the bark of the crotch in which he sat. It did seem to have assorted holes and hollows in its rough surface. "I never saw an Earth tree," he admitted. "We came from Haurtoz." "Where's that? Oh, never mind—some little planet. I don't bother with them all, since I came here and found out I could be anything I wanted." "What do you mean, anything you wanted?" asked Kolin, testing the firmness of a vertical vine. "Just what I said," continued the voice, sounding closer in his ear as his cheek brushed the ridged bark of the tree trunk. "And, if I do have to remind you, it would be nicer if you said 'Mr. Ashlew,' considering my age." "Your age? How old—?" "Can't really count it in Earth years any more. Lost track. I always figured bein' a tree was a nice, peaceful life; and when I remembered how long some of them live, that settled it. Sonny, this world ain't all it looks like." "It isn't, Mr. Ashlew?" asked Kolin, twisting about in an effort to see what the higher branches might hide. "Nope. Most everything here is run by the Life—that is, by the thing that first grew big enough to do some thinking, and set its roots down all over until it had control. That's the outskirts of it down below." "The other trees? That jungle?" "It's more'n a jungle, Sonny. When I landed here, along with the others from the Arcturan Spark , the planet looked pretty empty to me, just like it must have to—Watch it, there, Boy! If I didn't twist that branch over in time, you'd be bouncing off my roots right now!" "Th-thanks!" grunted Kolin, hanging on grimly. "Doggone vine!" commented the windy whisper. " He ain't one of my crowd. Landed years later in a ship from some star towards the center of the galaxy. You should have seen his looks before the Life got in touch with his mind and set up a mental field to help him change form. He looks twice as good as a vine!" "He's very handy," agreed Kolin politely. He groped for a foothold. "Well … matter of fact, I can't get through to him much, even with the Life's mental field helping. Guess he started living with a different way of thinking. It burns me. I thought of being a tree, and then he came along to take advantage of it!" Kolin braced himself securely to stretch tiring muscles. "Maybe I'd better stay a while," he muttered. "I don't know where I am." "You're about fifty feet up," the sighing voice informed him. "You ought to let me tell you how the Life helps you change form. You don't have to be a tree." "No?" " Uh -uh! Some of the boys that landed with me wanted to get around and see things. Lots changed to animals or birds. One even stayed a man—on the outside anyway. Most of them have to change as the bodies wear out, which I don't, and some made bad mistakes tryin' to be things they saw on other planets." "I wouldn't want to do that, Mr. Ashlew." "There's just one thing. The Life don't like taking chances on word about this place gettin' around. It sorta believes in peace and quiet. You might not get back to your ship in any form that could tell tales." "Listen!" Kolin blurted out. "I wasn't so much enjoying being what I was that getting back matters to me!" "Don't like your home planet, whatever the name was?" "Haurtoz. It's a rotten place. A Planetary State! You have to think and even look the way that's standard thirty hours a day, asleep or awake. You get scared to sleep for fear you might dream treason and they'd find out somehow." "Whooeee! Heard about them places. Must be tough just to live." Suddenly, Kolin found himself telling the tree about life on Haurtoz, and of the officially announced threats to the Planetary State's planned expansion. He dwelt upon the desperation of having no place to hide in case of trouble with the authorities. A multiple system of such worlds was agonizing to imagine. Somehow, the oddity of talking to a tree wore off. Kolin heard opinions spouting out which he had prudently kept bottled up for years. The more he talked and stormed and complained, the more relaxed he felt. "If there was ever a fellow ready for this planet," decided the tree named Ashlew, "you're it, Sonny! Hang on there while I signal the Life by root!" Kolin sensed a lack of direct attention. The rustle about him was natural, caused by an ordinary breeze. He noticed his hands shaking. "Don't know what got into me, talking that way to a tree," he muttered. "If Yrtok snapped out of it and heard, I'm as good as re-personalized right now." As he brooded upon the sorry choice of arousing a search by hiding where he was or going back to bluff things out, the tree spoke. "Maybe you're all set, Sonny. The Life has been thinkin' of learning about other worlds. If you can think of a safe form to jet off in, you might make yourself a deal. How'd you like to stay here?" "I don't know," said Kolin. "The penalty for desertion—" "Whoosh! Who'd find you? You could be a bird, a tree, even a cloud." Silenced but doubting, Kolin permitted himself to try the dream on for size. He considered what form might most easily escape the notice of search parties and still be tough enough to live a long time without renewal. Another factor slipped into his musings: mere hope of escape was unsatisfying after the outburst that had defined his fuming hatred for Haurtoz. I'd better watch myself! he thought. Don't drop diamonds to grab at stars! "What I wish I could do is not just get away but get even for the way they make us live … the whole damn set-up. They could just as easy make peace with the Earth colonies. You know why they don't?" "Why?" wheezed Ashlew. "They're scared that without talk of war, and scouting for Earth fleets that never come, people would have time to think about the way they have to live and who's running things in the Planetary State. Then the gravy train would get blown up—and I mean blown up!" The tree was silent for a moment. Kolin felt the branches stir meditatively. Then Ashlew offered a suggestion. "I could tell the Life your side of it," he hissed. "Once in with us, you can always make thinking connections, no matter how far away. Maybe you could make a deal to kill two birds with one stone, as they used to say on Earth…." Chief Steward Slichow paced up and down beside the ration crate turned up to serve him as a field desk. He scowled in turn, impartially, at his watch and at the weary stewards of his headquarters detail. The latter stumbled about, stacking and distributing small packets of emergency rations. The line of crewmen released temporarily from repair work was transient as to individuals but immutable as to length. Slichow muttered something profane about disregard of orders as he glared at the rocky ridges surrounding the landing place. He was so intent upon planning greetings with which to favor the tardy scouting parties that he failed to notice the loose cloud drifting over the ridge. It was tenuous, almost a haze. Close examination would have revealed it to be made up of myriads of tiny spores. They resembled those cast forth by one of the bushes Kolin's party had passed. Along the edges, the haze faded raggedly into thin air, but the units evidently formed a cohesive body. They drifted together, approaching the men as if taking intelligent advantage of the breeze. One of Chief Slichow's staggering flunkies, stealing a few seconds of relaxation on the pretext of dumping an armful of light plastic packing, wandered into the haze. He froze. After a few heartbeats, he dropped the trash and stared at ship and men as if he had never seen either. A hail from his master moved him. "Coming, Chief!" he called but, returning at a moderate pace, he murmured, "My name is Frazer. I'm a second assistant steward. I'll think as Unit One." Throughout the cloud of spores, the mind formerly known as Peter Kolin congratulated itself upon its choice of form. Nearer to the original shape of the Life than Ashlew got , he thought. He paused to consider the state of the tree named Ashlew, half immortal but rooted to one spot, unable to float on a breeze or through space itself on the pressure of light. Especially, it was unable to insinuate any part of itself into the control center of another form of life, as a second spore was taking charge of the body of Chief Slichow at that very instant. There are not enough men , thought Kolin. Some of me must drift through the airlock. In space, I can spread through the air system to the command group. Repairs to the Peace State and the return to Haurtoz passed like weeks to some of the crew but like brief moments in infinity to other units. At last, the ship parted the air above Headquarters City and landed. The unit known as Captain Theodor Kessel hesitated before descending the ramp. He surveyed the field, the city and the waiting team of inspecting officers. "Could hardly be better, could it?" he chuckled to the companion unit called Security Officer Tarth. "Hardly, sir. All ready for the liberation of Haurtoz." "Reformation of the Planetary State," mused the captain, smiling dreamily as he grasped the handrail. "And then—formation of the Planetary Mind!" END Transcriber's Note: This e-text was produced from Worlds of If January 1962 . Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.

The nature of rampant colonialism

The possibility to be who one wishes to be

The destructive power of nature

The lower end of social strata

23767_R1Y5NII5_7

What does "the Life" best represent?

By H. B. Fyfe THE TALKATIVE TREE Dang vines! Beats all how some plants have no manners—but what do you expect, when they used to be men! All things considered—the obscure star, the undetermined damage to the stellar drive and the way the small planet's murky atmosphere defied precision scanners—the pilot made a reasonably good landing. Despite sour feelings for the space service of Haurtoz, steward Peter Kolin had to admit that casualties might have been far worse. Chief Steward Slichow led his little command, less two third-class ration keepers thought to have been trapped in the lower hold, to a point two hundred meters from the steaming hull of the Peace State . He lined them up as if on parade. Kolin made himself inconspicuous. "Since the crew will be on emergency watches repairing the damage," announced the Chief in clipped, aggressive tones, "I have volunteered my section for preliminary scouting, as is suitable. It may be useful to discover temporary sources in this area of natural foods." Volunteered HIS section! thought Kolin rebelliously. Like the Supreme Director of Haurtoz! Being conscripted into this idiotic space fleet that never fights is bad enough without a tin god on jets like Slichow! Prudently, he did not express this resentment overtly. His well-schooled features revealed no trace of the idea—or of any other idea. The Planetary State of Haurtoz had been organized some fifteen light-years from old Earth, but many of the home world's less kindly techniques had been employed. Lack of complete loyalty to the state was likely to result in a siege of treatment that left the subject suitably "re-personalized." Kolin had heard of instances wherein mere unenthusiastic posture had betrayed intentions to harbor treasonable thoughts. "You will scout in five details of three persons each," Chief Slichow said. "Every hour, each detail will send one person in to report, and he will be replaced by one of the five I shall keep here to issue rations." Kolin permitted himself to wonder when anyone might get some rest, but assumed a mildly willing look. (Too eager an attitude could arouse suspicion of disguising an improper viewpoint.) The maintenance of a proper viewpoint was a necessity if the Planetary State were to survive the hostile plots of Earth and the latter's decadent colonies. That, at least, was the official line. Kolin found himself in a group with Jak Ammet, a third cook, and Eva Yrtok, powdered foods storekeeper. Since the crew would be eating packaged rations during repairs, Yrtok could be spared to command a scout detail. Each scout was issued a rocket pistol and a plastic water tube. Chief Slichow emphasized that the keepers of rations could hardly, in an emergency, give even the appearance of favoring themselves in regard to food. They would go without. Kolin maintained a standard expression as the Chief's sharp stare measured them. Yrtok, a dark, lean-faced girl, led the way with a quiet monosyllable. She carried the small radio they would be permitted to use for messages of utmost urgency. Ammet followed, and Kolin brought up the rear. To reach their assigned sector, they had to climb a forbidding ridge of rock within half a kilometer. Only a sparse creeper grew along their way, its elongated leaves shimmering with bronze-green reflections against a stony surface; but when they topped the ridge a thick forest was in sight. Yrtok and Ammet paused momentarily before descending. Kolin shared their sense of isolation. They would be out of sight of authority and responsible for their own actions. It was a strange sensation. They marched down into the valley at a brisk pace, becoming more aware of the clouds and atmospheric haze. Distant objects seemed blurred by the mist, taking on a somber, brooding grayness. For all Kolin could tell, he and the others were isolated in a world bounded by the rocky ridge behind them and a semi-circle of damp trees and bushes several hundred meters away. He suspected that the hills rising mistily ahead were part of a continuous slope, but could not be sure. Yrtok led the way along the most nearly level ground. Low creepers became more plentiful, interspersed with scrubby thickets of tangled, spike-armored bushes. Occasionally, small flying things flickered among the foliage. Once, a shrub puffed out an enormous cloud of tiny spores. "Be a job to find anything edible here," grunted Ammet, and Kolin agreed. Finally, after a longer hike than he had anticipated, they approached the edge of the deceptively distant forest. Yrtok paused to examine some purple berries glistening dangerously on a low shrub. Kolin regarded the trees with misgiving. "Looks as tough to get through as a tropical jungle," he remarked. "I think the stuff puts out shoots that grow back into the ground to root as they spread," said the woman. "Maybe we can find a way through." In two or three minutes, they reached the abrupt border of the odd-looking trees. Except for one thick trunked giant, all of them were about the same height. They craned their necks to estimate the altitude of the monster, but the top was hidden by the wide spread of branches. The depths behind it looked dark and impenetrable. "We'd better explore along the edge," decided Yrtok. "Ammet, now is the time to go back and tell the Chief which way we're— Ammet! " Kolin looked over his shoulder. Fifty meters away, Ammet sat beside the bush with the purple berries, utterly relaxed. "He must have tasted some!" exclaimed Kolin. "I'll see how he is." He ran back to the cook and shook him by the shoulder. Ammet's head lolled loosely to one side. His rather heavy features were vacant, lending him a doped appearance. Kolin straightened up and beckoned to Yrtok. For some reason, he had trouble attracting her attention. Then he noticed that she was kneeling. "Hope she didn't eat some stupid thing too!" he grumbled, trotting back. As he reached her, whatever Yrtok was examining came to life and scooted into the underbrush with a flash of greenish fur. All Kolin saw was that it had several legs too many. He pulled Yrtok to her feet. She pawed at him weakly, eyes as vacant as Ammet's. When he let go in sudden horror, she folded gently to the ground. She lay comfortably on her side, twitching one hand as if to brush something away. When she began to smile dreamily, Kolin backed away. The corners of his mouth felt oddly stiff; they had involuntarily drawn back to expose his clenched teeth. He glanced warily about, but nothing appeared to threaten him. "It's time to end this scout," he told himself. "It's dangerous. One good look and I'm jetting off! What I need is an easy tree to climb." He considered the massive giant. Soaring thirty or forty meters into the thin fog and dwarfing other growth, it seemed the most promising choice. At first, Kolin saw no way, but then the network of vines clinging to the rugged trunk suggested a route. He tried his weight gingerly, then began to climb. "I should have brought Yrtok's radio," he muttered. "Oh, well, I can take it when I come down, if she hasn't snapped out of her spell by then. Funny … I wonder if that green thing bit her." Footholds were plentiful among the interlaced lianas. Kolin progressed rapidly. When he reached the first thick limbs, twice head height, he felt safer. Later, at what he hoped was the halfway mark, he hooked one knee over a branch and paused to wipe sweat from his eyes. Peering down, he discovered the ground to be obscured by foliage. "I should have checked from down there to see how open the top is," he mused. "I wonder how the view will be from up there?" "Depends on what you're looking for, Sonny!" something remarked in a soughing wheeze. Kolin, slipping, grabbed desperately for the branch. His fingers clutched a handful of twigs and leaves, which just barely supported him until he regained a grip with the other hand. The branch quivered resentfully under him. "Careful, there!" whooshed the eerie voice. "It took me all summer to grow those!" Kolin could feel the skin crawling along his backbone. "Who are you?" he gasped. The answering sigh of laughter gave him a distinct chill despite its suggestion of amiability. "Name's Johnny Ashlew. Kinda thought you'd start with what I am. Didn't figure you'd ever seen a man grown into a tree before." Kolin looked about, seeing little but leaves and fog. "I have to climb down," he told himself in a reasonable tone. "It's bad enough that the other two passed out without me going space happy too." "What's your hurry?" demanded the voice. "I can talk to you just as easy all the way down, you know. Airholes in my bark—I'm not like an Earth tree." Kolin examined the bark of the crotch in which he sat. It did seem to have assorted holes and hollows in its rough surface. "I never saw an Earth tree," he admitted. "We came from Haurtoz." "Where's that? Oh, never mind—some little planet. I don't bother with them all, since I came here and found out I could be anything I wanted." "What do you mean, anything you wanted?" asked Kolin, testing the firmness of a vertical vine. "Just what I said," continued the voice, sounding closer in his ear as his cheek brushed the ridged bark of the tree trunk. "And, if I do have to remind you, it would be nicer if you said 'Mr. Ashlew,' considering my age." "Your age? How old—?" "Can't really count it in Earth years any more. Lost track. I always figured bein' a tree was a nice, peaceful life; and when I remembered how long some of them live, that settled it. Sonny, this world ain't all it looks like." "It isn't, Mr. Ashlew?" asked Kolin, twisting about in an effort to see what the higher branches might hide. "Nope. Most everything here is run by the Life—that is, by the thing that first grew big enough to do some thinking, and set its roots down all over until it had control. That's the outskirts of it down below." "The other trees? That jungle?" "It's more'n a jungle, Sonny. When I landed here, along with the others from the Arcturan Spark , the planet looked pretty empty to me, just like it must have to—Watch it, there, Boy! If I didn't twist that branch over in time, you'd be bouncing off my roots right now!" "Th-thanks!" grunted Kolin, hanging on grimly. "Doggone vine!" commented the windy whisper. " He ain't one of my crowd. Landed years later in a ship from some star towards the center of the galaxy. You should have seen his looks before the Life got in touch with his mind and set up a mental field to help him change form. He looks twice as good as a vine!" "He's very handy," agreed Kolin politely. He groped for a foothold. "Well … matter of fact, I can't get through to him much, even with the Life's mental field helping. Guess he started living with a different way of thinking. It burns me. I thought of being a tree, and then he came along to take advantage of it!" Kolin braced himself securely to stretch tiring muscles. "Maybe I'd better stay a while," he muttered. "I don't know where I am." "You're about fifty feet up," the sighing voice informed him. "You ought to let me tell you how the Life helps you change form. You don't have to be a tree." "No?" " Uh -uh! Some of the boys that landed with me wanted to get around and see things. Lots changed to animals or birds. One even stayed a man—on the outside anyway. Most of them have to change as the bodies wear out, which I don't, and some made bad mistakes tryin' to be things they saw on other planets." "I wouldn't want to do that, Mr. Ashlew." "There's just one thing. The Life don't like taking chances on word about this place gettin' around. It sorta believes in peace and quiet. You might not get back to your ship in any form that could tell tales." "Listen!" Kolin blurted out. "I wasn't so much enjoying being what I was that getting back matters to me!" "Don't like your home planet, whatever the name was?" "Haurtoz. It's a rotten place. A Planetary State! You have to think and even look the way that's standard thirty hours a day, asleep or awake. You get scared to sleep for fear you might dream treason and they'd find out somehow." "Whooeee! Heard about them places. Must be tough just to live." Suddenly, Kolin found himself telling the tree about life on Haurtoz, and of the officially announced threats to the Planetary State's planned expansion. He dwelt upon the desperation of having no place to hide in case of trouble with the authorities. A multiple system of such worlds was agonizing to imagine. Somehow, the oddity of talking to a tree wore off. Kolin heard opinions spouting out which he had prudently kept bottled up for years. The more he talked and stormed and complained, the more relaxed he felt. "If there was ever a fellow ready for this planet," decided the tree named Ashlew, "you're it, Sonny! Hang on there while I signal the Life by root!" Kolin sensed a lack of direct attention. The rustle about him was natural, caused by an ordinary breeze. He noticed his hands shaking. "Don't know what got into me, talking that way to a tree," he muttered. "If Yrtok snapped out of it and heard, I'm as good as re-personalized right now." As he brooded upon the sorry choice of arousing a search by hiding where he was or going back to bluff things out, the tree spoke. "Maybe you're all set, Sonny. The Life has been thinkin' of learning about other worlds. If you can think of a safe form to jet off in, you might make yourself a deal. How'd you like to stay here?" "I don't know," said Kolin. "The penalty for desertion—" "Whoosh! Who'd find you? You could be a bird, a tree, even a cloud." Silenced but doubting, Kolin permitted himself to try the dream on for size. He considered what form might most easily escape the notice of search parties and still be tough enough to live a long time without renewal. Another factor slipped into his musings: mere hope of escape was unsatisfying after the outburst that had defined his fuming hatred for Haurtoz. I'd better watch myself! he thought. Don't drop diamonds to grab at stars! "What I wish I could do is not just get away but get even for the way they make us live … the whole damn set-up. They could just as easy make peace with the Earth colonies. You know why they don't?" "Why?" wheezed Ashlew. "They're scared that without talk of war, and scouting for Earth fleets that never come, people would have time to think about the way they have to live and who's running things in the Planetary State. Then the gravy train would get blown up—and I mean blown up!" The tree was silent for a moment. Kolin felt the branches stir meditatively. Then Ashlew offered a suggestion. "I could tell the Life your side of it," he hissed. "Once in with us, you can always make thinking connections, no matter how far away. Maybe you could make a deal to kill two birds with one stone, as they used to say on Earth…." Chief Steward Slichow paced up and down beside the ration crate turned up to serve him as a field desk. He scowled in turn, impartially, at his watch and at the weary stewards of his headquarters detail. The latter stumbled about, stacking and distributing small packets of emergency rations. The line of crewmen released temporarily from repair work was transient as to individuals but immutable as to length. Slichow muttered something profane about disregard of orders as he glared at the rocky ridges surrounding the landing place. He was so intent upon planning greetings with which to favor the tardy scouting parties that he failed to notice the loose cloud drifting over the ridge. It was tenuous, almost a haze. Close examination would have revealed it to be made up of myriads of tiny spores. They resembled those cast forth by one of the bushes Kolin's party had passed. Along the edges, the haze faded raggedly into thin air, but the units evidently formed a cohesive body. They drifted together, approaching the men as if taking intelligent advantage of the breeze. One of Chief Slichow's staggering flunkies, stealing a few seconds of relaxation on the pretext of dumping an armful of light plastic packing, wandered into the haze. He froze. After a few heartbeats, he dropped the trash and stared at ship and men as if he had never seen either. A hail from his master moved him. "Coming, Chief!" he called but, returning at a moderate pace, he murmured, "My name is Frazer. I'm a second assistant steward. I'll think as Unit One." Throughout the cloud of spores, the mind formerly known as Peter Kolin congratulated itself upon its choice of form. Nearer to the original shape of the Life than Ashlew got , he thought. He paused to consider the state of the tree named Ashlew, half immortal but rooted to one spot, unable to float on a breeze or through space itself on the pressure of light. Especially, it was unable to insinuate any part of itself into the control center of another form of life, as a second spore was taking charge of the body of Chief Slichow at that very instant. There are not enough men , thought Kolin. Some of me must drift through the airlock. In space, I can spread through the air system to the command group. Repairs to the Peace State and the return to Haurtoz passed like weeks to some of the crew but like brief moments in infinity to other units. At last, the ship parted the air above Headquarters City and landed. The unit known as Captain Theodor Kessel hesitated before descending the ramp. He surveyed the field, the city and the waiting team of inspecting officers. "Could hardly be better, could it?" he chuckled to the companion unit called Security Officer Tarth. "Hardly, sir. All ready for the liberation of Haurtoz." "Reformation of the Planetary State," mused the captain, smiling dreamily as he grasped the handrail. "And then—formation of the Planetary Mind!" END Transcriber's Note: This e-text was produced from Worlds of If January 1962 . Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.

Freedom to live authentically

Escapism and abandonment of responsibility

Temptation and deviation from shared goals

Immortality and a return to wholeness

23767_R1Y5NII5_8

What was Kolin's primary motivation in transforming to his new form?

By H. B. Fyfe THE TALKATIVE TREE Dang vines! Beats all how some plants have no manners—but what do you expect, when they used to be men! All things considered—the obscure star, the undetermined damage to the stellar drive and the way the small planet's murky atmosphere defied precision scanners—the pilot made a reasonably good landing. Despite sour feelings for the space service of Haurtoz, steward Peter Kolin had to admit that casualties might have been far worse. Chief Steward Slichow led his little command, less two third-class ration keepers thought to have been trapped in the lower hold, to a point two hundred meters from the steaming hull of the Peace State . He lined them up as if on parade. Kolin made himself inconspicuous. "Since the crew will be on emergency watches repairing the damage," announced the Chief in clipped, aggressive tones, "I have volunteered my section for preliminary scouting, as is suitable. It may be useful to discover temporary sources in this area of natural foods." Volunteered HIS section! thought Kolin rebelliously. Like the Supreme Director of Haurtoz! Being conscripted into this idiotic space fleet that never fights is bad enough without a tin god on jets like Slichow! Prudently, he did not express this resentment overtly. His well-schooled features revealed no trace of the idea—or of any other idea. The Planetary State of Haurtoz had been organized some fifteen light-years from old Earth, but many of the home world's less kindly techniques had been employed. Lack of complete loyalty to the state was likely to result in a siege of treatment that left the subject suitably "re-personalized." Kolin had heard of instances wherein mere unenthusiastic posture had betrayed intentions to harbor treasonable thoughts. "You will scout in five details of three persons each," Chief Slichow said. "Every hour, each detail will send one person in to report, and he will be replaced by one of the five I shall keep here to issue rations." Kolin permitted himself to wonder when anyone might get some rest, but assumed a mildly willing look. (Too eager an attitude could arouse suspicion of disguising an improper viewpoint.) The maintenance of a proper viewpoint was a necessity if the Planetary State were to survive the hostile plots of Earth and the latter's decadent colonies. That, at least, was the official line. Kolin found himself in a group with Jak Ammet, a third cook, and Eva Yrtok, powdered foods storekeeper. Since the crew would be eating packaged rations during repairs, Yrtok could be spared to command a scout detail. Each scout was issued a rocket pistol and a plastic water tube. Chief Slichow emphasized that the keepers of rations could hardly, in an emergency, give even the appearance of favoring themselves in regard to food. They would go without. Kolin maintained a standard expression as the Chief's sharp stare measured them. Yrtok, a dark, lean-faced girl, led the way with a quiet monosyllable. She carried the small radio they would be permitted to use for messages of utmost urgency. Ammet followed, and Kolin brought up the rear. To reach their assigned sector, they had to climb a forbidding ridge of rock within half a kilometer. Only a sparse creeper grew along their way, its elongated leaves shimmering with bronze-green reflections against a stony surface; but when they topped the ridge a thick forest was in sight. Yrtok and Ammet paused momentarily before descending. Kolin shared their sense of isolation. They would be out of sight of authority and responsible for their own actions. It was a strange sensation. They marched down into the valley at a brisk pace, becoming more aware of the clouds and atmospheric haze. Distant objects seemed blurred by the mist, taking on a somber, brooding grayness. For all Kolin could tell, he and the others were isolated in a world bounded by the rocky ridge behind them and a semi-circle of damp trees and bushes several hundred meters away. He suspected that the hills rising mistily ahead were part of a continuous slope, but could not be sure. Yrtok led the way along the most nearly level ground. Low creepers became more plentiful, interspersed with scrubby thickets of tangled, spike-armored bushes. Occasionally, small flying things flickered among the foliage. Once, a shrub puffed out an enormous cloud of tiny spores. "Be a job to find anything edible here," grunted Ammet, and Kolin agreed. Finally, after a longer hike than he had anticipated, they approached the edge of the deceptively distant forest. Yrtok paused to examine some purple berries glistening dangerously on a low shrub. Kolin regarded the trees with misgiving. "Looks as tough to get through as a tropical jungle," he remarked. "I think the stuff puts out shoots that grow back into the ground to root as they spread," said the woman. "Maybe we can find a way through." In two or three minutes, they reached the abrupt border of the odd-looking trees. Except for one thick trunked giant, all of them were about the same height. They craned their necks to estimate the altitude of the monster, but the top was hidden by the wide spread of branches. The depths behind it looked dark and impenetrable. "We'd better explore along the edge," decided Yrtok. "Ammet, now is the time to go back and tell the Chief which way we're— Ammet! " Kolin looked over his shoulder. Fifty meters away, Ammet sat beside the bush with the purple berries, utterly relaxed. "He must have tasted some!" exclaimed Kolin. "I'll see how he is." He ran back to the cook and shook him by the shoulder. Ammet's head lolled loosely to one side. His rather heavy features were vacant, lending him a doped appearance. Kolin straightened up and beckoned to Yrtok. For some reason, he had trouble attracting her attention. Then he noticed that she was kneeling. "Hope she didn't eat some stupid thing too!" he grumbled, trotting back. As he reached her, whatever Yrtok was examining came to life and scooted into the underbrush with a flash of greenish fur. All Kolin saw was that it had several legs too many. He pulled Yrtok to her feet. She pawed at him weakly, eyes as vacant as Ammet's. When he let go in sudden horror, she folded gently to the ground. She lay comfortably on her side, twitching one hand as if to brush something away. When she began to smile dreamily, Kolin backed away. The corners of his mouth felt oddly stiff; they had involuntarily drawn back to expose his clenched teeth. He glanced warily about, but nothing appeared to threaten him. "It's time to end this scout," he told himself. "It's dangerous. One good look and I'm jetting off! What I need is an easy tree to climb." He considered the massive giant. Soaring thirty or forty meters into the thin fog and dwarfing other growth, it seemed the most promising choice. At first, Kolin saw no way, but then the network of vines clinging to the rugged trunk suggested a route. He tried his weight gingerly, then began to climb. "I should have brought Yrtok's radio," he muttered. "Oh, well, I can take it when I come down, if she hasn't snapped out of her spell by then. Funny … I wonder if that green thing bit her." Footholds were plentiful among the interlaced lianas. Kolin progressed rapidly. When he reached the first thick limbs, twice head height, he felt safer. Later, at what he hoped was the halfway mark, he hooked one knee over a branch and paused to wipe sweat from his eyes. Peering down, he discovered the ground to be obscured by foliage. "I should have checked from down there to see how open the top is," he mused. "I wonder how the view will be from up there?" "Depends on what you're looking for, Sonny!" something remarked in a soughing wheeze. Kolin, slipping, grabbed desperately for the branch. His fingers clutched a handful of twigs and leaves, which just barely supported him until he regained a grip with the other hand. The branch quivered resentfully under him. "Careful, there!" whooshed the eerie voice. "It took me all summer to grow those!" Kolin could feel the skin crawling along his backbone. "Who are you?" he gasped. The answering sigh of laughter gave him a distinct chill despite its suggestion of amiability. "Name's Johnny Ashlew. Kinda thought you'd start with what I am. Didn't figure you'd ever seen a man grown into a tree before." Kolin looked about, seeing little but leaves and fog. "I have to climb down," he told himself in a reasonable tone. "It's bad enough that the other two passed out without me going space happy too." "What's your hurry?" demanded the voice. "I can talk to you just as easy all the way down, you know. Airholes in my bark—I'm not like an Earth tree." Kolin examined the bark of the crotch in which he sat. It did seem to have assorted holes and hollows in its rough surface. "I never saw an Earth tree," he admitted. "We came from Haurtoz." "Where's that? Oh, never mind—some little planet. I don't bother with them all, since I came here and found out I could be anything I wanted." "What do you mean, anything you wanted?" asked Kolin, testing the firmness of a vertical vine. "Just what I said," continued the voice, sounding closer in his ear as his cheek brushed the ridged bark of the tree trunk. "And, if I do have to remind you, it would be nicer if you said 'Mr. Ashlew,' considering my age." "Your age? How old—?" "Can't really count it in Earth years any more. Lost track. I always figured bein' a tree was a nice, peaceful life; and when I remembered how long some of them live, that settled it. Sonny, this world ain't all it looks like." "It isn't, Mr. Ashlew?" asked Kolin, twisting about in an effort to see what the higher branches might hide. "Nope. Most everything here is run by the Life—that is, by the thing that first grew big enough to do some thinking, and set its roots down all over until it had control. That's the outskirts of it down below." "The other trees? That jungle?" "It's more'n a jungle, Sonny. When I landed here, along with the others from the Arcturan Spark , the planet looked pretty empty to me, just like it must have to—Watch it, there, Boy! If I didn't twist that branch over in time, you'd be bouncing off my roots right now!" "Th-thanks!" grunted Kolin, hanging on grimly. "Doggone vine!" commented the windy whisper. " He ain't one of my crowd. Landed years later in a ship from some star towards the center of the galaxy. You should have seen his looks before the Life got in touch with his mind and set up a mental field to help him change form. He looks twice as good as a vine!" "He's very handy," agreed Kolin politely. He groped for a foothold. "Well … matter of fact, I can't get through to him much, even with the Life's mental field helping. Guess he started living with a different way of thinking. It burns me. I thought of being a tree, and then he came along to take advantage of it!" Kolin braced himself securely to stretch tiring muscles. "Maybe I'd better stay a while," he muttered. "I don't know where I am." "You're about fifty feet up," the sighing voice informed him. "You ought to let me tell you how the Life helps you change form. You don't have to be a tree." "No?" " Uh -uh! Some of the boys that landed with me wanted to get around and see things. Lots changed to animals or birds. One even stayed a man—on the outside anyway. Most of them have to change as the bodies wear out, which I don't, and some made bad mistakes tryin' to be things they saw on other planets." "I wouldn't want to do that, Mr. Ashlew." "There's just one thing. The Life don't like taking chances on word about this place gettin' around. It sorta believes in peace and quiet. You might not get back to your ship in any form that could tell tales." "Listen!" Kolin blurted out. "I wasn't so much enjoying being what I was that getting back matters to me!" "Don't like your home planet, whatever the name was?" "Haurtoz. It's a rotten place. A Planetary State! You have to think and even look the way that's standard thirty hours a day, asleep or awake. You get scared to sleep for fear you might dream treason and they'd find out somehow." "Whooeee! Heard about them places. Must be tough just to live." Suddenly, Kolin found himself telling the tree about life on Haurtoz, and of the officially announced threats to the Planetary State's planned expansion. He dwelt upon the desperation of having no place to hide in case of trouble with the authorities. A multiple system of such worlds was agonizing to imagine. Somehow, the oddity of talking to a tree wore off. Kolin heard opinions spouting out which he had prudently kept bottled up for years. The more he talked and stormed and complained, the more relaxed he felt. "If there was ever a fellow ready for this planet," decided the tree named Ashlew, "you're it, Sonny! Hang on there while I signal the Life by root!" Kolin sensed a lack of direct attention. The rustle about him was natural, caused by an ordinary breeze. He noticed his hands shaking. "Don't know what got into me, talking that way to a tree," he muttered. "If Yrtok snapped out of it and heard, I'm as good as re-personalized right now." As he brooded upon the sorry choice of arousing a search by hiding where he was or going back to bluff things out, the tree spoke. "Maybe you're all set, Sonny. The Life has been thinkin' of learning about other worlds. If you can think of a safe form to jet off in, you might make yourself a deal. How'd you like to stay here?" "I don't know," said Kolin. "The penalty for desertion—" "Whoosh! Who'd find you? You could be a bird, a tree, even a cloud." Silenced but doubting, Kolin permitted himself to try the dream on for size. He considered what form might most easily escape the notice of search parties and still be tough enough to live a long time without renewal. Another factor slipped into his musings: mere hope of escape was unsatisfying after the outburst that had defined his fuming hatred for Haurtoz. I'd better watch myself! he thought. Don't drop diamonds to grab at stars! "What I wish I could do is not just get away but get even for the way they make us live … the whole damn set-up. They could just as easy make peace with the Earth colonies. You know why they don't?" "Why?" wheezed Ashlew. "They're scared that without talk of war, and scouting for Earth fleets that never come, people would have time to think about the way they have to live and who's running things in the Planetary State. Then the gravy train would get blown up—and I mean blown up!" The tree was silent for a moment. Kolin felt the branches stir meditatively. Then Ashlew offered a suggestion. "I could tell the Life your side of it," he hissed. "Once in with us, you can always make thinking connections, no matter how far away. Maybe you could make a deal to kill two birds with one stone, as they used to say on Earth…." Chief Steward Slichow paced up and down beside the ration crate turned up to serve him as a field desk. He scowled in turn, impartially, at his watch and at the weary stewards of his headquarters detail. The latter stumbled about, stacking and distributing small packets of emergency rations. The line of crewmen released temporarily from repair work was transient as to individuals but immutable as to length. Slichow muttered something profane about disregard of orders as he glared at the rocky ridges surrounding the landing place. He was so intent upon planning greetings with which to favor the tardy scouting parties that he failed to notice the loose cloud drifting over the ridge. It was tenuous, almost a haze. Close examination would have revealed it to be made up of myriads of tiny spores. They resembled those cast forth by one of the bushes Kolin's party had passed. Along the edges, the haze faded raggedly into thin air, but the units evidently formed a cohesive body. They drifted together, approaching the men as if taking intelligent advantage of the breeze. One of Chief Slichow's staggering flunkies, stealing a few seconds of relaxation on the pretext of dumping an armful of light plastic packing, wandered into the haze. He froze. After a few heartbeats, he dropped the trash and stared at ship and men as if he had never seen either. A hail from his master moved him. "Coming, Chief!" he called but, returning at a moderate pace, he murmured, "My name is Frazer. I'm a second assistant steward. I'll think as Unit One." Throughout the cloud of spores, the mind formerly known as Peter Kolin congratulated itself upon its choice of form. Nearer to the original shape of the Life than Ashlew got , he thought. He paused to consider the state of the tree named Ashlew, half immortal but rooted to one spot, unable to float on a breeze or through space itself on the pressure of light. Especially, it was unable to insinuate any part of itself into the control center of another form of life, as a second spore was taking charge of the body of Chief Slichow at that very instant. There are not enough men , thought Kolin. Some of me must drift through the airlock. In space, I can spread through the air system to the command group. Repairs to the Peace State and the return to Haurtoz passed like weeks to some of the crew but like brief moments in infinity to other units. At last, the ship parted the air above Headquarters City and landed. The unit known as Captain Theodor Kessel hesitated before descending the ramp. He surveyed the field, the city and the waiting team of inspecting officers. "Could hardly be better, could it?" he chuckled to the companion unit called Security Officer Tarth. "Hardly, sir. All ready for the liberation of Haurtoz." "Reformation of the Planetary State," mused the captain, smiling dreamily as he grasped the handrail. "And then—formation of the Planetary Mind!" END Transcriber's Note: This e-text was produced from Worlds of If January 1962 . Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.

Desire for power over authority

Desire to out-smart Johnny Ashlew

Desire to liberate the people of Haurtoz

Desire to be free from conformity

23942_YSQRQEB5_1

What profession do Betty and Simon share?

UNBORN TOMORROW BY MACK REYNOLDS Unfortunately , there was only one thing he could bring back from the wonderful future ... and though he didn't want to ... nevertheless he did.... Illustrated by Freas Betty looked up from her magazine. She said mildly, "You're late." "Don't yell at me, I feel awful," Simon told her. He sat down at his desk, passed his tongue over his teeth in distaste, groaned, fumbled in a drawer for the aspirin bottle. He looked over at Betty and said, almost as though reciting, "What I need is a vacation." "What," Betty said, "are you going to use for money?" "Providence," Simon told her whilst fiddling with the aspirin bottle, "will provide." "Hm-m-m. But before providing vacations it'd be nice if Providence turned up a missing jewel deal, say. Something where you could deduce that actually the ruby ring had gone down the drain and was caught in the elbow. Something that would net about fifty dollars." Simon said, mournful of tone, "Fifty dollars? Why not make it five hundred?" "I'm not selfish," Betty said. "All I want is enough to pay me this week's salary." "Money," Simon said. "When you took this job you said it was the romance that appealed to you." "Hm-m-m. I didn't know most sleuthing amounted to snooping around department stores to check on the clerks knocking down." Simon said, enigmatically, "Now it comes." There was a knock. Betty bounced up with Olympic agility and had the door swinging wide before the knocking was quite completed. He was old, little and had bug eyes behind pince-nez glasses. His suit was cut in the style of yesteryear but when a suit costs two or three hundred dollars you still retain caste whatever the styling. Simon said unenthusiastically, "Good morning, Mr. Oyster." He indicated the client's chair. "Sit down, sir." The client fussed himself with Betty's assistance into the seat, bug-eyed Simon, said finally, "You know my name, that's pretty good. Never saw you before in my life. Stop fussing with me, young lady. Your ad in the phone book says you'll investigate anything." "Anything," Simon said. "Only one exception." "Excellent. Do you believe in time travel?" Simon said nothing. Across the room, where she had resumed her seat, Betty cleared her throat. When Simon continued to say nothing she ventured, "Time travel is impossible." "Why?" "Why?" "Yes, why?" Betty looked to her boss for assistance. None was forthcoming. There ought to be some very quick, positive, definite answer. She said, "Well, for one thing, paradox. Suppose you had a time machine and traveled back a hundred years or so and killed your own great-grandfather. Then how could you ever be born?" "Confound it if I know," the little fellow growled. "How?" Simon said, "Let's get to the point, what you wanted to see me about." "I want to hire you to hunt me up some time travelers," the old boy said. Betty was too far in now to maintain her proper role of silent secretary. "Time travelers," she said, not very intelligently. The potential client sat more erect, obviously with intent to hold the floor for a time. He removed the pince-nez glasses and pointed them at Betty. He said, "Have you read much science fiction, Miss?" "Some," Betty admitted. "Then you'll realize that there are a dozen explanations of the paradoxes of time travel. Every writer in the field worth his salt has explained them away. But to get on. It's my contention that within a century or so man will have solved the problems of immortality and eternal youth, and it's also my suspicion that he will eventually be able to travel in time. So convinced am I of these possibilities that I am willing to gamble a portion of my fortune to investigate the presence in our era of such time travelers." Simon seemed incapable of carrying the ball this morning, so Betty said, "But ... Mr. Oyster, if the future has developed time travel why don't we ever meet such travelers?" Simon put in a word. "The usual explanation, Betty, is that they can't afford to allow the space-time continuum track to be altered. If, say, a time traveler returned to a period of twenty-five years ago and shot Hitler, then all subsequent history would be changed. In that case, the time traveler himself might never be born. They have to tread mighty carefully." Mr. Oyster was pleased. "I didn't expect you to be so well informed on the subject, young man." Simon shrugged and fumbled again with the aspirin bottle. Mr. Oyster went on. "I've been considering the matter for some time and—" Simon held up a hand. "There's no use prolonging this. As I understand it, you're an elderly gentleman with a considerable fortune and you realize that thus far nobody has succeeded in taking it with him." Mr. Oyster returned his glasses to their perch, bug-eyed Simon, but then nodded. Simon said, "You want to hire me to find a time traveler and in some manner or other—any manner will do—exhort from him the secret of eternal life and youth, which you figure the future will have discovered. You're willing to pony up a part of this fortune of yours, if I can deliver a bona fide time traveler." "Right!" Betty had been looking from one to the other. Now she said, plaintively, "But where are you going to find one of these characters—especially if they're interested in keeping hid?" The old boy was the center again. "I told you I'd been considering it for some time. The Oktoberfest , that's where they'd be!" He seemed elated. Betty and Simon waited. "The Oktoberfest ," he repeated. "The greatest festival the world has ever seen, the carnival, feria , fiesta to beat them all. Every year it's held in Munich. Makes the New Orleans Mardi gras look like a quilting party." He began to swing into the spirit of his description. "It originally started in celebration of the wedding of some local prince a century and a half ago and the Bavarians had such a bang-up time they've been holding it every year since. The Munich breweries do up a special beer, Marzenbräu they call it, and each brewery opens a tremendous tent on the fair grounds which will hold five thousand customers apiece. Millions of liters of beer are put away, hundreds of thousands of barbecued chickens, a small herd of oxen are roasted whole over spits, millions of pair of weisswurst , a very special sausage, millions upon millions of pretzels—" "All right," Simon said. "We'll accept it. The Oktoberfest is one whale of a wingding." "Well," the old boy pursued, into his subject now, "that's where they'd be, places like the Oktoberfest . For one thing, a time traveler wouldn't be conspicuous. At a festival like this somebody with a strange accent, or who didn't know exactly how to wear his clothes correctly, or was off the ordinary in any of a dozen other ways, wouldn't be noticed. You could be a four-armed space traveler from Mars, and you still wouldn't be conspicuous at the Oktoberfest . People would figure they had D.T.'s." "But why would a time traveler want to go to a—" Betty began. "Why not! What better opportunity to study a people than when they are in their cups? If you could go back a few thousand years, the things you would wish to see would be a Roman Triumph, perhaps the Rites of Dionysus, or one of Alexander's orgies. You wouldn't want to wander up and down the streets of, say, Athens while nothing was going on, particularly when you might be revealed as a suspicious character not being able to speak the language, not knowing how to wear the clothes and not familiar with the city's layout." He took a deep breath. "No ma'am, you'd have to stick to some great event, both for the sake of actual interest and for protection against being unmasked." The old boy wound it up. "Well, that's the story. What are your rates? The Oktoberfest starts on Friday and continues for sixteen days. You can take the plane to Munich, spend a week there and—" Simon was shaking his head. "Not interested." As soon as Betty had got her jaw back into place, she glared unbelievingly at him. Mr. Oyster was taken aback himself. "See here, young man, I realize this isn't an ordinary assignment, however, as I said, I am willing to risk a considerable portion of my fortune—" "Sorry," Simon said. "Can't be done." "A hundred dollars a day plus expenses," Mr. Oyster said quietly. "I like the fact that you already seem to have some interest and knowledge of the matter. I liked the way you knew my name when I walked in the door; my picture doesn't appear often in the papers." "No go," Simon said, a sad quality in his voice. "A fifty thousand dollar bonus if you bring me a time traveler." "Out of the question," Simon said. "But why ?" Betty wailed. "Just for laughs," Simon told the two of them sourly, "suppose I tell you a funny story. It goes like this:" I got a thousand dollars from Mr. Oyster (Simon began) in the way of an advance, and leaving him with Betty who was making out a receipt, I hustled back to the apartment and packed a bag. Hell, I'd wanted a vacation anyway, this was a natural. On the way to Idlewild I stopped off at the Germany Information Offices for some tourist literature. It takes roughly three and a half hours to get to Gander from Idlewild. I spent the time planning the fun I was going to have. It takes roughly seven and a half hours from Gander to Shannon and I spent that time dreaming up material I could put into my reports to Mr. Oyster. I was going to have to give him some kind of report for his money. Time travel yet! What a laugh! Between Shannon and Munich a faint suspicion began to simmer in my mind. These statistics I read on the Oktoberfest in the Munich tourist pamphlets. Five million people attended annually. Where did five million people come from to attend an overgrown festival in comparatively remote Southern Germany? The tourist season is over before September 21st, first day of the gigantic beer bust. Nor could the Germans account for any such number. Munich itself has a population of less than a million, counting children. And those millions of gallons of beer, the hundreds of thousands of chickens, the herds of oxen. Who ponied up all the money for such expenditures? How could the average German, with his twenty-five dollars a week salary? In Munich there was no hotel space available. I went to the Bahnhof where they have a hotel service and applied. They put my name down, pocketed the husky bribe, showed me where I could check my bag, told me they'd do what they could, and to report back in a few hours. I had another suspicious twinge. If five million people attended this beer bout, how were they accommodated? The Theresienwiese , the fair ground, was only a few blocks away. I was stiff from the plane ride so I walked. There are seven major brewers in the Munich area, each of them represented by one of the circuslike tents that Mr. Oyster mentioned. Each tent contained benches and tables for about five thousand persons and from six to ten thousands pack themselves in, competing for room. In the center is a tremendous bandstand, the musicians all lederhosen clad, the music as Bavarian as any to be found in a Bavarian beer hall. Hundreds of peasant garbed fräuleins darted about the tables with quart sized earthenware mugs, platters of chicken, sausage, kraut and pretzels. I found a place finally at a table which had space for twenty-odd beer bibbers. Odd is right. As weird an assortment of Germans and foreign tourists as could have been dreamed up, ranging from a seventy- or eighty-year-old couple in Bavarian costume, to the bald-headed drunk across the table from me. A desperate waitress bearing six mugs of beer in each hand scurried past. They call them masses , by the way, not mugs. The bald-headed character and I both held up a finger and she slid two of the masses over to us and then hustled on. "Down the hatch," the other said, holding up his mass in toast. "To the ladies," I told him. Before sipping, I said, "You know, the tourist pamphlets say this stuff is eighteen per cent. That's nonsense. No beer is that strong." I took a long pull. He looked at me, waiting. I came up. "Mistaken," I admitted. A mass or two apiece later he looked carefully at the name engraved on his earthenware mug. "Löwenbräu," he said. He took a small notebook from his pocket and a pencil, noted down the word and returned the things. "That's a queer looking pencil you have there," I told him. "German?" "Venusian," he said. "Oops, sorry. Shouldn't have said that." I had never heard of the brand so I skipped it. "Next is the Hofbräu," he said. "Next what?" Baldy's conversation didn't seem to hang together very well. "My pilgrimage," he told me. "All my life I've been wanting to go back to an Oktoberfest and sample every one of the seven brands of the best beer the world has ever known. I'm only as far as Löwenbräu. I'm afraid I'll never make it." I finished my mass . "I'll help you," I told him. "Very noble endeavor. Name is Simon." "Arth," he said. "How could you help?" "I'm still fresh—comparatively. I'll navigate you around. There are seven beer tents. How many have you got through, so far?" "Two, counting this one," Arth said. I looked at him. "It's going to be a chore," I said. "You've already got a nice edge on." Outside, as we made our way to the next tent, the fair looked like every big State-Fair ever seen, except it was bigger. Games, souvenir stands, sausage stands, rides, side shows, and people, people, people. The Hofbräu tent was as overflowing as the last but we managed to find two seats. The band was blaring, and five thousand half-swacked voices were roaring accompaniment. In Muenchen steht ein Hofbräuhaus! Eins, Zwei, G'sufa! At the G'sufa everybody upped with the mugs and drank each other's health. "This is what I call a real beer bust," I said approvingly. Arth was waving to a waitress. As in the Löwenbräu tent, a full quart was the smallest amount obtainable. A beer later I said, "I don't know if you'll make it or not, Arth." "Make what?" "All seven tents." "Oh." A waitress was on her way by, mugs foaming over their rims. I gestured to her for refills. "Where are you from, Arth?" I asked him, in the way of making conversation. "2183." "2183 where?" He looked at me, closing one eye to focus better. "Oh," he said. "Well, 2183 South Street, ah, New Albuquerque." "New Albuquerque? Where's that?" Arth thought about it. Took another long pull at the beer. "Right across the way from old Albuquerque," he said finally. "Maybe we ought to be getting on to the Pschorrbräu tent." "Maybe we ought to eat something first," I said. "I'm beginning to feel this. We could get some of that barbecued ox." Arth closed his eyes in pain. "Vegetarian," he said. "Couldn't possibly eat meat. Barbarous. Ugh." "Well, we need some nourishment," I said. "There's supposed to be considerable nourishment in beer." That made sense. I yelled, " Fräulein! Zwei neu bier! " Somewhere along in here the fog rolled in. When it rolled out again, I found myself closing one eye the better to read the lettering on my earthenware mug. It read Augustinerbräu. Somehow we'd evidently navigated from one tent to another. Arth was saying, "Where's your hotel?" That seemed like a good question. I thought about it for a while. Finally I said, "Haven't got one. Town's jam packed. Left my bag at the Bahnhof. I don't think we'll ever make it, Arth. How many we got to go?" "Lost track," Arth said. "You can come home with me." We drank to that and the fog rolled in again. When the fog rolled out, it was daylight. Bright, glaring, awful daylight. I was sprawled, complete with clothes, on one of twin beds. On the other bed, also completely clothed, was Arth. That sun was too much. I stumbled up from the bed, staggered to the window and fumbled around for a blind or curtain. There was none. Behind me a voice said in horror, "Who ... how ... oh, Wodo , where'd you come from?" I got a quick impression, looking out the window, that the Germans were certainly the most modern, futuristic people in the world. But I couldn't stand the light. "Where's the shade," I moaned. Arth did something and the window went opaque. "That's quite a gadget," I groaned. "If I didn't feel so lousy, I'd appreciate it." Arth was sitting on the edge of the bed holding his bald head in his hands. "I remember now," he sorrowed. "You didn't have a hotel. What a stupidity. I'll be phased. Phased all the way down." "You haven't got a handful of aspirin, have you?" I asked him. "Just a minute," Arth said, staggering erect and heading for what undoubtedly was a bathroom. "Stay where you are. Don't move. Don't touch anything." "All right," I told him plaintively. "I'm clean. I won't mess up the place. All I've got is a hangover, not lice." Arth was gone. He came back in two or three minutes, box of pills in hand. "Here, take one of these." I took the pill, followed it with a glass of water. And went out like a light. Arth was shaking my arm. "Want another mass ?" The band was blaring, and five thousand half-swacked voices were roaring accompaniment. In Muenchen steht ein Hofbräuhaus! Eins, Zwei, G'sufa! At the G'sufa everybody upped with their king-size mugs and drank each other's health. My head was killing me. "This is where I came in, or something," I groaned. Arth said, "That was last night." He looked at me over the rim of his beer mug. Something, somewhere, was wrong. But I didn't care. I finished my mass and then remembered. "I've got to get my bag. Oh, my head. Where did we spend last night?" Arth said, and his voice sounded cautious, "At my hotel, don't you remember?" "Not very well," I admitted. "I feel lousy. I must have dimmed out. I've got to go to the Bahnhof and get my luggage." Arth didn't put up an argument on that. We said good-by and I could feel him watching after me as I pushed through the tables on the way out. At the Bahnhof they could do me no good. There were no hotel rooms available in Munich. The head was getting worse by the minute. The fact that they'd somehow managed to lose my bag didn't help. I worked on that project for at least a couple of hours. Not only wasn't the bag at the luggage checking station, but the attendant there evidently couldn't make heads nor tails of the check receipt. He didn't speak English and my high school German was inadequate, especially accompanied by a blockbusting hangover. I didn't get anywhere tearing my hair and complaining from one end of the Bahnhof to the other. I drew a blank on the bag. And the head was getting worse by the minute. I was bleeding to death through the eyes and instead of butterflies I had bats in my stomach. Believe me, nobody should drink a gallon or more of Marzenbräu. I decided the hell with it. I took a cab to the airport, presented my return ticket, told them I wanted to leave on the first obtainable plane to New York. I'd spent two days at the Oktoberfest , and I'd had it. I got more guff there. Something was wrong with the ticket, wrong date or some such. But they fixed that up. I never was clear on what was fouled up, some clerk's error, evidently. The trip back was as uninteresting as the one over. As the hangover began to wear off—a little—I was almost sorry I hadn't been able to stay. If I'd only been able to get a room I would have stayed, I told myself. From Idlewild, I came directly to the office rather than going to my apartment. I figured I might as well check in with Betty. I opened the door and there I found Mr. Oyster sitting in the chair he had been occupying four—or was it five—days before when I'd left. I'd lost track of the time. I said to him, "Glad you're here, sir. I can report. Ah, what was it you came for? Impatient to hear if I'd had any results?" My mind was spinning like a whirling dervish in a revolving door. I'd spent a wad of his money and had nothing I could think of to show for it; nothing but the last stages of a grand-daddy hangover. "Came for?" Mr. Oyster snorted. "I'm merely waiting for your girl to make out my receipt. I thought you had already left." "You'll miss your plane," Betty said. There was suddenly a double dip of ice cream in my stomach. I walked over to my desk and looked down at the calendar. Mr. Oyster was saying something to the effect that if I didn't leave today, it would have to be tomorrow, that he hadn't ponied up that thousand dollars advance for anything less than immediate service. Stuffing his receipt in his wallet, he fussed his way out the door. I said to Betty hopefully, "I suppose you haven't changed this calendar since I left." Betty said, "What's the matter with you? You look funny. How did your clothes get so mussed? You tore the top sheet off that calendar yourself, not half an hour ago, just before this marble-missing client came in." She added, irrelevantly, "Time travelers yet." I tried just once more. "Uh, when did you first see this Mr. Oyster?" "Never saw him before in my life," she said. "Not until he came in this morning." "This morning," I said weakly. While Betty stared at me as though it was me that needed candling by a head shrinker preparatory to being sent off to a pressure cooker, I fished in my pocket for my wallet, counted the contents and winced at the pathetic remains of the thousand. I said pleadingly, "Betty, listen, how long ago did I go out that door—on the way to the airport?" "You've been acting sick all morning. You went out that door about ten minutes ago, were gone about three minutes, and then came back." "See here," Mr. Oyster said (interrupting Simon's story), "did you say this was supposed to be amusing, young man? I don't find it so. In fact, I believe I am being ridiculed." Simon shrugged, put one hand to his forehead and said, "That's only the first chapter. There are two more." "I'm not interested in more," Mr. Oyster said. "I suppose your point was to show me how ridiculous the whole idea actually is. Very well, you've done it. Confound it. However, I suppose your time, even when spent in this manner, has some value. Here is fifty dollars. And good day, sir!" He slammed the door after him as he left. Simon winced at the noise, took the aspirin bottle from its drawer, took two, washed them down with water from the desk carafe. Betty looked at him admiringly. Came to her feet, crossed over and took up the fifty dollars. "Week's wages," she said. "I suppose that's one way of taking care of a crackpot. But I'm surprised you didn't take his money and enjoy that vacation you've been yearning about." "I did," Simon groaned. "Three times." Betty stared at him. "You mean—" Simon nodded, miserably. She said, "But Simon . Fifty thousand dollars bonus. If that story was true, you should have gone back again to Munich. If there was one time traveler, there might have been—" "I keep telling you," Simon said bitterly, "I went back there three times. There were hundreds of them. Probably thousands." He took a deep breath. "Listen, we're just going to have to forget about it. They're not going to stand for the space-time continuum track being altered. If something comes up that looks like it might result in the track being changed, they set you right back at the beginning and let things start—for you—all over again. They just can't allow anything to come back from the future and change the past." "You mean," Betty was suddenly furious at him, "you've given up! Why this is the biggest thing— Why the fifty thousand dollars is nothing. The future! Just think!" Simon said wearily, "There's just one thing you can bring back with you from the future, a hangover compounded of a gallon or so of Marzenbräu. What's more you can pile one on top of the other, and another on top of that!" He shuddered. "If you think I'm going to take another crack at this merry-go-round and pile a fourth hangover on the three I'm already nursing, all at once, you can think again." THE END Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Astounding Science Fiction June 1959. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note.

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Detectives

Department store clerks

Time travelers

23942_YSQRQEB5_2

Why does Simon look for a bottle of aspirin in the beginning of the story?

UNBORN TOMORROW BY MACK REYNOLDS Unfortunately , there was only one thing he could bring back from the wonderful future ... and though he didn't want to ... nevertheless he did.... Illustrated by Freas Betty looked up from her magazine. She said mildly, "You're late." "Don't yell at me, I feel awful," Simon told her. He sat down at his desk, passed his tongue over his teeth in distaste, groaned, fumbled in a drawer for the aspirin bottle. He looked over at Betty and said, almost as though reciting, "What I need is a vacation." "What," Betty said, "are you going to use for money?" "Providence," Simon told her whilst fiddling with the aspirin bottle, "will provide." "Hm-m-m. But before providing vacations it'd be nice if Providence turned up a missing jewel deal, say. Something where you could deduce that actually the ruby ring had gone down the drain and was caught in the elbow. Something that would net about fifty dollars." Simon said, mournful of tone, "Fifty dollars? Why not make it five hundred?" "I'm not selfish," Betty said. "All I want is enough to pay me this week's salary." "Money," Simon said. "When you took this job you said it was the romance that appealed to you." "Hm-m-m. I didn't know most sleuthing amounted to snooping around department stores to check on the clerks knocking down." Simon said, enigmatically, "Now it comes." There was a knock. Betty bounced up with Olympic agility and had the door swinging wide before the knocking was quite completed. He was old, little and had bug eyes behind pince-nez glasses. His suit was cut in the style of yesteryear but when a suit costs two or three hundred dollars you still retain caste whatever the styling. Simon said unenthusiastically, "Good morning, Mr. Oyster." He indicated the client's chair. "Sit down, sir." The client fussed himself with Betty's assistance into the seat, bug-eyed Simon, said finally, "You know my name, that's pretty good. Never saw you before in my life. Stop fussing with me, young lady. Your ad in the phone book says you'll investigate anything." "Anything," Simon said. "Only one exception." "Excellent. Do you believe in time travel?" Simon said nothing. Across the room, where she had resumed her seat, Betty cleared her throat. When Simon continued to say nothing she ventured, "Time travel is impossible." "Why?" "Why?" "Yes, why?" Betty looked to her boss for assistance. None was forthcoming. There ought to be some very quick, positive, definite answer. She said, "Well, for one thing, paradox. Suppose you had a time machine and traveled back a hundred years or so and killed your own great-grandfather. Then how could you ever be born?" "Confound it if I know," the little fellow growled. "How?" Simon said, "Let's get to the point, what you wanted to see me about." "I want to hire you to hunt me up some time travelers," the old boy said. Betty was too far in now to maintain her proper role of silent secretary. "Time travelers," she said, not very intelligently. The potential client sat more erect, obviously with intent to hold the floor for a time. He removed the pince-nez glasses and pointed them at Betty. He said, "Have you read much science fiction, Miss?" "Some," Betty admitted. "Then you'll realize that there are a dozen explanations of the paradoxes of time travel. Every writer in the field worth his salt has explained them away. But to get on. It's my contention that within a century or so man will have solved the problems of immortality and eternal youth, and it's also my suspicion that he will eventually be able to travel in time. So convinced am I of these possibilities that I am willing to gamble a portion of my fortune to investigate the presence in our era of such time travelers." Simon seemed incapable of carrying the ball this morning, so Betty said, "But ... Mr. Oyster, if the future has developed time travel why don't we ever meet such travelers?" Simon put in a word. "The usual explanation, Betty, is that they can't afford to allow the space-time continuum track to be altered. If, say, a time traveler returned to a period of twenty-five years ago and shot Hitler, then all subsequent history would be changed. In that case, the time traveler himself might never be born. They have to tread mighty carefully." Mr. Oyster was pleased. "I didn't expect you to be so well informed on the subject, young man." Simon shrugged and fumbled again with the aspirin bottle. Mr. Oyster went on. "I've been considering the matter for some time and—" Simon held up a hand. "There's no use prolonging this. As I understand it, you're an elderly gentleman with a considerable fortune and you realize that thus far nobody has succeeded in taking it with him." Mr. Oyster returned his glasses to their perch, bug-eyed Simon, but then nodded. Simon said, "You want to hire me to find a time traveler and in some manner or other—any manner will do—exhort from him the secret of eternal life and youth, which you figure the future will have discovered. You're willing to pony up a part of this fortune of yours, if I can deliver a bona fide time traveler." "Right!" Betty had been looking from one to the other. Now she said, plaintively, "But where are you going to find one of these characters—especially if they're interested in keeping hid?" The old boy was the center again. "I told you I'd been considering it for some time. The Oktoberfest , that's where they'd be!" He seemed elated. Betty and Simon waited. "The Oktoberfest ," he repeated. "The greatest festival the world has ever seen, the carnival, feria , fiesta to beat them all. Every year it's held in Munich. Makes the New Orleans Mardi gras look like a quilting party." He began to swing into the spirit of his description. "It originally started in celebration of the wedding of some local prince a century and a half ago and the Bavarians had such a bang-up time they've been holding it every year since. The Munich breweries do up a special beer, Marzenbräu they call it, and each brewery opens a tremendous tent on the fair grounds which will hold five thousand customers apiece. Millions of liters of beer are put away, hundreds of thousands of barbecued chickens, a small herd of oxen are roasted whole over spits, millions of pair of weisswurst , a very special sausage, millions upon millions of pretzels—" "All right," Simon said. "We'll accept it. The Oktoberfest is one whale of a wingding." "Well," the old boy pursued, into his subject now, "that's where they'd be, places like the Oktoberfest . For one thing, a time traveler wouldn't be conspicuous. At a festival like this somebody with a strange accent, or who didn't know exactly how to wear his clothes correctly, or was off the ordinary in any of a dozen other ways, wouldn't be noticed. You could be a four-armed space traveler from Mars, and you still wouldn't be conspicuous at the Oktoberfest . People would figure they had D.T.'s." "But why would a time traveler want to go to a—" Betty began. "Why not! What better opportunity to study a people than when they are in their cups? If you could go back a few thousand years, the things you would wish to see would be a Roman Triumph, perhaps the Rites of Dionysus, or one of Alexander's orgies. You wouldn't want to wander up and down the streets of, say, Athens while nothing was going on, particularly when you might be revealed as a suspicious character not being able to speak the language, not knowing how to wear the clothes and not familiar with the city's layout." He took a deep breath. "No ma'am, you'd have to stick to some great event, both for the sake of actual interest and for protection against being unmasked." The old boy wound it up. "Well, that's the story. What are your rates? The Oktoberfest starts on Friday and continues for sixteen days. You can take the plane to Munich, spend a week there and—" Simon was shaking his head. "Not interested." As soon as Betty had got her jaw back into place, she glared unbelievingly at him. Mr. Oyster was taken aback himself. "See here, young man, I realize this isn't an ordinary assignment, however, as I said, I am willing to risk a considerable portion of my fortune—" "Sorry," Simon said. "Can't be done." "A hundred dollars a day plus expenses," Mr. Oyster said quietly. "I like the fact that you already seem to have some interest and knowledge of the matter. I liked the way you knew my name when I walked in the door; my picture doesn't appear often in the papers." "No go," Simon said, a sad quality in his voice. "A fifty thousand dollar bonus if you bring me a time traveler." "Out of the question," Simon said. "But why ?" Betty wailed. "Just for laughs," Simon told the two of them sourly, "suppose I tell you a funny story. It goes like this:" I got a thousand dollars from Mr. Oyster (Simon began) in the way of an advance, and leaving him with Betty who was making out a receipt, I hustled back to the apartment and packed a bag. Hell, I'd wanted a vacation anyway, this was a natural. On the way to Idlewild I stopped off at the Germany Information Offices for some tourist literature. It takes roughly three and a half hours to get to Gander from Idlewild. I spent the time planning the fun I was going to have. It takes roughly seven and a half hours from Gander to Shannon and I spent that time dreaming up material I could put into my reports to Mr. Oyster. I was going to have to give him some kind of report for his money. Time travel yet! What a laugh! Between Shannon and Munich a faint suspicion began to simmer in my mind. These statistics I read on the Oktoberfest in the Munich tourist pamphlets. Five million people attended annually. Where did five million people come from to attend an overgrown festival in comparatively remote Southern Germany? The tourist season is over before September 21st, first day of the gigantic beer bust. Nor could the Germans account for any such number. Munich itself has a population of less than a million, counting children. And those millions of gallons of beer, the hundreds of thousands of chickens, the herds of oxen. Who ponied up all the money for such expenditures? How could the average German, with his twenty-five dollars a week salary? In Munich there was no hotel space available. I went to the Bahnhof where they have a hotel service and applied. They put my name down, pocketed the husky bribe, showed me where I could check my bag, told me they'd do what they could, and to report back in a few hours. I had another suspicious twinge. If five million people attended this beer bout, how were they accommodated? The Theresienwiese , the fair ground, was only a few blocks away. I was stiff from the plane ride so I walked. There are seven major brewers in the Munich area, each of them represented by one of the circuslike tents that Mr. Oyster mentioned. Each tent contained benches and tables for about five thousand persons and from six to ten thousands pack themselves in, competing for room. In the center is a tremendous bandstand, the musicians all lederhosen clad, the music as Bavarian as any to be found in a Bavarian beer hall. Hundreds of peasant garbed fräuleins darted about the tables with quart sized earthenware mugs, platters of chicken, sausage, kraut and pretzels. I found a place finally at a table which had space for twenty-odd beer bibbers. Odd is right. As weird an assortment of Germans and foreign tourists as could have been dreamed up, ranging from a seventy- or eighty-year-old couple in Bavarian costume, to the bald-headed drunk across the table from me. A desperate waitress bearing six mugs of beer in each hand scurried past. They call them masses , by the way, not mugs. The bald-headed character and I both held up a finger and she slid two of the masses over to us and then hustled on. "Down the hatch," the other said, holding up his mass in toast. "To the ladies," I told him. Before sipping, I said, "You know, the tourist pamphlets say this stuff is eighteen per cent. That's nonsense. No beer is that strong." I took a long pull. He looked at me, waiting. I came up. "Mistaken," I admitted. A mass or two apiece later he looked carefully at the name engraved on his earthenware mug. "Löwenbräu," he said. He took a small notebook from his pocket and a pencil, noted down the word and returned the things. "That's a queer looking pencil you have there," I told him. "German?" "Venusian," he said. "Oops, sorry. Shouldn't have said that." I had never heard of the brand so I skipped it. "Next is the Hofbräu," he said. "Next what?" Baldy's conversation didn't seem to hang together very well. "My pilgrimage," he told me. "All my life I've been wanting to go back to an Oktoberfest and sample every one of the seven brands of the best beer the world has ever known. I'm only as far as Löwenbräu. I'm afraid I'll never make it." I finished my mass . "I'll help you," I told him. "Very noble endeavor. Name is Simon." "Arth," he said. "How could you help?" "I'm still fresh—comparatively. I'll navigate you around. There are seven beer tents. How many have you got through, so far?" "Two, counting this one," Arth said. I looked at him. "It's going to be a chore," I said. "You've already got a nice edge on." Outside, as we made our way to the next tent, the fair looked like every big State-Fair ever seen, except it was bigger. Games, souvenir stands, sausage stands, rides, side shows, and people, people, people. The Hofbräu tent was as overflowing as the last but we managed to find two seats. The band was blaring, and five thousand half-swacked voices were roaring accompaniment. In Muenchen steht ein Hofbräuhaus! Eins, Zwei, G'sufa! At the G'sufa everybody upped with the mugs and drank each other's health. "This is what I call a real beer bust," I said approvingly. Arth was waving to a waitress. As in the Löwenbräu tent, a full quart was the smallest amount obtainable. A beer later I said, "I don't know if you'll make it or not, Arth." "Make what?" "All seven tents." "Oh." A waitress was on her way by, mugs foaming over their rims. I gestured to her for refills. "Where are you from, Arth?" I asked him, in the way of making conversation. "2183." "2183 where?" He looked at me, closing one eye to focus better. "Oh," he said. "Well, 2183 South Street, ah, New Albuquerque." "New Albuquerque? Where's that?" Arth thought about it. Took another long pull at the beer. "Right across the way from old Albuquerque," he said finally. "Maybe we ought to be getting on to the Pschorrbräu tent." "Maybe we ought to eat something first," I said. "I'm beginning to feel this. We could get some of that barbecued ox." Arth closed his eyes in pain. "Vegetarian," he said. "Couldn't possibly eat meat. Barbarous. Ugh." "Well, we need some nourishment," I said. "There's supposed to be considerable nourishment in beer." That made sense. I yelled, " Fräulein! Zwei neu bier! " Somewhere along in here the fog rolled in. When it rolled out again, I found myself closing one eye the better to read the lettering on my earthenware mug. It read Augustinerbräu. Somehow we'd evidently navigated from one tent to another. Arth was saying, "Where's your hotel?" That seemed like a good question. I thought about it for a while. Finally I said, "Haven't got one. Town's jam packed. Left my bag at the Bahnhof. I don't think we'll ever make it, Arth. How many we got to go?" "Lost track," Arth said. "You can come home with me." We drank to that and the fog rolled in again. When the fog rolled out, it was daylight. Bright, glaring, awful daylight. I was sprawled, complete with clothes, on one of twin beds. On the other bed, also completely clothed, was Arth. That sun was too much. I stumbled up from the bed, staggered to the window and fumbled around for a blind or curtain. There was none. Behind me a voice said in horror, "Who ... how ... oh, Wodo , where'd you come from?" I got a quick impression, looking out the window, that the Germans were certainly the most modern, futuristic people in the world. But I couldn't stand the light. "Where's the shade," I moaned. Arth did something and the window went opaque. "That's quite a gadget," I groaned. "If I didn't feel so lousy, I'd appreciate it." Arth was sitting on the edge of the bed holding his bald head in his hands. "I remember now," he sorrowed. "You didn't have a hotel. What a stupidity. I'll be phased. Phased all the way down." "You haven't got a handful of aspirin, have you?" I asked him. "Just a minute," Arth said, staggering erect and heading for what undoubtedly was a bathroom. "Stay where you are. Don't move. Don't touch anything." "All right," I told him plaintively. "I'm clean. I won't mess up the place. All I've got is a hangover, not lice." Arth was gone. He came back in two or three minutes, box of pills in hand. "Here, take one of these." I took the pill, followed it with a glass of water. And went out like a light. Arth was shaking my arm. "Want another mass ?" The band was blaring, and five thousand half-swacked voices were roaring accompaniment. In Muenchen steht ein Hofbräuhaus! Eins, Zwei, G'sufa! At the G'sufa everybody upped with their king-size mugs and drank each other's health. My head was killing me. "This is where I came in, or something," I groaned. Arth said, "That was last night." He looked at me over the rim of his beer mug. Something, somewhere, was wrong. But I didn't care. I finished my mass and then remembered. "I've got to get my bag. Oh, my head. Where did we spend last night?" Arth said, and his voice sounded cautious, "At my hotel, don't you remember?" "Not very well," I admitted. "I feel lousy. I must have dimmed out. I've got to go to the Bahnhof and get my luggage." Arth didn't put up an argument on that. We said good-by and I could feel him watching after me as I pushed through the tables on the way out. At the Bahnhof they could do me no good. There were no hotel rooms available in Munich. The head was getting worse by the minute. The fact that they'd somehow managed to lose my bag didn't help. I worked on that project for at least a couple of hours. Not only wasn't the bag at the luggage checking station, but the attendant there evidently couldn't make heads nor tails of the check receipt. He didn't speak English and my high school German was inadequate, especially accompanied by a blockbusting hangover. I didn't get anywhere tearing my hair and complaining from one end of the Bahnhof to the other. I drew a blank on the bag. And the head was getting worse by the minute. I was bleeding to death through the eyes and instead of butterflies I had bats in my stomach. Believe me, nobody should drink a gallon or more of Marzenbräu. I decided the hell with it. I took a cab to the airport, presented my return ticket, told them I wanted to leave on the first obtainable plane to New York. I'd spent two days at the Oktoberfest , and I'd had it. I got more guff there. Something was wrong with the ticket, wrong date or some such. But they fixed that up. I never was clear on what was fouled up, some clerk's error, evidently. The trip back was as uninteresting as the one over. As the hangover began to wear off—a little—I was almost sorry I hadn't been able to stay. If I'd only been able to get a room I would have stayed, I told myself. From Idlewild, I came directly to the office rather than going to my apartment. I figured I might as well check in with Betty. I opened the door and there I found Mr. Oyster sitting in the chair he had been occupying four—or was it five—days before when I'd left. I'd lost track of the time. I said to him, "Glad you're here, sir. I can report. Ah, what was it you came for? Impatient to hear if I'd had any results?" My mind was spinning like a whirling dervish in a revolving door. I'd spent a wad of his money and had nothing I could think of to show for it; nothing but the last stages of a grand-daddy hangover. "Came for?" Mr. Oyster snorted. "I'm merely waiting for your girl to make out my receipt. I thought you had already left." "You'll miss your plane," Betty said. There was suddenly a double dip of ice cream in my stomach. I walked over to my desk and looked down at the calendar. Mr. Oyster was saying something to the effect that if I didn't leave today, it would have to be tomorrow, that he hadn't ponied up that thousand dollars advance for anything less than immediate service. Stuffing his receipt in his wallet, he fussed his way out the door. I said to Betty hopefully, "I suppose you haven't changed this calendar since I left." Betty said, "What's the matter with you? You look funny. How did your clothes get so mussed? You tore the top sheet off that calendar yourself, not half an hour ago, just before this marble-missing client came in." She added, irrelevantly, "Time travelers yet." I tried just once more. "Uh, when did you first see this Mr. Oyster?" "Never saw him before in my life," she said. "Not until he came in this morning." "This morning," I said weakly. While Betty stared at me as though it was me that needed candling by a head shrinker preparatory to being sent off to a pressure cooker, I fished in my pocket for my wallet, counted the contents and winced at the pathetic remains of the thousand. I said pleadingly, "Betty, listen, how long ago did I go out that door—on the way to the airport?" "You've been acting sick all morning. You went out that door about ten minutes ago, were gone about three minutes, and then came back." "See here," Mr. Oyster said (interrupting Simon's story), "did you say this was supposed to be amusing, young man? I don't find it so. In fact, I believe I am being ridiculed." Simon shrugged, put one hand to his forehead and said, "That's only the first chapter. There are two more." "I'm not interested in more," Mr. Oyster said. "I suppose your point was to show me how ridiculous the whole idea actually is. Very well, you've done it. Confound it. However, I suppose your time, even when spent in this manner, has some value. Here is fifty dollars. And good day, sir!" He slammed the door after him as he left. Simon winced at the noise, took the aspirin bottle from its drawer, took two, washed them down with water from the desk carafe. Betty looked at him admiringly. Came to her feet, crossed over and took up the fifty dollars. "Week's wages," she said. "I suppose that's one way of taking care of a crackpot. But I'm surprised you didn't take his money and enjoy that vacation you've been yearning about." "I did," Simon groaned. "Three times." Betty stared at him. "You mean—" Simon nodded, miserably. She said, "But Simon . Fifty thousand dollars bonus. If that story was true, you should have gone back again to Munich. If there was one time traveler, there might have been—" "I keep telling you," Simon said bitterly, "I went back there three times. There were hundreds of them. Probably thousands." He took a deep breath. "Listen, we're just going to have to forget about it. They're not going to stand for the space-time continuum track being altered. If something comes up that looks like it might result in the track being changed, they set you right back at the beginning and let things start—for you—all over again. They just can't allow anything to come back from the future and change the past." "You mean," Betty was suddenly furious at him, "you've given up! Why this is the biggest thing— Why the fifty thousand dollars is nothing. The future! Just think!" Simon said wearily, "There's just one thing you can bring back with you from the future, a hangover compounded of a gallon or so of Marzenbräu. What's more you can pile one on top of the other, and another on top of that!" He shuddered. "If you think I'm going to take another crack at this merry-go-round and pile a fourth hangover on the three I'm already nursing, all at once, you can think again." THE END Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Astounding Science Fiction June 1959. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note.

He has a migraine

He is concerned someone has tampered with it

He has a hangover

He keeps time traveling pills inside

23942_YSQRQEB5_3

Where was Simon before he arrived at work in the beginning of the story?

UNBORN TOMORROW BY MACK REYNOLDS Unfortunately , there was only one thing he could bring back from the wonderful future ... and though he didn't want to ... nevertheless he did.... Illustrated by Freas Betty looked up from her magazine. She said mildly, "You're late." "Don't yell at me, I feel awful," Simon told her. He sat down at his desk, passed his tongue over his teeth in distaste, groaned, fumbled in a drawer for the aspirin bottle. He looked over at Betty and said, almost as though reciting, "What I need is a vacation." "What," Betty said, "are you going to use for money?" "Providence," Simon told her whilst fiddling with the aspirin bottle, "will provide." "Hm-m-m. But before providing vacations it'd be nice if Providence turned up a missing jewel deal, say. Something where you could deduce that actually the ruby ring had gone down the drain and was caught in the elbow. Something that would net about fifty dollars." Simon said, mournful of tone, "Fifty dollars? Why not make it five hundred?" "I'm not selfish," Betty said. "All I want is enough to pay me this week's salary." "Money," Simon said. "When you took this job you said it was the romance that appealed to you." "Hm-m-m. I didn't know most sleuthing amounted to snooping around department stores to check on the clerks knocking down." Simon said, enigmatically, "Now it comes." There was a knock. Betty bounced up with Olympic agility and had the door swinging wide before the knocking was quite completed. He was old, little and had bug eyes behind pince-nez glasses. His suit was cut in the style of yesteryear but when a suit costs two or three hundred dollars you still retain caste whatever the styling. Simon said unenthusiastically, "Good morning, Mr. Oyster." He indicated the client's chair. "Sit down, sir." The client fussed himself with Betty's assistance into the seat, bug-eyed Simon, said finally, "You know my name, that's pretty good. Never saw you before in my life. Stop fussing with me, young lady. Your ad in the phone book says you'll investigate anything." "Anything," Simon said. "Only one exception." "Excellent. Do you believe in time travel?" Simon said nothing. Across the room, where she had resumed her seat, Betty cleared her throat. When Simon continued to say nothing she ventured, "Time travel is impossible." "Why?" "Why?" "Yes, why?" Betty looked to her boss for assistance. None was forthcoming. There ought to be some very quick, positive, definite answer. She said, "Well, for one thing, paradox. Suppose you had a time machine and traveled back a hundred years or so and killed your own great-grandfather. Then how could you ever be born?" "Confound it if I know," the little fellow growled. "How?" Simon said, "Let's get to the point, what you wanted to see me about." "I want to hire you to hunt me up some time travelers," the old boy said. Betty was too far in now to maintain her proper role of silent secretary. "Time travelers," she said, not very intelligently. The potential client sat more erect, obviously with intent to hold the floor for a time. He removed the pince-nez glasses and pointed them at Betty. He said, "Have you read much science fiction, Miss?" "Some," Betty admitted. "Then you'll realize that there are a dozen explanations of the paradoxes of time travel. Every writer in the field worth his salt has explained them away. But to get on. It's my contention that within a century or so man will have solved the problems of immortality and eternal youth, and it's also my suspicion that he will eventually be able to travel in time. So convinced am I of these possibilities that I am willing to gamble a portion of my fortune to investigate the presence in our era of such time travelers." Simon seemed incapable of carrying the ball this morning, so Betty said, "But ... Mr. Oyster, if the future has developed time travel why don't we ever meet such travelers?" Simon put in a word. "The usual explanation, Betty, is that they can't afford to allow the space-time continuum track to be altered. If, say, a time traveler returned to a period of twenty-five years ago and shot Hitler, then all subsequent history would be changed. In that case, the time traveler himself might never be born. They have to tread mighty carefully." Mr. Oyster was pleased. "I didn't expect you to be so well informed on the subject, young man." Simon shrugged and fumbled again with the aspirin bottle. Mr. Oyster went on. "I've been considering the matter for some time and—" Simon held up a hand. "There's no use prolonging this. As I understand it, you're an elderly gentleman with a considerable fortune and you realize that thus far nobody has succeeded in taking it with him." Mr. Oyster returned his glasses to their perch, bug-eyed Simon, but then nodded. Simon said, "You want to hire me to find a time traveler and in some manner or other—any manner will do—exhort from him the secret of eternal life and youth, which you figure the future will have discovered. You're willing to pony up a part of this fortune of yours, if I can deliver a bona fide time traveler." "Right!" Betty had been looking from one to the other. Now she said, plaintively, "But where are you going to find one of these characters—especially if they're interested in keeping hid?" The old boy was the center again. "I told you I'd been considering it for some time. The Oktoberfest , that's where they'd be!" He seemed elated. Betty and Simon waited. "The Oktoberfest ," he repeated. "The greatest festival the world has ever seen, the carnival, feria , fiesta to beat them all. Every year it's held in Munich. Makes the New Orleans Mardi gras look like a quilting party." He began to swing into the spirit of his description. "It originally started in celebration of the wedding of some local prince a century and a half ago and the Bavarians had such a bang-up time they've been holding it every year since. The Munich breweries do up a special beer, Marzenbräu they call it, and each brewery opens a tremendous tent on the fair grounds which will hold five thousand customers apiece. Millions of liters of beer are put away, hundreds of thousands of barbecued chickens, a small herd of oxen are roasted whole over spits, millions of pair of weisswurst , a very special sausage, millions upon millions of pretzels—" "All right," Simon said. "We'll accept it. The Oktoberfest is one whale of a wingding." "Well," the old boy pursued, into his subject now, "that's where they'd be, places like the Oktoberfest . For one thing, a time traveler wouldn't be conspicuous. At a festival like this somebody with a strange accent, or who didn't know exactly how to wear his clothes correctly, or was off the ordinary in any of a dozen other ways, wouldn't be noticed. You could be a four-armed space traveler from Mars, and you still wouldn't be conspicuous at the Oktoberfest . People would figure they had D.T.'s." "But why would a time traveler want to go to a—" Betty began. "Why not! What better opportunity to study a people than when they are in their cups? If you could go back a few thousand years, the things you would wish to see would be a Roman Triumph, perhaps the Rites of Dionysus, or one of Alexander's orgies. You wouldn't want to wander up and down the streets of, say, Athens while nothing was going on, particularly when you might be revealed as a suspicious character not being able to speak the language, not knowing how to wear the clothes and not familiar with the city's layout." He took a deep breath. "No ma'am, you'd have to stick to some great event, both for the sake of actual interest and for protection against being unmasked." The old boy wound it up. "Well, that's the story. What are your rates? The Oktoberfest starts on Friday and continues for sixteen days. You can take the plane to Munich, spend a week there and—" Simon was shaking his head. "Not interested." As soon as Betty had got her jaw back into place, she glared unbelievingly at him. Mr. Oyster was taken aback himself. "See here, young man, I realize this isn't an ordinary assignment, however, as I said, I am willing to risk a considerable portion of my fortune—" "Sorry," Simon said. "Can't be done." "A hundred dollars a day plus expenses," Mr. Oyster said quietly. "I like the fact that you already seem to have some interest and knowledge of the matter. I liked the way you knew my name when I walked in the door; my picture doesn't appear often in the papers." "No go," Simon said, a sad quality in his voice. "A fifty thousand dollar bonus if you bring me a time traveler." "Out of the question," Simon said. "But why ?" Betty wailed. "Just for laughs," Simon told the two of them sourly, "suppose I tell you a funny story. It goes like this:" I got a thousand dollars from Mr. Oyster (Simon began) in the way of an advance, and leaving him with Betty who was making out a receipt, I hustled back to the apartment and packed a bag. Hell, I'd wanted a vacation anyway, this was a natural. On the way to Idlewild I stopped off at the Germany Information Offices for some tourist literature. It takes roughly three and a half hours to get to Gander from Idlewild. I spent the time planning the fun I was going to have. It takes roughly seven and a half hours from Gander to Shannon and I spent that time dreaming up material I could put into my reports to Mr. Oyster. I was going to have to give him some kind of report for his money. Time travel yet! What a laugh! Between Shannon and Munich a faint suspicion began to simmer in my mind. These statistics I read on the Oktoberfest in the Munich tourist pamphlets. Five million people attended annually. Where did five million people come from to attend an overgrown festival in comparatively remote Southern Germany? The tourist season is over before September 21st, first day of the gigantic beer bust. Nor could the Germans account for any such number. Munich itself has a population of less than a million, counting children. And those millions of gallons of beer, the hundreds of thousands of chickens, the herds of oxen. Who ponied up all the money for such expenditures? How could the average German, with his twenty-five dollars a week salary? In Munich there was no hotel space available. I went to the Bahnhof where they have a hotel service and applied. They put my name down, pocketed the husky bribe, showed me where I could check my bag, told me they'd do what they could, and to report back in a few hours. I had another suspicious twinge. If five million people attended this beer bout, how were they accommodated? The Theresienwiese , the fair ground, was only a few blocks away. I was stiff from the plane ride so I walked. There are seven major brewers in the Munich area, each of them represented by one of the circuslike tents that Mr. Oyster mentioned. Each tent contained benches and tables for about five thousand persons and from six to ten thousands pack themselves in, competing for room. In the center is a tremendous bandstand, the musicians all lederhosen clad, the music as Bavarian as any to be found in a Bavarian beer hall. Hundreds of peasant garbed fräuleins darted about the tables with quart sized earthenware mugs, platters of chicken, sausage, kraut and pretzels. I found a place finally at a table which had space for twenty-odd beer bibbers. Odd is right. As weird an assortment of Germans and foreign tourists as could have been dreamed up, ranging from a seventy- or eighty-year-old couple in Bavarian costume, to the bald-headed drunk across the table from me. A desperate waitress bearing six mugs of beer in each hand scurried past. They call them masses , by the way, not mugs. The bald-headed character and I both held up a finger and she slid two of the masses over to us and then hustled on. "Down the hatch," the other said, holding up his mass in toast. "To the ladies," I told him. Before sipping, I said, "You know, the tourist pamphlets say this stuff is eighteen per cent. That's nonsense. No beer is that strong." I took a long pull. He looked at me, waiting. I came up. "Mistaken," I admitted. A mass or two apiece later he looked carefully at the name engraved on his earthenware mug. "Löwenbräu," he said. He took a small notebook from his pocket and a pencil, noted down the word and returned the things. "That's a queer looking pencil you have there," I told him. "German?" "Venusian," he said. "Oops, sorry. Shouldn't have said that." I had never heard of the brand so I skipped it. "Next is the Hofbräu," he said. "Next what?" Baldy's conversation didn't seem to hang together very well. "My pilgrimage," he told me. "All my life I've been wanting to go back to an Oktoberfest and sample every one of the seven brands of the best beer the world has ever known. I'm only as far as Löwenbräu. I'm afraid I'll never make it." I finished my mass . "I'll help you," I told him. "Very noble endeavor. Name is Simon." "Arth," he said. "How could you help?" "I'm still fresh—comparatively. I'll navigate you around. There are seven beer tents. How many have you got through, so far?" "Two, counting this one," Arth said. I looked at him. "It's going to be a chore," I said. "You've already got a nice edge on." Outside, as we made our way to the next tent, the fair looked like every big State-Fair ever seen, except it was bigger. Games, souvenir stands, sausage stands, rides, side shows, and people, people, people. The Hofbräu tent was as overflowing as the last but we managed to find two seats. The band was blaring, and five thousand half-swacked voices were roaring accompaniment. In Muenchen steht ein Hofbräuhaus! Eins, Zwei, G'sufa! At the G'sufa everybody upped with the mugs and drank each other's health. "This is what I call a real beer bust," I said approvingly. Arth was waving to a waitress. As in the Löwenbräu tent, a full quart was the smallest amount obtainable. A beer later I said, "I don't know if you'll make it or not, Arth." "Make what?" "All seven tents." "Oh." A waitress was on her way by, mugs foaming over their rims. I gestured to her for refills. "Where are you from, Arth?" I asked him, in the way of making conversation. "2183." "2183 where?" He looked at me, closing one eye to focus better. "Oh," he said. "Well, 2183 South Street, ah, New Albuquerque." "New Albuquerque? Where's that?" Arth thought about it. Took another long pull at the beer. "Right across the way from old Albuquerque," he said finally. "Maybe we ought to be getting on to the Pschorrbräu tent." "Maybe we ought to eat something first," I said. "I'm beginning to feel this. We could get some of that barbecued ox." Arth closed his eyes in pain. "Vegetarian," he said. "Couldn't possibly eat meat. Barbarous. Ugh." "Well, we need some nourishment," I said. "There's supposed to be considerable nourishment in beer." That made sense. I yelled, " Fräulein! Zwei neu bier! " Somewhere along in here the fog rolled in. When it rolled out again, I found myself closing one eye the better to read the lettering on my earthenware mug. It read Augustinerbräu. Somehow we'd evidently navigated from one tent to another. Arth was saying, "Where's your hotel?" That seemed like a good question. I thought about it for a while. Finally I said, "Haven't got one. Town's jam packed. Left my bag at the Bahnhof. I don't think we'll ever make it, Arth. How many we got to go?" "Lost track," Arth said. "You can come home with me." We drank to that and the fog rolled in again. When the fog rolled out, it was daylight. Bright, glaring, awful daylight. I was sprawled, complete with clothes, on one of twin beds. On the other bed, also completely clothed, was Arth. That sun was too much. I stumbled up from the bed, staggered to the window and fumbled around for a blind or curtain. There was none. Behind me a voice said in horror, "Who ... how ... oh, Wodo , where'd you come from?" I got a quick impression, looking out the window, that the Germans were certainly the most modern, futuristic people in the world. But I couldn't stand the light. "Where's the shade," I moaned. Arth did something and the window went opaque. "That's quite a gadget," I groaned. "If I didn't feel so lousy, I'd appreciate it." Arth was sitting on the edge of the bed holding his bald head in his hands. "I remember now," he sorrowed. "You didn't have a hotel. What a stupidity. I'll be phased. Phased all the way down." "You haven't got a handful of aspirin, have you?" I asked him. "Just a minute," Arth said, staggering erect and heading for what undoubtedly was a bathroom. "Stay where you are. Don't move. Don't touch anything." "All right," I told him plaintively. "I'm clean. I won't mess up the place. All I've got is a hangover, not lice." Arth was gone. He came back in two or three minutes, box of pills in hand. "Here, take one of these." I took the pill, followed it with a glass of water. And went out like a light. Arth was shaking my arm. "Want another mass ?" The band was blaring, and five thousand half-swacked voices were roaring accompaniment. In Muenchen steht ein Hofbräuhaus! Eins, Zwei, G'sufa! At the G'sufa everybody upped with their king-size mugs and drank each other's health. My head was killing me. "This is where I came in, or something," I groaned. Arth said, "That was last night." He looked at me over the rim of his beer mug. Something, somewhere, was wrong. But I didn't care. I finished my mass and then remembered. "I've got to get my bag. Oh, my head. Where did we spend last night?" Arth said, and his voice sounded cautious, "At my hotel, don't you remember?" "Not very well," I admitted. "I feel lousy. I must have dimmed out. I've got to go to the Bahnhof and get my luggage." Arth didn't put up an argument on that. We said good-by and I could feel him watching after me as I pushed through the tables on the way out. At the Bahnhof they could do me no good. There were no hotel rooms available in Munich. The head was getting worse by the minute. The fact that they'd somehow managed to lose my bag didn't help. I worked on that project for at least a couple of hours. Not only wasn't the bag at the luggage checking station, but the attendant there evidently couldn't make heads nor tails of the check receipt. He didn't speak English and my high school German was inadequate, especially accompanied by a blockbusting hangover. I didn't get anywhere tearing my hair and complaining from one end of the Bahnhof to the other. I drew a blank on the bag. And the head was getting worse by the minute. I was bleeding to death through the eyes and instead of butterflies I had bats in my stomach. Believe me, nobody should drink a gallon or more of Marzenbräu. I decided the hell with it. I took a cab to the airport, presented my return ticket, told them I wanted to leave on the first obtainable plane to New York. I'd spent two days at the Oktoberfest , and I'd had it. I got more guff there. Something was wrong with the ticket, wrong date or some such. But they fixed that up. I never was clear on what was fouled up, some clerk's error, evidently. The trip back was as uninteresting as the one over. As the hangover began to wear off—a little—I was almost sorry I hadn't been able to stay. If I'd only been able to get a room I would have stayed, I told myself. From Idlewild, I came directly to the office rather than going to my apartment. I figured I might as well check in with Betty. I opened the door and there I found Mr. Oyster sitting in the chair he had been occupying four—or was it five—days before when I'd left. I'd lost track of the time. I said to him, "Glad you're here, sir. I can report. Ah, what was it you came for? Impatient to hear if I'd had any results?" My mind was spinning like a whirling dervish in a revolving door. I'd spent a wad of his money and had nothing I could think of to show for it; nothing but the last stages of a grand-daddy hangover. "Came for?" Mr. Oyster snorted. "I'm merely waiting for your girl to make out my receipt. I thought you had already left." "You'll miss your plane," Betty said. There was suddenly a double dip of ice cream in my stomach. I walked over to my desk and looked down at the calendar. Mr. Oyster was saying something to the effect that if I didn't leave today, it would have to be tomorrow, that he hadn't ponied up that thousand dollars advance for anything less than immediate service. Stuffing his receipt in his wallet, he fussed his way out the door. I said to Betty hopefully, "I suppose you haven't changed this calendar since I left." Betty said, "What's the matter with you? You look funny. How did your clothes get so mussed? You tore the top sheet off that calendar yourself, not half an hour ago, just before this marble-missing client came in." She added, irrelevantly, "Time travelers yet." I tried just once more. "Uh, when did you first see this Mr. Oyster?" "Never saw him before in my life," she said. "Not until he came in this morning." "This morning," I said weakly. While Betty stared at me as though it was me that needed candling by a head shrinker preparatory to being sent off to a pressure cooker, I fished in my pocket for my wallet, counted the contents and winced at the pathetic remains of the thousand. I said pleadingly, "Betty, listen, how long ago did I go out that door—on the way to the airport?" "You've been acting sick all morning. You went out that door about ten minutes ago, were gone about three minutes, and then came back." "See here," Mr. Oyster said (interrupting Simon's story), "did you say this was supposed to be amusing, young man? I don't find it so. In fact, I believe I am being ridiculed." Simon shrugged, put one hand to his forehead and said, "That's only the first chapter. There are two more." "I'm not interested in more," Mr. Oyster said. "I suppose your point was to show me how ridiculous the whole idea actually is. Very well, you've done it. Confound it. However, I suppose your time, even when spent in this manner, has some value. Here is fifty dollars. And good day, sir!" He slammed the door after him as he left. Simon winced at the noise, took the aspirin bottle from its drawer, took two, washed them down with water from the desk carafe. Betty looked at him admiringly. Came to her feet, crossed over and took up the fifty dollars. "Week's wages," she said. "I suppose that's one way of taking care of a crackpot. But I'm surprised you didn't take his money and enjoy that vacation you've been yearning about." "I did," Simon groaned. "Three times." Betty stared at him. "You mean—" Simon nodded, miserably. She said, "But Simon . Fifty thousand dollars bonus. If that story was true, you should have gone back again to Munich. If there was one time traveler, there might have been—" "I keep telling you," Simon said bitterly, "I went back there three times. There were hundreds of them. Probably thousands." He took a deep breath. "Listen, we're just going to have to forget about it. They're not going to stand for the space-time continuum track being altered. If something comes up that looks like it might result in the track being changed, they set you right back at the beginning and let things start—for you—all over again. They just can't allow anything to come back from the future and change the past." "You mean," Betty was suddenly furious at him, "you've given up! Why this is the biggest thing— Why the fifty thousand dollars is nothing. The future! Just think!" Simon said wearily, "There's just one thing you can bring back with you from the future, a hangover compounded of a gallon or so of Marzenbräu. What's more you can pile one on top of the other, and another on top of that!" He shuddered. "If you think I'm going to take another crack at this merry-go-round and pile a fourth hangover on the three I'm already nursing, all at once, you can think again." THE END Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Astounding Science Fiction June 1959. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note.

Idlewild

Munich

Providence

New Orleans

23942_YSQRQEB5_4

Why does Simon ultimately deny Mr. Oyster's request to go to Oktoberfest?

UNBORN TOMORROW BY MACK REYNOLDS Unfortunately , there was only one thing he could bring back from the wonderful future ... and though he didn't want to ... nevertheless he did.... Illustrated by Freas Betty looked up from her magazine. She said mildly, "You're late." "Don't yell at me, I feel awful," Simon told her. He sat down at his desk, passed his tongue over his teeth in distaste, groaned, fumbled in a drawer for the aspirin bottle. He looked over at Betty and said, almost as though reciting, "What I need is a vacation." "What," Betty said, "are you going to use for money?" "Providence," Simon told her whilst fiddling with the aspirin bottle, "will provide." "Hm-m-m. But before providing vacations it'd be nice if Providence turned up a missing jewel deal, say. Something where you could deduce that actually the ruby ring had gone down the drain and was caught in the elbow. Something that would net about fifty dollars." Simon said, mournful of tone, "Fifty dollars? Why not make it five hundred?" "I'm not selfish," Betty said. "All I want is enough to pay me this week's salary." "Money," Simon said. "When you took this job you said it was the romance that appealed to you." "Hm-m-m. I didn't know most sleuthing amounted to snooping around department stores to check on the clerks knocking down." Simon said, enigmatically, "Now it comes." There was a knock. Betty bounced up with Olympic agility and had the door swinging wide before the knocking was quite completed. He was old, little and had bug eyes behind pince-nez glasses. His suit was cut in the style of yesteryear but when a suit costs two or three hundred dollars you still retain caste whatever the styling. Simon said unenthusiastically, "Good morning, Mr. Oyster." He indicated the client's chair. "Sit down, sir." The client fussed himself with Betty's assistance into the seat, bug-eyed Simon, said finally, "You know my name, that's pretty good. Never saw you before in my life. Stop fussing with me, young lady. Your ad in the phone book says you'll investigate anything." "Anything," Simon said. "Only one exception." "Excellent. Do you believe in time travel?" Simon said nothing. Across the room, where she had resumed her seat, Betty cleared her throat. When Simon continued to say nothing she ventured, "Time travel is impossible." "Why?" "Why?" "Yes, why?" Betty looked to her boss for assistance. None was forthcoming. There ought to be some very quick, positive, definite answer. She said, "Well, for one thing, paradox. Suppose you had a time machine and traveled back a hundred years or so and killed your own great-grandfather. Then how could you ever be born?" "Confound it if I know," the little fellow growled. "How?" Simon said, "Let's get to the point, what you wanted to see me about." "I want to hire you to hunt me up some time travelers," the old boy said. Betty was too far in now to maintain her proper role of silent secretary. "Time travelers," she said, not very intelligently. The potential client sat more erect, obviously with intent to hold the floor for a time. He removed the pince-nez glasses and pointed them at Betty. He said, "Have you read much science fiction, Miss?" "Some," Betty admitted. "Then you'll realize that there are a dozen explanations of the paradoxes of time travel. Every writer in the field worth his salt has explained them away. But to get on. It's my contention that within a century or so man will have solved the problems of immortality and eternal youth, and it's also my suspicion that he will eventually be able to travel in time. So convinced am I of these possibilities that I am willing to gamble a portion of my fortune to investigate the presence in our era of such time travelers." Simon seemed incapable of carrying the ball this morning, so Betty said, "But ... Mr. Oyster, if the future has developed time travel why don't we ever meet such travelers?" Simon put in a word. "The usual explanation, Betty, is that they can't afford to allow the space-time continuum track to be altered. If, say, a time traveler returned to a period of twenty-five years ago and shot Hitler, then all subsequent history would be changed. In that case, the time traveler himself might never be born. They have to tread mighty carefully." Mr. Oyster was pleased. "I didn't expect you to be so well informed on the subject, young man." Simon shrugged and fumbled again with the aspirin bottle. Mr. Oyster went on. "I've been considering the matter for some time and—" Simon held up a hand. "There's no use prolonging this. As I understand it, you're an elderly gentleman with a considerable fortune and you realize that thus far nobody has succeeded in taking it with him." Mr. Oyster returned his glasses to their perch, bug-eyed Simon, but then nodded. Simon said, "You want to hire me to find a time traveler and in some manner or other—any manner will do—exhort from him the secret of eternal life and youth, which you figure the future will have discovered. You're willing to pony up a part of this fortune of yours, if I can deliver a bona fide time traveler." "Right!" Betty had been looking from one to the other. Now she said, plaintively, "But where are you going to find one of these characters—especially if they're interested in keeping hid?" The old boy was the center again. "I told you I'd been considering it for some time. The Oktoberfest , that's where they'd be!" He seemed elated. Betty and Simon waited. "The Oktoberfest ," he repeated. "The greatest festival the world has ever seen, the carnival, feria , fiesta to beat them all. Every year it's held in Munich. Makes the New Orleans Mardi gras look like a quilting party." He began to swing into the spirit of his description. "It originally started in celebration of the wedding of some local prince a century and a half ago and the Bavarians had such a bang-up time they've been holding it every year since. The Munich breweries do up a special beer, Marzenbräu they call it, and each brewery opens a tremendous tent on the fair grounds which will hold five thousand customers apiece. Millions of liters of beer are put away, hundreds of thousands of barbecued chickens, a small herd of oxen are roasted whole over spits, millions of pair of weisswurst , a very special sausage, millions upon millions of pretzels—" "All right," Simon said. "We'll accept it. The Oktoberfest is one whale of a wingding." "Well," the old boy pursued, into his subject now, "that's where they'd be, places like the Oktoberfest . For one thing, a time traveler wouldn't be conspicuous. At a festival like this somebody with a strange accent, or who didn't know exactly how to wear his clothes correctly, or was off the ordinary in any of a dozen other ways, wouldn't be noticed. You could be a four-armed space traveler from Mars, and you still wouldn't be conspicuous at the Oktoberfest . People would figure they had D.T.'s." "But why would a time traveler want to go to a—" Betty began. "Why not! What better opportunity to study a people than when they are in their cups? If you could go back a few thousand years, the things you would wish to see would be a Roman Triumph, perhaps the Rites of Dionysus, or one of Alexander's orgies. You wouldn't want to wander up and down the streets of, say, Athens while nothing was going on, particularly when you might be revealed as a suspicious character not being able to speak the language, not knowing how to wear the clothes and not familiar with the city's layout." He took a deep breath. "No ma'am, you'd have to stick to some great event, both for the sake of actual interest and for protection against being unmasked." The old boy wound it up. "Well, that's the story. What are your rates? The Oktoberfest starts on Friday and continues for sixteen days. You can take the plane to Munich, spend a week there and—" Simon was shaking his head. "Not interested." As soon as Betty had got her jaw back into place, she glared unbelievingly at him. Mr. Oyster was taken aback himself. "See here, young man, I realize this isn't an ordinary assignment, however, as I said, I am willing to risk a considerable portion of my fortune—" "Sorry," Simon said. "Can't be done." "A hundred dollars a day plus expenses," Mr. Oyster said quietly. "I like the fact that you already seem to have some interest and knowledge of the matter. I liked the way you knew my name when I walked in the door; my picture doesn't appear often in the papers." "No go," Simon said, a sad quality in his voice. "A fifty thousand dollar bonus if you bring me a time traveler." "Out of the question," Simon said. "But why ?" Betty wailed. "Just for laughs," Simon told the two of them sourly, "suppose I tell you a funny story. It goes like this:" I got a thousand dollars from Mr. Oyster (Simon began) in the way of an advance, and leaving him with Betty who was making out a receipt, I hustled back to the apartment and packed a bag. Hell, I'd wanted a vacation anyway, this was a natural. On the way to Idlewild I stopped off at the Germany Information Offices for some tourist literature. It takes roughly three and a half hours to get to Gander from Idlewild. I spent the time planning the fun I was going to have. It takes roughly seven and a half hours from Gander to Shannon and I spent that time dreaming up material I could put into my reports to Mr. Oyster. I was going to have to give him some kind of report for his money. Time travel yet! What a laugh! Between Shannon and Munich a faint suspicion began to simmer in my mind. These statistics I read on the Oktoberfest in the Munich tourist pamphlets. Five million people attended annually. Where did five million people come from to attend an overgrown festival in comparatively remote Southern Germany? The tourist season is over before September 21st, first day of the gigantic beer bust. Nor could the Germans account for any such number. Munich itself has a population of less than a million, counting children. And those millions of gallons of beer, the hundreds of thousands of chickens, the herds of oxen. Who ponied up all the money for such expenditures? How could the average German, with his twenty-five dollars a week salary? In Munich there was no hotel space available. I went to the Bahnhof where they have a hotel service and applied. They put my name down, pocketed the husky bribe, showed me where I could check my bag, told me they'd do what they could, and to report back in a few hours. I had another suspicious twinge. If five million people attended this beer bout, how were they accommodated? The Theresienwiese , the fair ground, was only a few blocks away. I was stiff from the plane ride so I walked. There are seven major brewers in the Munich area, each of them represented by one of the circuslike tents that Mr. Oyster mentioned. Each tent contained benches and tables for about five thousand persons and from six to ten thousands pack themselves in, competing for room. In the center is a tremendous bandstand, the musicians all lederhosen clad, the music as Bavarian as any to be found in a Bavarian beer hall. Hundreds of peasant garbed fräuleins darted about the tables with quart sized earthenware mugs, platters of chicken, sausage, kraut and pretzels. I found a place finally at a table which had space for twenty-odd beer bibbers. Odd is right. As weird an assortment of Germans and foreign tourists as could have been dreamed up, ranging from a seventy- or eighty-year-old couple in Bavarian costume, to the bald-headed drunk across the table from me. A desperate waitress bearing six mugs of beer in each hand scurried past. They call them masses , by the way, not mugs. The bald-headed character and I both held up a finger and she slid two of the masses over to us and then hustled on. "Down the hatch," the other said, holding up his mass in toast. "To the ladies," I told him. Before sipping, I said, "You know, the tourist pamphlets say this stuff is eighteen per cent. That's nonsense. No beer is that strong." I took a long pull. He looked at me, waiting. I came up. "Mistaken," I admitted. A mass or two apiece later he looked carefully at the name engraved on his earthenware mug. "Löwenbräu," he said. He took a small notebook from his pocket and a pencil, noted down the word and returned the things. "That's a queer looking pencil you have there," I told him. "German?" "Venusian," he said. "Oops, sorry. Shouldn't have said that." I had never heard of the brand so I skipped it. "Next is the Hofbräu," he said. "Next what?" Baldy's conversation didn't seem to hang together very well. "My pilgrimage," he told me. "All my life I've been wanting to go back to an Oktoberfest and sample every one of the seven brands of the best beer the world has ever known. I'm only as far as Löwenbräu. I'm afraid I'll never make it." I finished my mass . "I'll help you," I told him. "Very noble endeavor. Name is Simon." "Arth," he said. "How could you help?" "I'm still fresh—comparatively. I'll navigate you around. There are seven beer tents. How many have you got through, so far?" "Two, counting this one," Arth said. I looked at him. "It's going to be a chore," I said. "You've already got a nice edge on." Outside, as we made our way to the next tent, the fair looked like every big State-Fair ever seen, except it was bigger. Games, souvenir stands, sausage stands, rides, side shows, and people, people, people. The Hofbräu tent was as overflowing as the last but we managed to find two seats. The band was blaring, and five thousand half-swacked voices were roaring accompaniment. In Muenchen steht ein Hofbräuhaus! Eins, Zwei, G'sufa! At the G'sufa everybody upped with the mugs and drank each other's health. "This is what I call a real beer bust," I said approvingly. Arth was waving to a waitress. As in the Löwenbräu tent, a full quart was the smallest amount obtainable. A beer later I said, "I don't know if you'll make it or not, Arth." "Make what?" "All seven tents." "Oh." A waitress was on her way by, mugs foaming over their rims. I gestured to her for refills. "Where are you from, Arth?" I asked him, in the way of making conversation. "2183." "2183 where?" He looked at me, closing one eye to focus better. "Oh," he said. "Well, 2183 South Street, ah, New Albuquerque." "New Albuquerque? Where's that?" Arth thought about it. Took another long pull at the beer. "Right across the way from old Albuquerque," he said finally. "Maybe we ought to be getting on to the Pschorrbräu tent." "Maybe we ought to eat something first," I said. "I'm beginning to feel this. We could get some of that barbecued ox." Arth closed his eyes in pain. "Vegetarian," he said. "Couldn't possibly eat meat. Barbarous. Ugh." "Well, we need some nourishment," I said. "There's supposed to be considerable nourishment in beer." That made sense. I yelled, " Fräulein! Zwei neu bier! " Somewhere along in here the fog rolled in. When it rolled out again, I found myself closing one eye the better to read the lettering on my earthenware mug. It read Augustinerbräu. Somehow we'd evidently navigated from one tent to another. Arth was saying, "Where's your hotel?" That seemed like a good question. I thought about it for a while. Finally I said, "Haven't got one. Town's jam packed. Left my bag at the Bahnhof. I don't think we'll ever make it, Arth. How many we got to go?" "Lost track," Arth said. "You can come home with me." We drank to that and the fog rolled in again. When the fog rolled out, it was daylight. Bright, glaring, awful daylight. I was sprawled, complete with clothes, on one of twin beds. On the other bed, also completely clothed, was Arth. That sun was too much. I stumbled up from the bed, staggered to the window and fumbled around for a blind or curtain. There was none. Behind me a voice said in horror, "Who ... how ... oh, Wodo , where'd you come from?" I got a quick impression, looking out the window, that the Germans were certainly the most modern, futuristic people in the world. But I couldn't stand the light. "Where's the shade," I moaned. Arth did something and the window went opaque. "That's quite a gadget," I groaned. "If I didn't feel so lousy, I'd appreciate it." Arth was sitting on the edge of the bed holding his bald head in his hands. "I remember now," he sorrowed. "You didn't have a hotel. What a stupidity. I'll be phased. Phased all the way down." "You haven't got a handful of aspirin, have you?" I asked him. "Just a minute," Arth said, staggering erect and heading for what undoubtedly was a bathroom. "Stay where you are. Don't move. Don't touch anything." "All right," I told him plaintively. "I'm clean. I won't mess up the place. All I've got is a hangover, not lice." Arth was gone. He came back in two or three minutes, box of pills in hand. "Here, take one of these." I took the pill, followed it with a glass of water. And went out like a light. Arth was shaking my arm. "Want another mass ?" The band was blaring, and five thousand half-swacked voices were roaring accompaniment. In Muenchen steht ein Hofbräuhaus! Eins, Zwei, G'sufa! At the G'sufa everybody upped with their king-size mugs and drank each other's health. My head was killing me. "This is where I came in, or something," I groaned. Arth said, "That was last night." He looked at me over the rim of his beer mug. Something, somewhere, was wrong. But I didn't care. I finished my mass and then remembered. "I've got to get my bag. Oh, my head. Where did we spend last night?" Arth said, and his voice sounded cautious, "At my hotel, don't you remember?" "Not very well," I admitted. "I feel lousy. I must have dimmed out. I've got to go to the Bahnhof and get my luggage." Arth didn't put up an argument on that. We said good-by and I could feel him watching after me as I pushed through the tables on the way out. At the Bahnhof they could do me no good. There were no hotel rooms available in Munich. The head was getting worse by the minute. The fact that they'd somehow managed to lose my bag didn't help. I worked on that project for at least a couple of hours. Not only wasn't the bag at the luggage checking station, but the attendant there evidently couldn't make heads nor tails of the check receipt. He didn't speak English and my high school German was inadequate, especially accompanied by a blockbusting hangover. I didn't get anywhere tearing my hair and complaining from one end of the Bahnhof to the other. I drew a blank on the bag. And the head was getting worse by the minute. I was bleeding to death through the eyes and instead of butterflies I had bats in my stomach. Believe me, nobody should drink a gallon or more of Marzenbräu. I decided the hell with it. I took a cab to the airport, presented my return ticket, told them I wanted to leave on the first obtainable plane to New York. I'd spent two days at the Oktoberfest , and I'd had it. I got more guff there. Something was wrong with the ticket, wrong date or some such. But they fixed that up. I never was clear on what was fouled up, some clerk's error, evidently. The trip back was as uninteresting as the one over. As the hangover began to wear off—a little—I was almost sorry I hadn't been able to stay. If I'd only been able to get a room I would have stayed, I told myself. From Idlewild, I came directly to the office rather than going to my apartment. I figured I might as well check in with Betty. I opened the door and there I found Mr. Oyster sitting in the chair he had been occupying four—or was it five—days before when I'd left. I'd lost track of the time. I said to him, "Glad you're here, sir. I can report. Ah, what was it you came for? Impatient to hear if I'd had any results?" My mind was spinning like a whirling dervish in a revolving door. I'd spent a wad of his money and had nothing I could think of to show for it; nothing but the last stages of a grand-daddy hangover. "Came for?" Mr. Oyster snorted. "I'm merely waiting for your girl to make out my receipt. I thought you had already left." "You'll miss your plane," Betty said. There was suddenly a double dip of ice cream in my stomach. I walked over to my desk and looked down at the calendar. Mr. Oyster was saying something to the effect that if I didn't leave today, it would have to be tomorrow, that he hadn't ponied up that thousand dollars advance for anything less than immediate service. Stuffing his receipt in his wallet, he fussed his way out the door. I said to Betty hopefully, "I suppose you haven't changed this calendar since I left." Betty said, "What's the matter with you? You look funny. How did your clothes get so mussed? You tore the top sheet off that calendar yourself, not half an hour ago, just before this marble-missing client came in." She added, irrelevantly, "Time travelers yet." I tried just once more. "Uh, when did you first see this Mr. Oyster?" "Never saw him before in my life," she said. "Not until he came in this morning." "This morning," I said weakly. While Betty stared at me as though it was me that needed candling by a head shrinker preparatory to being sent off to a pressure cooker, I fished in my pocket for my wallet, counted the contents and winced at the pathetic remains of the thousand. I said pleadingly, "Betty, listen, how long ago did I go out that door—on the way to the airport?" "You've been acting sick all morning. You went out that door about ten minutes ago, were gone about three minutes, and then came back." "See here," Mr. Oyster said (interrupting Simon's story), "did you say this was supposed to be amusing, young man? I don't find it so. In fact, I believe I am being ridiculed." Simon shrugged, put one hand to his forehead and said, "That's only the first chapter. There are two more." "I'm not interested in more," Mr. Oyster said. "I suppose your point was to show me how ridiculous the whole idea actually is. Very well, you've done it. Confound it. However, I suppose your time, even when spent in this manner, has some value. Here is fifty dollars. And good day, sir!" He slammed the door after him as he left. Simon winced at the noise, took the aspirin bottle from its drawer, took two, washed them down with water from the desk carafe. Betty looked at him admiringly. Came to her feet, crossed over and took up the fifty dollars. "Week's wages," she said. "I suppose that's one way of taking care of a crackpot. But I'm surprised you didn't take his money and enjoy that vacation you've been yearning about." "I did," Simon groaned. "Three times." Betty stared at him. "You mean—" Simon nodded, miserably. She said, "But Simon . Fifty thousand dollars bonus. If that story was true, you should have gone back again to Munich. If there was one time traveler, there might have been—" "I keep telling you," Simon said bitterly, "I went back there three times. There were hundreds of them. Probably thousands." He took a deep breath. "Listen, we're just going to have to forget about it. They're not going to stand for the space-time continuum track being altered. If something comes up that looks like it might result in the track being changed, they set you right back at the beginning and let things start—for you—all over again. They just can't allow anything to come back from the future and change the past." "You mean," Betty was suddenly furious at him, "you've given up! Why this is the biggest thing— Why the fifty thousand dollars is nothing. The future! Just think!" Simon said wearily, "There's just one thing you can bring back with you from the future, a hangover compounded of a gallon or so of Marzenbräu. What's more you can pile one on top of the other, and another on top of that!" He shuddered. "If you think I'm going to take another crack at this merry-go-round and pile a fourth hangover on the three I'm already nursing, all at once, you can think again." THE END Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Astounding Science Fiction June 1959. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note.

He believes that Mr. Oyster is on a mission to destroy time travelers

He thinks that Mr. Oyster is attempting to alter the space-time continuum

He knows he will not be allowed to do something that might impact the past

He does not believe that Mr. Oyster is offering fair compensation

23942_YSQRQEB5_5

In telling the story about potentially traveling to Oktoberfest, what is Simon most skeptical of?

UNBORN TOMORROW BY MACK REYNOLDS Unfortunately , there was only one thing he could bring back from the wonderful future ... and though he didn't want to ... nevertheless he did.... Illustrated by Freas Betty looked up from her magazine. She said mildly, "You're late." "Don't yell at me, I feel awful," Simon told her. He sat down at his desk, passed his tongue over his teeth in distaste, groaned, fumbled in a drawer for the aspirin bottle. He looked over at Betty and said, almost as though reciting, "What I need is a vacation." "What," Betty said, "are you going to use for money?" "Providence," Simon told her whilst fiddling with the aspirin bottle, "will provide." "Hm-m-m. But before providing vacations it'd be nice if Providence turned up a missing jewel deal, say. Something where you could deduce that actually the ruby ring had gone down the drain and was caught in the elbow. Something that would net about fifty dollars." Simon said, mournful of tone, "Fifty dollars? Why not make it five hundred?" "I'm not selfish," Betty said. "All I want is enough to pay me this week's salary." "Money," Simon said. "When you took this job you said it was the romance that appealed to you." "Hm-m-m. I didn't know most sleuthing amounted to snooping around department stores to check on the clerks knocking down." Simon said, enigmatically, "Now it comes." There was a knock. Betty bounced up with Olympic agility and had the door swinging wide before the knocking was quite completed. He was old, little and had bug eyes behind pince-nez glasses. His suit was cut in the style of yesteryear but when a suit costs two or three hundred dollars you still retain caste whatever the styling. Simon said unenthusiastically, "Good morning, Mr. Oyster." He indicated the client's chair. "Sit down, sir." The client fussed himself with Betty's assistance into the seat, bug-eyed Simon, said finally, "You know my name, that's pretty good. Never saw you before in my life. Stop fussing with me, young lady. Your ad in the phone book says you'll investigate anything." "Anything," Simon said. "Only one exception." "Excellent. Do you believe in time travel?" Simon said nothing. Across the room, where she had resumed her seat, Betty cleared her throat. When Simon continued to say nothing she ventured, "Time travel is impossible." "Why?" "Why?" "Yes, why?" Betty looked to her boss for assistance. None was forthcoming. There ought to be some very quick, positive, definite answer. She said, "Well, for one thing, paradox. Suppose you had a time machine and traveled back a hundred years or so and killed your own great-grandfather. Then how could you ever be born?" "Confound it if I know," the little fellow growled. "How?" Simon said, "Let's get to the point, what you wanted to see me about." "I want to hire you to hunt me up some time travelers," the old boy said. Betty was too far in now to maintain her proper role of silent secretary. "Time travelers," she said, not very intelligently. The potential client sat more erect, obviously with intent to hold the floor for a time. He removed the pince-nez glasses and pointed them at Betty. He said, "Have you read much science fiction, Miss?" "Some," Betty admitted. "Then you'll realize that there are a dozen explanations of the paradoxes of time travel. Every writer in the field worth his salt has explained them away. But to get on. It's my contention that within a century or so man will have solved the problems of immortality and eternal youth, and it's also my suspicion that he will eventually be able to travel in time. So convinced am I of these possibilities that I am willing to gamble a portion of my fortune to investigate the presence in our era of such time travelers." Simon seemed incapable of carrying the ball this morning, so Betty said, "But ... Mr. Oyster, if the future has developed time travel why don't we ever meet such travelers?" Simon put in a word. "The usual explanation, Betty, is that they can't afford to allow the space-time continuum track to be altered. If, say, a time traveler returned to a period of twenty-five years ago and shot Hitler, then all subsequent history would be changed. In that case, the time traveler himself might never be born. They have to tread mighty carefully." Mr. Oyster was pleased. "I didn't expect you to be so well informed on the subject, young man." Simon shrugged and fumbled again with the aspirin bottle. Mr. Oyster went on. "I've been considering the matter for some time and—" Simon held up a hand. "There's no use prolonging this. As I understand it, you're an elderly gentleman with a considerable fortune and you realize that thus far nobody has succeeded in taking it with him." Mr. Oyster returned his glasses to their perch, bug-eyed Simon, but then nodded. Simon said, "You want to hire me to find a time traveler and in some manner or other—any manner will do—exhort from him the secret of eternal life and youth, which you figure the future will have discovered. You're willing to pony up a part of this fortune of yours, if I can deliver a bona fide time traveler." "Right!" Betty had been looking from one to the other. Now she said, plaintively, "But where are you going to find one of these characters—especially if they're interested in keeping hid?" The old boy was the center again. "I told you I'd been considering it for some time. The Oktoberfest , that's where they'd be!" He seemed elated. Betty and Simon waited. "The Oktoberfest ," he repeated. "The greatest festival the world has ever seen, the carnival, feria , fiesta to beat them all. Every year it's held in Munich. Makes the New Orleans Mardi gras look like a quilting party." He began to swing into the spirit of his description. "It originally started in celebration of the wedding of some local prince a century and a half ago and the Bavarians had such a bang-up time they've been holding it every year since. The Munich breweries do up a special beer, Marzenbräu they call it, and each brewery opens a tremendous tent on the fair grounds which will hold five thousand customers apiece. Millions of liters of beer are put away, hundreds of thousands of barbecued chickens, a small herd of oxen are roasted whole over spits, millions of pair of weisswurst , a very special sausage, millions upon millions of pretzels—" "All right," Simon said. "We'll accept it. The Oktoberfest is one whale of a wingding." "Well," the old boy pursued, into his subject now, "that's where they'd be, places like the Oktoberfest . For one thing, a time traveler wouldn't be conspicuous. At a festival like this somebody with a strange accent, or who didn't know exactly how to wear his clothes correctly, or was off the ordinary in any of a dozen other ways, wouldn't be noticed. You could be a four-armed space traveler from Mars, and you still wouldn't be conspicuous at the Oktoberfest . People would figure they had D.T.'s." "But why would a time traveler want to go to a—" Betty began. "Why not! What better opportunity to study a people than when they are in their cups? If you could go back a few thousand years, the things you would wish to see would be a Roman Triumph, perhaps the Rites of Dionysus, or one of Alexander's orgies. You wouldn't want to wander up and down the streets of, say, Athens while nothing was going on, particularly when you might be revealed as a suspicious character not being able to speak the language, not knowing how to wear the clothes and not familiar with the city's layout." He took a deep breath. "No ma'am, you'd have to stick to some great event, both for the sake of actual interest and for protection against being unmasked." The old boy wound it up. "Well, that's the story. What are your rates? The Oktoberfest starts on Friday and continues for sixteen days. You can take the plane to Munich, spend a week there and—" Simon was shaking his head. "Not interested." As soon as Betty had got her jaw back into place, she glared unbelievingly at him. Mr. Oyster was taken aback himself. "See here, young man, I realize this isn't an ordinary assignment, however, as I said, I am willing to risk a considerable portion of my fortune—" "Sorry," Simon said. "Can't be done." "A hundred dollars a day plus expenses," Mr. Oyster said quietly. "I like the fact that you already seem to have some interest and knowledge of the matter. I liked the way you knew my name when I walked in the door; my picture doesn't appear often in the papers." "No go," Simon said, a sad quality in his voice. "A fifty thousand dollar bonus if you bring me a time traveler." "Out of the question," Simon said. "But why ?" Betty wailed. "Just for laughs," Simon told the two of them sourly, "suppose I tell you a funny story. It goes like this:" I got a thousand dollars from Mr. Oyster (Simon began) in the way of an advance, and leaving him with Betty who was making out a receipt, I hustled back to the apartment and packed a bag. Hell, I'd wanted a vacation anyway, this was a natural. On the way to Idlewild I stopped off at the Germany Information Offices for some tourist literature. It takes roughly three and a half hours to get to Gander from Idlewild. I spent the time planning the fun I was going to have. It takes roughly seven and a half hours from Gander to Shannon and I spent that time dreaming up material I could put into my reports to Mr. Oyster. I was going to have to give him some kind of report for his money. Time travel yet! What a laugh! Between Shannon and Munich a faint suspicion began to simmer in my mind. These statistics I read on the Oktoberfest in the Munich tourist pamphlets. Five million people attended annually. Where did five million people come from to attend an overgrown festival in comparatively remote Southern Germany? The tourist season is over before September 21st, first day of the gigantic beer bust. Nor could the Germans account for any such number. Munich itself has a population of less than a million, counting children. And those millions of gallons of beer, the hundreds of thousands of chickens, the herds of oxen. Who ponied up all the money for such expenditures? How could the average German, with his twenty-five dollars a week salary? In Munich there was no hotel space available. I went to the Bahnhof where they have a hotel service and applied. They put my name down, pocketed the husky bribe, showed me where I could check my bag, told me they'd do what they could, and to report back in a few hours. I had another suspicious twinge. If five million people attended this beer bout, how were they accommodated? The Theresienwiese , the fair ground, was only a few blocks away. I was stiff from the plane ride so I walked. There are seven major brewers in the Munich area, each of them represented by one of the circuslike tents that Mr. Oyster mentioned. Each tent contained benches and tables for about five thousand persons and from six to ten thousands pack themselves in, competing for room. In the center is a tremendous bandstand, the musicians all lederhosen clad, the music as Bavarian as any to be found in a Bavarian beer hall. Hundreds of peasant garbed fräuleins darted about the tables with quart sized earthenware mugs, platters of chicken, sausage, kraut and pretzels. I found a place finally at a table which had space for twenty-odd beer bibbers. Odd is right. As weird an assortment of Germans and foreign tourists as could have been dreamed up, ranging from a seventy- or eighty-year-old couple in Bavarian costume, to the bald-headed drunk across the table from me. A desperate waitress bearing six mugs of beer in each hand scurried past. They call them masses , by the way, not mugs. The bald-headed character and I both held up a finger and she slid two of the masses over to us and then hustled on. "Down the hatch," the other said, holding up his mass in toast. "To the ladies," I told him. Before sipping, I said, "You know, the tourist pamphlets say this stuff is eighteen per cent. That's nonsense. No beer is that strong." I took a long pull. He looked at me, waiting. I came up. "Mistaken," I admitted. A mass or two apiece later he looked carefully at the name engraved on his earthenware mug. "Löwenbräu," he said. He took a small notebook from his pocket and a pencil, noted down the word and returned the things. "That's a queer looking pencil you have there," I told him. "German?" "Venusian," he said. "Oops, sorry. Shouldn't have said that." I had never heard of the brand so I skipped it. "Next is the Hofbräu," he said. "Next what?" Baldy's conversation didn't seem to hang together very well. "My pilgrimage," he told me. "All my life I've been wanting to go back to an Oktoberfest and sample every one of the seven brands of the best beer the world has ever known. I'm only as far as Löwenbräu. I'm afraid I'll never make it." I finished my mass . "I'll help you," I told him. "Very noble endeavor. Name is Simon." "Arth," he said. "How could you help?" "I'm still fresh—comparatively. I'll navigate you around. There are seven beer tents. How many have you got through, so far?" "Two, counting this one," Arth said. I looked at him. "It's going to be a chore," I said. "You've already got a nice edge on." Outside, as we made our way to the next tent, the fair looked like every big State-Fair ever seen, except it was bigger. Games, souvenir stands, sausage stands, rides, side shows, and people, people, people. The Hofbräu tent was as overflowing as the last but we managed to find two seats. The band was blaring, and five thousand half-swacked voices were roaring accompaniment. In Muenchen steht ein Hofbräuhaus! Eins, Zwei, G'sufa! At the G'sufa everybody upped with the mugs and drank each other's health. "This is what I call a real beer bust," I said approvingly. Arth was waving to a waitress. As in the Löwenbräu tent, a full quart was the smallest amount obtainable. A beer later I said, "I don't know if you'll make it or not, Arth." "Make what?" "All seven tents." "Oh." A waitress was on her way by, mugs foaming over their rims. I gestured to her for refills. "Where are you from, Arth?" I asked him, in the way of making conversation. "2183." "2183 where?" He looked at me, closing one eye to focus better. "Oh," he said. "Well, 2183 South Street, ah, New Albuquerque." "New Albuquerque? Where's that?" Arth thought about it. Took another long pull at the beer. "Right across the way from old Albuquerque," he said finally. "Maybe we ought to be getting on to the Pschorrbräu tent." "Maybe we ought to eat something first," I said. "I'm beginning to feel this. We could get some of that barbecued ox." Arth closed his eyes in pain. "Vegetarian," he said. "Couldn't possibly eat meat. Barbarous. Ugh." "Well, we need some nourishment," I said. "There's supposed to be considerable nourishment in beer." That made sense. I yelled, " Fräulein! Zwei neu bier! " Somewhere along in here the fog rolled in. When it rolled out again, I found myself closing one eye the better to read the lettering on my earthenware mug. It read Augustinerbräu. Somehow we'd evidently navigated from one tent to another. Arth was saying, "Where's your hotel?" That seemed like a good question. I thought about it for a while. Finally I said, "Haven't got one. Town's jam packed. Left my bag at the Bahnhof. I don't think we'll ever make it, Arth. How many we got to go?" "Lost track," Arth said. "You can come home with me." We drank to that and the fog rolled in again. When the fog rolled out, it was daylight. Bright, glaring, awful daylight. I was sprawled, complete with clothes, on one of twin beds. On the other bed, also completely clothed, was Arth. That sun was too much. I stumbled up from the bed, staggered to the window and fumbled around for a blind or curtain. There was none. Behind me a voice said in horror, "Who ... how ... oh, Wodo , where'd you come from?" I got a quick impression, looking out the window, that the Germans were certainly the most modern, futuristic people in the world. But I couldn't stand the light. "Where's the shade," I moaned. Arth did something and the window went opaque. "That's quite a gadget," I groaned. "If I didn't feel so lousy, I'd appreciate it." Arth was sitting on the edge of the bed holding his bald head in his hands. "I remember now," he sorrowed. "You didn't have a hotel. What a stupidity. I'll be phased. Phased all the way down." "You haven't got a handful of aspirin, have you?" I asked him. "Just a minute," Arth said, staggering erect and heading for what undoubtedly was a bathroom. "Stay where you are. Don't move. Don't touch anything." "All right," I told him plaintively. "I'm clean. I won't mess up the place. All I've got is a hangover, not lice." Arth was gone. He came back in two or three minutes, box of pills in hand. "Here, take one of these." I took the pill, followed it with a glass of water. And went out like a light. Arth was shaking my arm. "Want another mass ?" The band was blaring, and five thousand half-swacked voices were roaring accompaniment. In Muenchen steht ein Hofbräuhaus! Eins, Zwei, G'sufa! At the G'sufa everybody upped with their king-size mugs and drank each other's health. My head was killing me. "This is where I came in, or something," I groaned. Arth said, "That was last night." He looked at me over the rim of his beer mug. Something, somewhere, was wrong. But I didn't care. I finished my mass and then remembered. "I've got to get my bag. Oh, my head. Where did we spend last night?" Arth said, and his voice sounded cautious, "At my hotel, don't you remember?" "Not very well," I admitted. "I feel lousy. I must have dimmed out. I've got to go to the Bahnhof and get my luggage." Arth didn't put up an argument on that. We said good-by and I could feel him watching after me as I pushed through the tables on the way out. At the Bahnhof they could do me no good. There were no hotel rooms available in Munich. The head was getting worse by the minute. The fact that they'd somehow managed to lose my bag didn't help. I worked on that project for at least a couple of hours. Not only wasn't the bag at the luggage checking station, but the attendant there evidently couldn't make heads nor tails of the check receipt. He didn't speak English and my high school German was inadequate, especially accompanied by a blockbusting hangover. I didn't get anywhere tearing my hair and complaining from one end of the Bahnhof to the other. I drew a blank on the bag. And the head was getting worse by the minute. I was bleeding to death through the eyes and instead of butterflies I had bats in my stomach. Believe me, nobody should drink a gallon or more of Marzenbräu. I decided the hell with it. I took a cab to the airport, presented my return ticket, told them I wanted to leave on the first obtainable plane to New York. I'd spent two days at the Oktoberfest , and I'd had it. I got more guff there. Something was wrong with the ticket, wrong date or some such. But they fixed that up. I never was clear on what was fouled up, some clerk's error, evidently. The trip back was as uninteresting as the one over. As the hangover began to wear off—a little—I was almost sorry I hadn't been able to stay. If I'd only been able to get a room I would have stayed, I told myself. From Idlewild, I came directly to the office rather than going to my apartment. I figured I might as well check in with Betty. I opened the door and there I found Mr. Oyster sitting in the chair he had been occupying four—or was it five—days before when I'd left. I'd lost track of the time. I said to him, "Glad you're here, sir. I can report. Ah, what was it you came for? Impatient to hear if I'd had any results?" My mind was spinning like a whirling dervish in a revolving door. I'd spent a wad of his money and had nothing I could think of to show for it; nothing but the last stages of a grand-daddy hangover. "Came for?" Mr. Oyster snorted. "I'm merely waiting for your girl to make out my receipt. I thought you had already left." "You'll miss your plane," Betty said. There was suddenly a double dip of ice cream in my stomach. I walked over to my desk and looked down at the calendar. Mr. Oyster was saying something to the effect that if I didn't leave today, it would have to be tomorrow, that he hadn't ponied up that thousand dollars advance for anything less than immediate service. Stuffing his receipt in his wallet, he fussed his way out the door. I said to Betty hopefully, "I suppose you haven't changed this calendar since I left." Betty said, "What's the matter with you? You look funny. How did your clothes get so mussed? You tore the top sheet off that calendar yourself, not half an hour ago, just before this marble-missing client came in." She added, irrelevantly, "Time travelers yet." I tried just once more. "Uh, when did you first see this Mr. Oyster?" "Never saw him before in my life," she said. "Not until he came in this morning." "This morning," I said weakly. While Betty stared at me as though it was me that needed candling by a head shrinker preparatory to being sent off to a pressure cooker, I fished in my pocket for my wallet, counted the contents and winced at the pathetic remains of the thousand. I said pleadingly, "Betty, listen, how long ago did I go out that door—on the way to the airport?" "You've been acting sick all morning. You went out that door about ten minutes ago, were gone about three minutes, and then came back." "See here," Mr. Oyster said (interrupting Simon's story), "did you say this was supposed to be amusing, young man? I don't find it so. In fact, I believe I am being ridiculed." Simon shrugged, put one hand to his forehead and said, "That's only the first chapter. There are two more." "I'm not interested in more," Mr. Oyster said. "I suppose your point was to show me how ridiculous the whole idea actually is. Very well, you've done it. Confound it. However, I suppose your time, even when spent in this manner, has some value. Here is fifty dollars. And good day, sir!" He slammed the door after him as he left. Simon winced at the noise, took the aspirin bottle from its drawer, took two, washed them down with water from the desk carafe. Betty looked at him admiringly. Came to her feet, crossed over and took up the fifty dollars. "Week's wages," she said. "I suppose that's one way of taking care of a crackpot. But I'm surprised you didn't take his money and enjoy that vacation you've been yearning about." "I did," Simon groaned. "Three times." Betty stared at him. "You mean—" Simon nodded, miserably. She said, "But Simon . Fifty thousand dollars bonus. If that story was true, you should have gone back again to Munich. If there was one time traveler, there might have been—" "I keep telling you," Simon said bitterly, "I went back there three times. There were hundreds of them. Probably thousands." He took a deep breath. "Listen, we're just going to have to forget about it. They're not going to stand for the space-time continuum track being altered. If something comes up that looks like it might result in the track being changed, they set you right back at the beginning and let things start—for you—all over again. They just can't allow anything to come back from the future and change the past." "You mean," Betty was suddenly furious at him, "you've given up! Why this is the biggest thing— Why the fifty thousand dollars is nothing. The future! Just think!" Simon said wearily, "There's just one thing you can bring back with you from the future, a hangover compounded of a gallon or so of Marzenbräu. What's more you can pile one on top of the other, and another on top of that!" He shuddered. "If you think I'm going to take another crack at this merry-go-round and pile a fourth hangover on the three I'm already nursing, all at once, you can think again." THE END Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Astounding Science Fiction June 1959. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note.

How the vendors are able to produce such a large amount of food and beer

How the brewers are able to make beer with such a high alcohol by volume percentage

How Arf is able to consume that much beer without getting a hangover

How the city can accommodate that many locals and tourists

23942_YSQRQEB5_6

How has Simon manipulated Mr. Oyster?

UNBORN TOMORROW BY MACK REYNOLDS Unfortunately , there was only one thing he could bring back from the wonderful future ... and though he didn't want to ... nevertheless he did.... Illustrated by Freas Betty looked up from her magazine. She said mildly, "You're late." "Don't yell at me, I feel awful," Simon told her. He sat down at his desk, passed his tongue over his teeth in distaste, groaned, fumbled in a drawer for the aspirin bottle. He looked over at Betty and said, almost as though reciting, "What I need is a vacation." "What," Betty said, "are you going to use for money?" "Providence," Simon told her whilst fiddling with the aspirin bottle, "will provide." "Hm-m-m. But before providing vacations it'd be nice if Providence turned up a missing jewel deal, say. Something where you could deduce that actually the ruby ring had gone down the drain and was caught in the elbow. Something that would net about fifty dollars." Simon said, mournful of tone, "Fifty dollars? Why not make it five hundred?" "I'm not selfish," Betty said. "All I want is enough to pay me this week's salary." "Money," Simon said. "When you took this job you said it was the romance that appealed to you." "Hm-m-m. I didn't know most sleuthing amounted to snooping around department stores to check on the clerks knocking down." Simon said, enigmatically, "Now it comes." There was a knock. Betty bounced up with Olympic agility and had the door swinging wide before the knocking was quite completed. He was old, little and had bug eyes behind pince-nez glasses. His suit was cut in the style of yesteryear but when a suit costs two or three hundred dollars you still retain caste whatever the styling. Simon said unenthusiastically, "Good morning, Mr. Oyster." He indicated the client's chair. "Sit down, sir." The client fussed himself with Betty's assistance into the seat, bug-eyed Simon, said finally, "You know my name, that's pretty good. Never saw you before in my life. Stop fussing with me, young lady. Your ad in the phone book says you'll investigate anything." "Anything," Simon said. "Only one exception." "Excellent. Do you believe in time travel?" Simon said nothing. Across the room, where she had resumed her seat, Betty cleared her throat. When Simon continued to say nothing she ventured, "Time travel is impossible." "Why?" "Why?" "Yes, why?" Betty looked to her boss for assistance. None was forthcoming. There ought to be some very quick, positive, definite answer. She said, "Well, for one thing, paradox. Suppose you had a time machine and traveled back a hundred years or so and killed your own great-grandfather. Then how could you ever be born?" "Confound it if I know," the little fellow growled. "How?" Simon said, "Let's get to the point, what you wanted to see me about." "I want to hire you to hunt me up some time travelers," the old boy said. Betty was too far in now to maintain her proper role of silent secretary. "Time travelers," she said, not very intelligently. The potential client sat more erect, obviously with intent to hold the floor for a time. He removed the pince-nez glasses and pointed them at Betty. He said, "Have you read much science fiction, Miss?" "Some," Betty admitted. "Then you'll realize that there are a dozen explanations of the paradoxes of time travel. Every writer in the field worth his salt has explained them away. But to get on. It's my contention that within a century or so man will have solved the problems of immortality and eternal youth, and it's also my suspicion that he will eventually be able to travel in time. So convinced am I of these possibilities that I am willing to gamble a portion of my fortune to investigate the presence in our era of such time travelers." Simon seemed incapable of carrying the ball this morning, so Betty said, "But ... Mr. Oyster, if the future has developed time travel why don't we ever meet such travelers?" Simon put in a word. "The usual explanation, Betty, is that they can't afford to allow the space-time continuum track to be altered. If, say, a time traveler returned to a period of twenty-five years ago and shot Hitler, then all subsequent history would be changed. In that case, the time traveler himself might never be born. They have to tread mighty carefully." Mr. Oyster was pleased. "I didn't expect you to be so well informed on the subject, young man." Simon shrugged and fumbled again with the aspirin bottle. Mr. Oyster went on. "I've been considering the matter for some time and—" Simon held up a hand. "There's no use prolonging this. As I understand it, you're an elderly gentleman with a considerable fortune and you realize that thus far nobody has succeeded in taking it with him." Mr. Oyster returned his glasses to their perch, bug-eyed Simon, but then nodded. Simon said, "You want to hire me to find a time traveler and in some manner or other—any manner will do—exhort from him the secret of eternal life and youth, which you figure the future will have discovered. You're willing to pony up a part of this fortune of yours, if I can deliver a bona fide time traveler." "Right!" Betty had been looking from one to the other. Now she said, plaintively, "But where are you going to find one of these characters—especially if they're interested in keeping hid?" The old boy was the center again. "I told you I'd been considering it for some time. The Oktoberfest , that's where they'd be!" He seemed elated. Betty and Simon waited. "The Oktoberfest ," he repeated. "The greatest festival the world has ever seen, the carnival, feria , fiesta to beat them all. Every year it's held in Munich. Makes the New Orleans Mardi gras look like a quilting party." He began to swing into the spirit of his description. "It originally started in celebration of the wedding of some local prince a century and a half ago and the Bavarians had such a bang-up time they've been holding it every year since. The Munich breweries do up a special beer, Marzenbräu they call it, and each brewery opens a tremendous tent on the fair grounds which will hold five thousand customers apiece. Millions of liters of beer are put away, hundreds of thousands of barbecued chickens, a small herd of oxen are roasted whole over spits, millions of pair of weisswurst , a very special sausage, millions upon millions of pretzels—" "All right," Simon said. "We'll accept it. The Oktoberfest is one whale of a wingding." "Well," the old boy pursued, into his subject now, "that's where they'd be, places like the Oktoberfest . For one thing, a time traveler wouldn't be conspicuous. At a festival like this somebody with a strange accent, or who didn't know exactly how to wear his clothes correctly, or was off the ordinary in any of a dozen other ways, wouldn't be noticed. You could be a four-armed space traveler from Mars, and you still wouldn't be conspicuous at the Oktoberfest . People would figure they had D.T.'s." "But why would a time traveler want to go to a—" Betty began. "Why not! What better opportunity to study a people than when they are in their cups? If you could go back a few thousand years, the things you would wish to see would be a Roman Triumph, perhaps the Rites of Dionysus, or one of Alexander's orgies. You wouldn't want to wander up and down the streets of, say, Athens while nothing was going on, particularly when you might be revealed as a suspicious character not being able to speak the language, not knowing how to wear the clothes and not familiar with the city's layout." He took a deep breath. "No ma'am, you'd have to stick to some great event, both for the sake of actual interest and for protection against being unmasked." The old boy wound it up. "Well, that's the story. What are your rates? The Oktoberfest starts on Friday and continues for sixteen days. You can take the plane to Munich, spend a week there and—" Simon was shaking his head. "Not interested." As soon as Betty had got her jaw back into place, she glared unbelievingly at him. Mr. Oyster was taken aback himself. "See here, young man, I realize this isn't an ordinary assignment, however, as I said, I am willing to risk a considerable portion of my fortune—" "Sorry," Simon said. "Can't be done." "A hundred dollars a day plus expenses," Mr. Oyster said quietly. "I like the fact that you already seem to have some interest and knowledge of the matter. I liked the way you knew my name when I walked in the door; my picture doesn't appear often in the papers." "No go," Simon said, a sad quality in his voice. "A fifty thousand dollar bonus if you bring me a time traveler." "Out of the question," Simon said. "But why ?" Betty wailed. "Just for laughs," Simon told the two of them sourly, "suppose I tell you a funny story. It goes like this:" I got a thousand dollars from Mr. Oyster (Simon began) in the way of an advance, and leaving him with Betty who was making out a receipt, I hustled back to the apartment and packed a bag. Hell, I'd wanted a vacation anyway, this was a natural. On the way to Idlewild I stopped off at the Germany Information Offices for some tourist literature. It takes roughly three and a half hours to get to Gander from Idlewild. I spent the time planning the fun I was going to have. It takes roughly seven and a half hours from Gander to Shannon and I spent that time dreaming up material I could put into my reports to Mr. Oyster. I was going to have to give him some kind of report for his money. Time travel yet! What a laugh! Between Shannon and Munich a faint suspicion began to simmer in my mind. These statistics I read on the Oktoberfest in the Munich tourist pamphlets. Five million people attended annually. Where did five million people come from to attend an overgrown festival in comparatively remote Southern Germany? The tourist season is over before September 21st, first day of the gigantic beer bust. Nor could the Germans account for any such number. Munich itself has a population of less than a million, counting children. And those millions of gallons of beer, the hundreds of thousands of chickens, the herds of oxen. Who ponied up all the money for such expenditures? How could the average German, with his twenty-five dollars a week salary? In Munich there was no hotel space available. I went to the Bahnhof where they have a hotel service and applied. They put my name down, pocketed the husky bribe, showed me where I could check my bag, told me they'd do what they could, and to report back in a few hours. I had another suspicious twinge. If five million people attended this beer bout, how were they accommodated? The Theresienwiese , the fair ground, was only a few blocks away. I was stiff from the plane ride so I walked. There are seven major brewers in the Munich area, each of them represented by one of the circuslike tents that Mr. Oyster mentioned. Each tent contained benches and tables for about five thousand persons and from six to ten thousands pack themselves in, competing for room. In the center is a tremendous bandstand, the musicians all lederhosen clad, the music as Bavarian as any to be found in a Bavarian beer hall. Hundreds of peasant garbed fräuleins darted about the tables with quart sized earthenware mugs, platters of chicken, sausage, kraut and pretzels. I found a place finally at a table which had space for twenty-odd beer bibbers. Odd is right. As weird an assortment of Germans and foreign tourists as could have been dreamed up, ranging from a seventy- or eighty-year-old couple in Bavarian costume, to the bald-headed drunk across the table from me. A desperate waitress bearing six mugs of beer in each hand scurried past. They call them masses , by the way, not mugs. The bald-headed character and I both held up a finger and she slid two of the masses over to us and then hustled on. "Down the hatch," the other said, holding up his mass in toast. "To the ladies," I told him. Before sipping, I said, "You know, the tourist pamphlets say this stuff is eighteen per cent. That's nonsense. No beer is that strong." I took a long pull. He looked at me, waiting. I came up. "Mistaken," I admitted. A mass or two apiece later he looked carefully at the name engraved on his earthenware mug. "Löwenbräu," he said. He took a small notebook from his pocket and a pencil, noted down the word and returned the things. "That's a queer looking pencil you have there," I told him. "German?" "Venusian," he said. "Oops, sorry. Shouldn't have said that." I had never heard of the brand so I skipped it. "Next is the Hofbräu," he said. "Next what?" Baldy's conversation didn't seem to hang together very well. "My pilgrimage," he told me. "All my life I've been wanting to go back to an Oktoberfest and sample every one of the seven brands of the best beer the world has ever known. I'm only as far as Löwenbräu. I'm afraid I'll never make it." I finished my mass . "I'll help you," I told him. "Very noble endeavor. Name is Simon." "Arth," he said. "How could you help?" "I'm still fresh—comparatively. I'll navigate you around. There are seven beer tents. How many have you got through, so far?" "Two, counting this one," Arth said. I looked at him. "It's going to be a chore," I said. "You've already got a nice edge on." Outside, as we made our way to the next tent, the fair looked like every big State-Fair ever seen, except it was bigger. Games, souvenir stands, sausage stands, rides, side shows, and people, people, people. The Hofbräu tent was as overflowing as the last but we managed to find two seats. The band was blaring, and five thousand half-swacked voices were roaring accompaniment. In Muenchen steht ein Hofbräuhaus! Eins, Zwei, G'sufa! At the G'sufa everybody upped with the mugs and drank each other's health. "This is what I call a real beer bust," I said approvingly. Arth was waving to a waitress. As in the Löwenbräu tent, a full quart was the smallest amount obtainable. A beer later I said, "I don't know if you'll make it or not, Arth." "Make what?" "All seven tents." "Oh." A waitress was on her way by, mugs foaming over their rims. I gestured to her for refills. "Where are you from, Arth?" I asked him, in the way of making conversation. "2183." "2183 where?" He looked at me, closing one eye to focus better. "Oh," he said. "Well, 2183 South Street, ah, New Albuquerque." "New Albuquerque? Where's that?" Arth thought about it. Took another long pull at the beer. "Right across the way from old Albuquerque," he said finally. "Maybe we ought to be getting on to the Pschorrbräu tent." "Maybe we ought to eat something first," I said. "I'm beginning to feel this. We could get some of that barbecued ox." Arth closed his eyes in pain. "Vegetarian," he said. "Couldn't possibly eat meat. Barbarous. Ugh." "Well, we need some nourishment," I said. "There's supposed to be considerable nourishment in beer." That made sense. I yelled, " Fräulein! Zwei neu bier! " Somewhere along in here the fog rolled in. When it rolled out again, I found myself closing one eye the better to read the lettering on my earthenware mug. It read Augustinerbräu. Somehow we'd evidently navigated from one tent to another. Arth was saying, "Where's your hotel?" That seemed like a good question. I thought about it for a while. Finally I said, "Haven't got one. Town's jam packed. Left my bag at the Bahnhof. I don't think we'll ever make it, Arth. How many we got to go?" "Lost track," Arth said. "You can come home with me." We drank to that and the fog rolled in again. When the fog rolled out, it was daylight. Bright, glaring, awful daylight. I was sprawled, complete with clothes, on one of twin beds. On the other bed, also completely clothed, was Arth. That sun was too much. I stumbled up from the bed, staggered to the window and fumbled around for a blind or curtain. There was none. Behind me a voice said in horror, "Who ... how ... oh, Wodo , where'd you come from?" I got a quick impression, looking out the window, that the Germans were certainly the most modern, futuristic people in the world. But I couldn't stand the light. "Where's the shade," I moaned. Arth did something and the window went opaque. "That's quite a gadget," I groaned. "If I didn't feel so lousy, I'd appreciate it." Arth was sitting on the edge of the bed holding his bald head in his hands. "I remember now," he sorrowed. "You didn't have a hotel. What a stupidity. I'll be phased. Phased all the way down." "You haven't got a handful of aspirin, have you?" I asked him. "Just a minute," Arth said, staggering erect and heading for what undoubtedly was a bathroom. "Stay where you are. Don't move. Don't touch anything." "All right," I told him plaintively. "I'm clean. I won't mess up the place. All I've got is a hangover, not lice." Arth was gone. He came back in two or three minutes, box of pills in hand. "Here, take one of these." I took the pill, followed it with a glass of water. And went out like a light. Arth was shaking my arm. "Want another mass ?" The band was blaring, and five thousand half-swacked voices were roaring accompaniment. In Muenchen steht ein Hofbräuhaus! Eins, Zwei, G'sufa! At the G'sufa everybody upped with their king-size mugs and drank each other's health. My head was killing me. "This is where I came in, or something," I groaned. Arth said, "That was last night." He looked at me over the rim of his beer mug. Something, somewhere, was wrong. But I didn't care. I finished my mass and then remembered. "I've got to get my bag. Oh, my head. Where did we spend last night?" Arth said, and his voice sounded cautious, "At my hotel, don't you remember?" "Not very well," I admitted. "I feel lousy. I must have dimmed out. I've got to go to the Bahnhof and get my luggage." Arth didn't put up an argument on that. We said good-by and I could feel him watching after me as I pushed through the tables on the way out. At the Bahnhof they could do me no good. There were no hotel rooms available in Munich. The head was getting worse by the minute. The fact that they'd somehow managed to lose my bag didn't help. I worked on that project for at least a couple of hours. Not only wasn't the bag at the luggage checking station, but the attendant there evidently couldn't make heads nor tails of the check receipt. He didn't speak English and my high school German was inadequate, especially accompanied by a blockbusting hangover. I didn't get anywhere tearing my hair and complaining from one end of the Bahnhof to the other. I drew a blank on the bag. And the head was getting worse by the minute. I was bleeding to death through the eyes and instead of butterflies I had bats in my stomach. Believe me, nobody should drink a gallon or more of Marzenbräu. I decided the hell with it. I took a cab to the airport, presented my return ticket, told them I wanted to leave on the first obtainable plane to New York. I'd spent two days at the Oktoberfest , and I'd had it. I got more guff there. Something was wrong with the ticket, wrong date or some such. But they fixed that up. I never was clear on what was fouled up, some clerk's error, evidently. The trip back was as uninteresting as the one over. As the hangover began to wear off—a little—I was almost sorry I hadn't been able to stay. If I'd only been able to get a room I would have stayed, I told myself. From Idlewild, I came directly to the office rather than going to my apartment. I figured I might as well check in with Betty. I opened the door and there I found Mr. Oyster sitting in the chair he had been occupying four—or was it five—days before when I'd left. I'd lost track of the time. I said to him, "Glad you're here, sir. I can report. Ah, what was it you came for? Impatient to hear if I'd had any results?" My mind was spinning like a whirling dervish in a revolving door. I'd spent a wad of his money and had nothing I could think of to show for it; nothing but the last stages of a grand-daddy hangover. "Came for?" Mr. Oyster snorted. "I'm merely waiting for your girl to make out my receipt. I thought you had already left." "You'll miss your plane," Betty said. There was suddenly a double dip of ice cream in my stomach. I walked over to my desk and looked down at the calendar. Mr. Oyster was saying something to the effect that if I didn't leave today, it would have to be tomorrow, that he hadn't ponied up that thousand dollars advance for anything less than immediate service. Stuffing his receipt in his wallet, he fussed his way out the door. I said to Betty hopefully, "I suppose you haven't changed this calendar since I left." Betty said, "What's the matter with you? You look funny. How did your clothes get so mussed? You tore the top sheet off that calendar yourself, not half an hour ago, just before this marble-missing client came in." She added, irrelevantly, "Time travelers yet." I tried just once more. "Uh, when did you first see this Mr. Oyster?" "Never saw him before in my life," she said. "Not until he came in this morning." "This morning," I said weakly. While Betty stared at me as though it was me that needed candling by a head shrinker preparatory to being sent off to a pressure cooker, I fished in my pocket for my wallet, counted the contents and winced at the pathetic remains of the thousand. I said pleadingly, "Betty, listen, how long ago did I go out that door—on the way to the airport?" "You've been acting sick all morning. You went out that door about ten minutes ago, were gone about three minutes, and then came back." "See here," Mr. Oyster said (interrupting Simon's story), "did you say this was supposed to be amusing, young man? I don't find it so. In fact, I believe I am being ridiculed." Simon shrugged, put one hand to his forehead and said, "That's only the first chapter. There are two more." "I'm not interested in more," Mr. Oyster said. "I suppose your point was to show me how ridiculous the whole idea actually is. Very well, you've done it. Confound it. However, I suppose your time, even when spent in this manner, has some value. Here is fifty dollars. And good day, sir!" He slammed the door after him as he left. Simon winced at the noise, took the aspirin bottle from its drawer, took two, washed them down with water from the desk carafe. Betty looked at him admiringly. Came to her feet, crossed over and took up the fifty dollars. "Week's wages," she said. "I suppose that's one way of taking care of a crackpot. But I'm surprised you didn't take his money and enjoy that vacation you've been yearning about." "I did," Simon groaned. "Three times." Betty stared at him. "You mean—" Simon nodded, miserably. She said, "But Simon . Fifty thousand dollars bonus. If that story was true, you should have gone back again to Munich. If there was one time traveler, there might have been—" "I keep telling you," Simon said bitterly, "I went back there three times. There were hundreds of them. Probably thousands." He took a deep breath. "Listen, we're just going to have to forget about it. They're not going to stand for the space-time continuum track being altered. If something comes up that looks like it might result in the track being changed, they set you right back at the beginning and let things start—for you—all over again. They just can't allow anything to come back from the future and change the past." "You mean," Betty was suddenly furious at him, "you've given up! Why this is the biggest thing— Why the fifty thousand dollars is nothing. The future! Just think!" Simon said wearily, "There's just one thing you can bring back with you from the future, a hangover compounded of a gallon or so of Marzenbräu. What's more you can pile one on top of the other, and another on top of that!" He shuddered. "If you think I'm going to take another crack at this merry-go-round and pile a fourth hangover on the three I'm already nursing, all at once, you can think again." THE END Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Astounding Science Fiction June 1959. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note.

He has traveled back in time thrice to attempt to bring back a time traveler

He has taken over $50,000 of Mr. Oyster's money based on unfulfilled investigations

He has discovered that Mr. Oyster is actually Arth from several decades ago

He has used the opportunity to travel to Oktoberfest on vacation, and never intended to grant Mr. Oyster's request

23942_YSQRQEB5_7

Why does Simon not bring back a time traveler?

UNBORN TOMORROW BY MACK REYNOLDS Unfortunately , there was only one thing he could bring back from the wonderful future ... and though he didn't want to ... nevertheless he did.... Illustrated by Freas Betty looked up from her magazine. She said mildly, "You're late." "Don't yell at me, I feel awful," Simon told her. He sat down at his desk, passed his tongue over his teeth in distaste, groaned, fumbled in a drawer for the aspirin bottle. He looked over at Betty and said, almost as though reciting, "What I need is a vacation." "What," Betty said, "are you going to use for money?" "Providence," Simon told her whilst fiddling with the aspirin bottle, "will provide." "Hm-m-m. But before providing vacations it'd be nice if Providence turned up a missing jewel deal, say. Something where you could deduce that actually the ruby ring had gone down the drain and was caught in the elbow. Something that would net about fifty dollars." Simon said, mournful of tone, "Fifty dollars? Why not make it five hundred?" "I'm not selfish," Betty said. "All I want is enough to pay me this week's salary." "Money," Simon said. "When you took this job you said it was the romance that appealed to you." "Hm-m-m. I didn't know most sleuthing amounted to snooping around department stores to check on the clerks knocking down." Simon said, enigmatically, "Now it comes." There was a knock. Betty bounced up with Olympic agility and had the door swinging wide before the knocking was quite completed. He was old, little and had bug eyes behind pince-nez glasses. His suit was cut in the style of yesteryear but when a suit costs two or three hundred dollars you still retain caste whatever the styling. Simon said unenthusiastically, "Good morning, Mr. Oyster." He indicated the client's chair. "Sit down, sir." The client fussed himself with Betty's assistance into the seat, bug-eyed Simon, said finally, "You know my name, that's pretty good. Never saw you before in my life. Stop fussing with me, young lady. Your ad in the phone book says you'll investigate anything." "Anything," Simon said. "Only one exception." "Excellent. Do you believe in time travel?" Simon said nothing. Across the room, where she had resumed her seat, Betty cleared her throat. When Simon continued to say nothing she ventured, "Time travel is impossible." "Why?" "Why?" "Yes, why?" Betty looked to her boss for assistance. None was forthcoming. There ought to be some very quick, positive, definite answer. She said, "Well, for one thing, paradox. Suppose you had a time machine and traveled back a hundred years or so and killed your own great-grandfather. Then how could you ever be born?" "Confound it if I know," the little fellow growled. "How?" Simon said, "Let's get to the point, what you wanted to see me about." "I want to hire you to hunt me up some time travelers," the old boy said. Betty was too far in now to maintain her proper role of silent secretary. "Time travelers," she said, not very intelligently. The potential client sat more erect, obviously with intent to hold the floor for a time. He removed the pince-nez glasses and pointed them at Betty. He said, "Have you read much science fiction, Miss?" "Some," Betty admitted. "Then you'll realize that there are a dozen explanations of the paradoxes of time travel. Every writer in the field worth his salt has explained them away. But to get on. It's my contention that within a century or so man will have solved the problems of immortality and eternal youth, and it's also my suspicion that he will eventually be able to travel in time. So convinced am I of these possibilities that I am willing to gamble a portion of my fortune to investigate the presence in our era of such time travelers." Simon seemed incapable of carrying the ball this morning, so Betty said, "But ... Mr. Oyster, if the future has developed time travel why don't we ever meet such travelers?" Simon put in a word. "The usual explanation, Betty, is that they can't afford to allow the space-time continuum track to be altered. If, say, a time traveler returned to a period of twenty-five years ago and shot Hitler, then all subsequent history would be changed. In that case, the time traveler himself might never be born. They have to tread mighty carefully." Mr. Oyster was pleased. "I didn't expect you to be so well informed on the subject, young man." Simon shrugged and fumbled again with the aspirin bottle. Mr. Oyster went on. "I've been considering the matter for some time and—" Simon held up a hand. "There's no use prolonging this. As I understand it, you're an elderly gentleman with a considerable fortune and you realize that thus far nobody has succeeded in taking it with him." Mr. Oyster returned his glasses to their perch, bug-eyed Simon, but then nodded. Simon said, "You want to hire me to find a time traveler and in some manner or other—any manner will do—exhort from him the secret of eternal life and youth, which you figure the future will have discovered. You're willing to pony up a part of this fortune of yours, if I can deliver a bona fide time traveler." "Right!" Betty had been looking from one to the other. Now she said, plaintively, "But where are you going to find one of these characters—especially if they're interested in keeping hid?" The old boy was the center again. "I told you I'd been considering it for some time. The Oktoberfest , that's where they'd be!" He seemed elated. Betty and Simon waited. "The Oktoberfest ," he repeated. "The greatest festival the world has ever seen, the carnival, feria , fiesta to beat them all. Every year it's held in Munich. Makes the New Orleans Mardi gras look like a quilting party." He began to swing into the spirit of his description. "It originally started in celebration of the wedding of some local prince a century and a half ago and the Bavarians had such a bang-up time they've been holding it every year since. The Munich breweries do up a special beer, Marzenbräu they call it, and each brewery opens a tremendous tent on the fair grounds which will hold five thousand customers apiece. Millions of liters of beer are put away, hundreds of thousands of barbecued chickens, a small herd of oxen are roasted whole over spits, millions of pair of weisswurst , a very special sausage, millions upon millions of pretzels—" "All right," Simon said. "We'll accept it. The Oktoberfest is one whale of a wingding." "Well," the old boy pursued, into his subject now, "that's where they'd be, places like the Oktoberfest . For one thing, a time traveler wouldn't be conspicuous. At a festival like this somebody with a strange accent, or who didn't know exactly how to wear his clothes correctly, or was off the ordinary in any of a dozen other ways, wouldn't be noticed. You could be a four-armed space traveler from Mars, and you still wouldn't be conspicuous at the Oktoberfest . People would figure they had D.T.'s." "But why would a time traveler want to go to a—" Betty began. "Why not! What better opportunity to study a people than when they are in their cups? If you could go back a few thousand years, the things you would wish to see would be a Roman Triumph, perhaps the Rites of Dionysus, or one of Alexander's orgies. You wouldn't want to wander up and down the streets of, say, Athens while nothing was going on, particularly when you might be revealed as a suspicious character not being able to speak the language, not knowing how to wear the clothes and not familiar with the city's layout." He took a deep breath. "No ma'am, you'd have to stick to some great event, both for the sake of actual interest and for protection against being unmasked." The old boy wound it up. "Well, that's the story. What are your rates? The Oktoberfest starts on Friday and continues for sixteen days. You can take the plane to Munich, spend a week there and—" Simon was shaking his head. "Not interested." As soon as Betty had got her jaw back into place, she glared unbelievingly at him. Mr. Oyster was taken aback himself. "See here, young man, I realize this isn't an ordinary assignment, however, as I said, I am willing to risk a considerable portion of my fortune—" "Sorry," Simon said. "Can't be done." "A hundred dollars a day plus expenses," Mr. Oyster said quietly. "I like the fact that you already seem to have some interest and knowledge of the matter. I liked the way you knew my name when I walked in the door; my picture doesn't appear often in the papers." "No go," Simon said, a sad quality in his voice. "A fifty thousand dollar bonus if you bring me a time traveler." "Out of the question," Simon said. "But why ?" Betty wailed. "Just for laughs," Simon told the two of them sourly, "suppose I tell you a funny story. It goes like this:" I got a thousand dollars from Mr. Oyster (Simon began) in the way of an advance, and leaving him with Betty who was making out a receipt, I hustled back to the apartment and packed a bag. Hell, I'd wanted a vacation anyway, this was a natural. On the way to Idlewild I stopped off at the Germany Information Offices for some tourist literature. It takes roughly three and a half hours to get to Gander from Idlewild. I spent the time planning the fun I was going to have. It takes roughly seven and a half hours from Gander to Shannon and I spent that time dreaming up material I could put into my reports to Mr. Oyster. I was going to have to give him some kind of report for his money. Time travel yet! What a laugh! Between Shannon and Munich a faint suspicion began to simmer in my mind. These statistics I read on the Oktoberfest in the Munich tourist pamphlets. Five million people attended annually. Where did five million people come from to attend an overgrown festival in comparatively remote Southern Germany? The tourist season is over before September 21st, first day of the gigantic beer bust. Nor could the Germans account for any such number. Munich itself has a population of less than a million, counting children. And those millions of gallons of beer, the hundreds of thousands of chickens, the herds of oxen. Who ponied up all the money for such expenditures? How could the average German, with his twenty-five dollars a week salary? In Munich there was no hotel space available. I went to the Bahnhof where they have a hotel service and applied. They put my name down, pocketed the husky bribe, showed me where I could check my bag, told me they'd do what they could, and to report back in a few hours. I had another suspicious twinge. If five million people attended this beer bout, how were they accommodated? The Theresienwiese , the fair ground, was only a few blocks away. I was stiff from the plane ride so I walked. There are seven major brewers in the Munich area, each of them represented by one of the circuslike tents that Mr. Oyster mentioned. Each tent contained benches and tables for about five thousand persons and from six to ten thousands pack themselves in, competing for room. In the center is a tremendous bandstand, the musicians all lederhosen clad, the music as Bavarian as any to be found in a Bavarian beer hall. Hundreds of peasant garbed fräuleins darted about the tables with quart sized earthenware mugs, platters of chicken, sausage, kraut and pretzels. I found a place finally at a table which had space for twenty-odd beer bibbers. Odd is right. As weird an assortment of Germans and foreign tourists as could have been dreamed up, ranging from a seventy- or eighty-year-old couple in Bavarian costume, to the bald-headed drunk across the table from me. A desperate waitress bearing six mugs of beer in each hand scurried past. They call them masses , by the way, not mugs. The bald-headed character and I both held up a finger and she slid two of the masses over to us and then hustled on. "Down the hatch," the other said, holding up his mass in toast. "To the ladies," I told him. Before sipping, I said, "You know, the tourist pamphlets say this stuff is eighteen per cent. That's nonsense. No beer is that strong." I took a long pull. He looked at me, waiting. I came up. "Mistaken," I admitted. A mass or two apiece later he looked carefully at the name engraved on his earthenware mug. "Löwenbräu," he said. He took a small notebook from his pocket and a pencil, noted down the word and returned the things. "That's a queer looking pencil you have there," I told him. "German?" "Venusian," he said. "Oops, sorry. Shouldn't have said that." I had never heard of the brand so I skipped it. "Next is the Hofbräu," he said. "Next what?" Baldy's conversation didn't seem to hang together very well. "My pilgrimage," he told me. "All my life I've been wanting to go back to an Oktoberfest and sample every one of the seven brands of the best beer the world has ever known. I'm only as far as Löwenbräu. I'm afraid I'll never make it." I finished my mass . "I'll help you," I told him. "Very noble endeavor. Name is Simon." "Arth," he said. "How could you help?" "I'm still fresh—comparatively. I'll navigate you around. There are seven beer tents. How many have you got through, so far?" "Two, counting this one," Arth said. I looked at him. "It's going to be a chore," I said. "You've already got a nice edge on." Outside, as we made our way to the next tent, the fair looked like every big State-Fair ever seen, except it was bigger. Games, souvenir stands, sausage stands, rides, side shows, and people, people, people. The Hofbräu tent was as overflowing as the last but we managed to find two seats. The band was blaring, and five thousand half-swacked voices were roaring accompaniment. In Muenchen steht ein Hofbräuhaus! Eins, Zwei, G'sufa! At the G'sufa everybody upped with the mugs and drank each other's health. "This is what I call a real beer bust," I said approvingly. Arth was waving to a waitress. As in the Löwenbräu tent, a full quart was the smallest amount obtainable. A beer later I said, "I don't know if you'll make it or not, Arth." "Make what?" "All seven tents." "Oh." A waitress was on her way by, mugs foaming over their rims. I gestured to her for refills. "Where are you from, Arth?" I asked him, in the way of making conversation. "2183." "2183 where?" He looked at me, closing one eye to focus better. "Oh," he said. "Well, 2183 South Street, ah, New Albuquerque." "New Albuquerque? Where's that?" Arth thought about it. Took another long pull at the beer. "Right across the way from old Albuquerque," he said finally. "Maybe we ought to be getting on to the Pschorrbräu tent." "Maybe we ought to eat something first," I said. "I'm beginning to feel this. We could get some of that barbecued ox." Arth closed his eyes in pain. "Vegetarian," he said. "Couldn't possibly eat meat. Barbarous. Ugh." "Well, we need some nourishment," I said. "There's supposed to be considerable nourishment in beer." That made sense. I yelled, " Fräulein! Zwei neu bier! " Somewhere along in here the fog rolled in. When it rolled out again, I found myself closing one eye the better to read the lettering on my earthenware mug. It read Augustinerbräu. Somehow we'd evidently navigated from one tent to another. Arth was saying, "Where's your hotel?" That seemed like a good question. I thought about it for a while. Finally I said, "Haven't got one. Town's jam packed. Left my bag at the Bahnhof. I don't think we'll ever make it, Arth. How many we got to go?" "Lost track," Arth said. "You can come home with me." We drank to that and the fog rolled in again. When the fog rolled out, it was daylight. Bright, glaring, awful daylight. I was sprawled, complete with clothes, on one of twin beds. On the other bed, also completely clothed, was Arth. That sun was too much. I stumbled up from the bed, staggered to the window and fumbled around for a blind or curtain. There was none. Behind me a voice said in horror, "Who ... how ... oh, Wodo , where'd you come from?" I got a quick impression, looking out the window, that the Germans were certainly the most modern, futuristic people in the world. But I couldn't stand the light. "Where's the shade," I moaned. Arth did something and the window went opaque. "That's quite a gadget," I groaned. "If I didn't feel so lousy, I'd appreciate it." Arth was sitting on the edge of the bed holding his bald head in his hands. "I remember now," he sorrowed. "You didn't have a hotel. What a stupidity. I'll be phased. Phased all the way down." "You haven't got a handful of aspirin, have you?" I asked him. "Just a minute," Arth said, staggering erect and heading for what undoubtedly was a bathroom. "Stay where you are. Don't move. Don't touch anything." "All right," I told him plaintively. "I'm clean. I won't mess up the place. All I've got is a hangover, not lice." Arth was gone. He came back in two or three minutes, box of pills in hand. "Here, take one of these." I took the pill, followed it with a glass of water. And went out like a light. Arth was shaking my arm. "Want another mass ?" The band was blaring, and five thousand half-swacked voices were roaring accompaniment. In Muenchen steht ein Hofbräuhaus! Eins, Zwei, G'sufa! At the G'sufa everybody upped with their king-size mugs and drank each other's health. My head was killing me. "This is where I came in, or something," I groaned. Arth said, "That was last night." He looked at me over the rim of his beer mug. Something, somewhere, was wrong. But I didn't care. I finished my mass and then remembered. "I've got to get my bag. Oh, my head. Where did we spend last night?" Arth said, and his voice sounded cautious, "At my hotel, don't you remember?" "Not very well," I admitted. "I feel lousy. I must have dimmed out. I've got to go to the Bahnhof and get my luggage." Arth didn't put up an argument on that. We said good-by and I could feel him watching after me as I pushed through the tables on the way out. At the Bahnhof they could do me no good. There were no hotel rooms available in Munich. The head was getting worse by the minute. The fact that they'd somehow managed to lose my bag didn't help. I worked on that project for at least a couple of hours. Not only wasn't the bag at the luggage checking station, but the attendant there evidently couldn't make heads nor tails of the check receipt. He didn't speak English and my high school German was inadequate, especially accompanied by a blockbusting hangover. I didn't get anywhere tearing my hair and complaining from one end of the Bahnhof to the other. I drew a blank on the bag. And the head was getting worse by the minute. I was bleeding to death through the eyes and instead of butterflies I had bats in my stomach. Believe me, nobody should drink a gallon or more of Marzenbräu. I decided the hell with it. I took a cab to the airport, presented my return ticket, told them I wanted to leave on the first obtainable plane to New York. I'd spent two days at the Oktoberfest , and I'd had it. I got more guff there. Something was wrong with the ticket, wrong date or some such. But they fixed that up. I never was clear on what was fouled up, some clerk's error, evidently. The trip back was as uninteresting as the one over. As the hangover began to wear off—a little—I was almost sorry I hadn't been able to stay. If I'd only been able to get a room I would have stayed, I told myself. From Idlewild, I came directly to the office rather than going to my apartment. I figured I might as well check in with Betty. I opened the door and there I found Mr. Oyster sitting in the chair he had been occupying four—or was it five—days before when I'd left. I'd lost track of the time. I said to him, "Glad you're here, sir. I can report. Ah, what was it you came for? Impatient to hear if I'd had any results?" My mind was spinning like a whirling dervish in a revolving door. I'd spent a wad of his money and had nothing I could think of to show for it; nothing but the last stages of a grand-daddy hangover. "Came for?" Mr. Oyster snorted. "I'm merely waiting for your girl to make out my receipt. I thought you had already left." "You'll miss your plane," Betty said. There was suddenly a double dip of ice cream in my stomach. I walked over to my desk and looked down at the calendar. Mr. Oyster was saying something to the effect that if I didn't leave today, it would have to be tomorrow, that he hadn't ponied up that thousand dollars advance for anything less than immediate service. Stuffing his receipt in his wallet, he fussed his way out the door. I said to Betty hopefully, "I suppose you haven't changed this calendar since I left." Betty said, "What's the matter with you? You look funny. How did your clothes get so mussed? You tore the top sheet off that calendar yourself, not half an hour ago, just before this marble-missing client came in." She added, irrelevantly, "Time travelers yet." I tried just once more. "Uh, when did you first see this Mr. Oyster?" "Never saw him before in my life," she said. "Not until he came in this morning." "This morning," I said weakly. While Betty stared at me as though it was me that needed candling by a head shrinker preparatory to being sent off to a pressure cooker, I fished in my pocket for my wallet, counted the contents and winced at the pathetic remains of the thousand. I said pleadingly, "Betty, listen, how long ago did I go out that door—on the way to the airport?" "You've been acting sick all morning. You went out that door about ten minutes ago, were gone about three minutes, and then came back." "See here," Mr. Oyster said (interrupting Simon's story), "did you say this was supposed to be amusing, young man? I don't find it so. In fact, I believe I am being ridiculed." Simon shrugged, put one hand to his forehead and said, "That's only the first chapter. There are two more." "I'm not interested in more," Mr. Oyster said. "I suppose your point was to show me how ridiculous the whole idea actually is. Very well, you've done it. Confound it. However, I suppose your time, even when spent in this manner, has some value. Here is fifty dollars. And good day, sir!" He slammed the door after him as he left. Simon winced at the noise, took the aspirin bottle from its drawer, took two, washed them down with water from the desk carafe. Betty looked at him admiringly. Came to her feet, crossed over and took up the fifty dollars. "Week's wages," she said. "I suppose that's one way of taking care of a crackpot. But I'm surprised you didn't take his money and enjoy that vacation you've been yearning about." "I did," Simon groaned. "Three times." Betty stared at him. "You mean—" Simon nodded, miserably. She said, "But Simon . Fifty thousand dollars bonus. If that story was true, you should have gone back again to Munich. If there was one time traveler, there might have been—" "I keep telling you," Simon said bitterly, "I went back there three times. There were hundreds of them. Probably thousands." He took a deep breath. "Listen, we're just going to have to forget about it. They're not going to stand for the space-time continuum track being altered. If something comes up that looks like it might result in the track being changed, they set you right back at the beginning and let things start—for you—all over again. They just can't allow anything to come back from the future and change the past." "You mean," Betty was suddenly furious at him, "you've given up! Why this is the biggest thing— Why the fifty thousand dollars is nothing. The future! Just think!" Simon said wearily, "There's just one thing you can bring back with you from the future, a hangover compounded of a gallon or so of Marzenbräu. What's more you can pile one on top of the other, and another on top of that!" He shuddered. "If you think I'm going to take another crack at this merry-go-round and pile a fourth hangover on the three I'm already nursing, all at once, you can think again." THE END Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Astounding Science Fiction June 1959. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note.

He knows that Arth is Mr. Oyster setting a trap to ensnare Simon, who is a time traveler himself

Simon is a time traveler himself, and would never reveal the secrets of his fellow time travelers

He became too intoxicated with Arth and sabotaged his own investigation

The authorities would not allow him to do anything that might significantly change the space-time continuum

23960_BH9IVT53_1

What is the purpose of the battle scene from the story?

... After a Few Words ... by Seaton McKettrig Illustrated by Summer This is a science-fiction story. History is a science; the other part is, as all Americans know, the most fictional field we have today. He settled himself comfortably in his seat, and carefully put the helmet on, pulling it down firmly until it was properly seated. For a moment, he could see nothing. Then his hand moved up and, with a flick of the wrist, lifted the visor. Ahead of him, in serried array, with lances erect and pennons flying, was the forward part of the column. Far ahead, he knew, were the Knights Templars, who had taken the advance. Behind the Templars rode the mailed knights of Brittany and Anjou. These were followed by King Guy of Jerusalem and the host of Poitou. He himself, Sir Robert de Bouain, was riding with the Norman and English troops, just behind the men of Poitou. Sir Robert turned slightly in his saddle. To his right, he could see the brilliant red-and-gold banner of the lion-hearted Richard of England— gules, in pale three lions passant guardant or . Behind the standard-bearer, his great war horse moving with a steady, measured pace, his coronet of gold on his steel helm gleaming in the glaring desert sun, the lions of England on his firm-held shield, was the King himself. Further behind, the Knights Hospitallers protected the rear, guarding the column of the hosts of Christendom from harassment by the Bedouins. "By our Lady!" came a voice from his left. "Three days out from Acre, and the accursed Saracens still elude us." Sir Robert de Bouain twisted again in his saddle to look at the knight riding alongside him. Sir Gaeton de l'Arc-Tombé sat tall and straight in his saddle, his visor up, his blue eyes narrowed against the glare of the sun. Sir Robert's lips formed a smile. "They are not far off, Sir Gaeton. They have been following us. As we march parallel to the seacoast, so they have been marching with us in those hills to the east." "Like the jackals they are," said Sir Gaeton. "They assail us from the rear, and they set up traps in our path ahead. Our spies tell us that the Turks lie ahead of us in countless numbers. And yet, they fear to face us in open battle." "Is it fear, or are they merely gathering their forces?" "Both," said Sir Gaeton flatly. "They fear us, else they would not dally to amass so fearsome a force. If, as our informers tell us, there are uncounted Turks to the fore, and if, as we are aware, our rear is being dogged by the Bedouin and the black horsemen of Egypt, it would seem that Saladin has at hand more than enough to overcome us, were they all truly Christian knights." "Give them time. We must wait for their attack, sir knight. It were foolhardy to attempt to seek them in their own hills, and yet they must stop us. They will attack before we reach Jerusalem, fear not." "We of Gascony fear no heathen Musselman," Sir Gaeton growled. "It's this Hellish heat that is driving me mad." He pointed toward the eastern hills. "The sun is yet low, and already the heat is unbearable." Sir Robert heard his own laugh echo hollowly within his helmet. "Perhaps 'twere better to be mad when the assault comes. Madmen fight better than men of cooler blood." He knew that the others were baking inside their heavy armor, although he himself was not too uncomfortable. Sir Gaeton looked at him with a smile that held both irony and respect. "In truth, sir knight, it is apparent that you fear neither men nor heat. Nor is your own blood too cool. True, I ride with your Normans and your English and your King Richard of the Lion's Heart, but I am a Gascon, and have sworn no fealty to him. But to side with the Duke of Burgundy against King Richard—" He gave a short, barking laugh. "I fear no man," he went on, "but if I had to fear one, it would be Richard of England." Sir Robert's voice came like a sword: steely, flat, cold, and sharp. "My lord the King spoke in haste. He has reason to be bitter against Philip of France, as do we all. Philip has deserted the field. He has returned to France in haste, leaving the rest of us to fight the Saracen for the Holy Land leaving only the contingent of his vassal the Duke of Burgundy to remain with us." "Richard of England has never been on the best of terms with Philip Augustus," said Sir Gaeton. "No, and with good cause. But he allowed his anger against Philip to color his judgment when he spoke harshly against the Duke of Burgundy. The Duke is no coward, and Richard Plantagenet well knows it. As I said, he spoke in haste." "And you intervened," said Sir Gaeton. "It was my duty." Sir Robert's voice was stubborn. "Could we have permitted a quarrel to develop between the two finest knights and warleaders in Christendom at this crucial point? The desertion of Philip of France has cost us dearly. Could we permit the desertion of Burgundy, too?" "You did what must be done in honor," the Gascon conceded, "but you have not gained the love of Richard by doing so." Sir Robert felt his jaw set firmly. "My king knows I am loyal." Sir Gaeton said nothing more, but there was a look in his eyes that showed that he felt that Richard of England might even doubt the loyalty of Sir Robert de Bouain. Sir Robert rode on in silence, feeling the movement of the horse beneath him. There was a sudden sound to the rear. Like a wash of the tide from the sea came the sound of Saracen war cries and the clash of steel on steel mingled with the sounds of horses in agony and anger. Sir Robert turned his horse to look. The Negro troops of Saladin's Egyptian contingent were thundering down upon the rear! They clashed with the Hospitallers, slamming in like a rain of heavy stones, too close in for the use of bows. There was only the sword against armor, like the sound of a thousand hammers against a thousand anvils. "Stand fast! Stand fast! Hold them off!" It was the voice of King Richard, sounding like a clarion over the din of battle. Sir Robert felt his horse move, as though it were urging him on toward the battle, but his hand held to the reins, keeping the great charger in check. The King had said "Stand fast!" and this was no time to disobey the orders of Richard. The Saracen troops were coming in from the rear, and the Hospitallers were taking the brunt of the charge. They fought like madmen, but they were slowly being forced back. The Master of the Hospitallers rode to the rear, to the King's standard, which hardly moved in the still desert air, now that the column had stopped moving. The voice of the Duke of Burgundy came to Sir Robert's ears. "Stand fast. The King bids you all to stand fast," said the duke, his voice fading as he rode on up the column toward the knights of Poitou and the Knights Templars. The Master of the Hospitallers was speaking in a low, urgent voice to the King: "My lord, we are pressed on by the enemy and in danger of eternal infamy. We are losing our horses, one after the other!" "Good Master," said Richard, "it is you who must sustain their attack. No one can be everywhere at once." The Master of the Hospitallers nodded curtly and charged back into the fray. The King turned to Sir Baldwin de Carreo, who sat ahorse nearby, and pointed toward the eastern hills. "They will come from there, hitting us in the flank; we cannot afford to amass a rearward charge. To do so would be to fall directly into the hands of the Saracen." A voice very close to Sir Robert said: "Richard is right. If we go to the aid of the Hospitallers, we will expose the column to a flank attack." It was Sir Gaeton. "My lord the King," Sir Robert heard his voice say, "is right in all but one thing. If we allow the Egyptians to take us from the rear, there will be no need for Saladin and his Turks to come down on our flank. And the Hospitallers cannot hold for long at this rate. A charge at full gallop would break the Egyptian line and give the Hospitallers breathing time. Are you with me?" "Against the orders of the King?" "The King cannot see everything! There are times when a man must use his own judgment! You said you were afraid of no man. Are you with me?" After a moment's hesitation, Sir Gaeton couched his lance. "I'm with you, sir knight! Live or die, I follow! Strike and strike hard!" "Forward then!" Sir Robert heard himself shouting. "Forward for St. George and for England!" "St. George and England!" the Gascon echoed. Two great war horses began to move ponderously forward toward the battle lines, gaining momentum as they went. Moving in unison, the two knights, their horses now at a fast trot, lowered their lances, picking their Saracen targets with care. Larger and larger loomed the Egyptian cavalrymen as the horses changed pace to a thundering gallop. The Egyptians tried to dodge, as they saw, too late, the approach of the Christian knights. Sir Robert felt the shock against himself and his horse as the steel tip of the long ash lance struck the Saracen horseman in the chest. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw that Sir Gaeton, too, had scored. The Saracen, impaled on Sir Robert's lance, shot from the saddle as he died. His lighter armor had hardly impeded the incoming spear-point, and now his body dragged it down as he dropped toward the desert sand. Another Moslem cavalryman was charging in now, swinging his curved saber, taking advantage of Sir Robert's sagging lance. There was nothing else to do but drop the lance and draw his heavy broadsword. His hand grasped it, and it came singing from its scabbard. The Egyptian's curved sword clanged against Sir Robert's helm, setting his head ringing. In return, the knight's broadsword came about in a sweeping arc, and the Egyptian's horse rode on with the rider's headless body. Behind him, Sir Robert heard further cries of "St. George and England!" The Hospitallers, taking heart at the charge, were going in! Behind them came the Count of Champagne, the Earl of Leister, and the Bishop of Beauvais, who carried a great warhammer in order that he might not break Church Law by shedding blood. Sir Robert's own sword rose and fell, cutting and hacking at the enemy. He himself felt a dreamlike detachment, as though he were watching the battle rather than participating in it. But he could see that the Moslems were falling back before the Christian onslaught. And then, quite suddenly, there seemed to be no foeman to swing at. Breathing heavily, Sir Robert sheathed his broadsword. Beside him, Sir Gaeton did the same, saying: "It will be a few minutes before they can regroup, sir knight. We may have routed them completely." "Aye. But King Richard will not approve of my breaking ranks and disobeying orders. I may win the battle and lose my head in the end." "This is no time to worry about the future," said the Gascon. "Rest for a moment and relax, that you may be the stronger later. Here—have an Old Kings ." He had a pack of cigarettes in his gauntleted hand, which he profferred to Sir Robert. There were three cigarettes protruding from it, one slightly farther than the others. Sir Robert's hand reached out and took that one. "Thanks. When the going gets rough, I really enjoy an Old Kings ." He put one end of the cigarette in his mouth and lit the other from the lighter in Sir Gaeton's hand. "Yes, sir," said Sir Gaeton, after lighting his own cigarette, " Old Kings are the greatest. They give a man real, deep-down smoking pleasure." "There's no doubt about it, Old Kings are a man's cigarette." Sir Robert could feel the soothing smoke in his lungs as he inhaled deeply. "That's great. When I want a cigarette, I don't want just any cigarette." "Nor I," agreed the Gascon. " Old Kings is the only real cigarette when you're doing a real man's work." "That's for sure." Sir Robert watched a smoke ring expand in the air. There was a sudden clash of arms off to their left. Sir Robert dropped his cigarette to the ground. "The trouble is that doing a real he-man's work doesn't always allow you to enjoy the fine, rich tobaccos of Old Kings right down to the very end." "No, but you can always light another later," said the Gascon knight. King Richard, on seeing his army moving suddenly toward the harassed rear, had realized the danger and had charged through the Hospitallers to get into the thick of the fray. Now the Turks were charging down from the hills, hitting—not the flank as he had expected, but the rear! Saladin had expected him to hold fast! Sir Robert and Sir Gaeton spurred their chargers toward the flapping banner of England. The fierce warrior-king of England, his mighty sword in hand, was cutting down Turks as though they were grain-stalks, but still the Saracen horde pressed on. More and more of the terrible Turks came boiling down out of the hills, their glittering scimitars swinging. Sir Robert lost all track of time. There was nothing to do but keep his own great broadsword moving, swinging like some gigantic metronome as he hacked down the Moslem foes. And then, suddenly, he found himself surrounded by the Saracens! He was isolated and alone, cut off from the rest of the Christian forces! He glanced quickly around as he slashed another Saracen from pate to breastbone. Where was Sir Gaeton? Where were the others? Where was the red-and-gold banner of Richard? He caught a glimpse of the fluttering banner far to the rear and started to fall back. And then he saw another knight nearby, a huge man who swung his sparkling blade with power and force. On his steel helm gleamed a golden coronet! Richard! And the great king, in spite of his prowess was outnumbered heavily and would, within seconds, be cut down by the Saracen horde! Without hesitation, Sir Robert plunged his horse toward the surrounded monarch, his great blade cutting a path before him. He saw Richard go down, falling from the saddle of his charger, but by that time his own sword was cutting into the screaming Saracens and they had no time to attempt any further mischief to the King. They had their hands full with Sir Robert de Bouain. He did not know how long he fought there, holding his charger motionless over the inert body of the fallen king, hewing down the screaming enemy, but presently he heard the familiar cry of "For St. George and for England" behind him. The Norman and English troops were charging in, bringing with them the banner of England! And then Richard was on his feet, cleaving the air about him with his own broadsword. Its bright edge, besmeared with Saracen blood, was biting viciously into the foe. The Turks began to fall back. Within seconds, the Christian knights were boiling around the embattled pair, forcing the Turks into retreat. And for the second time, Sir Robert found himself with no one to fight. And then a voice was saying: "You have done well this day, sir knight. Richard Plantagenet will not forget." Sir Robert turned in his saddle to face the smiling king. "My lord king, be assured that I would never forget my loyalty to my sovereign and liege lord. My sword and my life are yours whenever you call." King Richard's gauntleted hand grasped his own. "If it please God, I shall never ask your life. An earldom awaits you when we return to England, sir knight." And then the king mounted his horse and was running full gallop after the retreating Saracens. Robert took off his helmet. He blinked for a second to adjust his eyes to the relative dimness of the studio. After the brightness of the desert that the televicarion helmet had projected into his eyes, the studio seemed strangely cavelike. "How'd you like it, Bob?" asked one of the two producers of the show. Robert Bowen nodded briskly and patted the televike helmet. "It was O.K.," he said. "Good show. A little talky at the beginning, and it needs a better fade-out, but the action scenes were fine. The sponsor ought to like it—for a while, at least." "What do you mean, 'for a while'?" Robert Bowen sighed. "If this thing goes on the air the way it is, he'll lose sales." "Why? Commercial not good enough?" " Too good! Man, I've smoked Old Kings , and, believe me, the real thing never tasted as good as that cigarette did in the commercial!"

To accurately depict a significant battle from the Crusades

To associate tobacco products with masculinity, brotherhood, and pride

To illustrate the powerful bonds of allegiance among soldiers on the battlefield

To reveal how the King Phillip's cowardice initiated the downfall of one of the world's greatest armies

23960_BH9IVT53_2

What is motivating the King's army to fight against the Turks? (territorial conquest, religious, gold/money, personal glory)

... After a Few Words ... by Seaton McKettrig Illustrated by Summer This is a science-fiction story. History is a science; the other part is, as all Americans know, the most fictional field we have today. He settled himself comfortably in his seat, and carefully put the helmet on, pulling it down firmly until it was properly seated. For a moment, he could see nothing. Then his hand moved up and, with a flick of the wrist, lifted the visor. Ahead of him, in serried array, with lances erect and pennons flying, was the forward part of the column. Far ahead, he knew, were the Knights Templars, who had taken the advance. Behind the Templars rode the mailed knights of Brittany and Anjou. These were followed by King Guy of Jerusalem and the host of Poitou. He himself, Sir Robert de Bouain, was riding with the Norman and English troops, just behind the men of Poitou. Sir Robert turned slightly in his saddle. To his right, he could see the brilliant red-and-gold banner of the lion-hearted Richard of England— gules, in pale three lions passant guardant or . Behind the standard-bearer, his great war horse moving with a steady, measured pace, his coronet of gold on his steel helm gleaming in the glaring desert sun, the lions of England on his firm-held shield, was the King himself. Further behind, the Knights Hospitallers protected the rear, guarding the column of the hosts of Christendom from harassment by the Bedouins. "By our Lady!" came a voice from his left. "Three days out from Acre, and the accursed Saracens still elude us." Sir Robert de Bouain twisted again in his saddle to look at the knight riding alongside him. Sir Gaeton de l'Arc-Tombé sat tall and straight in his saddle, his visor up, his blue eyes narrowed against the glare of the sun. Sir Robert's lips formed a smile. "They are not far off, Sir Gaeton. They have been following us. As we march parallel to the seacoast, so they have been marching with us in those hills to the east." "Like the jackals they are," said Sir Gaeton. "They assail us from the rear, and they set up traps in our path ahead. Our spies tell us that the Turks lie ahead of us in countless numbers. And yet, they fear to face us in open battle." "Is it fear, or are they merely gathering their forces?" "Both," said Sir Gaeton flatly. "They fear us, else they would not dally to amass so fearsome a force. If, as our informers tell us, there are uncounted Turks to the fore, and if, as we are aware, our rear is being dogged by the Bedouin and the black horsemen of Egypt, it would seem that Saladin has at hand more than enough to overcome us, were they all truly Christian knights." "Give them time. We must wait for their attack, sir knight. It were foolhardy to attempt to seek them in their own hills, and yet they must stop us. They will attack before we reach Jerusalem, fear not." "We of Gascony fear no heathen Musselman," Sir Gaeton growled. "It's this Hellish heat that is driving me mad." He pointed toward the eastern hills. "The sun is yet low, and already the heat is unbearable." Sir Robert heard his own laugh echo hollowly within his helmet. "Perhaps 'twere better to be mad when the assault comes. Madmen fight better than men of cooler blood." He knew that the others were baking inside their heavy armor, although he himself was not too uncomfortable. Sir Gaeton looked at him with a smile that held both irony and respect. "In truth, sir knight, it is apparent that you fear neither men nor heat. Nor is your own blood too cool. True, I ride with your Normans and your English and your King Richard of the Lion's Heart, but I am a Gascon, and have sworn no fealty to him. But to side with the Duke of Burgundy against King Richard—" He gave a short, barking laugh. "I fear no man," he went on, "but if I had to fear one, it would be Richard of England." Sir Robert's voice came like a sword: steely, flat, cold, and sharp. "My lord the King spoke in haste. He has reason to be bitter against Philip of France, as do we all. Philip has deserted the field. He has returned to France in haste, leaving the rest of us to fight the Saracen for the Holy Land leaving only the contingent of his vassal the Duke of Burgundy to remain with us." "Richard of England has never been on the best of terms with Philip Augustus," said Sir Gaeton. "No, and with good cause. But he allowed his anger against Philip to color his judgment when he spoke harshly against the Duke of Burgundy. The Duke is no coward, and Richard Plantagenet well knows it. As I said, he spoke in haste." "And you intervened," said Sir Gaeton. "It was my duty." Sir Robert's voice was stubborn. "Could we have permitted a quarrel to develop between the two finest knights and warleaders in Christendom at this crucial point? The desertion of Philip of France has cost us dearly. Could we permit the desertion of Burgundy, too?" "You did what must be done in honor," the Gascon conceded, "but you have not gained the love of Richard by doing so." Sir Robert felt his jaw set firmly. "My king knows I am loyal." Sir Gaeton said nothing more, but there was a look in his eyes that showed that he felt that Richard of England might even doubt the loyalty of Sir Robert de Bouain. Sir Robert rode on in silence, feeling the movement of the horse beneath him. There was a sudden sound to the rear. Like a wash of the tide from the sea came the sound of Saracen war cries and the clash of steel on steel mingled with the sounds of horses in agony and anger. Sir Robert turned his horse to look. The Negro troops of Saladin's Egyptian contingent were thundering down upon the rear! They clashed with the Hospitallers, slamming in like a rain of heavy stones, too close in for the use of bows. There was only the sword against armor, like the sound of a thousand hammers against a thousand anvils. "Stand fast! Stand fast! Hold them off!" It was the voice of King Richard, sounding like a clarion over the din of battle. Sir Robert felt his horse move, as though it were urging him on toward the battle, but his hand held to the reins, keeping the great charger in check. The King had said "Stand fast!" and this was no time to disobey the orders of Richard. The Saracen troops were coming in from the rear, and the Hospitallers were taking the brunt of the charge. They fought like madmen, but they were slowly being forced back. The Master of the Hospitallers rode to the rear, to the King's standard, which hardly moved in the still desert air, now that the column had stopped moving. The voice of the Duke of Burgundy came to Sir Robert's ears. "Stand fast. The King bids you all to stand fast," said the duke, his voice fading as he rode on up the column toward the knights of Poitou and the Knights Templars. The Master of the Hospitallers was speaking in a low, urgent voice to the King: "My lord, we are pressed on by the enemy and in danger of eternal infamy. We are losing our horses, one after the other!" "Good Master," said Richard, "it is you who must sustain their attack. No one can be everywhere at once." The Master of the Hospitallers nodded curtly and charged back into the fray. The King turned to Sir Baldwin de Carreo, who sat ahorse nearby, and pointed toward the eastern hills. "They will come from there, hitting us in the flank; we cannot afford to amass a rearward charge. To do so would be to fall directly into the hands of the Saracen." A voice very close to Sir Robert said: "Richard is right. If we go to the aid of the Hospitallers, we will expose the column to a flank attack." It was Sir Gaeton. "My lord the King," Sir Robert heard his voice say, "is right in all but one thing. If we allow the Egyptians to take us from the rear, there will be no need for Saladin and his Turks to come down on our flank. And the Hospitallers cannot hold for long at this rate. A charge at full gallop would break the Egyptian line and give the Hospitallers breathing time. Are you with me?" "Against the orders of the King?" "The King cannot see everything! There are times when a man must use his own judgment! You said you were afraid of no man. Are you with me?" After a moment's hesitation, Sir Gaeton couched his lance. "I'm with you, sir knight! Live or die, I follow! Strike and strike hard!" "Forward then!" Sir Robert heard himself shouting. "Forward for St. George and for England!" "St. George and England!" the Gascon echoed. Two great war horses began to move ponderously forward toward the battle lines, gaining momentum as they went. Moving in unison, the two knights, their horses now at a fast trot, lowered their lances, picking their Saracen targets with care. Larger and larger loomed the Egyptian cavalrymen as the horses changed pace to a thundering gallop. The Egyptians tried to dodge, as they saw, too late, the approach of the Christian knights. Sir Robert felt the shock against himself and his horse as the steel tip of the long ash lance struck the Saracen horseman in the chest. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw that Sir Gaeton, too, had scored. The Saracen, impaled on Sir Robert's lance, shot from the saddle as he died. His lighter armor had hardly impeded the incoming spear-point, and now his body dragged it down as he dropped toward the desert sand. Another Moslem cavalryman was charging in now, swinging his curved saber, taking advantage of Sir Robert's sagging lance. There was nothing else to do but drop the lance and draw his heavy broadsword. His hand grasped it, and it came singing from its scabbard. The Egyptian's curved sword clanged against Sir Robert's helm, setting his head ringing. In return, the knight's broadsword came about in a sweeping arc, and the Egyptian's horse rode on with the rider's headless body. Behind him, Sir Robert heard further cries of "St. George and England!" The Hospitallers, taking heart at the charge, were going in! Behind them came the Count of Champagne, the Earl of Leister, and the Bishop of Beauvais, who carried a great warhammer in order that he might not break Church Law by shedding blood. Sir Robert's own sword rose and fell, cutting and hacking at the enemy. He himself felt a dreamlike detachment, as though he were watching the battle rather than participating in it. But he could see that the Moslems were falling back before the Christian onslaught. And then, quite suddenly, there seemed to be no foeman to swing at. Breathing heavily, Sir Robert sheathed his broadsword. Beside him, Sir Gaeton did the same, saying: "It will be a few minutes before they can regroup, sir knight. We may have routed them completely." "Aye. But King Richard will not approve of my breaking ranks and disobeying orders. I may win the battle and lose my head in the end." "This is no time to worry about the future," said the Gascon. "Rest for a moment and relax, that you may be the stronger later. Here—have an Old Kings ." He had a pack of cigarettes in his gauntleted hand, which he profferred to Sir Robert. There were three cigarettes protruding from it, one slightly farther than the others. Sir Robert's hand reached out and took that one. "Thanks. When the going gets rough, I really enjoy an Old Kings ." He put one end of the cigarette in his mouth and lit the other from the lighter in Sir Gaeton's hand. "Yes, sir," said Sir Gaeton, after lighting his own cigarette, " Old Kings are the greatest. They give a man real, deep-down smoking pleasure." "There's no doubt about it, Old Kings are a man's cigarette." Sir Robert could feel the soothing smoke in his lungs as he inhaled deeply. "That's great. When I want a cigarette, I don't want just any cigarette." "Nor I," agreed the Gascon. " Old Kings is the only real cigarette when you're doing a real man's work." "That's for sure." Sir Robert watched a smoke ring expand in the air. There was a sudden clash of arms off to their left. Sir Robert dropped his cigarette to the ground. "The trouble is that doing a real he-man's work doesn't always allow you to enjoy the fine, rich tobaccos of Old Kings right down to the very end." "No, but you can always light another later," said the Gascon knight. King Richard, on seeing his army moving suddenly toward the harassed rear, had realized the danger and had charged through the Hospitallers to get into the thick of the fray. Now the Turks were charging down from the hills, hitting—not the flank as he had expected, but the rear! Saladin had expected him to hold fast! Sir Robert and Sir Gaeton spurred their chargers toward the flapping banner of England. The fierce warrior-king of England, his mighty sword in hand, was cutting down Turks as though they were grain-stalks, but still the Saracen horde pressed on. More and more of the terrible Turks came boiling down out of the hills, their glittering scimitars swinging. Sir Robert lost all track of time. There was nothing to do but keep his own great broadsword moving, swinging like some gigantic metronome as he hacked down the Moslem foes. And then, suddenly, he found himself surrounded by the Saracens! He was isolated and alone, cut off from the rest of the Christian forces! He glanced quickly around as he slashed another Saracen from pate to breastbone. Where was Sir Gaeton? Where were the others? Where was the red-and-gold banner of Richard? He caught a glimpse of the fluttering banner far to the rear and started to fall back. And then he saw another knight nearby, a huge man who swung his sparkling blade with power and force. On his steel helm gleamed a golden coronet! Richard! And the great king, in spite of his prowess was outnumbered heavily and would, within seconds, be cut down by the Saracen horde! Without hesitation, Sir Robert plunged his horse toward the surrounded monarch, his great blade cutting a path before him. He saw Richard go down, falling from the saddle of his charger, but by that time his own sword was cutting into the screaming Saracens and they had no time to attempt any further mischief to the King. They had their hands full with Sir Robert de Bouain. He did not know how long he fought there, holding his charger motionless over the inert body of the fallen king, hewing down the screaming enemy, but presently he heard the familiar cry of "For St. George and for England" behind him. The Norman and English troops were charging in, bringing with them the banner of England! And then Richard was on his feet, cleaving the air about him with his own broadsword. Its bright edge, besmeared with Saracen blood, was biting viciously into the foe. The Turks began to fall back. Within seconds, the Christian knights were boiling around the embattled pair, forcing the Turks into retreat. And for the second time, Sir Robert found himself with no one to fight. And then a voice was saying: "You have done well this day, sir knight. Richard Plantagenet will not forget." Sir Robert turned in his saddle to face the smiling king. "My lord king, be assured that I would never forget my loyalty to my sovereign and liege lord. My sword and my life are yours whenever you call." King Richard's gauntleted hand grasped his own. "If it please God, I shall never ask your life. An earldom awaits you when we return to England, sir knight." And then the king mounted his horse and was running full gallop after the retreating Saracens. Robert took off his helmet. He blinked for a second to adjust his eyes to the relative dimness of the studio. After the brightness of the desert that the televicarion helmet had projected into his eyes, the studio seemed strangely cavelike. "How'd you like it, Bob?" asked one of the two producers of the show. Robert Bowen nodded briskly and patted the televike helmet. "It was O.K.," he said. "Good show. A little talky at the beginning, and it needs a better fade-out, but the action scenes were fine. The sponsor ought to like it—for a while, at least." "What do you mean, 'for a while'?" Robert Bowen sighed. "If this thing goes on the air the way it is, he'll lose sales." "Why? Commercial not good enough?" " Too good! Man, I've smoked Old Kings , and, believe me, the real thing never tasted as good as that cigarette did in the commercial!"

National pride

Religious faith

Personal glory

Territorial conquest

23960_BH9IVT53_3

We can assume that King Richard's army represents which group?

... After a Few Words ... by Seaton McKettrig Illustrated by Summer This is a science-fiction story. History is a science; the other part is, as all Americans know, the most fictional field we have today. He settled himself comfortably in his seat, and carefully put the helmet on, pulling it down firmly until it was properly seated. For a moment, he could see nothing. Then his hand moved up and, with a flick of the wrist, lifted the visor. Ahead of him, in serried array, with lances erect and pennons flying, was the forward part of the column. Far ahead, he knew, were the Knights Templars, who had taken the advance. Behind the Templars rode the mailed knights of Brittany and Anjou. These were followed by King Guy of Jerusalem and the host of Poitou. He himself, Sir Robert de Bouain, was riding with the Norman and English troops, just behind the men of Poitou. Sir Robert turned slightly in his saddle. To his right, he could see the brilliant red-and-gold banner of the lion-hearted Richard of England— gules, in pale three lions passant guardant or . Behind the standard-bearer, his great war horse moving with a steady, measured pace, his coronet of gold on his steel helm gleaming in the glaring desert sun, the lions of England on his firm-held shield, was the King himself. Further behind, the Knights Hospitallers protected the rear, guarding the column of the hosts of Christendom from harassment by the Bedouins. "By our Lady!" came a voice from his left. "Three days out from Acre, and the accursed Saracens still elude us." Sir Robert de Bouain twisted again in his saddle to look at the knight riding alongside him. Sir Gaeton de l'Arc-Tombé sat tall and straight in his saddle, his visor up, his blue eyes narrowed against the glare of the sun. Sir Robert's lips formed a smile. "They are not far off, Sir Gaeton. They have been following us. As we march parallel to the seacoast, so they have been marching with us in those hills to the east." "Like the jackals they are," said Sir Gaeton. "They assail us from the rear, and they set up traps in our path ahead. Our spies tell us that the Turks lie ahead of us in countless numbers. And yet, they fear to face us in open battle." "Is it fear, or are they merely gathering their forces?" "Both," said Sir Gaeton flatly. "They fear us, else they would not dally to amass so fearsome a force. If, as our informers tell us, there are uncounted Turks to the fore, and if, as we are aware, our rear is being dogged by the Bedouin and the black horsemen of Egypt, it would seem that Saladin has at hand more than enough to overcome us, were they all truly Christian knights." "Give them time. We must wait for their attack, sir knight. It were foolhardy to attempt to seek them in their own hills, and yet they must stop us. They will attack before we reach Jerusalem, fear not." "We of Gascony fear no heathen Musselman," Sir Gaeton growled. "It's this Hellish heat that is driving me mad." He pointed toward the eastern hills. "The sun is yet low, and already the heat is unbearable." Sir Robert heard his own laugh echo hollowly within his helmet. "Perhaps 'twere better to be mad when the assault comes. Madmen fight better than men of cooler blood." He knew that the others were baking inside their heavy armor, although he himself was not too uncomfortable. Sir Gaeton looked at him with a smile that held both irony and respect. "In truth, sir knight, it is apparent that you fear neither men nor heat. Nor is your own blood too cool. True, I ride with your Normans and your English and your King Richard of the Lion's Heart, but I am a Gascon, and have sworn no fealty to him. But to side with the Duke of Burgundy against King Richard—" He gave a short, barking laugh. "I fear no man," he went on, "but if I had to fear one, it would be Richard of England." Sir Robert's voice came like a sword: steely, flat, cold, and sharp. "My lord the King spoke in haste. He has reason to be bitter against Philip of France, as do we all. Philip has deserted the field. He has returned to France in haste, leaving the rest of us to fight the Saracen for the Holy Land leaving only the contingent of his vassal the Duke of Burgundy to remain with us." "Richard of England has never been on the best of terms with Philip Augustus," said Sir Gaeton. "No, and with good cause. But he allowed his anger against Philip to color his judgment when he spoke harshly against the Duke of Burgundy. The Duke is no coward, and Richard Plantagenet well knows it. As I said, he spoke in haste." "And you intervened," said Sir Gaeton. "It was my duty." Sir Robert's voice was stubborn. "Could we have permitted a quarrel to develop between the two finest knights and warleaders in Christendom at this crucial point? The desertion of Philip of France has cost us dearly. Could we permit the desertion of Burgundy, too?" "You did what must be done in honor," the Gascon conceded, "but you have not gained the love of Richard by doing so." Sir Robert felt his jaw set firmly. "My king knows I am loyal." Sir Gaeton said nothing more, but there was a look in his eyes that showed that he felt that Richard of England might even doubt the loyalty of Sir Robert de Bouain. Sir Robert rode on in silence, feeling the movement of the horse beneath him. There was a sudden sound to the rear. Like a wash of the tide from the sea came the sound of Saracen war cries and the clash of steel on steel mingled with the sounds of horses in agony and anger. Sir Robert turned his horse to look. The Negro troops of Saladin's Egyptian contingent were thundering down upon the rear! They clashed with the Hospitallers, slamming in like a rain of heavy stones, too close in for the use of bows. There was only the sword against armor, like the sound of a thousand hammers against a thousand anvils. "Stand fast! Stand fast! Hold them off!" It was the voice of King Richard, sounding like a clarion over the din of battle. Sir Robert felt his horse move, as though it were urging him on toward the battle, but his hand held to the reins, keeping the great charger in check. The King had said "Stand fast!" and this was no time to disobey the orders of Richard. The Saracen troops were coming in from the rear, and the Hospitallers were taking the brunt of the charge. They fought like madmen, but they were slowly being forced back. The Master of the Hospitallers rode to the rear, to the King's standard, which hardly moved in the still desert air, now that the column had stopped moving. The voice of the Duke of Burgundy came to Sir Robert's ears. "Stand fast. The King bids you all to stand fast," said the duke, his voice fading as he rode on up the column toward the knights of Poitou and the Knights Templars. The Master of the Hospitallers was speaking in a low, urgent voice to the King: "My lord, we are pressed on by the enemy and in danger of eternal infamy. We are losing our horses, one after the other!" "Good Master," said Richard, "it is you who must sustain their attack. No one can be everywhere at once." The Master of the Hospitallers nodded curtly and charged back into the fray. The King turned to Sir Baldwin de Carreo, who sat ahorse nearby, and pointed toward the eastern hills. "They will come from there, hitting us in the flank; we cannot afford to amass a rearward charge. To do so would be to fall directly into the hands of the Saracen." A voice very close to Sir Robert said: "Richard is right. If we go to the aid of the Hospitallers, we will expose the column to a flank attack." It was Sir Gaeton. "My lord the King," Sir Robert heard his voice say, "is right in all but one thing. If we allow the Egyptians to take us from the rear, there will be no need for Saladin and his Turks to come down on our flank. And the Hospitallers cannot hold for long at this rate. A charge at full gallop would break the Egyptian line and give the Hospitallers breathing time. Are you with me?" "Against the orders of the King?" "The King cannot see everything! There are times when a man must use his own judgment! You said you were afraid of no man. Are you with me?" After a moment's hesitation, Sir Gaeton couched his lance. "I'm with you, sir knight! Live or die, I follow! Strike and strike hard!" "Forward then!" Sir Robert heard himself shouting. "Forward for St. George and for England!" "St. George and England!" the Gascon echoed. Two great war horses began to move ponderously forward toward the battle lines, gaining momentum as they went. Moving in unison, the two knights, their horses now at a fast trot, lowered their lances, picking their Saracen targets with care. Larger and larger loomed the Egyptian cavalrymen as the horses changed pace to a thundering gallop. The Egyptians tried to dodge, as they saw, too late, the approach of the Christian knights. Sir Robert felt the shock against himself and his horse as the steel tip of the long ash lance struck the Saracen horseman in the chest. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw that Sir Gaeton, too, had scored. The Saracen, impaled on Sir Robert's lance, shot from the saddle as he died. His lighter armor had hardly impeded the incoming spear-point, and now his body dragged it down as he dropped toward the desert sand. Another Moslem cavalryman was charging in now, swinging his curved saber, taking advantage of Sir Robert's sagging lance. There was nothing else to do but drop the lance and draw his heavy broadsword. His hand grasped it, and it came singing from its scabbard. The Egyptian's curved sword clanged against Sir Robert's helm, setting his head ringing. In return, the knight's broadsword came about in a sweeping arc, and the Egyptian's horse rode on with the rider's headless body. Behind him, Sir Robert heard further cries of "St. George and England!" The Hospitallers, taking heart at the charge, were going in! Behind them came the Count of Champagne, the Earl of Leister, and the Bishop of Beauvais, who carried a great warhammer in order that he might not break Church Law by shedding blood. Sir Robert's own sword rose and fell, cutting and hacking at the enemy. He himself felt a dreamlike detachment, as though he were watching the battle rather than participating in it. But he could see that the Moslems were falling back before the Christian onslaught. And then, quite suddenly, there seemed to be no foeman to swing at. Breathing heavily, Sir Robert sheathed his broadsword. Beside him, Sir Gaeton did the same, saying: "It will be a few minutes before they can regroup, sir knight. We may have routed them completely." "Aye. But King Richard will not approve of my breaking ranks and disobeying orders. I may win the battle and lose my head in the end." "This is no time to worry about the future," said the Gascon. "Rest for a moment and relax, that you may be the stronger later. Here—have an Old Kings ." He had a pack of cigarettes in his gauntleted hand, which he profferred to Sir Robert. There were three cigarettes protruding from it, one slightly farther than the others. Sir Robert's hand reached out and took that one. "Thanks. When the going gets rough, I really enjoy an Old Kings ." He put one end of the cigarette in his mouth and lit the other from the lighter in Sir Gaeton's hand. "Yes, sir," said Sir Gaeton, after lighting his own cigarette, " Old Kings are the greatest. They give a man real, deep-down smoking pleasure." "There's no doubt about it, Old Kings are a man's cigarette." Sir Robert could feel the soothing smoke in his lungs as he inhaled deeply. "That's great. When I want a cigarette, I don't want just any cigarette." "Nor I," agreed the Gascon. " Old Kings is the only real cigarette when you're doing a real man's work." "That's for sure." Sir Robert watched a smoke ring expand in the air. There was a sudden clash of arms off to their left. Sir Robert dropped his cigarette to the ground. "The trouble is that doing a real he-man's work doesn't always allow you to enjoy the fine, rich tobaccos of Old Kings right down to the very end." "No, but you can always light another later," said the Gascon knight. King Richard, on seeing his army moving suddenly toward the harassed rear, had realized the danger and had charged through the Hospitallers to get into the thick of the fray. Now the Turks were charging down from the hills, hitting—not the flank as he had expected, but the rear! Saladin had expected him to hold fast! Sir Robert and Sir Gaeton spurred their chargers toward the flapping banner of England. The fierce warrior-king of England, his mighty sword in hand, was cutting down Turks as though they were grain-stalks, but still the Saracen horde pressed on. More and more of the terrible Turks came boiling down out of the hills, their glittering scimitars swinging. Sir Robert lost all track of time. There was nothing to do but keep his own great broadsword moving, swinging like some gigantic metronome as he hacked down the Moslem foes. And then, suddenly, he found himself surrounded by the Saracens! He was isolated and alone, cut off from the rest of the Christian forces! He glanced quickly around as he slashed another Saracen from pate to breastbone. Where was Sir Gaeton? Where were the others? Where was the red-and-gold banner of Richard? He caught a glimpse of the fluttering banner far to the rear and started to fall back. And then he saw another knight nearby, a huge man who swung his sparkling blade with power and force. On his steel helm gleamed a golden coronet! Richard! And the great king, in spite of his prowess was outnumbered heavily and would, within seconds, be cut down by the Saracen horde! Without hesitation, Sir Robert plunged his horse toward the surrounded monarch, his great blade cutting a path before him. He saw Richard go down, falling from the saddle of his charger, but by that time his own sword was cutting into the screaming Saracens and they had no time to attempt any further mischief to the King. They had their hands full with Sir Robert de Bouain. He did not know how long he fought there, holding his charger motionless over the inert body of the fallen king, hewing down the screaming enemy, but presently he heard the familiar cry of "For St. George and for England" behind him. The Norman and English troops were charging in, bringing with them the banner of England! And then Richard was on his feet, cleaving the air about him with his own broadsword. Its bright edge, besmeared with Saracen blood, was biting viciously into the foe. The Turks began to fall back. Within seconds, the Christian knights were boiling around the embattled pair, forcing the Turks into retreat. And for the second time, Sir Robert found himself with no one to fight. And then a voice was saying: "You have done well this day, sir knight. Richard Plantagenet will not forget." Sir Robert turned in his saddle to face the smiling king. "My lord king, be assured that I would never forget my loyalty to my sovereign and liege lord. My sword and my life are yours whenever you call." King Richard's gauntleted hand grasped his own. "If it please God, I shall never ask your life. An earldom awaits you when we return to England, sir knight." And then the king mounted his horse and was running full gallop after the retreating Saracens. Robert took off his helmet. He blinked for a second to adjust his eyes to the relative dimness of the studio. After the brightness of the desert that the televicarion helmet had projected into his eyes, the studio seemed strangely cavelike. "How'd you like it, Bob?" asked one of the two producers of the show. Robert Bowen nodded briskly and patted the televike helmet. "It was O.K.," he said. "Good show. A little talky at the beginning, and it needs a better fade-out, but the action scenes were fine. The sponsor ought to like it—for a while, at least." "What do you mean, 'for a while'?" Robert Bowen sighed. "If this thing goes on the air the way it is, he'll lose sales." "Why? Commercial not good enough?" " Too good! Man, I've smoked Old Kings , and, believe me, the real thing never tasted as good as that cigarette did in the commercial!"

Muslims

Christians

Normans

Anglo-Saxons

23960_BH9IVT53_4

How are the Gascons different from the rest of King Richard's cohort?

... After a Few Words ... by Seaton McKettrig Illustrated by Summer This is a science-fiction story. History is a science; the other part is, as all Americans know, the most fictional field we have today. He settled himself comfortably in his seat, and carefully put the helmet on, pulling it down firmly until it was properly seated. For a moment, he could see nothing. Then his hand moved up and, with a flick of the wrist, lifted the visor. Ahead of him, in serried array, with lances erect and pennons flying, was the forward part of the column. Far ahead, he knew, were the Knights Templars, who had taken the advance. Behind the Templars rode the mailed knights of Brittany and Anjou. These were followed by King Guy of Jerusalem and the host of Poitou. He himself, Sir Robert de Bouain, was riding with the Norman and English troops, just behind the men of Poitou. Sir Robert turned slightly in his saddle. To his right, he could see the brilliant red-and-gold banner of the lion-hearted Richard of England— gules, in pale three lions passant guardant or . Behind the standard-bearer, his great war horse moving with a steady, measured pace, his coronet of gold on his steel helm gleaming in the glaring desert sun, the lions of England on his firm-held shield, was the King himself. Further behind, the Knights Hospitallers protected the rear, guarding the column of the hosts of Christendom from harassment by the Bedouins. "By our Lady!" came a voice from his left. "Three days out from Acre, and the accursed Saracens still elude us." Sir Robert de Bouain twisted again in his saddle to look at the knight riding alongside him. Sir Gaeton de l'Arc-Tombé sat tall and straight in his saddle, his visor up, his blue eyes narrowed against the glare of the sun. Sir Robert's lips formed a smile. "They are not far off, Sir Gaeton. They have been following us. As we march parallel to the seacoast, so they have been marching with us in those hills to the east." "Like the jackals they are," said Sir Gaeton. "They assail us from the rear, and they set up traps in our path ahead. Our spies tell us that the Turks lie ahead of us in countless numbers. And yet, they fear to face us in open battle." "Is it fear, or are they merely gathering their forces?" "Both," said Sir Gaeton flatly. "They fear us, else they would not dally to amass so fearsome a force. If, as our informers tell us, there are uncounted Turks to the fore, and if, as we are aware, our rear is being dogged by the Bedouin and the black horsemen of Egypt, it would seem that Saladin has at hand more than enough to overcome us, were they all truly Christian knights." "Give them time. We must wait for their attack, sir knight. It were foolhardy to attempt to seek them in their own hills, and yet they must stop us. They will attack before we reach Jerusalem, fear not." "We of Gascony fear no heathen Musselman," Sir Gaeton growled. "It's this Hellish heat that is driving me mad." He pointed toward the eastern hills. "The sun is yet low, and already the heat is unbearable." Sir Robert heard his own laugh echo hollowly within his helmet. "Perhaps 'twere better to be mad when the assault comes. Madmen fight better than men of cooler blood." He knew that the others were baking inside their heavy armor, although he himself was not too uncomfortable. Sir Gaeton looked at him with a smile that held both irony and respect. "In truth, sir knight, it is apparent that you fear neither men nor heat. Nor is your own blood too cool. True, I ride with your Normans and your English and your King Richard of the Lion's Heart, but I am a Gascon, and have sworn no fealty to him. But to side with the Duke of Burgundy against King Richard—" He gave a short, barking laugh. "I fear no man," he went on, "but if I had to fear one, it would be Richard of England." Sir Robert's voice came like a sword: steely, flat, cold, and sharp. "My lord the King spoke in haste. He has reason to be bitter against Philip of France, as do we all. Philip has deserted the field. He has returned to France in haste, leaving the rest of us to fight the Saracen for the Holy Land leaving only the contingent of his vassal the Duke of Burgundy to remain with us." "Richard of England has never been on the best of terms with Philip Augustus," said Sir Gaeton. "No, and with good cause. But he allowed his anger against Philip to color his judgment when he spoke harshly against the Duke of Burgundy. The Duke is no coward, and Richard Plantagenet well knows it. As I said, he spoke in haste." "And you intervened," said Sir Gaeton. "It was my duty." Sir Robert's voice was stubborn. "Could we have permitted a quarrel to develop between the two finest knights and warleaders in Christendom at this crucial point? The desertion of Philip of France has cost us dearly. Could we permit the desertion of Burgundy, too?" "You did what must be done in honor," the Gascon conceded, "but you have not gained the love of Richard by doing so." Sir Robert felt his jaw set firmly. "My king knows I am loyal." Sir Gaeton said nothing more, but there was a look in his eyes that showed that he felt that Richard of England might even doubt the loyalty of Sir Robert de Bouain. Sir Robert rode on in silence, feeling the movement of the horse beneath him. There was a sudden sound to the rear. Like a wash of the tide from the sea came the sound of Saracen war cries and the clash of steel on steel mingled with the sounds of horses in agony and anger. Sir Robert turned his horse to look. The Negro troops of Saladin's Egyptian contingent were thundering down upon the rear! They clashed with the Hospitallers, slamming in like a rain of heavy stones, too close in for the use of bows. There was only the sword against armor, like the sound of a thousand hammers against a thousand anvils. "Stand fast! Stand fast! Hold them off!" It was the voice of King Richard, sounding like a clarion over the din of battle. Sir Robert felt his horse move, as though it were urging him on toward the battle, but his hand held to the reins, keeping the great charger in check. The King had said "Stand fast!" and this was no time to disobey the orders of Richard. The Saracen troops were coming in from the rear, and the Hospitallers were taking the brunt of the charge. They fought like madmen, but they were slowly being forced back. The Master of the Hospitallers rode to the rear, to the King's standard, which hardly moved in the still desert air, now that the column had stopped moving. The voice of the Duke of Burgundy came to Sir Robert's ears. "Stand fast. The King bids you all to stand fast," said the duke, his voice fading as he rode on up the column toward the knights of Poitou and the Knights Templars. The Master of the Hospitallers was speaking in a low, urgent voice to the King: "My lord, we are pressed on by the enemy and in danger of eternal infamy. We are losing our horses, one after the other!" "Good Master," said Richard, "it is you who must sustain their attack. No one can be everywhere at once." The Master of the Hospitallers nodded curtly and charged back into the fray. The King turned to Sir Baldwin de Carreo, who sat ahorse nearby, and pointed toward the eastern hills. "They will come from there, hitting us in the flank; we cannot afford to amass a rearward charge. To do so would be to fall directly into the hands of the Saracen." A voice very close to Sir Robert said: "Richard is right. If we go to the aid of the Hospitallers, we will expose the column to a flank attack." It was Sir Gaeton. "My lord the King," Sir Robert heard his voice say, "is right in all but one thing. If we allow the Egyptians to take us from the rear, there will be no need for Saladin and his Turks to come down on our flank. And the Hospitallers cannot hold for long at this rate. A charge at full gallop would break the Egyptian line and give the Hospitallers breathing time. Are you with me?" "Against the orders of the King?" "The King cannot see everything! There are times when a man must use his own judgment! You said you were afraid of no man. Are you with me?" After a moment's hesitation, Sir Gaeton couched his lance. "I'm with you, sir knight! Live or die, I follow! Strike and strike hard!" "Forward then!" Sir Robert heard himself shouting. "Forward for St. George and for England!" "St. George and England!" the Gascon echoed. Two great war horses began to move ponderously forward toward the battle lines, gaining momentum as they went. Moving in unison, the two knights, their horses now at a fast trot, lowered their lances, picking their Saracen targets with care. Larger and larger loomed the Egyptian cavalrymen as the horses changed pace to a thundering gallop. The Egyptians tried to dodge, as they saw, too late, the approach of the Christian knights. Sir Robert felt the shock against himself and his horse as the steel tip of the long ash lance struck the Saracen horseman in the chest. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw that Sir Gaeton, too, had scored. The Saracen, impaled on Sir Robert's lance, shot from the saddle as he died. His lighter armor had hardly impeded the incoming spear-point, and now his body dragged it down as he dropped toward the desert sand. Another Moslem cavalryman was charging in now, swinging his curved saber, taking advantage of Sir Robert's sagging lance. There was nothing else to do but drop the lance and draw his heavy broadsword. His hand grasped it, and it came singing from its scabbard. The Egyptian's curved sword clanged against Sir Robert's helm, setting his head ringing. In return, the knight's broadsword came about in a sweeping arc, and the Egyptian's horse rode on with the rider's headless body. Behind him, Sir Robert heard further cries of "St. George and England!" The Hospitallers, taking heart at the charge, were going in! Behind them came the Count of Champagne, the Earl of Leister, and the Bishop of Beauvais, who carried a great warhammer in order that he might not break Church Law by shedding blood. Sir Robert's own sword rose and fell, cutting and hacking at the enemy. He himself felt a dreamlike detachment, as though he were watching the battle rather than participating in it. But he could see that the Moslems were falling back before the Christian onslaught. And then, quite suddenly, there seemed to be no foeman to swing at. Breathing heavily, Sir Robert sheathed his broadsword. Beside him, Sir Gaeton did the same, saying: "It will be a few minutes before they can regroup, sir knight. We may have routed them completely." "Aye. But King Richard will not approve of my breaking ranks and disobeying orders. I may win the battle and lose my head in the end." "This is no time to worry about the future," said the Gascon. "Rest for a moment and relax, that you may be the stronger later. Here—have an Old Kings ." He had a pack of cigarettes in his gauntleted hand, which he profferred to Sir Robert. There were three cigarettes protruding from it, one slightly farther than the others. Sir Robert's hand reached out and took that one. "Thanks. When the going gets rough, I really enjoy an Old Kings ." He put one end of the cigarette in his mouth and lit the other from the lighter in Sir Gaeton's hand. "Yes, sir," said Sir Gaeton, after lighting his own cigarette, " Old Kings are the greatest. They give a man real, deep-down smoking pleasure." "There's no doubt about it, Old Kings are a man's cigarette." Sir Robert could feel the soothing smoke in his lungs as he inhaled deeply. "That's great. When I want a cigarette, I don't want just any cigarette." "Nor I," agreed the Gascon. " Old Kings is the only real cigarette when you're doing a real man's work." "That's for sure." Sir Robert watched a smoke ring expand in the air. There was a sudden clash of arms off to their left. Sir Robert dropped his cigarette to the ground. "The trouble is that doing a real he-man's work doesn't always allow you to enjoy the fine, rich tobaccos of Old Kings right down to the very end." "No, but you can always light another later," said the Gascon knight. King Richard, on seeing his army moving suddenly toward the harassed rear, had realized the danger and had charged through the Hospitallers to get into the thick of the fray. Now the Turks were charging down from the hills, hitting—not the flank as he had expected, but the rear! Saladin had expected him to hold fast! Sir Robert and Sir Gaeton spurred their chargers toward the flapping banner of England. The fierce warrior-king of England, his mighty sword in hand, was cutting down Turks as though they were grain-stalks, but still the Saracen horde pressed on. More and more of the terrible Turks came boiling down out of the hills, their glittering scimitars swinging. Sir Robert lost all track of time. There was nothing to do but keep his own great broadsword moving, swinging like some gigantic metronome as he hacked down the Moslem foes. And then, suddenly, he found himself surrounded by the Saracens! He was isolated and alone, cut off from the rest of the Christian forces! He glanced quickly around as he slashed another Saracen from pate to breastbone. Where was Sir Gaeton? Where were the others? Where was the red-and-gold banner of Richard? He caught a glimpse of the fluttering banner far to the rear and started to fall back. And then he saw another knight nearby, a huge man who swung his sparkling blade with power and force. On his steel helm gleamed a golden coronet! Richard! And the great king, in spite of his prowess was outnumbered heavily and would, within seconds, be cut down by the Saracen horde! Without hesitation, Sir Robert plunged his horse toward the surrounded monarch, his great blade cutting a path before him. He saw Richard go down, falling from the saddle of his charger, but by that time his own sword was cutting into the screaming Saracens and they had no time to attempt any further mischief to the King. They had their hands full with Sir Robert de Bouain. He did not know how long he fought there, holding his charger motionless over the inert body of the fallen king, hewing down the screaming enemy, but presently he heard the familiar cry of "For St. George and for England" behind him. The Norman and English troops were charging in, bringing with them the banner of England! And then Richard was on his feet, cleaving the air about him with his own broadsword. Its bright edge, besmeared with Saracen blood, was biting viciously into the foe. The Turks began to fall back. Within seconds, the Christian knights were boiling around the embattled pair, forcing the Turks into retreat. And for the second time, Sir Robert found himself with no one to fight. And then a voice was saying: "You have done well this day, sir knight. Richard Plantagenet will not forget." Sir Robert turned in his saddle to face the smiling king. "My lord king, be assured that I would never forget my loyalty to my sovereign and liege lord. My sword and my life are yours whenever you call." King Richard's gauntleted hand grasped his own. "If it please God, I shall never ask your life. An earldom awaits you when we return to England, sir knight." And then the king mounted his horse and was running full gallop after the retreating Saracens. Robert took off his helmet. He blinked for a second to adjust his eyes to the relative dimness of the studio. After the brightness of the desert that the televicarion helmet had projected into his eyes, the studio seemed strangely cavelike. "How'd you like it, Bob?" asked one of the two producers of the show. Robert Bowen nodded briskly and patted the televike helmet. "It was O.K.," he said. "Good show. A little talky at the beginning, and it needs a better fade-out, but the action scenes were fine. The sponsor ought to like it—for a while, at least." "What do you mean, 'for a while'?" Robert Bowen sighed. "If this thing goes on the air the way it is, he'll lose sales." "Why? Commercial not good enough?" " Too good! Man, I've smoked Old Kings , and, believe me, the real thing never tasted as good as that cigarette did in the commercial!"

They are better trained

They are treasonous

They are mercenaries

They are not as well trained

23960_BH9IVT53_5

Why is King Richard angry at the King of France? (abandoning the battlefield and his men)

... After a Few Words ... by Seaton McKettrig Illustrated by Summer This is a science-fiction story. History is a science; the other part is, as all Americans know, the most fictional field we have today. He settled himself comfortably in his seat, and carefully put the helmet on, pulling it down firmly until it was properly seated. For a moment, he could see nothing. Then his hand moved up and, with a flick of the wrist, lifted the visor. Ahead of him, in serried array, with lances erect and pennons flying, was the forward part of the column. Far ahead, he knew, were the Knights Templars, who had taken the advance. Behind the Templars rode the mailed knights of Brittany and Anjou. These were followed by King Guy of Jerusalem and the host of Poitou. He himself, Sir Robert de Bouain, was riding with the Norman and English troops, just behind the men of Poitou. Sir Robert turned slightly in his saddle. To his right, he could see the brilliant red-and-gold banner of the lion-hearted Richard of England— gules, in pale three lions passant guardant or . Behind the standard-bearer, his great war horse moving with a steady, measured pace, his coronet of gold on his steel helm gleaming in the glaring desert sun, the lions of England on his firm-held shield, was the King himself. Further behind, the Knights Hospitallers protected the rear, guarding the column of the hosts of Christendom from harassment by the Bedouins. "By our Lady!" came a voice from his left. "Three days out from Acre, and the accursed Saracens still elude us." Sir Robert de Bouain twisted again in his saddle to look at the knight riding alongside him. Sir Gaeton de l'Arc-Tombé sat tall and straight in his saddle, his visor up, his blue eyes narrowed against the glare of the sun. Sir Robert's lips formed a smile. "They are not far off, Sir Gaeton. They have been following us. As we march parallel to the seacoast, so they have been marching with us in those hills to the east." "Like the jackals they are," said Sir Gaeton. "They assail us from the rear, and they set up traps in our path ahead. Our spies tell us that the Turks lie ahead of us in countless numbers. And yet, they fear to face us in open battle." "Is it fear, or are they merely gathering their forces?" "Both," said Sir Gaeton flatly. "They fear us, else they would not dally to amass so fearsome a force. If, as our informers tell us, there are uncounted Turks to the fore, and if, as we are aware, our rear is being dogged by the Bedouin and the black horsemen of Egypt, it would seem that Saladin has at hand more than enough to overcome us, were they all truly Christian knights." "Give them time. We must wait for their attack, sir knight. It were foolhardy to attempt to seek them in their own hills, and yet they must stop us. They will attack before we reach Jerusalem, fear not." "We of Gascony fear no heathen Musselman," Sir Gaeton growled. "It's this Hellish heat that is driving me mad." He pointed toward the eastern hills. "The sun is yet low, and already the heat is unbearable." Sir Robert heard his own laugh echo hollowly within his helmet. "Perhaps 'twere better to be mad when the assault comes. Madmen fight better than men of cooler blood." He knew that the others were baking inside their heavy armor, although he himself was not too uncomfortable. Sir Gaeton looked at him with a smile that held both irony and respect. "In truth, sir knight, it is apparent that you fear neither men nor heat. Nor is your own blood too cool. True, I ride with your Normans and your English and your King Richard of the Lion's Heart, but I am a Gascon, and have sworn no fealty to him. But to side with the Duke of Burgundy against King Richard—" He gave a short, barking laugh. "I fear no man," he went on, "but if I had to fear one, it would be Richard of England." Sir Robert's voice came like a sword: steely, flat, cold, and sharp. "My lord the King spoke in haste. He has reason to be bitter against Philip of France, as do we all. Philip has deserted the field. He has returned to France in haste, leaving the rest of us to fight the Saracen for the Holy Land leaving only the contingent of his vassal the Duke of Burgundy to remain with us." "Richard of England has never been on the best of terms with Philip Augustus," said Sir Gaeton. "No, and with good cause. But he allowed his anger against Philip to color his judgment when he spoke harshly against the Duke of Burgundy. The Duke is no coward, and Richard Plantagenet well knows it. As I said, he spoke in haste." "And you intervened," said Sir Gaeton. "It was my duty." Sir Robert's voice was stubborn. "Could we have permitted a quarrel to develop between the two finest knights and warleaders in Christendom at this crucial point? The desertion of Philip of France has cost us dearly. Could we permit the desertion of Burgundy, too?" "You did what must be done in honor," the Gascon conceded, "but you have not gained the love of Richard by doing so." Sir Robert felt his jaw set firmly. "My king knows I am loyal." Sir Gaeton said nothing more, but there was a look in his eyes that showed that he felt that Richard of England might even doubt the loyalty of Sir Robert de Bouain. Sir Robert rode on in silence, feeling the movement of the horse beneath him. There was a sudden sound to the rear. Like a wash of the tide from the sea came the sound of Saracen war cries and the clash of steel on steel mingled with the sounds of horses in agony and anger. Sir Robert turned his horse to look. The Negro troops of Saladin's Egyptian contingent were thundering down upon the rear! They clashed with the Hospitallers, slamming in like a rain of heavy stones, too close in for the use of bows. There was only the sword against armor, like the sound of a thousand hammers against a thousand anvils. "Stand fast! Stand fast! Hold them off!" It was the voice of King Richard, sounding like a clarion over the din of battle. Sir Robert felt his horse move, as though it were urging him on toward the battle, but his hand held to the reins, keeping the great charger in check. The King had said "Stand fast!" and this was no time to disobey the orders of Richard. The Saracen troops were coming in from the rear, and the Hospitallers were taking the brunt of the charge. They fought like madmen, but they were slowly being forced back. The Master of the Hospitallers rode to the rear, to the King's standard, which hardly moved in the still desert air, now that the column had stopped moving. The voice of the Duke of Burgundy came to Sir Robert's ears. "Stand fast. The King bids you all to stand fast," said the duke, his voice fading as he rode on up the column toward the knights of Poitou and the Knights Templars. The Master of the Hospitallers was speaking in a low, urgent voice to the King: "My lord, we are pressed on by the enemy and in danger of eternal infamy. We are losing our horses, one after the other!" "Good Master," said Richard, "it is you who must sustain their attack. No one can be everywhere at once." The Master of the Hospitallers nodded curtly and charged back into the fray. The King turned to Sir Baldwin de Carreo, who sat ahorse nearby, and pointed toward the eastern hills. "They will come from there, hitting us in the flank; we cannot afford to amass a rearward charge. To do so would be to fall directly into the hands of the Saracen." A voice very close to Sir Robert said: "Richard is right. If we go to the aid of the Hospitallers, we will expose the column to a flank attack." It was Sir Gaeton. "My lord the King," Sir Robert heard his voice say, "is right in all but one thing. If we allow the Egyptians to take us from the rear, there will be no need for Saladin and his Turks to come down on our flank. And the Hospitallers cannot hold for long at this rate. A charge at full gallop would break the Egyptian line and give the Hospitallers breathing time. Are you with me?" "Against the orders of the King?" "The King cannot see everything! There are times when a man must use his own judgment! You said you were afraid of no man. Are you with me?" After a moment's hesitation, Sir Gaeton couched his lance. "I'm with you, sir knight! Live or die, I follow! Strike and strike hard!" "Forward then!" Sir Robert heard himself shouting. "Forward for St. George and for England!" "St. George and England!" the Gascon echoed. Two great war horses began to move ponderously forward toward the battle lines, gaining momentum as they went. Moving in unison, the two knights, their horses now at a fast trot, lowered their lances, picking their Saracen targets with care. Larger and larger loomed the Egyptian cavalrymen as the horses changed pace to a thundering gallop. The Egyptians tried to dodge, as they saw, too late, the approach of the Christian knights. Sir Robert felt the shock against himself and his horse as the steel tip of the long ash lance struck the Saracen horseman in the chest. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw that Sir Gaeton, too, had scored. The Saracen, impaled on Sir Robert's lance, shot from the saddle as he died. His lighter armor had hardly impeded the incoming spear-point, and now his body dragged it down as he dropped toward the desert sand. Another Moslem cavalryman was charging in now, swinging his curved saber, taking advantage of Sir Robert's sagging lance. There was nothing else to do but drop the lance and draw his heavy broadsword. His hand grasped it, and it came singing from its scabbard. The Egyptian's curved sword clanged against Sir Robert's helm, setting his head ringing. In return, the knight's broadsword came about in a sweeping arc, and the Egyptian's horse rode on with the rider's headless body. Behind him, Sir Robert heard further cries of "St. George and England!" The Hospitallers, taking heart at the charge, were going in! Behind them came the Count of Champagne, the Earl of Leister, and the Bishop of Beauvais, who carried a great warhammer in order that he might not break Church Law by shedding blood. Sir Robert's own sword rose and fell, cutting and hacking at the enemy. He himself felt a dreamlike detachment, as though he were watching the battle rather than participating in it. But he could see that the Moslems were falling back before the Christian onslaught. And then, quite suddenly, there seemed to be no foeman to swing at. Breathing heavily, Sir Robert sheathed his broadsword. Beside him, Sir Gaeton did the same, saying: "It will be a few minutes before they can regroup, sir knight. We may have routed them completely." "Aye. But King Richard will not approve of my breaking ranks and disobeying orders. I may win the battle and lose my head in the end." "This is no time to worry about the future," said the Gascon. "Rest for a moment and relax, that you may be the stronger later. Here—have an Old Kings ." He had a pack of cigarettes in his gauntleted hand, which he profferred to Sir Robert. There were three cigarettes protruding from it, one slightly farther than the others. Sir Robert's hand reached out and took that one. "Thanks. When the going gets rough, I really enjoy an Old Kings ." He put one end of the cigarette in his mouth and lit the other from the lighter in Sir Gaeton's hand. "Yes, sir," said Sir Gaeton, after lighting his own cigarette, " Old Kings are the greatest. They give a man real, deep-down smoking pleasure." "There's no doubt about it, Old Kings are a man's cigarette." Sir Robert could feel the soothing smoke in his lungs as he inhaled deeply. "That's great. When I want a cigarette, I don't want just any cigarette." "Nor I," agreed the Gascon. " Old Kings is the only real cigarette when you're doing a real man's work." "That's for sure." Sir Robert watched a smoke ring expand in the air. There was a sudden clash of arms off to their left. Sir Robert dropped his cigarette to the ground. "The trouble is that doing a real he-man's work doesn't always allow you to enjoy the fine, rich tobaccos of Old Kings right down to the very end." "No, but you can always light another later," said the Gascon knight. King Richard, on seeing his army moving suddenly toward the harassed rear, had realized the danger and had charged through the Hospitallers to get into the thick of the fray. Now the Turks were charging down from the hills, hitting—not the flank as he had expected, but the rear! Saladin had expected him to hold fast! Sir Robert and Sir Gaeton spurred their chargers toward the flapping banner of England. The fierce warrior-king of England, his mighty sword in hand, was cutting down Turks as though they were grain-stalks, but still the Saracen horde pressed on. More and more of the terrible Turks came boiling down out of the hills, their glittering scimitars swinging. Sir Robert lost all track of time. There was nothing to do but keep his own great broadsword moving, swinging like some gigantic metronome as he hacked down the Moslem foes. And then, suddenly, he found himself surrounded by the Saracens! He was isolated and alone, cut off from the rest of the Christian forces! He glanced quickly around as he slashed another Saracen from pate to breastbone. Where was Sir Gaeton? Where were the others? Where was the red-and-gold banner of Richard? He caught a glimpse of the fluttering banner far to the rear and started to fall back. And then he saw another knight nearby, a huge man who swung his sparkling blade with power and force. On his steel helm gleamed a golden coronet! Richard! And the great king, in spite of his prowess was outnumbered heavily and would, within seconds, be cut down by the Saracen horde! Without hesitation, Sir Robert plunged his horse toward the surrounded monarch, his great blade cutting a path before him. He saw Richard go down, falling from the saddle of his charger, but by that time his own sword was cutting into the screaming Saracens and they had no time to attempt any further mischief to the King. They had their hands full with Sir Robert de Bouain. He did not know how long he fought there, holding his charger motionless over the inert body of the fallen king, hewing down the screaming enemy, but presently he heard the familiar cry of "For St. George and for England" behind him. The Norman and English troops were charging in, bringing with them the banner of England! And then Richard was on his feet, cleaving the air about him with his own broadsword. Its bright edge, besmeared with Saracen blood, was biting viciously into the foe. The Turks began to fall back. Within seconds, the Christian knights were boiling around the embattled pair, forcing the Turks into retreat. And for the second time, Sir Robert found himself with no one to fight. And then a voice was saying: "You have done well this day, sir knight. Richard Plantagenet will not forget." Sir Robert turned in his saddle to face the smiling king. "My lord king, be assured that I would never forget my loyalty to my sovereign and liege lord. My sword and my life are yours whenever you call." King Richard's gauntleted hand grasped his own. "If it please God, I shall never ask your life. An earldom awaits you when we return to England, sir knight." And then the king mounted his horse and was running full gallop after the retreating Saracens. Robert took off his helmet. He blinked for a second to adjust his eyes to the relative dimness of the studio. After the brightness of the desert that the televicarion helmet had projected into his eyes, the studio seemed strangely cavelike. "How'd you like it, Bob?" asked one of the two producers of the show. Robert Bowen nodded briskly and patted the televike helmet. "It was O.K.," he said. "Good show. A little talky at the beginning, and it needs a better fade-out, but the action scenes were fine. The sponsor ought to like it—for a while, at least." "What do you mean, 'for a while'?" Robert Bowen sighed. "If this thing goes on the air the way it is, he'll lose sales." "Why? Commercial not good enough?" " Too good! Man, I've smoked Old Kings , and, believe me, the real thing never tasted as good as that cigarette did in the commercial!"

He has yet to declare his allegiance to King Richard or Saladin

He is aiding Saladin's men by providing them with equipment

He abandoned the battlefield and left his soldiers to fight his battle

He is refusing to send additional French soldiers to the battlefield

23960_BH9IVT53_6

We can assume that Saladin's army represents which group?

... After a Few Words ... by Seaton McKettrig Illustrated by Summer This is a science-fiction story. History is a science; the other part is, as all Americans know, the most fictional field we have today. He settled himself comfortably in his seat, and carefully put the helmet on, pulling it down firmly until it was properly seated. For a moment, he could see nothing. Then his hand moved up and, with a flick of the wrist, lifted the visor. Ahead of him, in serried array, with lances erect and pennons flying, was the forward part of the column. Far ahead, he knew, were the Knights Templars, who had taken the advance. Behind the Templars rode the mailed knights of Brittany and Anjou. These were followed by King Guy of Jerusalem and the host of Poitou. He himself, Sir Robert de Bouain, was riding with the Norman and English troops, just behind the men of Poitou. Sir Robert turned slightly in his saddle. To his right, he could see the brilliant red-and-gold banner of the lion-hearted Richard of England— gules, in pale three lions passant guardant or . Behind the standard-bearer, his great war horse moving with a steady, measured pace, his coronet of gold on his steel helm gleaming in the glaring desert sun, the lions of England on his firm-held shield, was the King himself. Further behind, the Knights Hospitallers protected the rear, guarding the column of the hosts of Christendom from harassment by the Bedouins. "By our Lady!" came a voice from his left. "Three days out from Acre, and the accursed Saracens still elude us." Sir Robert de Bouain twisted again in his saddle to look at the knight riding alongside him. Sir Gaeton de l'Arc-Tombé sat tall and straight in his saddle, his visor up, his blue eyes narrowed against the glare of the sun. Sir Robert's lips formed a smile. "They are not far off, Sir Gaeton. They have been following us. As we march parallel to the seacoast, so they have been marching with us in those hills to the east." "Like the jackals they are," said Sir Gaeton. "They assail us from the rear, and they set up traps in our path ahead. Our spies tell us that the Turks lie ahead of us in countless numbers. And yet, they fear to face us in open battle." "Is it fear, or are they merely gathering their forces?" "Both," said Sir Gaeton flatly. "They fear us, else they would not dally to amass so fearsome a force. If, as our informers tell us, there are uncounted Turks to the fore, and if, as we are aware, our rear is being dogged by the Bedouin and the black horsemen of Egypt, it would seem that Saladin has at hand more than enough to overcome us, were they all truly Christian knights." "Give them time. We must wait for their attack, sir knight. It were foolhardy to attempt to seek them in their own hills, and yet they must stop us. They will attack before we reach Jerusalem, fear not." "We of Gascony fear no heathen Musselman," Sir Gaeton growled. "It's this Hellish heat that is driving me mad." He pointed toward the eastern hills. "The sun is yet low, and already the heat is unbearable." Sir Robert heard his own laugh echo hollowly within his helmet. "Perhaps 'twere better to be mad when the assault comes. Madmen fight better than men of cooler blood." He knew that the others were baking inside their heavy armor, although he himself was not too uncomfortable. Sir Gaeton looked at him with a smile that held both irony and respect. "In truth, sir knight, it is apparent that you fear neither men nor heat. Nor is your own blood too cool. True, I ride with your Normans and your English and your King Richard of the Lion's Heart, but I am a Gascon, and have sworn no fealty to him. But to side with the Duke of Burgundy against King Richard—" He gave a short, barking laugh. "I fear no man," he went on, "but if I had to fear one, it would be Richard of England." Sir Robert's voice came like a sword: steely, flat, cold, and sharp. "My lord the King spoke in haste. He has reason to be bitter against Philip of France, as do we all. Philip has deserted the field. He has returned to France in haste, leaving the rest of us to fight the Saracen for the Holy Land leaving only the contingent of his vassal the Duke of Burgundy to remain with us." "Richard of England has never been on the best of terms with Philip Augustus," said Sir Gaeton. "No, and with good cause. But he allowed his anger against Philip to color his judgment when he spoke harshly against the Duke of Burgundy. The Duke is no coward, and Richard Plantagenet well knows it. As I said, he spoke in haste." "And you intervened," said Sir Gaeton. "It was my duty." Sir Robert's voice was stubborn. "Could we have permitted a quarrel to develop between the two finest knights and warleaders in Christendom at this crucial point? The desertion of Philip of France has cost us dearly. Could we permit the desertion of Burgundy, too?" "You did what must be done in honor," the Gascon conceded, "but you have not gained the love of Richard by doing so." Sir Robert felt his jaw set firmly. "My king knows I am loyal." Sir Gaeton said nothing more, but there was a look in his eyes that showed that he felt that Richard of England might even doubt the loyalty of Sir Robert de Bouain. Sir Robert rode on in silence, feeling the movement of the horse beneath him. There was a sudden sound to the rear. Like a wash of the tide from the sea came the sound of Saracen war cries and the clash of steel on steel mingled with the sounds of horses in agony and anger. Sir Robert turned his horse to look. The Negro troops of Saladin's Egyptian contingent were thundering down upon the rear! They clashed with the Hospitallers, slamming in like a rain of heavy stones, too close in for the use of bows. There was only the sword against armor, like the sound of a thousand hammers against a thousand anvils. "Stand fast! Stand fast! Hold them off!" It was the voice of King Richard, sounding like a clarion over the din of battle. Sir Robert felt his horse move, as though it were urging him on toward the battle, but his hand held to the reins, keeping the great charger in check. The King had said "Stand fast!" and this was no time to disobey the orders of Richard. The Saracen troops were coming in from the rear, and the Hospitallers were taking the brunt of the charge. They fought like madmen, but they were slowly being forced back. The Master of the Hospitallers rode to the rear, to the King's standard, which hardly moved in the still desert air, now that the column had stopped moving. The voice of the Duke of Burgundy came to Sir Robert's ears. "Stand fast. The King bids you all to stand fast," said the duke, his voice fading as he rode on up the column toward the knights of Poitou and the Knights Templars. The Master of the Hospitallers was speaking in a low, urgent voice to the King: "My lord, we are pressed on by the enemy and in danger of eternal infamy. We are losing our horses, one after the other!" "Good Master," said Richard, "it is you who must sustain their attack. No one can be everywhere at once." The Master of the Hospitallers nodded curtly and charged back into the fray. The King turned to Sir Baldwin de Carreo, who sat ahorse nearby, and pointed toward the eastern hills. "They will come from there, hitting us in the flank; we cannot afford to amass a rearward charge. To do so would be to fall directly into the hands of the Saracen." A voice very close to Sir Robert said: "Richard is right. If we go to the aid of the Hospitallers, we will expose the column to a flank attack." It was Sir Gaeton. "My lord the King," Sir Robert heard his voice say, "is right in all but one thing. If we allow the Egyptians to take us from the rear, there will be no need for Saladin and his Turks to come down on our flank. And the Hospitallers cannot hold for long at this rate. A charge at full gallop would break the Egyptian line and give the Hospitallers breathing time. Are you with me?" "Against the orders of the King?" "The King cannot see everything! There are times when a man must use his own judgment! You said you were afraid of no man. Are you with me?" After a moment's hesitation, Sir Gaeton couched his lance. "I'm with you, sir knight! Live or die, I follow! Strike and strike hard!" "Forward then!" Sir Robert heard himself shouting. "Forward for St. George and for England!" "St. George and England!" the Gascon echoed. Two great war horses began to move ponderously forward toward the battle lines, gaining momentum as they went. Moving in unison, the two knights, their horses now at a fast trot, lowered their lances, picking their Saracen targets with care. Larger and larger loomed the Egyptian cavalrymen as the horses changed pace to a thundering gallop. The Egyptians tried to dodge, as they saw, too late, the approach of the Christian knights. Sir Robert felt the shock against himself and his horse as the steel tip of the long ash lance struck the Saracen horseman in the chest. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw that Sir Gaeton, too, had scored. The Saracen, impaled on Sir Robert's lance, shot from the saddle as he died. His lighter armor had hardly impeded the incoming spear-point, and now his body dragged it down as he dropped toward the desert sand. Another Moslem cavalryman was charging in now, swinging his curved saber, taking advantage of Sir Robert's sagging lance. There was nothing else to do but drop the lance and draw his heavy broadsword. His hand grasped it, and it came singing from its scabbard. The Egyptian's curved sword clanged against Sir Robert's helm, setting his head ringing. In return, the knight's broadsword came about in a sweeping arc, and the Egyptian's horse rode on with the rider's headless body. Behind him, Sir Robert heard further cries of "St. George and England!" The Hospitallers, taking heart at the charge, were going in! Behind them came the Count of Champagne, the Earl of Leister, and the Bishop of Beauvais, who carried a great warhammer in order that he might not break Church Law by shedding blood. Sir Robert's own sword rose and fell, cutting and hacking at the enemy. He himself felt a dreamlike detachment, as though he were watching the battle rather than participating in it. But he could see that the Moslems were falling back before the Christian onslaught. And then, quite suddenly, there seemed to be no foeman to swing at. Breathing heavily, Sir Robert sheathed his broadsword. Beside him, Sir Gaeton did the same, saying: "It will be a few minutes before they can regroup, sir knight. We may have routed them completely." "Aye. But King Richard will not approve of my breaking ranks and disobeying orders. I may win the battle and lose my head in the end." "This is no time to worry about the future," said the Gascon. "Rest for a moment and relax, that you may be the stronger later. Here—have an Old Kings ." He had a pack of cigarettes in his gauntleted hand, which he profferred to Sir Robert. There were three cigarettes protruding from it, one slightly farther than the others. Sir Robert's hand reached out and took that one. "Thanks. When the going gets rough, I really enjoy an Old Kings ." He put one end of the cigarette in his mouth and lit the other from the lighter in Sir Gaeton's hand. "Yes, sir," said Sir Gaeton, after lighting his own cigarette, " Old Kings are the greatest. They give a man real, deep-down smoking pleasure." "There's no doubt about it, Old Kings are a man's cigarette." Sir Robert could feel the soothing smoke in his lungs as he inhaled deeply. "That's great. When I want a cigarette, I don't want just any cigarette." "Nor I," agreed the Gascon. " Old Kings is the only real cigarette when you're doing a real man's work." "That's for sure." Sir Robert watched a smoke ring expand in the air. There was a sudden clash of arms off to their left. Sir Robert dropped his cigarette to the ground. "The trouble is that doing a real he-man's work doesn't always allow you to enjoy the fine, rich tobaccos of Old Kings right down to the very end." "No, but you can always light another later," said the Gascon knight. King Richard, on seeing his army moving suddenly toward the harassed rear, had realized the danger and had charged through the Hospitallers to get into the thick of the fray. Now the Turks were charging down from the hills, hitting—not the flank as he had expected, but the rear! Saladin had expected him to hold fast! Sir Robert and Sir Gaeton spurred their chargers toward the flapping banner of England. The fierce warrior-king of England, his mighty sword in hand, was cutting down Turks as though they were grain-stalks, but still the Saracen horde pressed on. More and more of the terrible Turks came boiling down out of the hills, their glittering scimitars swinging. Sir Robert lost all track of time. There was nothing to do but keep his own great broadsword moving, swinging like some gigantic metronome as he hacked down the Moslem foes. And then, suddenly, he found himself surrounded by the Saracens! He was isolated and alone, cut off from the rest of the Christian forces! He glanced quickly around as he slashed another Saracen from pate to breastbone. Where was Sir Gaeton? Where were the others? Where was the red-and-gold banner of Richard? He caught a glimpse of the fluttering banner far to the rear and started to fall back. And then he saw another knight nearby, a huge man who swung his sparkling blade with power and force. On his steel helm gleamed a golden coronet! Richard! And the great king, in spite of his prowess was outnumbered heavily and would, within seconds, be cut down by the Saracen horde! Without hesitation, Sir Robert plunged his horse toward the surrounded monarch, his great blade cutting a path before him. He saw Richard go down, falling from the saddle of his charger, but by that time his own sword was cutting into the screaming Saracens and they had no time to attempt any further mischief to the King. They had their hands full with Sir Robert de Bouain. He did not know how long he fought there, holding his charger motionless over the inert body of the fallen king, hewing down the screaming enemy, but presently he heard the familiar cry of "For St. George and for England" behind him. The Norman and English troops were charging in, bringing with them the banner of England! And then Richard was on his feet, cleaving the air about him with his own broadsword. Its bright edge, besmeared with Saracen blood, was biting viciously into the foe. The Turks began to fall back. Within seconds, the Christian knights were boiling around the embattled pair, forcing the Turks into retreat. And for the second time, Sir Robert found himself with no one to fight. And then a voice was saying: "You have done well this day, sir knight. Richard Plantagenet will not forget." Sir Robert turned in his saddle to face the smiling king. "My lord king, be assured that I would never forget my loyalty to my sovereign and liege lord. My sword and my life are yours whenever you call." King Richard's gauntleted hand grasped his own. "If it please God, I shall never ask your life. An earldom awaits you when we return to England, sir knight." And then the king mounted his horse and was running full gallop after the retreating Saracens. Robert took off his helmet. He blinked for a second to adjust his eyes to the relative dimness of the studio. After the brightness of the desert that the televicarion helmet had projected into his eyes, the studio seemed strangely cavelike. "How'd you like it, Bob?" asked one of the two producers of the show. Robert Bowen nodded briskly and patted the televike helmet. "It was O.K.," he said. "Good show. A little talky at the beginning, and it needs a better fade-out, but the action scenes were fine. The sponsor ought to like it—for a while, at least." "What do you mean, 'for a while'?" Robert Bowen sighed. "If this thing goes on the air the way it is, he'll lose sales." "Why? Commercial not good enough?" " Too good! Man, I've smoked Old Kings , and, believe me, the real thing never tasted as good as that cigarette did in the commercial!"

Mercenaries

Muslims

Africans

Christians

23960_BH9IVT53_7

The main source of tension in the story is between:

... After a Few Words ... by Seaton McKettrig Illustrated by Summer This is a science-fiction story. History is a science; the other part is, as all Americans know, the most fictional field we have today. He settled himself comfortably in his seat, and carefully put the helmet on, pulling it down firmly until it was properly seated. For a moment, he could see nothing. Then his hand moved up and, with a flick of the wrist, lifted the visor. Ahead of him, in serried array, with lances erect and pennons flying, was the forward part of the column. Far ahead, he knew, were the Knights Templars, who had taken the advance. Behind the Templars rode the mailed knights of Brittany and Anjou. These were followed by King Guy of Jerusalem and the host of Poitou. He himself, Sir Robert de Bouain, was riding with the Norman and English troops, just behind the men of Poitou. Sir Robert turned slightly in his saddle. To his right, he could see the brilliant red-and-gold banner of the lion-hearted Richard of England— gules, in pale three lions passant guardant or . Behind the standard-bearer, his great war horse moving with a steady, measured pace, his coronet of gold on his steel helm gleaming in the glaring desert sun, the lions of England on his firm-held shield, was the King himself. Further behind, the Knights Hospitallers protected the rear, guarding the column of the hosts of Christendom from harassment by the Bedouins. "By our Lady!" came a voice from his left. "Three days out from Acre, and the accursed Saracens still elude us." Sir Robert de Bouain twisted again in his saddle to look at the knight riding alongside him. Sir Gaeton de l'Arc-Tombé sat tall and straight in his saddle, his visor up, his blue eyes narrowed against the glare of the sun. Sir Robert's lips formed a smile. "They are not far off, Sir Gaeton. They have been following us. As we march parallel to the seacoast, so they have been marching with us in those hills to the east." "Like the jackals they are," said Sir Gaeton. "They assail us from the rear, and they set up traps in our path ahead. Our spies tell us that the Turks lie ahead of us in countless numbers. And yet, they fear to face us in open battle." "Is it fear, or are they merely gathering their forces?" "Both," said Sir Gaeton flatly. "They fear us, else they would not dally to amass so fearsome a force. If, as our informers tell us, there are uncounted Turks to the fore, and if, as we are aware, our rear is being dogged by the Bedouin and the black horsemen of Egypt, it would seem that Saladin has at hand more than enough to overcome us, were they all truly Christian knights." "Give them time. We must wait for their attack, sir knight. It were foolhardy to attempt to seek them in their own hills, and yet they must stop us. They will attack before we reach Jerusalem, fear not." "We of Gascony fear no heathen Musselman," Sir Gaeton growled. "It's this Hellish heat that is driving me mad." He pointed toward the eastern hills. "The sun is yet low, and already the heat is unbearable." Sir Robert heard his own laugh echo hollowly within his helmet. "Perhaps 'twere better to be mad when the assault comes. Madmen fight better than men of cooler blood." He knew that the others were baking inside their heavy armor, although he himself was not too uncomfortable. Sir Gaeton looked at him with a smile that held both irony and respect. "In truth, sir knight, it is apparent that you fear neither men nor heat. Nor is your own blood too cool. True, I ride with your Normans and your English and your King Richard of the Lion's Heart, but I am a Gascon, and have sworn no fealty to him. But to side with the Duke of Burgundy against King Richard—" He gave a short, barking laugh. "I fear no man," he went on, "but if I had to fear one, it would be Richard of England." Sir Robert's voice came like a sword: steely, flat, cold, and sharp. "My lord the King spoke in haste. He has reason to be bitter against Philip of France, as do we all. Philip has deserted the field. He has returned to France in haste, leaving the rest of us to fight the Saracen for the Holy Land leaving only the contingent of his vassal the Duke of Burgundy to remain with us." "Richard of England has never been on the best of terms with Philip Augustus," said Sir Gaeton. "No, and with good cause. But he allowed his anger against Philip to color his judgment when he spoke harshly against the Duke of Burgundy. The Duke is no coward, and Richard Plantagenet well knows it. As I said, he spoke in haste." "And you intervened," said Sir Gaeton. "It was my duty." Sir Robert's voice was stubborn. "Could we have permitted a quarrel to develop between the two finest knights and warleaders in Christendom at this crucial point? The desertion of Philip of France has cost us dearly. Could we permit the desertion of Burgundy, too?" "You did what must be done in honor," the Gascon conceded, "but you have not gained the love of Richard by doing so." Sir Robert felt his jaw set firmly. "My king knows I am loyal." Sir Gaeton said nothing more, but there was a look in his eyes that showed that he felt that Richard of England might even doubt the loyalty of Sir Robert de Bouain. Sir Robert rode on in silence, feeling the movement of the horse beneath him. There was a sudden sound to the rear. Like a wash of the tide from the sea came the sound of Saracen war cries and the clash of steel on steel mingled with the sounds of horses in agony and anger. Sir Robert turned his horse to look. The Negro troops of Saladin's Egyptian contingent were thundering down upon the rear! They clashed with the Hospitallers, slamming in like a rain of heavy stones, too close in for the use of bows. There was only the sword against armor, like the sound of a thousand hammers against a thousand anvils. "Stand fast! Stand fast! Hold them off!" It was the voice of King Richard, sounding like a clarion over the din of battle. Sir Robert felt his horse move, as though it were urging him on toward the battle, but his hand held to the reins, keeping the great charger in check. The King had said "Stand fast!" and this was no time to disobey the orders of Richard. The Saracen troops were coming in from the rear, and the Hospitallers were taking the brunt of the charge. They fought like madmen, but they were slowly being forced back. The Master of the Hospitallers rode to the rear, to the King's standard, which hardly moved in the still desert air, now that the column had stopped moving. The voice of the Duke of Burgundy came to Sir Robert's ears. "Stand fast. The King bids you all to stand fast," said the duke, his voice fading as he rode on up the column toward the knights of Poitou and the Knights Templars. The Master of the Hospitallers was speaking in a low, urgent voice to the King: "My lord, we are pressed on by the enemy and in danger of eternal infamy. We are losing our horses, one after the other!" "Good Master," said Richard, "it is you who must sustain their attack. No one can be everywhere at once." The Master of the Hospitallers nodded curtly and charged back into the fray. The King turned to Sir Baldwin de Carreo, who sat ahorse nearby, and pointed toward the eastern hills. "They will come from there, hitting us in the flank; we cannot afford to amass a rearward charge. To do so would be to fall directly into the hands of the Saracen." A voice very close to Sir Robert said: "Richard is right. If we go to the aid of the Hospitallers, we will expose the column to a flank attack." It was Sir Gaeton. "My lord the King," Sir Robert heard his voice say, "is right in all but one thing. If we allow the Egyptians to take us from the rear, there will be no need for Saladin and his Turks to come down on our flank. And the Hospitallers cannot hold for long at this rate. A charge at full gallop would break the Egyptian line and give the Hospitallers breathing time. Are you with me?" "Against the orders of the King?" "The King cannot see everything! There are times when a man must use his own judgment! You said you were afraid of no man. Are you with me?" After a moment's hesitation, Sir Gaeton couched his lance. "I'm with you, sir knight! Live or die, I follow! Strike and strike hard!" "Forward then!" Sir Robert heard himself shouting. "Forward for St. George and for England!" "St. George and England!" the Gascon echoed. Two great war horses began to move ponderously forward toward the battle lines, gaining momentum as they went. Moving in unison, the two knights, their horses now at a fast trot, lowered their lances, picking their Saracen targets with care. Larger and larger loomed the Egyptian cavalrymen as the horses changed pace to a thundering gallop. The Egyptians tried to dodge, as they saw, too late, the approach of the Christian knights. Sir Robert felt the shock against himself and his horse as the steel tip of the long ash lance struck the Saracen horseman in the chest. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw that Sir Gaeton, too, had scored. The Saracen, impaled on Sir Robert's lance, shot from the saddle as he died. His lighter armor had hardly impeded the incoming spear-point, and now his body dragged it down as he dropped toward the desert sand. Another Moslem cavalryman was charging in now, swinging his curved saber, taking advantage of Sir Robert's sagging lance. There was nothing else to do but drop the lance and draw his heavy broadsword. His hand grasped it, and it came singing from its scabbard. The Egyptian's curved sword clanged against Sir Robert's helm, setting his head ringing. In return, the knight's broadsword came about in a sweeping arc, and the Egyptian's horse rode on with the rider's headless body. Behind him, Sir Robert heard further cries of "St. George and England!" The Hospitallers, taking heart at the charge, were going in! Behind them came the Count of Champagne, the Earl of Leister, and the Bishop of Beauvais, who carried a great warhammer in order that he might not break Church Law by shedding blood. Sir Robert's own sword rose and fell, cutting and hacking at the enemy. He himself felt a dreamlike detachment, as though he were watching the battle rather than participating in it. But he could see that the Moslems were falling back before the Christian onslaught. And then, quite suddenly, there seemed to be no foeman to swing at. Breathing heavily, Sir Robert sheathed his broadsword. Beside him, Sir Gaeton did the same, saying: "It will be a few minutes before they can regroup, sir knight. We may have routed them completely." "Aye. But King Richard will not approve of my breaking ranks and disobeying orders. I may win the battle and lose my head in the end." "This is no time to worry about the future," said the Gascon. "Rest for a moment and relax, that you may be the stronger later. Here—have an Old Kings ." He had a pack of cigarettes in his gauntleted hand, which he profferred to Sir Robert. There were three cigarettes protruding from it, one slightly farther than the others. Sir Robert's hand reached out and took that one. "Thanks. When the going gets rough, I really enjoy an Old Kings ." He put one end of the cigarette in his mouth and lit the other from the lighter in Sir Gaeton's hand. "Yes, sir," said Sir Gaeton, after lighting his own cigarette, " Old Kings are the greatest. They give a man real, deep-down smoking pleasure." "There's no doubt about it, Old Kings are a man's cigarette." Sir Robert could feel the soothing smoke in his lungs as he inhaled deeply. "That's great. When I want a cigarette, I don't want just any cigarette." "Nor I," agreed the Gascon. " Old Kings is the only real cigarette when you're doing a real man's work." "That's for sure." Sir Robert watched a smoke ring expand in the air. There was a sudden clash of arms off to their left. Sir Robert dropped his cigarette to the ground. "The trouble is that doing a real he-man's work doesn't always allow you to enjoy the fine, rich tobaccos of Old Kings right down to the very end." "No, but you can always light another later," said the Gascon knight. King Richard, on seeing his army moving suddenly toward the harassed rear, had realized the danger and had charged through the Hospitallers to get into the thick of the fray. Now the Turks were charging down from the hills, hitting—not the flank as he had expected, but the rear! Saladin had expected him to hold fast! Sir Robert and Sir Gaeton spurred their chargers toward the flapping banner of England. The fierce warrior-king of England, his mighty sword in hand, was cutting down Turks as though they were grain-stalks, but still the Saracen horde pressed on. More and more of the terrible Turks came boiling down out of the hills, their glittering scimitars swinging. Sir Robert lost all track of time. There was nothing to do but keep his own great broadsword moving, swinging like some gigantic metronome as he hacked down the Moslem foes. And then, suddenly, he found himself surrounded by the Saracens! He was isolated and alone, cut off from the rest of the Christian forces! He glanced quickly around as he slashed another Saracen from pate to breastbone. Where was Sir Gaeton? Where were the others? Where was the red-and-gold banner of Richard? He caught a glimpse of the fluttering banner far to the rear and started to fall back. And then he saw another knight nearby, a huge man who swung his sparkling blade with power and force. On his steel helm gleamed a golden coronet! Richard! And the great king, in spite of his prowess was outnumbered heavily and would, within seconds, be cut down by the Saracen horde! Without hesitation, Sir Robert plunged his horse toward the surrounded monarch, his great blade cutting a path before him. He saw Richard go down, falling from the saddle of his charger, but by that time his own sword was cutting into the screaming Saracens and they had no time to attempt any further mischief to the King. They had their hands full with Sir Robert de Bouain. He did not know how long he fought there, holding his charger motionless over the inert body of the fallen king, hewing down the screaming enemy, but presently he heard the familiar cry of "For St. George and for England" behind him. The Norman and English troops were charging in, bringing with them the banner of England! And then Richard was on his feet, cleaving the air about him with his own broadsword. Its bright edge, besmeared with Saracen blood, was biting viciously into the foe. The Turks began to fall back. Within seconds, the Christian knights were boiling around the embattled pair, forcing the Turks into retreat. And for the second time, Sir Robert found himself with no one to fight. And then a voice was saying: "You have done well this day, sir knight. Richard Plantagenet will not forget." Sir Robert turned in his saddle to face the smiling king. "My lord king, be assured that I would never forget my loyalty to my sovereign and liege lord. My sword and my life are yours whenever you call." King Richard's gauntleted hand grasped his own. "If it please God, I shall never ask your life. An earldom awaits you when we return to England, sir knight." And then the king mounted his horse and was running full gallop after the retreating Saracens. Robert took off his helmet. He blinked for a second to adjust his eyes to the relative dimness of the studio. After the brightness of the desert that the televicarion helmet had projected into his eyes, the studio seemed strangely cavelike. "How'd you like it, Bob?" asked one of the two producers of the show. Robert Bowen nodded briskly and patted the televike helmet. "It was O.K.," he said. "Good show. A little talky at the beginning, and it needs a better fade-out, but the action scenes were fine. The sponsor ought to like it—for a while, at least." "What do you mean, 'for a while'?" Robert Bowen sighed. "If this thing goes on the air the way it is, he'll lose sales." "Why? Commercial not good enough?" " Too good! Man, I've smoked Old Kings , and, believe me, the real thing never tasted as good as that cigarette did in the commercial!"

The English army and the French mercenaries

The religious factions from Christianity and Islam

Allegiance to authority and breaking from authority

An outward demeanor of strength and interior reality of fear and doubt

23960_BH9IVT53_8

What is the main risk of Sir Robert's command to charge into Saladin's frontline?

... After a Few Words ... by Seaton McKettrig Illustrated by Summer This is a science-fiction story. History is a science; the other part is, as all Americans know, the most fictional field we have today. He settled himself comfortably in his seat, and carefully put the helmet on, pulling it down firmly until it was properly seated. For a moment, he could see nothing. Then his hand moved up and, with a flick of the wrist, lifted the visor. Ahead of him, in serried array, with lances erect and pennons flying, was the forward part of the column. Far ahead, he knew, were the Knights Templars, who had taken the advance. Behind the Templars rode the mailed knights of Brittany and Anjou. These were followed by King Guy of Jerusalem and the host of Poitou. He himself, Sir Robert de Bouain, was riding with the Norman and English troops, just behind the men of Poitou. Sir Robert turned slightly in his saddle. To his right, he could see the brilliant red-and-gold banner of the lion-hearted Richard of England— gules, in pale three lions passant guardant or . Behind the standard-bearer, his great war horse moving with a steady, measured pace, his coronet of gold on his steel helm gleaming in the glaring desert sun, the lions of England on his firm-held shield, was the King himself. Further behind, the Knights Hospitallers protected the rear, guarding the column of the hosts of Christendom from harassment by the Bedouins. "By our Lady!" came a voice from his left. "Three days out from Acre, and the accursed Saracens still elude us." Sir Robert de Bouain twisted again in his saddle to look at the knight riding alongside him. Sir Gaeton de l'Arc-Tombé sat tall and straight in his saddle, his visor up, his blue eyes narrowed against the glare of the sun. Sir Robert's lips formed a smile. "They are not far off, Sir Gaeton. They have been following us. As we march parallel to the seacoast, so they have been marching with us in those hills to the east." "Like the jackals they are," said Sir Gaeton. "They assail us from the rear, and they set up traps in our path ahead. Our spies tell us that the Turks lie ahead of us in countless numbers. And yet, they fear to face us in open battle." "Is it fear, or are they merely gathering their forces?" "Both," said Sir Gaeton flatly. "They fear us, else they would not dally to amass so fearsome a force. If, as our informers tell us, there are uncounted Turks to the fore, and if, as we are aware, our rear is being dogged by the Bedouin and the black horsemen of Egypt, it would seem that Saladin has at hand more than enough to overcome us, were they all truly Christian knights." "Give them time. We must wait for their attack, sir knight. It were foolhardy to attempt to seek them in their own hills, and yet they must stop us. They will attack before we reach Jerusalem, fear not." "We of Gascony fear no heathen Musselman," Sir Gaeton growled. "It's this Hellish heat that is driving me mad." He pointed toward the eastern hills. "The sun is yet low, and already the heat is unbearable." Sir Robert heard his own laugh echo hollowly within his helmet. "Perhaps 'twere better to be mad when the assault comes. Madmen fight better than men of cooler blood." He knew that the others were baking inside their heavy armor, although he himself was not too uncomfortable. Sir Gaeton looked at him with a smile that held both irony and respect. "In truth, sir knight, it is apparent that you fear neither men nor heat. Nor is your own blood too cool. True, I ride with your Normans and your English and your King Richard of the Lion's Heart, but I am a Gascon, and have sworn no fealty to him. But to side with the Duke of Burgundy against King Richard—" He gave a short, barking laugh. "I fear no man," he went on, "but if I had to fear one, it would be Richard of England." Sir Robert's voice came like a sword: steely, flat, cold, and sharp. "My lord the King spoke in haste. He has reason to be bitter against Philip of France, as do we all. Philip has deserted the field. He has returned to France in haste, leaving the rest of us to fight the Saracen for the Holy Land leaving only the contingent of his vassal the Duke of Burgundy to remain with us." "Richard of England has never been on the best of terms with Philip Augustus," said Sir Gaeton. "No, and with good cause. But he allowed his anger against Philip to color his judgment when he spoke harshly against the Duke of Burgundy. The Duke is no coward, and Richard Plantagenet well knows it. As I said, he spoke in haste." "And you intervened," said Sir Gaeton. "It was my duty." Sir Robert's voice was stubborn. "Could we have permitted a quarrel to develop between the two finest knights and warleaders in Christendom at this crucial point? The desertion of Philip of France has cost us dearly. Could we permit the desertion of Burgundy, too?" "You did what must be done in honor," the Gascon conceded, "but you have not gained the love of Richard by doing so." Sir Robert felt his jaw set firmly. "My king knows I am loyal." Sir Gaeton said nothing more, but there was a look in his eyes that showed that he felt that Richard of England might even doubt the loyalty of Sir Robert de Bouain. Sir Robert rode on in silence, feeling the movement of the horse beneath him. There was a sudden sound to the rear. Like a wash of the tide from the sea came the sound of Saracen war cries and the clash of steel on steel mingled with the sounds of horses in agony and anger. Sir Robert turned his horse to look. The Negro troops of Saladin's Egyptian contingent were thundering down upon the rear! They clashed with the Hospitallers, slamming in like a rain of heavy stones, too close in for the use of bows. There was only the sword against armor, like the sound of a thousand hammers against a thousand anvils. "Stand fast! Stand fast! Hold them off!" It was the voice of King Richard, sounding like a clarion over the din of battle. Sir Robert felt his horse move, as though it were urging him on toward the battle, but his hand held to the reins, keeping the great charger in check. The King had said "Stand fast!" and this was no time to disobey the orders of Richard. The Saracen troops were coming in from the rear, and the Hospitallers were taking the brunt of the charge. They fought like madmen, but they were slowly being forced back. The Master of the Hospitallers rode to the rear, to the King's standard, which hardly moved in the still desert air, now that the column had stopped moving. The voice of the Duke of Burgundy came to Sir Robert's ears. "Stand fast. The King bids you all to stand fast," said the duke, his voice fading as he rode on up the column toward the knights of Poitou and the Knights Templars. The Master of the Hospitallers was speaking in a low, urgent voice to the King: "My lord, we are pressed on by the enemy and in danger of eternal infamy. We are losing our horses, one after the other!" "Good Master," said Richard, "it is you who must sustain their attack. No one can be everywhere at once." The Master of the Hospitallers nodded curtly and charged back into the fray. The King turned to Sir Baldwin de Carreo, who sat ahorse nearby, and pointed toward the eastern hills. "They will come from there, hitting us in the flank; we cannot afford to amass a rearward charge. To do so would be to fall directly into the hands of the Saracen." A voice very close to Sir Robert said: "Richard is right. If we go to the aid of the Hospitallers, we will expose the column to a flank attack." It was Sir Gaeton. "My lord the King," Sir Robert heard his voice say, "is right in all but one thing. If we allow the Egyptians to take us from the rear, there will be no need for Saladin and his Turks to come down on our flank. And the Hospitallers cannot hold for long at this rate. A charge at full gallop would break the Egyptian line and give the Hospitallers breathing time. Are you with me?" "Against the orders of the King?" "The King cannot see everything! There are times when a man must use his own judgment! You said you were afraid of no man. Are you with me?" After a moment's hesitation, Sir Gaeton couched his lance. "I'm with you, sir knight! Live or die, I follow! Strike and strike hard!" "Forward then!" Sir Robert heard himself shouting. "Forward for St. George and for England!" "St. George and England!" the Gascon echoed. Two great war horses began to move ponderously forward toward the battle lines, gaining momentum as they went. Moving in unison, the two knights, their horses now at a fast trot, lowered their lances, picking their Saracen targets with care. Larger and larger loomed the Egyptian cavalrymen as the horses changed pace to a thundering gallop. The Egyptians tried to dodge, as they saw, too late, the approach of the Christian knights. Sir Robert felt the shock against himself and his horse as the steel tip of the long ash lance struck the Saracen horseman in the chest. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw that Sir Gaeton, too, had scored. The Saracen, impaled on Sir Robert's lance, shot from the saddle as he died. His lighter armor had hardly impeded the incoming spear-point, and now his body dragged it down as he dropped toward the desert sand. Another Moslem cavalryman was charging in now, swinging his curved saber, taking advantage of Sir Robert's sagging lance. There was nothing else to do but drop the lance and draw his heavy broadsword. His hand grasped it, and it came singing from its scabbard. The Egyptian's curved sword clanged against Sir Robert's helm, setting his head ringing. In return, the knight's broadsword came about in a sweeping arc, and the Egyptian's horse rode on with the rider's headless body. Behind him, Sir Robert heard further cries of "St. George and England!" The Hospitallers, taking heart at the charge, were going in! Behind them came the Count of Champagne, the Earl of Leister, and the Bishop of Beauvais, who carried a great warhammer in order that he might not break Church Law by shedding blood. Sir Robert's own sword rose and fell, cutting and hacking at the enemy. He himself felt a dreamlike detachment, as though he were watching the battle rather than participating in it. But he could see that the Moslems were falling back before the Christian onslaught. And then, quite suddenly, there seemed to be no foeman to swing at. Breathing heavily, Sir Robert sheathed his broadsword. Beside him, Sir Gaeton did the same, saying: "It will be a few minutes before they can regroup, sir knight. We may have routed them completely." "Aye. But King Richard will not approve of my breaking ranks and disobeying orders. I may win the battle and lose my head in the end." "This is no time to worry about the future," said the Gascon. "Rest for a moment and relax, that you may be the stronger later. Here—have an Old Kings ." He had a pack of cigarettes in his gauntleted hand, which he profferred to Sir Robert. There were three cigarettes protruding from it, one slightly farther than the others. Sir Robert's hand reached out and took that one. "Thanks. When the going gets rough, I really enjoy an Old Kings ." He put one end of the cigarette in his mouth and lit the other from the lighter in Sir Gaeton's hand. "Yes, sir," said Sir Gaeton, after lighting his own cigarette, " Old Kings are the greatest. They give a man real, deep-down smoking pleasure." "There's no doubt about it, Old Kings are a man's cigarette." Sir Robert could feel the soothing smoke in his lungs as he inhaled deeply. "That's great. When I want a cigarette, I don't want just any cigarette." "Nor I," agreed the Gascon. " Old Kings is the only real cigarette when you're doing a real man's work." "That's for sure." Sir Robert watched a smoke ring expand in the air. There was a sudden clash of arms off to their left. Sir Robert dropped his cigarette to the ground. "The trouble is that doing a real he-man's work doesn't always allow you to enjoy the fine, rich tobaccos of Old Kings right down to the very end." "No, but you can always light another later," said the Gascon knight. King Richard, on seeing his army moving suddenly toward the harassed rear, had realized the danger and had charged through the Hospitallers to get into the thick of the fray. Now the Turks were charging down from the hills, hitting—not the flank as he had expected, but the rear! Saladin had expected him to hold fast! Sir Robert and Sir Gaeton spurred their chargers toward the flapping banner of England. The fierce warrior-king of England, his mighty sword in hand, was cutting down Turks as though they were grain-stalks, but still the Saracen horde pressed on. More and more of the terrible Turks came boiling down out of the hills, their glittering scimitars swinging. Sir Robert lost all track of time. There was nothing to do but keep his own great broadsword moving, swinging like some gigantic metronome as he hacked down the Moslem foes. And then, suddenly, he found himself surrounded by the Saracens! He was isolated and alone, cut off from the rest of the Christian forces! He glanced quickly around as he slashed another Saracen from pate to breastbone. Where was Sir Gaeton? Where were the others? Where was the red-and-gold banner of Richard? He caught a glimpse of the fluttering banner far to the rear and started to fall back. And then he saw another knight nearby, a huge man who swung his sparkling blade with power and force. On his steel helm gleamed a golden coronet! Richard! And the great king, in spite of his prowess was outnumbered heavily and would, within seconds, be cut down by the Saracen horde! Without hesitation, Sir Robert plunged his horse toward the surrounded monarch, his great blade cutting a path before him. He saw Richard go down, falling from the saddle of his charger, but by that time his own sword was cutting into the screaming Saracens and they had no time to attempt any further mischief to the King. They had their hands full with Sir Robert de Bouain. He did not know how long he fought there, holding his charger motionless over the inert body of the fallen king, hewing down the screaming enemy, but presently he heard the familiar cry of "For St. George and for England" behind him. The Norman and English troops were charging in, bringing with them the banner of England! And then Richard was on his feet, cleaving the air about him with his own broadsword. Its bright edge, besmeared with Saracen blood, was biting viciously into the foe. The Turks began to fall back. Within seconds, the Christian knights were boiling around the embattled pair, forcing the Turks into retreat. And for the second time, Sir Robert found himself with no one to fight. And then a voice was saying: "You have done well this day, sir knight. Richard Plantagenet will not forget." Sir Robert turned in his saddle to face the smiling king. "My lord king, be assured that I would never forget my loyalty to my sovereign and liege lord. My sword and my life are yours whenever you call." King Richard's gauntleted hand grasped his own. "If it please God, I shall never ask your life. An earldom awaits you when we return to England, sir knight." And then the king mounted his horse and was running full gallop after the retreating Saracens. Robert took off his helmet. He blinked for a second to adjust his eyes to the relative dimness of the studio. After the brightness of the desert that the televicarion helmet had projected into his eyes, the studio seemed strangely cavelike. "How'd you like it, Bob?" asked one of the two producers of the show. Robert Bowen nodded briskly and patted the televike helmet. "It was O.K.," he said. "Good show. A little talky at the beginning, and it needs a better fade-out, but the action scenes were fine. The sponsor ought to like it—for a while, at least." "What do you mean, 'for a while'?" Robert Bowen sighed. "If this thing goes on the air the way it is, he'll lose sales." "Why? Commercial not good enough?" " Too good! Man, I've smoked Old Kings , and, believe me, the real thing never tasted as good as that cigarette did in the commercial!"

The Hospitallers might not have enough time to recover

He is disobeying King Richard's orders

King Richard will be left unprotected

Sir Robert will likely perish in the fray

23960_BH9IVT53_9

What is anachronistic within the battle between King Richard and Saladin?

... After a Few Words ... by Seaton McKettrig Illustrated by Summer This is a science-fiction story. History is a science; the other part is, as all Americans know, the most fictional field we have today. He settled himself comfortably in his seat, and carefully put the helmet on, pulling it down firmly until it was properly seated. For a moment, he could see nothing. Then his hand moved up and, with a flick of the wrist, lifted the visor. Ahead of him, in serried array, with lances erect and pennons flying, was the forward part of the column. Far ahead, he knew, were the Knights Templars, who had taken the advance. Behind the Templars rode the mailed knights of Brittany and Anjou. These were followed by King Guy of Jerusalem and the host of Poitou. He himself, Sir Robert de Bouain, was riding with the Norman and English troops, just behind the men of Poitou. Sir Robert turned slightly in his saddle. To his right, he could see the brilliant red-and-gold banner of the lion-hearted Richard of England— gules, in pale three lions passant guardant or . Behind the standard-bearer, his great war horse moving with a steady, measured pace, his coronet of gold on his steel helm gleaming in the glaring desert sun, the lions of England on his firm-held shield, was the King himself. Further behind, the Knights Hospitallers protected the rear, guarding the column of the hosts of Christendom from harassment by the Bedouins. "By our Lady!" came a voice from his left. "Three days out from Acre, and the accursed Saracens still elude us." Sir Robert de Bouain twisted again in his saddle to look at the knight riding alongside him. Sir Gaeton de l'Arc-Tombé sat tall and straight in his saddle, his visor up, his blue eyes narrowed against the glare of the sun. Sir Robert's lips formed a smile. "They are not far off, Sir Gaeton. They have been following us. As we march parallel to the seacoast, so they have been marching with us in those hills to the east." "Like the jackals they are," said Sir Gaeton. "They assail us from the rear, and they set up traps in our path ahead. Our spies tell us that the Turks lie ahead of us in countless numbers. And yet, they fear to face us in open battle." "Is it fear, or are they merely gathering their forces?" "Both," said Sir Gaeton flatly. "They fear us, else they would not dally to amass so fearsome a force. If, as our informers tell us, there are uncounted Turks to the fore, and if, as we are aware, our rear is being dogged by the Bedouin and the black horsemen of Egypt, it would seem that Saladin has at hand more than enough to overcome us, were they all truly Christian knights." "Give them time. We must wait for their attack, sir knight. It were foolhardy to attempt to seek them in their own hills, and yet they must stop us. They will attack before we reach Jerusalem, fear not." "We of Gascony fear no heathen Musselman," Sir Gaeton growled. "It's this Hellish heat that is driving me mad." He pointed toward the eastern hills. "The sun is yet low, and already the heat is unbearable." Sir Robert heard his own laugh echo hollowly within his helmet. "Perhaps 'twere better to be mad when the assault comes. Madmen fight better than men of cooler blood." He knew that the others were baking inside their heavy armor, although he himself was not too uncomfortable. Sir Gaeton looked at him with a smile that held both irony and respect. "In truth, sir knight, it is apparent that you fear neither men nor heat. Nor is your own blood too cool. True, I ride with your Normans and your English and your King Richard of the Lion's Heart, but I am a Gascon, and have sworn no fealty to him. But to side with the Duke of Burgundy against King Richard—" He gave a short, barking laugh. "I fear no man," he went on, "but if I had to fear one, it would be Richard of England." Sir Robert's voice came like a sword: steely, flat, cold, and sharp. "My lord the King spoke in haste. He has reason to be bitter against Philip of France, as do we all. Philip has deserted the field. He has returned to France in haste, leaving the rest of us to fight the Saracen for the Holy Land leaving only the contingent of his vassal the Duke of Burgundy to remain with us." "Richard of England has never been on the best of terms with Philip Augustus," said Sir Gaeton. "No, and with good cause. But he allowed his anger against Philip to color his judgment when he spoke harshly against the Duke of Burgundy. The Duke is no coward, and Richard Plantagenet well knows it. As I said, he spoke in haste." "And you intervened," said Sir Gaeton. "It was my duty." Sir Robert's voice was stubborn. "Could we have permitted a quarrel to develop between the two finest knights and warleaders in Christendom at this crucial point? The desertion of Philip of France has cost us dearly. Could we permit the desertion of Burgundy, too?" "You did what must be done in honor," the Gascon conceded, "but you have not gained the love of Richard by doing so." Sir Robert felt his jaw set firmly. "My king knows I am loyal." Sir Gaeton said nothing more, but there was a look in his eyes that showed that he felt that Richard of England might even doubt the loyalty of Sir Robert de Bouain. Sir Robert rode on in silence, feeling the movement of the horse beneath him. There was a sudden sound to the rear. Like a wash of the tide from the sea came the sound of Saracen war cries and the clash of steel on steel mingled with the sounds of horses in agony and anger. Sir Robert turned his horse to look. The Negro troops of Saladin's Egyptian contingent were thundering down upon the rear! They clashed with the Hospitallers, slamming in like a rain of heavy stones, too close in for the use of bows. There was only the sword against armor, like the sound of a thousand hammers against a thousand anvils. "Stand fast! Stand fast! Hold them off!" It was the voice of King Richard, sounding like a clarion over the din of battle. Sir Robert felt his horse move, as though it were urging him on toward the battle, but his hand held to the reins, keeping the great charger in check. The King had said "Stand fast!" and this was no time to disobey the orders of Richard. The Saracen troops were coming in from the rear, and the Hospitallers were taking the brunt of the charge. They fought like madmen, but they were slowly being forced back. The Master of the Hospitallers rode to the rear, to the King's standard, which hardly moved in the still desert air, now that the column had stopped moving. The voice of the Duke of Burgundy came to Sir Robert's ears. "Stand fast. The King bids you all to stand fast," said the duke, his voice fading as he rode on up the column toward the knights of Poitou and the Knights Templars. The Master of the Hospitallers was speaking in a low, urgent voice to the King: "My lord, we are pressed on by the enemy and in danger of eternal infamy. We are losing our horses, one after the other!" "Good Master," said Richard, "it is you who must sustain their attack. No one can be everywhere at once." The Master of the Hospitallers nodded curtly and charged back into the fray. The King turned to Sir Baldwin de Carreo, who sat ahorse nearby, and pointed toward the eastern hills. "They will come from there, hitting us in the flank; we cannot afford to amass a rearward charge. To do so would be to fall directly into the hands of the Saracen." A voice very close to Sir Robert said: "Richard is right. If we go to the aid of the Hospitallers, we will expose the column to a flank attack." It was Sir Gaeton. "My lord the King," Sir Robert heard his voice say, "is right in all but one thing. If we allow the Egyptians to take us from the rear, there will be no need for Saladin and his Turks to come down on our flank. And the Hospitallers cannot hold for long at this rate. A charge at full gallop would break the Egyptian line and give the Hospitallers breathing time. Are you with me?" "Against the orders of the King?" "The King cannot see everything! There are times when a man must use his own judgment! You said you were afraid of no man. Are you with me?" After a moment's hesitation, Sir Gaeton couched his lance. "I'm with you, sir knight! Live or die, I follow! Strike and strike hard!" "Forward then!" Sir Robert heard himself shouting. "Forward for St. George and for England!" "St. George and England!" the Gascon echoed. Two great war horses began to move ponderously forward toward the battle lines, gaining momentum as they went. Moving in unison, the two knights, their horses now at a fast trot, lowered their lances, picking their Saracen targets with care. Larger and larger loomed the Egyptian cavalrymen as the horses changed pace to a thundering gallop. The Egyptians tried to dodge, as they saw, too late, the approach of the Christian knights. Sir Robert felt the shock against himself and his horse as the steel tip of the long ash lance struck the Saracen horseman in the chest. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw that Sir Gaeton, too, had scored. The Saracen, impaled on Sir Robert's lance, shot from the saddle as he died. His lighter armor had hardly impeded the incoming spear-point, and now his body dragged it down as he dropped toward the desert sand. Another Moslem cavalryman was charging in now, swinging his curved saber, taking advantage of Sir Robert's sagging lance. There was nothing else to do but drop the lance and draw his heavy broadsword. His hand grasped it, and it came singing from its scabbard. The Egyptian's curved sword clanged against Sir Robert's helm, setting his head ringing. In return, the knight's broadsword came about in a sweeping arc, and the Egyptian's horse rode on with the rider's headless body. Behind him, Sir Robert heard further cries of "St. George and England!" The Hospitallers, taking heart at the charge, were going in! Behind them came the Count of Champagne, the Earl of Leister, and the Bishop of Beauvais, who carried a great warhammer in order that he might not break Church Law by shedding blood. Sir Robert's own sword rose and fell, cutting and hacking at the enemy. He himself felt a dreamlike detachment, as though he were watching the battle rather than participating in it. But he could see that the Moslems were falling back before the Christian onslaught. And then, quite suddenly, there seemed to be no foeman to swing at. Breathing heavily, Sir Robert sheathed his broadsword. Beside him, Sir Gaeton did the same, saying: "It will be a few minutes before they can regroup, sir knight. We may have routed them completely." "Aye. But King Richard will not approve of my breaking ranks and disobeying orders. I may win the battle and lose my head in the end." "This is no time to worry about the future," said the Gascon. "Rest for a moment and relax, that you may be the stronger later. Here—have an Old Kings ." He had a pack of cigarettes in his gauntleted hand, which he profferred to Sir Robert. There were three cigarettes protruding from it, one slightly farther than the others. Sir Robert's hand reached out and took that one. "Thanks. When the going gets rough, I really enjoy an Old Kings ." He put one end of the cigarette in his mouth and lit the other from the lighter in Sir Gaeton's hand. "Yes, sir," said Sir Gaeton, after lighting his own cigarette, " Old Kings are the greatest. They give a man real, deep-down smoking pleasure." "There's no doubt about it, Old Kings are a man's cigarette." Sir Robert could feel the soothing smoke in his lungs as he inhaled deeply. "That's great. When I want a cigarette, I don't want just any cigarette." "Nor I," agreed the Gascon. " Old Kings is the only real cigarette when you're doing a real man's work." "That's for sure." Sir Robert watched a smoke ring expand in the air. There was a sudden clash of arms off to their left. Sir Robert dropped his cigarette to the ground. "The trouble is that doing a real he-man's work doesn't always allow you to enjoy the fine, rich tobaccos of Old Kings right down to the very end." "No, but you can always light another later," said the Gascon knight. King Richard, on seeing his army moving suddenly toward the harassed rear, had realized the danger and had charged through the Hospitallers to get into the thick of the fray. Now the Turks were charging down from the hills, hitting—not the flank as he had expected, but the rear! Saladin had expected him to hold fast! Sir Robert and Sir Gaeton spurred their chargers toward the flapping banner of England. The fierce warrior-king of England, his mighty sword in hand, was cutting down Turks as though they were grain-stalks, but still the Saracen horde pressed on. More and more of the terrible Turks came boiling down out of the hills, their glittering scimitars swinging. Sir Robert lost all track of time. There was nothing to do but keep his own great broadsword moving, swinging like some gigantic metronome as he hacked down the Moslem foes. And then, suddenly, he found himself surrounded by the Saracens! He was isolated and alone, cut off from the rest of the Christian forces! He glanced quickly around as he slashed another Saracen from pate to breastbone. Where was Sir Gaeton? Where were the others? Where was the red-and-gold banner of Richard? He caught a glimpse of the fluttering banner far to the rear and started to fall back. And then he saw another knight nearby, a huge man who swung his sparkling blade with power and force. On his steel helm gleamed a golden coronet! Richard! And the great king, in spite of his prowess was outnumbered heavily and would, within seconds, be cut down by the Saracen horde! Without hesitation, Sir Robert plunged his horse toward the surrounded monarch, his great blade cutting a path before him. He saw Richard go down, falling from the saddle of his charger, but by that time his own sword was cutting into the screaming Saracens and they had no time to attempt any further mischief to the King. They had their hands full with Sir Robert de Bouain. He did not know how long he fought there, holding his charger motionless over the inert body of the fallen king, hewing down the screaming enemy, but presently he heard the familiar cry of "For St. George and for England" behind him. The Norman and English troops were charging in, bringing with them the banner of England! And then Richard was on his feet, cleaving the air about him with his own broadsword. Its bright edge, besmeared with Saracen blood, was biting viciously into the foe. The Turks began to fall back. Within seconds, the Christian knights were boiling around the embattled pair, forcing the Turks into retreat. And for the second time, Sir Robert found himself with no one to fight. And then a voice was saying: "You have done well this day, sir knight. Richard Plantagenet will not forget." Sir Robert turned in his saddle to face the smiling king. "My lord king, be assured that I would never forget my loyalty to my sovereign and liege lord. My sword and my life are yours whenever you call." King Richard's gauntleted hand grasped his own. "If it please God, I shall never ask your life. An earldom awaits you when we return to England, sir knight." And then the king mounted his horse and was running full gallop after the retreating Saracens. Robert took off his helmet. He blinked for a second to adjust his eyes to the relative dimness of the studio. After the brightness of the desert that the televicarion helmet had projected into his eyes, the studio seemed strangely cavelike. "How'd you like it, Bob?" asked one of the two producers of the show. Robert Bowen nodded briskly and patted the televike helmet. "It was O.K.," he said. "Good show. A little talky at the beginning, and it needs a better fade-out, but the action scenes were fine. The sponsor ought to like it—for a while, at least." "What do you mean, 'for a while'?" Robert Bowen sighed. "If this thing goes on the air the way it is, he'll lose sales." "Why? Commercial not good enough?" " Too good! Man, I've smoked Old Kings , and, believe me, the real thing never tasted as good as that cigarette did in the commercial!"

The pack of Old Kings

The horse saddle

The broadsword

The coronet

24150_K0VE3QFL_1

What does Niemand intend to communicate through referencing the line from Julius Caesar?

DISTURBING SUN By PHILIP LATHAM Illustrated by Freas This, be it understood, is fiction—nothing but fiction—and not, under any circumstances, to be considered as having any truth whatever to it. It's obviously utterly impossible ... isn't it? An interview with Dr. I. M. Niemand, Director of the Psychophysical Institute of Solar and Terrestrial Relations, Camarillo, California. In the closing days of December, 1957, at the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in New York, Dr. Niemand delivered a paper entitled simply, "On the Nature of the Solar S-Regions." Owing to its unassuming title the startling implications contained in the paper were completely overlooked by the press. These implications are discussed here in an exclusive interview with Dr. Niemand by Philip Latham. LATHAM. Dr. Niemand, what would you say is your main job? NIEMAND. I suppose you might say my main job today is to find out all I can between activity on the Sun and various forms of activity on the Earth. LATHAM. What do you mean by activity on the Sun? NIEMAND. Well, a sunspot is a form of solar activity. LATHAM. Just what is a sunspot? NIEMAND. I'm afraid I can't say just what a sunspot is. I can only describe it. A sunspot is a region on the Sun that is cooler than its surroundings. That's why it looks dark. It isn't so hot. Therefore not so bright. LATHAM. Isn't it true that the number of spots on the Sun rises and falls in a cycle of eleven years? NIEMAND. The number of spots on the Sun rises and falls in a cycle of about eleven years. That word about makes quite a difference. LATHAM. In what way? NIEMAND. It means you can only approximately predict the future course of sunspot activity. Sunspots are mighty treacherous things. LATHAM. Haven't there been a great many correlations announced between sunspots and various effects on the Earth? NIEMAND. Scores of them. LATHAM. What is your opinion of these correlations? NIEMAND. Pure bosh in most cases. LATHAM. But some are valid? NIEMAND. A few. There is unquestionably a correlation between sunspots and disturbances of the Earth's magnetic field ... radio fade-outs ... auroras ... things like that. LATHAM. Now, Dr. Niemand, I understand that you have been investigating solar and terrestrial relationships along rather unorthodox lines. NIEMAND. Yes, I suppose some people would say so. LATHAM. You have broken new ground? NIEMAND. That's true. LATHAM. In what way have your investigations differed from those of others? NIEMAND. I think our biggest advance was the discovery that sunspots themselves are not the direct cause of the disturbances we have been studying on the Earth. It's something like the eruptions in rubeola. Attention is concentrated on the bright red papules because they're such a conspicuous symptom of the disease. Whereas the real cause is an invisible filterable virus. In the solar case it turned out to be these S-Regions. LATHAM. Why S-Regions? NIEMAND. We had to call them something. Named after the Sun, I suppose. LATHAM. You say an S-Region is invisible? NIEMAND. It is quite invisible to the eye but readily detected by suitable instrumental methods. It is extremely doubtful, however, if the radiation we detect is the actual cause of the disturbing effects observed. LATHAM. Just what are these effects? NIEMAND. Well, they're common enough, goodness knows. As old as the world, in fact. Yet strangely enough it's hard to describe them in exact terms. LATHAM. Can you give us a general idea? NIEMAND. I'll try. Let's see ... remember that speech from "Julius Caesar" where Cassius is bewailing the evil times that beset ancient Rome? I believe it went like this: "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves that we are underlings." LATHAM. I'm afraid I don't see— NIEMAND. Well, Shakespeare would have been nearer the truth if he had put it the other way around. "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in ourselves but in our stars" or better "in the Sun." LATHAM. In the Sun? NIEMAND. That's right, in the Sun. I suppose the oldest problem in the world is the origin of human evil. Philosophers have wrestled with it ever since the days of Job. And like Job they have usually given up in despair, convinced that the origin of evil is too deep for the human mind to solve. Generally they have concluded that man is inherently wicked and sinful and that is the end of it. Now for the first time science has thrown new light on this subject. LATHAM. How is that? NIEMAND. Consider the record of history. There are occasional periods when conditions are fairly calm and peaceful. Art and industry flourished. Man at last seemed to be making progress toward some higher goal. Then suddenly— for no detectable reason —conditions are reversed. Wars rage. People go mad. The world is plunged into an orgy of bloodshed and misery. LATHAM. But weren't there reasons? NIEMAND. What reasons? LATHAM. Well, disputes over boundaries ... economic rivalry ... border incidents.... NIEMAND. Nonsense. Men always make some flimsy excuse for going to war. The truth of the matter is that men go to war because they want to go to war. They can't help themselves. They are impelled by forces over which they have no control. By forces outside of themselves. LATHAM. Those are broad, sweeping statements. Can't you be more specific? NIEMAND. Perhaps I'd better go back to the beginning. Let me see.... It all started back in March, 1955, when I started getting patients suffering from a complex of symptoms, such as profound mental depression, anxiety, insomnia, alternating with fits of violent rage and resentment against life and the world in general. These people were deeply disturbed. No doubt about that. Yet they were not psychotic and hardly more than mildly neurotic. Now every doctor gets a good many patients of this type. Such a syndrome is characteristic of menopausal women and some men during the climacteric, but these people failed to fit into this picture. They were married and single persons of both sexes and of all ages. They came from all walks of life. The onset of their attack was invariably sudden and with scarcely any warning. They would be going about their work feeling perfectly all right. Then in a minute the whole world was like some scene from a nightmare. A week or ten days later the attack would cease as mysteriously as it had come and they would be their old self again. LATHAM. Aren't such attacks characteristic of the stress and strain of modern life? NIEMAND. I'm afraid that old stress-and-strain theory has been badly overworked. Been hearing about it ever since I was a pre-med student at ucla . Even as a boy I can remember my grandfather deploring the stress and strain of modern life when he was a country doctor practicing in Indiana. In my opinion one of the most valuable contributions anthropologists have made in recent years is the discovery that primitive man is afflicted with essentially the same neurotic conditions as those of us who live a so-called civilized life. They have found savages displaying every symptom of a nervous breakdown among the mountain tribes of the Elgonyi and the Aruntas of Australia. No, Mr. Latham, it's time the stress-and-strain theory was relegated to the junk pile along with demoniac possession and blood letting. LATHAM. You must have done something for your patients— NIEMAND. A doctor must always do something for the patients who come to his office seeking help. First I gave them a thorough physical examination. I turned up some minor ailments—a slight heart murmur or a trace of albumin in the urine—but nothing of any significance. On the whole they were a remarkably healthy bunch of individuals, much more so than an average sample of the population. Then I made a searching inquiry into their personal life. Here again I drew a blank. They had no particular financial worries. Their sex life was generally satisfactory. There was no history of mental illness in the family. In fact, the only thing that seemed to be the matter with them was that there were times when they felt like hell. LATHAM. I suppose you tried tranquilizers? NIEMAND. Oh, yes. In a few cases in which I tried tranquilizing pills of the meprobamate type there was some slight improvement. I want to emphasize, however, that I do not believe in prescribing shotgun remedies for a patient. To my way of thinking it is a lazy slipshod way of carrying on the practice of medicine. The only thing for which I do give myself credit was that I asked my patients to keep a detailed record of their symptoms taking special care to note the time of exacerbation—increase in the severity of the symptoms—as accurately as possible. LATHAM. And this gave you a clue? NIEMAND. It was the beginning. In most instances patients reported the attack struck with almost the impact of a physical blow. The prodromal symptoms were usually slight ... a sudden feeling of uneasiness and guilt ... hot and cold flashes ... dizziness ... double vision. Then this ghastly sense of depression coupled with a blind insensate rage at life. One man said he felt as if the world were closing in on him. Another that he felt the people around him were plotting his destruction. One housewife made her husband lock her in her room for fear she would injure the children. I pored over these case histories for a long time getting absolutely nowhere. Then finally a pattern began to emerge. LATHAM. What sort of pattern? NIEMAND. The first thing that struck me was that the attacks all occurred during the daytime, between the hours of about seven in the morning and five in the evening. Then there were these coincidences— LATHAM. Coincidences? NIEMAND. Total strangers miles apart were stricken at almost the same moment. At first I thought nothing of it but as my records accumulated I became convinced it could not be attributed to chance. A mathematical analysis showed the number of coincidences followed a Poisson distribution very closely. I couldn't possibly see what daylight had to do with it. There is some evidence that mental patients are most disturbed around the time of full moon, but a search of medical literature failed to reveal any connection with the Sun. LATHAM. What did you do? NIEMAND. Naturally I said nothing of this to my patients. I did, however, take pains to impress upon them the necessity of keeping an exact record of the onset of an attack. The better records they kept the more conclusive was the evidence. Men and women were experiencing nearly simultaneous attacks of rage and depression all over southern California, which was as far as my practice extended. One day it occurred to me: if people a few miles apart could be stricken simultaneously, why not people hundreds or thousands of miles apart? It was this idea that prompted me to get in touch with an old colleague of mine I had known at UC medical school, Dr. Max Hillyard, who was in practice in Utica, New York. LATHAM. With what result? NIEMAND. I was afraid the result would be that my old roommate would think I had gone completely crazy. Imagine my surprise and gratification on receiving an answer by return mail to the effect that he also had been getting an increasing number of patients suffering with the same identical symptoms as my own. Furthermore, upon exchanging records we did find that in many cases patients three thousand miles apart had been stricken simultaneously— LATHAM. Just a minute. I would like to know how you define "simultaneous." NIEMAND. We say an attack is simultaneous when one occurred on the east coast, for example, not earlier or later than five minutes of an attack on the west coast. That is about as close as you can hope to time a subjective effect of this nature. And now another fact emerged which gave us another clue. LATHAM. Which was? NIEMAND. In every case of a simultaneous attack the Sun was shining at both New York and California. LATHAM. You mean if it was cloudy— NIEMAND. No, no. The weather had nothing to do with it. I mean the Sun had to be above the horizon at both places. A person might undergo an attack soon after sunrise in New York but there would be no corresponding record of an attack in California where it was still dark. Conversely, a person might be stricken late in the afternoon in California without a corresponding attack in New York where the Sun had set. Dr. Hillyard and I had been searching desperately for a clue. We had both noticed that the attacks occurred only during the daylight hours but this had not seemed especially significant. Here we had evidence pointing directly to the source of trouble. It must have some connection with the Sun. LATHAM. That must have had you badly puzzled at first. NIEMAND. It certainly did. It looked as if we were headed back to the Middle Ages when astrology and medicine went hand in hand. But since it was our only lead we had no other choice but to follow it regardless of the consequences. Here luck played somewhat of a part, for Hillyard happened to have a contact that proved invaluable to us. Several years before Hillyard had gotten to know a young astrophysicist, Henry Middletown, who had come to him suffering from a severe case of myositis in the arms and shoulders. Hillyard had been able to effect a complete cure for which the boy was very grateful, and they had kept up a desultory correspondence. Middletown was now specializing in radio astronomy at the government's new solar observatory on Turtle Back Mountain in Arizona. If it had not been for Middletown's help I'm afraid our investigation would never have gotten past the clinical stage. LATHAM. In what way was Middletown of assistance? NIEMAND. It was the old case of workers in one field of science being completely ignorant of what was going on in another field. Someday we will have to establish a clearing house in science instead of keeping it in tight little compartments as we do at present. Well, Hillyard and I packed up for Arizona with considerable misgivings. We were afraid Middletown wouldn't take our findings seriously but somewhat to our surprise he heard our story with the closest attention. I guess astronomers have gotten so used to hearing from flying saucer enthusiasts and science-fiction addicts that nothing surprises them any more. When we had finished he asked to see our records. Hillyard had them all set down for easy numerical tabulation. Middletown went to work with scarcely a word. Within an hour he had produced a chart that was simply astounding. LATHAM. Can you describe this chart for us? NIEMAND. It was really quite simple. But if it had not been for Middletown's experience in charting other solar phenomena it would never have occurred to us to do it. First, he laid out a series of about thirty squares horizontally across a sheet of graph paper. He dated these beginning March 1, 1955, when our records began. In each square he put a number from 1 to 10 that was a rough index of the number and intensity of the attacks reported on that day. Then he laid out another horizontal row below the first one dated twenty-seven days later. That is, the square under March 1st in the top row was dated March 28th in the row below it. He filled in the chart until he had an array of dozens of rows that included all our data down to May, 1958. When Middletown had finished it was easy to see that the squares of highest index number did not fall at random on the chart. Instead they fell in slightly slanting parallel series so that you could draw straight lines down through them. The connection with the Sun was obvious. LATHAM. In what way? NIEMAND. Why, because twenty-seven days is about the synodic period of solar rotation. That is, if you see a large spot at the center of the Sun's disk today, there is a good chance if it survives that you will see it at the same place twenty-seven days later. But that night Middletown produced another chart that showed the connection with the Sun in a way that was even more convincing. LATHAM. How was that? NIEMAND. I said that the lines drawn down through the days of greatest mental disturbance slanted slightly. On this second chart the squares were dated under one another not at intervals of twenty-seven days, but at intervals of twenty-seven point three days. LATHAM. Why is that so important? NIEMAND. Because the average period of solar rotation in the sunspot zone is not twenty-seven days but twenty-seven point three days. And on this chart the lines did not slant but went vertically downward. The correlation with the synodic rotation of the Sun was practically perfect. LATHAM. But how did you get onto the S-Regions? NIEMAND. Middletown was immediately struck by the resemblance between the chart of mental disturbance and one he had been plotting over the years from his radio observations. Now when he compared the two charts the resemblance between the two was unmistakable. The pattern shown by the chart of mental disturbance corresponded in a striking way with the solar chart but with this difference. The disturbances on the Earth started two days later on the average than the disturbances due to the S-Regions on the Sun. In other words, there was a lag of about forty-eight hours between the two. But otherwise they were almost identical. LATHAM. But if these S-Regions of Middletown's are invisible how could he detect them? NIEMAND. The S-Regions are invisible to the eye through an optical telescope, but are detected with ease by a radio telescope. Middletown had discovered them when he was a graduate student working on radio astronomy in Australia, and he had followed up his researches with the more powerful equipment at Turtle Back Mountain. The formation of an S-Region is heralded by a long series of bursts of a few seconds duration, when the radiation may increase up to several thousand times that of the background intensity. These noise storms have been recorded simultaneously on wavelengths of from one to fifteen meters, which so far is the upper limit of the observations. In a few instances, however, intense bursts have also been detected down to fifty cm. LATHAM. I believe you said the periods of mental disturbance last for about ten or twelve days. How does that tie-in with the S-Regions? NIEMAND. Very closely. You see it takes about twelve days for an S-Region to pass across the face of the Sun, since the synodic rotation is twenty-seven point three days. LATHAM. I should think it would be nearer thirteen or fourteen days. NIEMAND. Apparently an S-Region is not particularly effective when it is just coming on or just going off the disk of the Sun. LATHAM. Are the S-Regions associated with sunspots? NIEMAND. They are connected in this way: that sunspot activity and S-Region activity certainly go together. The more sunspots the more violent and intense is the S-Region activity. But there is not a one-to-one correspondence between sunspots and S-Regions. That is, you cannot connect a particular sunspot group with a particular S-Region. The same thing is true of sunspots and magnetic storms. LATHAM. How do you account for this? NIEMAND. We don't account for it. LATHAM. What other properties of the S-Regions have you discovered? NIEMAND. Middletown says that the radio waves emanating from them are strongly circularly polarized. Moreover, the sense of rotation remains constant while one is passing across the Sun. If the magnetic field associated with an S-Region extends into the high solar corona through which the rays pass, then the sense of rotation corresponds to the ordinary ray of the magneto-ionic theory. LATHAM. Does this mean that the mental disturbances arise from some form of electromagnetic radiation? NIEMAND. We doubt it. As I said before, the charts show a lag of about forty-eight hours between the development of an S-Region and the onset of mental disturbance. This indicates that the malignant energy emanating from an S-Region consists of some highly penetrating form of corpuscular radiation, as yet unidentified. [A] LATHAM. A question that puzzles me is why some people are affected by the S-Regions while others are not. NIEMAND. Our latest results indicate that probably no one is completely immune. All are affected in some degree. Just why some should be affected so much more than others is still a matter of speculation. LATHAM. How long does an S-Region last? NIEMAND. An S-Region may have a lifetime of from three to perhaps a dozen solar rotations. Then it dies out and for a time we are free from this malignant radiation. Then a new region develops in perhaps an entirely different region of the Sun. Sometimes there may be several different S-Regions all going at once. LATHAM. Why were not the S-Regions discovered long ago? NIEMAND. Because the radio exploration of the Sun only began since the end of World War II. LATHAM. How does it happen that you only got patients suffering from S-radiation since about 1955? NIEMAND. I think we did get such patients previously but not in large enough numbers to attract attention. Also the present sunspot cycle started its rise to maximum about 1954. LATHAM. Is there no way of escaping the S-radiation? NIEMAND. I'm afraid the only sure way is to keep on the unilluminated side of the Earth which is rather difficult to do. Apparently the corpuscular beam from an S-Region is several degrees wide and not very sharply defined, since its effects are felt simultaneously over the entire continent. Hillyard and Middletown are working on some form of shielding device but so far without success. LATHAM. What is the present state of S-Region activity? NIEMAND. At the present moment there happens to be no S-Region activity on the Sun. But a new one may develop at any time. Also, the outlook for a decrease in activity is not very favorable. Sunspot activity continues at a high level and is steadily mounting in violence. The last sunspot cycle had the highest maximum of any since 1780, but the present cycle bids fair to set an all time record. LATHAM. And so you believe that the S-Regions are the cause of most of the present trouble in the world. That it is not ourselves but something outside ourselves— NIEMAND. That is the logical outcome of our investigation. We are controlled and swayed by forces which in many cases we are powerless to resist. LATHAM. Could we not be warned of the presence of an S-Region? NIEMAND. The trouble is they seem to develop at random on the Sun. I'm afraid any warning system would be worse than useless. We would be crying WOLF! all the time. LATHAM. How may a person who is not particularly susceptible to this malignant radiation know that one of these regions is active? NIEMAND. If you have a feeling of restlessness and anxiety, if you are unable to concentrate, if you feel suddenly depressed and discouraged about yourself, or are filled with resentment toward the world, then you may be pretty sure that an S-Region is passing across the face of the Sun. Keep a tight rein on yourself. For it seems that evil will always be with us ... as long as the Sun shall continue to shine upon this little world. THE END [A] Middletown believes that the Intense radiation recently discovered from information derived from Explorer I and III has no connection with the corpuscular S-radiation.

Sunspot-related disturbances have been negatively impacting humans prior to the Roman empire

We are more in control of our behavior than we think

Sunspot-related disturbances have been negatively impacting humans prior to the Middle Ages

We are not as in control of our behavior as we would like to think

24150_K0VE3QFL_2

Which statement most accurately represents Niemand's beliefs toward humans and free will?

DISTURBING SUN By PHILIP LATHAM Illustrated by Freas This, be it understood, is fiction—nothing but fiction—and not, under any circumstances, to be considered as having any truth whatever to it. It's obviously utterly impossible ... isn't it? An interview with Dr. I. M. Niemand, Director of the Psychophysical Institute of Solar and Terrestrial Relations, Camarillo, California. In the closing days of December, 1957, at the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in New York, Dr. Niemand delivered a paper entitled simply, "On the Nature of the Solar S-Regions." Owing to its unassuming title the startling implications contained in the paper were completely overlooked by the press. These implications are discussed here in an exclusive interview with Dr. Niemand by Philip Latham. LATHAM. Dr. Niemand, what would you say is your main job? NIEMAND. I suppose you might say my main job today is to find out all I can between activity on the Sun and various forms of activity on the Earth. LATHAM. What do you mean by activity on the Sun? NIEMAND. Well, a sunspot is a form of solar activity. LATHAM. Just what is a sunspot? NIEMAND. I'm afraid I can't say just what a sunspot is. I can only describe it. A sunspot is a region on the Sun that is cooler than its surroundings. That's why it looks dark. It isn't so hot. Therefore not so bright. LATHAM. Isn't it true that the number of spots on the Sun rises and falls in a cycle of eleven years? NIEMAND. The number of spots on the Sun rises and falls in a cycle of about eleven years. That word about makes quite a difference. LATHAM. In what way? NIEMAND. It means you can only approximately predict the future course of sunspot activity. Sunspots are mighty treacherous things. LATHAM. Haven't there been a great many correlations announced between sunspots and various effects on the Earth? NIEMAND. Scores of them. LATHAM. What is your opinion of these correlations? NIEMAND. Pure bosh in most cases. LATHAM. But some are valid? NIEMAND. A few. There is unquestionably a correlation between sunspots and disturbances of the Earth's magnetic field ... radio fade-outs ... auroras ... things like that. LATHAM. Now, Dr. Niemand, I understand that you have been investigating solar and terrestrial relationships along rather unorthodox lines. NIEMAND. Yes, I suppose some people would say so. LATHAM. You have broken new ground? NIEMAND. That's true. LATHAM. In what way have your investigations differed from those of others? NIEMAND. I think our biggest advance was the discovery that sunspots themselves are not the direct cause of the disturbances we have been studying on the Earth. It's something like the eruptions in rubeola. Attention is concentrated on the bright red papules because they're such a conspicuous symptom of the disease. Whereas the real cause is an invisible filterable virus. In the solar case it turned out to be these S-Regions. LATHAM. Why S-Regions? NIEMAND. We had to call them something. Named after the Sun, I suppose. LATHAM. You say an S-Region is invisible? NIEMAND. It is quite invisible to the eye but readily detected by suitable instrumental methods. It is extremely doubtful, however, if the radiation we detect is the actual cause of the disturbing effects observed. LATHAM. Just what are these effects? NIEMAND. Well, they're common enough, goodness knows. As old as the world, in fact. Yet strangely enough it's hard to describe them in exact terms. LATHAM. Can you give us a general idea? NIEMAND. I'll try. Let's see ... remember that speech from "Julius Caesar" where Cassius is bewailing the evil times that beset ancient Rome? I believe it went like this: "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves that we are underlings." LATHAM. I'm afraid I don't see— NIEMAND. Well, Shakespeare would have been nearer the truth if he had put it the other way around. "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in ourselves but in our stars" or better "in the Sun." LATHAM. In the Sun? NIEMAND. That's right, in the Sun. I suppose the oldest problem in the world is the origin of human evil. Philosophers have wrestled with it ever since the days of Job. And like Job they have usually given up in despair, convinced that the origin of evil is too deep for the human mind to solve. Generally they have concluded that man is inherently wicked and sinful and that is the end of it. Now for the first time science has thrown new light on this subject. LATHAM. How is that? NIEMAND. Consider the record of history. There are occasional periods when conditions are fairly calm and peaceful. Art and industry flourished. Man at last seemed to be making progress toward some higher goal. Then suddenly— for no detectable reason —conditions are reversed. Wars rage. People go mad. The world is plunged into an orgy of bloodshed and misery. LATHAM. But weren't there reasons? NIEMAND. What reasons? LATHAM. Well, disputes over boundaries ... economic rivalry ... border incidents.... NIEMAND. Nonsense. Men always make some flimsy excuse for going to war. The truth of the matter is that men go to war because they want to go to war. They can't help themselves. They are impelled by forces over which they have no control. By forces outside of themselves. LATHAM. Those are broad, sweeping statements. Can't you be more specific? NIEMAND. Perhaps I'd better go back to the beginning. Let me see.... It all started back in March, 1955, when I started getting patients suffering from a complex of symptoms, such as profound mental depression, anxiety, insomnia, alternating with fits of violent rage and resentment against life and the world in general. These people were deeply disturbed. No doubt about that. Yet they were not psychotic and hardly more than mildly neurotic. Now every doctor gets a good many patients of this type. Such a syndrome is characteristic of menopausal women and some men during the climacteric, but these people failed to fit into this picture. They were married and single persons of both sexes and of all ages. They came from all walks of life. The onset of their attack was invariably sudden and with scarcely any warning. They would be going about their work feeling perfectly all right. Then in a minute the whole world was like some scene from a nightmare. A week or ten days later the attack would cease as mysteriously as it had come and they would be their old self again. LATHAM. Aren't such attacks characteristic of the stress and strain of modern life? NIEMAND. I'm afraid that old stress-and-strain theory has been badly overworked. Been hearing about it ever since I was a pre-med student at ucla . Even as a boy I can remember my grandfather deploring the stress and strain of modern life when he was a country doctor practicing in Indiana. In my opinion one of the most valuable contributions anthropologists have made in recent years is the discovery that primitive man is afflicted with essentially the same neurotic conditions as those of us who live a so-called civilized life. They have found savages displaying every symptom of a nervous breakdown among the mountain tribes of the Elgonyi and the Aruntas of Australia. No, Mr. Latham, it's time the stress-and-strain theory was relegated to the junk pile along with demoniac possession and blood letting. LATHAM. You must have done something for your patients— NIEMAND. A doctor must always do something for the patients who come to his office seeking help. First I gave them a thorough physical examination. I turned up some minor ailments—a slight heart murmur or a trace of albumin in the urine—but nothing of any significance. On the whole they were a remarkably healthy bunch of individuals, much more so than an average sample of the population. Then I made a searching inquiry into their personal life. Here again I drew a blank. They had no particular financial worries. Their sex life was generally satisfactory. There was no history of mental illness in the family. In fact, the only thing that seemed to be the matter with them was that there were times when they felt like hell. LATHAM. I suppose you tried tranquilizers? NIEMAND. Oh, yes. In a few cases in which I tried tranquilizing pills of the meprobamate type there was some slight improvement. I want to emphasize, however, that I do not believe in prescribing shotgun remedies for a patient. To my way of thinking it is a lazy slipshod way of carrying on the practice of medicine. The only thing for which I do give myself credit was that I asked my patients to keep a detailed record of their symptoms taking special care to note the time of exacerbation—increase in the severity of the symptoms—as accurately as possible. LATHAM. And this gave you a clue? NIEMAND. It was the beginning. In most instances patients reported the attack struck with almost the impact of a physical blow. The prodromal symptoms were usually slight ... a sudden feeling of uneasiness and guilt ... hot and cold flashes ... dizziness ... double vision. Then this ghastly sense of depression coupled with a blind insensate rage at life. One man said he felt as if the world were closing in on him. Another that he felt the people around him were plotting his destruction. One housewife made her husband lock her in her room for fear she would injure the children. I pored over these case histories for a long time getting absolutely nowhere. Then finally a pattern began to emerge. LATHAM. What sort of pattern? NIEMAND. The first thing that struck me was that the attacks all occurred during the daytime, between the hours of about seven in the morning and five in the evening. Then there were these coincidences— LATHAM. Coincidences? NIEMAND. Total strangers miles apart were stricken at almost the same moment. At first I thought nothing of it but as my records accumulated I became convinced it could not be attributed to chance. A mathematical analysis showed the number of coincidences followed a Poisson distribution very closely. I couldn't possibly see what daylight had to do with it. There is some evidence that mental patients are most disturbed around the time of full moon, but a search of medical literature failed to reveal any connection with the Sun. LATHAM. What did you do? NIEMAND. Naturally I said nothing of this to my patients. I did, however, take pains to impress upon them the necessity of keeping an exact record of the onset of an attack. The better records they kept the more conclusive was the evidence. Men and women were experiencing nearly simultaneous attacks of rage and depression all over southern California, which was as far as my practice extended. One day it occurred to me: if people a few miles apart could be stricken simultaneously, why not people hundreds or thousands of miles apart? It was this idea that prompted me to get in touch with an old colleague of mine I had known at UC medical school, Dr. Max Hillyard, who was in practice in Utica, New York. LATHAM. With what result? NIEMAND. I was afraid the result would be that my old roommate would think I had gone completely crazy. Imagine my surprise and gratification on receiving an answer by return mail to the effect that he also had been getting an increasing number of patients suffering with the same identical symptoms as my own. Furthermore, upon exchanging records we did find that in many cases patients three thousand miles apart had been stricken simultaneously— LATHAM. Just a minute. I would like to know how you define "simultaneous." NIEMAND. We say an attack is simultaneous when one occurred on the east coast, for example, not earlier or later than five minutes of an attack on the west coast. That is about as close as you can hope to time a subjective effect of this nature. And now another fact emerged which gave us another clue. LATHAM. Which was? NIEMAND. In every case of a simultaneous attack the Sun was shining at both New York and California. LATHAM. You mean if it was cloudy— NIEMAND. No, no. The weather had nothing to do with it. I mean the Sun had to be above the horizon at both places. A person might undergo an attack soon after sunrise in New York but there would be no corresponding record of an attack in California where it was still dark. Conversely, a person might be stricken late in the afternoon in California without a corresponding attack in New York where the Sun had set. Dr. Hillyard and I had been searching desperately for a clue. We had both noticed that the attacks occurred only during the daylight hours but this had not seemed especially significant. Here we had evidence pointing directly to the source of trouble. It must have some connection with the Sun. LATHAM. That must have had you badly puzzled at first. NIEMAND. It certainly did. It looked as if we were headed back to the Middle Ages when astrology and medicine went hand in hand. But since it was our only lead we had no other choice but to follow it regardless of the consequences. Here luck played somewhat of a part, for Hillyard happened to have a contact that proved invaluable to us. Several years before Hillyard had gotten to know a young astrophysicist, Henry Middletown, who had come to him suffering from a severe case of myositis in the arms and shoulders. Hillyard had been able to effect a complete cure for which the boy was very grateful, and they had kept up a desultory correspondence. Middletown was now specializing in radio astronomy at the government's new solar observatory on Turtle Back Mountain in Arizona. If it had not been for Middletown's help I'm afraid our investigation would never have gotten past the clinical stage. LATHAM. In what way was Middletown of assistance? NIEMAND. It was the old case of workers in one field of science being completely ignorant of what was going on in another field. Someday we will have to establish a clearing house in science instead of keeping it in tight little compartments as we do at present. Well, Hillyard and I packed up for Arizona with considerable misgivings. We were afraid Middletown wouldn't take our findings seriously but somewhat to our surprise he heard our story with the closest attention. I guess astronomers have gotten so used to hearing from flying saucer enthusiasts and science-fiction addicts that nothing surprises them any more. When we had finished he asked to see our records. Hillyard had them all set down for easy numerical tabulation. Middletown went to work with scarcely a word. Within an hour he had produced a chart that was simply astounding. LATHAM. Can you describe this chart for us? NIEMAND. It was really quite simple. But if it had not been for Middletown's experience in charting other solar phenomena it would never have occurred to us to do it. First, he laid out a series of about thirty squares horizontally across a sheet of graph paper. He dated these beginning March 1, 1955, when our records began. In each square he put a number from 1 to 10 that was a rough index of the number and intensity of the attacks reported on that day. Then he laid out another horizontal row below the first one dated twenty-seven days later. That is, the square under March 1st in the top row was dated March 28th in the row below it. He filled in the chart until he had an array of dozens of rows that included all our data down to May, 1958. When Middletown had finished it was easy to see that the squares of highest index number did not fall at random on the chart. Instead they fell in slightly slanting parallel series so that you could draw straight lines down through them. The connection with the Sun was obvious. LATHAM. In what way? NIEMAND. Why, because twenty-seven days is about the synodic period of solar rotation. That is, if you see a large spot at the center of the Sun's disk today, there is a good chance if it survives that you will see it at the same place twenty-seven days later. But that night Middletown produced another chart that showed the connection with the Sun in a way that was even more convincing. LATHAM. How was that? NIEMAND. I said that the lines drawn down through the days of greatest mental disturbance slanted slightly. On this second chart the squares were dated under one another not at intervals of twenty-seven days, but at intervals of twenty-seven point three days. LATHAM. Why is that so important? NIEMAND. Because the average period of solar rotation in the sunspot zone is not twenty-seven days but twenty-seven point three days. And on this chart the lines did not slant but went vertically downward. The correlation with the synodic rotation of the Sun was practically perfect. LATHAM. But how did you get onto the S-Regions? NIEMAND. Middletown was immediately struck by the resemblance between the chart of mental disturbance and one he had been plotting over the years from his radio observations. Now when he compared the two charts the resemblance between the two was unmistakable. The pattern shown by the chart of mental disturbance corresponded in a striking way with the solar chart but with this difference. The disturbances on the Earth started two days later on the average than the disturbances due to the S-Regions on the Sun. In other words, there was a lag of about forty-eight hours between the two. But otherwise they were almost identical. LATHAM. But if these S-Regions of Middletown's are invisible how could he detect them? NIEMAND. The S-Regions are invisible to the eye through an optical telescope, but are detected with ease by a radio telescope. Middletown had discovered them when he was a graduate student working on radio astronomy in Australia, and he had followed up his researches with the more powerful equipment at Turtle Back Mountain. The formation of an S-Region is heralded by a long series of bursts of a few seconds duration, when the radiation may increase up to several thousand times that of the background intensity. These noise storms have been recorded simultaneously on wavelengths of from one to fifteen meters, which so far is the upper limit of the observations. In a few instances, however, intense bursts have also been detected down to fifty cm. LATHAM. I believe you said the periods of mental disturbance last for about ten or twelve days. How does that tie-in with the S-Regions? NIEMAND. Very closely. You see it takes about twelve days for an S-Region to pass across the face of the Sun, since the synodic rotation is twenty-seven point three days. LATHAM. I should think it would be nearer thirteen or fourteen days. NIEMAND. Apparently an S-Region is not particularly effective when it is just coming on or just going off the disk of the Sun. LATHAM. Are the S-Regions associated with sunspots? NIEMAND. They are connected in this way: that sunspot activity and S-Region activity certainly go together. The more sunspots the more violent and intense is the S-Region activity. But there is not a one-to-one correspondence between sunspots and S-Regions. That is, you cannot connect a particular sunspot group with a particular S-Region. The same thing is true of sunspots and magnetic storms. LATHAM. How do you account for this? NIEMAND. We don't account for it. LATHAM. What other properties of the S-Regions have you discovered? NIEMAND. Middletown says that the radio waves emanating from them are strongly circularly polarized. Moreover, the sense of rotation remains constant while one is passing across the Sun. If the magnetic field associated with an S-Region extends into the high solar corona through which the rays pass, then the sense of rotation corresponds to the ordinary ray of the magneto-ionic theory. LATHAM. Does this mean that the mental disturbances arise from some form of electromagnetic radiation? NIEMAND. We doubt it. As I said before, the charts show a lag of about forty-eight hours between the development of an S-Region and the onset of mental disturbance. This indicates that the malignant energy emanating from an S-Region consists of some highly penetrating form of corpuscular radiation, as yet unidentified. [A] LATHAM. A question that puzzles me is why some people are affected by the S-Regions while others are not. NIEMAND. Our latest results indicate that probably no one is completely immune. All are affected in some degree. Just why some should be affected so much more than others is still a matter of speculation. LATHAM. How long does an S-Region last? NIEMAND. An S-Region may have a lifetime of from three to perhaps a dozen solar rotations. Then it dies out and for a time we are free from this malignant radiation. Then a new region develops in perhaps an entirely different region of the Sun. Sometimes there may be several different S-Regions all going at once. LATHAM. Why were not the S-Regions discovered long ago? NIEMAND. Because the radio exploration of the Sun only began since the end of World War II. LATHAM. How does it happen that you only got patients suffering from S-radiation since about 1955? NIEMAND. I think we did get such patients previously but not in large enough numbers to attract attention. Also the present sunspot cycle started its rise to maximum about 1954. LATHAM. Is there no way of escaping the S-radiation? NIEMAND. I'm afraid the only sure way is to keep on the unilluminated side of the Earth which is rather difficult to do. Apparently the corpuscular beam from an S-Region is several degrees wide and not very sharply defined, since its effects are felt simultaneously over the entire continent. Hillyard and Middletown are working on some form of shielding device but so far without success. LATHAM. What is the present state of S-Region activity? NIEMAND. At the present moment there happens to be no S-Region activity on the Sun. But a new one may develop at any time. Also, the outlook for a decrease in activity is not very favorable. Sunspot activity continues at a high level and is steadily mounting in violence. The last sunspot cycle had the highest maximum of any since 1780, but the present cycle bids fair to set an all time record. LATHAM. And so you believe that the S-Regions are the cause of most of the present trouble in the world. That it is not ourselves but something outside ourselves— NIEMAND. That is the logical outcome of our investigation. We are controlled and swayed by forces which in many cases we are powerless to resist. LATHAM. Could we not be warned of the presence of an S-Region? NIEMAND. The trouble is they seem to develop at random on the Sun. I'm afraid any warning system would be worse than useless. We would be crying WOLF! all the time. LATHAM. How may a person who is not particularly susceptible to this malignant radiation know that one of these regions is active? NIEMAND. If you have a feeling of restlessness and anxiety, if you are unable to concentrate, if you feel suddenly depressed and discouraged about yourself, or are filled with resentment toward the world, then you may be pretty sure that an S-Region is passing across the face of the Sun. Keep a tight rein on yourself. For it seems that evil will always be with us ... as long as the Sun shall continue to shine upon this little world. THE END [A] Middletown believes that the Intense radiation recently discovered from information derived from Explorer I and III has no connection with the corpuscular S-radiation.

Some humans have more control over the impact of sunspot disturbances on their mental health than others

All human desires are influenced, in some way, by the frequency and intensity of sunspots in any given time

Humans have the free will to pursue their desires, which are in part influenced by external influences

Humans have natural desires and the free will to pursue them

24150_K0VE3QFL_3

Which term best describes Latham's tone in the interview?

DISTURBING SUN By PHILIP LATHAM Illustrated by Freas This, be it understood, is fiction—nothing but fiction—and not, under any circumstances, to be considered as having any truth whatever to it. It's obviously utterly impossible ... isn't it? An interview with Dr. I. M. Niemand, Director of the Psychophysical Institute of Solar and Terrestrial Relations, Camarillo, California. In the closing days of December, 1957, at the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in New York, Dr. Niemand delivered a paper entitled simply, "On the Nature of the Solar S-Regions." Owing to its unassuming title the startling implications contained in the paper were completely overlooked by the press. These implications are discussed here in an exclusive interview with Dr. Niemand by Philip Latham. LATHAM. Dr. Niemand, what would you say is your main job? NIEMAND. I suppose you might say my main job today is to find out all I can between activity on the Sun and various forms of activity on the Earth. LATHAM. What do you mean by activity on the Sun? NIEMAND. Well, a sunspot is a form of solar activity. LATHAM. Just what is a sunspot? NIEMAND. I'm afraid I can't say just what a sunspot is. I can only describe it. A sunspot is a region on the Sun that is cooler than its surroundings. That's why it looks dark. It isn't so hot. Therefore not so bright. LATHAM. Isn't it true that the number of spots on the Sun rises and falls in a cycle of eleven years? NIEMAND. The number of spots on the Sun rises and falls in a cycle of about eleven years. That word about makes quite a difference. LATHAM. In what way? NIEMAND. It means you can only approximately predict the future course of sunspot activity. Sunspots are mighty treacherous things. LATHAM. Haven't there been a great many correlations announced between sunspots and various effects on the Earth? NIEMAND. Scores of them. LATHAM. What is your opinion of these correlations? NIEMAND. Pure bosh in most cases. LATHAM. But some are valid? NIEMAND. A few. There is unquestionably a correlation between sunspots and disturbances of the Earth's magnetic field ... radio fade-outs ... auroras ... things like that. LATHAM. Now, Dr. Niemand, I understand that you have been investigating solar and terrestrial relationships along rather unorthodox lines. NIEMAND. Yes, I suppose some people would say so. LATHAM. You have broken new ground? NIEMAND. That's true. LATHAM. In what way have your investigations differed from those of others? NIEMAND. I think our biggest advance was the discovery that sunspots themselves are not the direct cause of the disturbances we have been studying on the Earth. It's something like the eruptions in rubeola. Attention is concentrated on the bright red papules because they're such a conspicuous symptom of the disease. Whereas the real cause is an invisible filterable virus. In the solar case it turned out to be these S-Regions. LATHAM. Why S-Regions? NIEMAND. We had to call them something. Named after the Sun, I suppose. LATHAM. You say an S-Region is invisible? NIEMAND. It is quite invisible to the eye but readily detected by suitable instrumental methods. It is extremely doubtful, however, if the radiation we detect is the actual cause of the disturbing effects observed. LATHAM. Just what are these effects? NIEMAND. Well, they're common enough, goodness knows. As old as the world, in fact. Yet strangely enough it's hard to describe them in exact terms. LATHAM. Can you give us a general idea? NIEMAND. I'll try. Let's see ... remember that speech from "Julius Caesar" where Cassius is bewailing the evil times that beset ancient Rome? I believe it went like this: "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves that we are underlings." LATHAM. I'm afraid I don't see— NIEMAND. Well, Shakespeare would have been nearer the truth if he had put it the other way around. "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in ourselves but in our stars" or better "in the Sun." LATHAM. In the Sun? NIEMAND. That's right, in the Sun. I suppose the oldest problem in the world is the origin of human evil. Philosophers have wrestled with it ever since the days of Job. And like Job they have usually given up in despair, convinced that the origin of evil is too deep for the human mind to solve. Generally they have concluded that man is inherently wicked and sinful and that is the end of it. Now for the first time science has thrown new light on this subject. LATHAM. How is that? NIEMAND. Consider the record of history. There are occasional periods when conditions are fairly calm and peaceful. Art and industry flourished. Man at last seemed to be making progress toward some higher goal. Then suddenly— for no detectable reason —conditions are reversed. Wars rage. People go mad. The world is plunged into an orgy of bloodshed and misery. LATHAM. But weren't there reasons? NIEMAND. What reasons? LATHAM. Well, disputes over boundaries ... economic rivalry ... border incidents.... NIEMAND. Nonsense. Men always make some flimsy excuse for going to war. The truth of the matter is that men go to war because they want to go to war. They can't help themselves. They are impelled by forces over which they have no control. By forces outside of themselves. LATHAM. Those are broad, sweeping statements. Can't you be more specific? NIEMAND. Perhaps I'd better go back to the beginning. Let me see.... It all started back in March, 1955, when I started getting patients suffering from a complex of symptoms, such as profound mental depression, anxiety, insomnia, alternating with fits of violent rage and resentment against life and the world in general. These people were deeply disturbed. No doubt about that. Yet they were not psychotic and hardly more than mildly neurotic. Now every doctor gets a good many patients of this type. Such a syndrome is characteristic of menopausal women and some men during the climacteric, but these people failed to fit into this picture. They were married and single persons of both sexes and of all ages. They came from all walks of life. The onset of their attack was invariably sudden and with scarcely any warning. They would be going about their work feeling perfectly all right. Then in a minute the whole world was like some scene from a nightmare. A week or ten days later the attack would cease as mysteriously as it had come and they would be their old self again. LATHAM. Aren't such attacks characteristic of the stress and strain of modern life? NIEMAND. I'm afraid that old stress-and-strain theory has been badly overworked. Been hearing about it ever since I was a pre-med student at ucla . Even as a boy I can remember my grandfather deploring the stress and strain of modern life when he was a country doctor practicing in Indiana. In my opinion one of the most valuable contributions anthropologists have made in recent years is the discovery that primitive man is afflicted with essentially the same neurotic conditions as those of us who live a so-called civilized life. They have found savages displaying every symptom of a nervous breakdown among the mountain tribes of the Elgonyi and the Aruntas of Australia. No, Mr. Latham, it's time the stress-and-strain theory was relegated to the junk pile along with demoniac possession and blood letting. LATHAM. You must have done something for your patients— NIEMAND. A doctor must always do something for the patients who come to his office seeking help. First I gave them a thorough physical examination. I turned up some minor ailments—a slight heart murmur or a trace of albumin in the urine—but nothing of any significance. On the whole they were a remarkably healthy bunch of individuals, much more so than an average sample of the population. Then I made a searching inquiry into their personal life. Here again I drew a blank. They had no particular financial worries. Their sex life was generally satisfactory. There was no history of mental illness in the family. In fact, the only thing that seemed to be the matter with them was that there were times when they felt like hell. LATHAM. I suppose you tried tranquilizers? NIEMAND. Oh, yes. In a few cases in which I tried tranquilizing pills of the meprobamate type there was some slight improvement. I want to emphasize, however, that I do not believe in prescribing shotgun remedies for a patient. To my way of thinking it is a lazy slipshod way of carrying on the practice of medicine. The only thing for which I do give myself credit was that I asked my patients to keep a detailed record of their symptoms taking special care to note the time of exacerbation—increase in the severity of the symptoms—as accurately as possible. LATHAM. And this gave you a clue? NIEMAND. It was the beginning. In most instances patients reported the attack struck with almost the impact of a physical blow. The prodromal symptoms were usually slight ... a sudden feeling of uneasiness and guilt ... hot and cold flashes ... dizziness ... double vision. Then this ghastly sense of depression coupled with a blind insensate rage at life. One man said he felt as if the world were closing in on him. Another that he felt the people around him were plotting his destruction. One housewife made her husband lock her in her room for fear she would injure the children. I pored over these case histories for a long time getting absolutely nowhere. Then finally a pattern began to emerge. LATHAM. What sort of pattern? NIEMAND. The first thing that struck me was that the attacks all occurred during the daytime, between the hours of about seven in the morning and five in the evening. Then there were these coincidences— LATHAM. Coincidences? NIEMAND. Total strangers miles apart were stricken at almost the same moment. At first I thought nothing of it but as my records accumulated I became convinced it could not be attributed to chance. A mathematical analysis showed the number of coincidences followed a Poisson distribution very closely. I couldn't possibly see what daylight had to do with it. There is some evidence that mental patients are most disturbed around the time of full moon, but a search of medical literature failed to reveal any connection with the Sun. LATHAM. What did you do? NIEMAND. Naturally I said nothing of this to my patients. I did, however, take pains to impress upon them the necessity of keeping an exact record of the onset of an attack. The better records they kept the more conclusive was the evidence. Men and women were experiencing nearly simultaneous attacks of rage and depression all over southern California, which was as far as my practice extended. One day it occurred to me: if people a few miles apart could be stricken simultaneously, why not people hundreds or thousands of miles apart? It was this idea that prompted me to get in touch with an old colleague of mine I had known at UC medical school, Dr. Max Hillyard, who was in practice in Utica, New York. LATHAM. With what result? NIEMAND. I was afraid the result would be that my old roommate would think I had gone completely crazy. Imagine my surprise and gratification on receiving an answer by return mail to the effect that he also had been getting an increasing number of patients suffering with the same identical symptoms as my own. Furthermore, upon exchanging records we did find that in many cases patients three thousand miles apart had been stricken simultaneously— LATHAM. Just a minute. I would like to know how you define "simultaneous." NIEMAND. We say an attack is simultaneous when one occurred on the east coast, for example, not earlier or later than five minutes of an attack on the west coast. That is about as close as you can hope to time a subjective effect of this nature. And now another fact emerged which gave us another clue. LATHAM. Which was? NIEMAND. In every case of a simultaneous attack the Sun was shining at both New York and California. LATHAM. You mean if it was cloudy— NIEMAND. No, no. The weather had nothing to do with it. I mean the Sun had to be above the horizon at both places. A person might undergo an attack soon after sunrise in New York but there would be no corresponding record of an attack in California where it was still dark. Conversely, a person might be stricken late in the afternoon in California without a corresponding attack in New York where the Sun had set. Dr. Hillyard and I had been searching desperately for a clue. We had both noticed that the attacks occurred only during the daylight hours but this had not seemed especially significant. Here we had evidence pointing directly to the source of trouble. It must have some connection with the Sun. LATHAM. That must have had you badly puzzled at first. NIEMAND. It certainly did. It looked as if we were headed back to the Middle Ages when astrology and medicine went hand in hand. But since it was our only lead we had no other choice but to follow it regardless of the consequences. Here luck played somewhat of a part, for Hillyard happened to have a contact that proved invaluable to us. Several years before Hillyard had gotten to know a young astrophysicist, Henry Middletown, who had come to him suffering from a severe case of myositis in the arms and shoulders. Hillyard had been able to effect a complete cure for which the boy was very grateful, and they had kept up a desultory correspondence. Middletown was now specializing in radio astronomy at the government's new solar observatory on Turtle Back Mountain in Arizona. If it had not been for Middletown's help I'm afraid our investigation would never have gotten past the clinical stage. LATHAM. In what way was Middletown of assistance? NIEMAND. It was the old case of workers in one field of science being completely ignorant of what was going on in another field. Someday we will have to establish a clearing house in science instead of keeping it in tight little compartments as we do at present. Well, Hillyard and I packed up for Arizona with considerable misgivings. We were afraid Middletown wouldn't take our findings seriously but somewhat to our surprise he heard our story with the closest attention. I guess astronomers have gotten so used to hearing from flying saucer enthusiasts and science-fiction addicts that nothing surprises them any more. When we had finished he asked to see our records. Hillyard had them all set down for easy numerical tabulation. Middletown went to work with scarcely a word. Within an hour he had produced a chart that was simply astounding. LATHAM. Can you describe this chart for us? NIEMAND. It was really quite simple. But if it had not been for Middletown's experience in charting other solar phenomena it would never have occurred to us to do it. First, he laid out a series of about thirty squares horizontally across a sheet of graph paper. He dated these beginning March 1, 1955, when our records began. In each square he put a number from 1 to 10 that was a rough index of the number and intensity of the attacks reported on that day. Then he laid out another horizontal row below the first one dated twenty-seven days later. That is, the square under March 1st in the top row was dated March 28th in the row below it. He filled in the chart until he had an array of dozens of rows that included all our data down to May, 1958. When Middletown had finished it was easy to see that the squares of highest index number did not fall at random on the chart. Instead they fell in slightly slanting parallel series so that you could draw straight lines down through them. The connection with the Sun was obvious. LATHAM. In what way? NIEMAND. Why, because twenty-seven days is about the synodic period of solar rotation. That is, if you see a large spot at the center of the Sun's disk today, there is a good chance if it survives that you will see it at the same place twenty-seven days later. But that night Middletown produced another chart that showed the connection with the Sun in a way that was even more convincing. LATHAM. How was that? NIEMAND. I said that the lines drawn down through the days of greatest mental disturbance slanted slightly. On this second chart the squares were dated under one another not at intervals of twenty-seven days, but at intervals of twenty-seven point three days. LATHAM. Why is that so important? NIEMAND. Because the average period of solar rotation in the sunspot zone is not twenty-seven days but twenty-seven point three days. And on this chart the lines did not slant but went vertically downward. The correlation with the synodic rotation of the Sun was practically perfect. LATHAM. But how did you get onto the S-Regions? NIEMAND. Middletown was immediately struck by the resemblance between the chart of mental disturbance and one he had been plotting over the years from his radio observations. Now when he compared the two charts the resemblance between the two was unmistakable. The pattern shown by the chart of mental disturbance corresponded in a striking way with the solar chart but with this difference. The disturbances on the Earth started two days later on the average than the disturbances due to the S-Regions on the Sun. In other words, there was a lag of about forty-eight hours between the two. But otherwise they were almost identical. LATHAM. But if these S-Regions of Middletown's are invisible how could he detect them? NIEMAND. The S-Regions are invisible to the eye through an optical telescope, but are detected with ease by a radio telescope. Middletown had discovered them when he was a graduate student working on radio astronomy in Australia, and he had followed up his researches with the more powerful equipment at Turtle Back Mountain. The formation of an S-Region is heralded by a long series of bursts of a few seconds duration, when the radiation may increase up to several thousand times that of the background intensity. These noise storms have been recorded simultaneously on wavelengths of from one to fifteen meters, which so far is the upper limit of the observations. In a few instances, however, intense bursts have also been detected down to fifty cm. LATHAM. I believe you said the periods of mental disturbance last for about ten or twelve days. How does that tie-in with the S-Regions? NIEMAND. Very closely. You see it takes about twelve days for an S-Region to pass across the face of the Sun, since the synodic rotation is twenty-seven point three days. LATHAM. I should think it would be nearer thirteen or fourteen days. NIEMAND. Apparently an S-Region is not particularly effective when it is just coming on or just going off the disk of the Sun. LATHAM. Are the S-Regions associated with sunspots? NIEMAND. They are connected in this way: that sunspot activity and S-Region activity certainly go together. The more sunspots the more violent and intense is the S-Region activity. But there is not a one-to-one correspondence between sunspots and S-Regions. That is, you cannot connect a particular sunspot group with a particular S-Region. The same thing is true of sunspots and magnetic storms. LATHAM. How do you account for this? NIEMAND. We don't account for it. LATHAM. What other properties of the S-Regions have you discovered? NIEMAND. Middletown says that the radio waves emanating from them are strongly circularly polarized. Moreover, the sense of rotation remains constant while one is passing across the Sun. If the magnetic field associated with an S-Region extends into the high solar corona through which the rays pass, then the sense of rotation corresponds to the ordinary ray of the magneto-ionic theory. LATHAM. Does this mean that the mental disturbances arise from some form of electromagnetic radiation? NIEMAND. We doubt it. As I said before, the charts show a lag of about forty-eight hours between the development of an S-Region and the onset of mental disturbance. This indicates that the malignant energy emanating from an S-Region consists of some highly penetrating form of corpuscular radiation, as yet unidentified. [A] LATHAM. A question that puzzles me is why some people are affected by the S-Regions while others are not. NIEMAND. Our latest results indicate that probably no one is completely immune. All are affected in some degree. Just why some should be affected so much more than others is still a matter of speculation. LATHAM. How long does an S-Region last? NIEMAND. An S-Region may have a lifetime of from three to perhaps a dozen solar rotations. Then it dies out and for a time we are free from this malignant radiation. Then a new region develops in perhaps an entirely different region of the Sun. Sometimes there may be several different S-Regions all going at once. LATHAM. Why were not the S-Regions discovered long ago? NIEMAND. Because the radio exploration of the Sun only began since the end of World War II. LATHAM. How does it happen that you only got patients suffering from S-radiation since about 1955? NIEMAND. I think we did get such patients previously but not in large enough numbers to attract attention. Also the present sunspot cycle started its rise to maximum about 1954. LATHAM. Is there no way of escaping the S-radiation? NIEMAND. I'm afraid the only sure way is to keep on the unilluminated side of the Earth which is rather difficult to do. Apparently the corpuscular beam from an S-Region is several degrees wide and not very sharply defined, since its effects are felt simultaneously over the entire continent. Hillyard and Middletown are working on some form of shielding device but so far without success. LATHAM. What is the present state of S-Region activity? NIEMAND. At the present moment there happens to be no S-Region activity on the Sun. But a new one may develop at any time. Also, the outlook for a decrease in activity is not very favorable. Sunspot activity continues at a high level and is steadily mounting in violence. The last sunspot cycle had the highest maximum of any since 1780, but the present cycle bids fair to set an all time record. LATHAM. And so you believe that the S-Regions are the cause of most of the present trouble in the world. That it is not ourselves but something outside ourselves— NIEMAND. That is the logical outcome of our investigation. We are controlled and swayed by forces which in many cases we are powerless to resist. LATHAM. Could we not be warned of the presence of an S-Region? NIEMAND. The trouble is they seem to develop at random on the Sun. I'm afraid any warning system would be worse than useless. We would be crying WOLF! all the time. LATHAM. How may a person who is not particularly susceptible to this malignant radiation know that one of these regions is active? NIEMAND. If you have a feeling of restlessness and anxiety, if you are unable to concentrate, if you feel suddenly depressed and discouraged about yourself, or are filled with resentment toward the world, then you may be pretty sure that an S-Region is passing across the face of the Sun. Keep a tight rein on yourself. For it seems that evil will always be with us ... as long as the Sun shall continue to shine upon this little world. THE END [A] Middletown believes that the Intense radiation recently discovered from information derived from Explorer I and III has no connection with the corpuscular S-radiation.

Neutral

Skeptical

Pressing

Perplexed

24150_K0VE3QFL_4

What is Niemand's tone toward the 'stress-and-strain of modern life' theory?

DISTURBING SUN By PHILIP LATHAM Illustrated by Freas This, be it understood, is fiction—nothing but fiction—and not, under any circumstances, to be considered as having any truth whatever to it. It's obviously utterly impossible ... isn't it? An interview with Dr. I. M. Niemand, Director of the Psychophysical Institute of Solar and Terrestrial Relations, Camarillo, California. In the closing days of December, 1957, at the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in New York, Dr. Niemand delivered a paper entitled simply, "On the Nature of the Solar S-Regions." Owing to its unassuming title the startling implications contained in the paper were completely overlooked by the press. These implications are discussed here in an exclusive interview with Dr. Niemand by Philip Latham. LATHAM. Dr. Niemand, what would you say is your main job? NIEMAND. I suppose you might say my main job today is to find out all I can between activity on the Sun and various forms of activity on the Earth. LATHAM. What do you mean by activity on the Sun? NIEMAND. Well, a sunspot is a form of solar activity. LATHAM. Just what is a sunspot? NIEMAND. I'm afraid I can't say just what a sunspot is. I can only describe it. A sunspot is a region on the Sun that is cooler than its surroundings. That's why it looks dark. It isn't so hot. Therefore not so bright. LATHAM. Isn't it true that the number of spots on the Sun rises and falls in a cycle of eleven years? NIEMAND. The number of spots on the Sun rises and falls in a cycle of about eleven years. That word about makes quite a difference. LATHAM. In what way? NIEMAND. It means you can only approximately predict the future course of sunspot activity. Sunspots are mighty treacherous things. LATHAM. Haven't there been a great many correlations announced between sunspots and various effects on the Earth? NIEMAND. Scores of them. LATHAM. What is your opinion of these correlations? NIEMAND. Pure bosh in most cases. LATHAM. But some are valid? NIEMAND. A few. There is unquestionably a correlation between sunspots and disturbances of the Earth's magnetic field ... radio fade-outs ... auroras ... things like that. LATHAM. Now, Dr. Niemand, I understand that you have been investigating solar and terrestrial relationships along rather unorthodox lines. NIEMAND. Yes, I suppose some people would say so. LATHAM. You have broken new ground? NIEMAND. That's true. LATHAM. In what way have your investigations differed from those of others? NIEMAND. I think our biggest advance was the discovery that sunspots themselves are not the direct cause of the disturbances we have been studying on the Earth. It's something like the eruptions in rubeola. Attention is concentrated on the bright red papules because they're such a conspicuous symptom of the disease. Whereas the real cause is an invisible filterable virus. In the solar case it turned out to be these S-Regions. LATHAM. Why S-Regions? NIEMAND. We had to call them something. Named after the Sun, I suppose. LATHAM. You say an S-Region is invisible? NIEMAND. It is quite invisible to the eye but readily detected by suitable instrumental methods. It is extremely doubtful, however, if the radiation we detect is the actual cause of the disturbing effects observed. LATHAM. Just what are these effects? NIEMAND. Well, they're common enough, goodness knows. As old as the world, in fact. Yet strangely enough it's hard to describe them in exact terms. LATHAM. Can you give us a general idea? NIEMAND. I'll try. Let's see ... remember that speech from "Julius Caesar" where Cassius is bewailing the evil times that beset ancient Rome? I believe it went like this: "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves that we are underlings." LATHAM. I'm afraid I don't see— NIEMAND. Well, Shakespeare would have been nearer the truth if he had put it the other way around. "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in ourselves but in our stars" or better "in the Sun." LATHAM. In the Sun? NIEMAND. That's right, in the Sun. I suppose the oldest problem in the world is the origin of human evil. Philosophers have wrestled with it ever since the days of Job. And like Job they have usually given up in despair, convinced that the origin of evil is too deep for the human mind to solve. Generally they have concluded that man is inherently wicked and sinful and that is the end of it. Now for the first time science has thrown new light on this subject. LATHAM. How is that? NIEMAND. Consider the record of history. There are occasional periods when conditions are fairly calm and peaceful. Art and industry flourished. Man at last seemed to be making progress toward some higher goal. Then suddenly— for no detectable reason —conditions are reversed. Wars rage. People go mad. The world is plunged into an orgy of bloodshed and misery. LATHAM. But weren't there reasons? NIEMAND. What reasons? LATHAM. Well, disputes over boundaries ... economic rivalry ... border incidents.... NIEMAND. Nonsense. Men always make some flimsy excuse for going to war. The truth of the matter is that men go to war because they want to go to war. They can't help themselves. They are impelled by forces over which they have no control. By forces outside of themselves. LATHAM. Those are broad, sweeping statements. Can't you be more specific? NIEMAND. Perhaps I'd better go back to the beginning. Let me see.... It all started back in March, 1955, when I started getting patients suffering from a complex of symptoms, such as profound mental depression, anxiety, insomnia, alternating with fits of violent rage and resentment against life and the world in general. These people were deeply disturbed. No doubt about that. Yet they were not psychotic and hardly more than mildly neurotic. Now every doctor gets a good many patients of this type. Such a syndrome is characteristic of menopausal women and some men during the climacteric, but these people failed to fit into this picture. They were married and single persons of both sexes and of all ages. They came from all walks of life. The onset of their attack was invariably sudden and with scarcely any warning. They would be going about their work feeling perfectly all right. Then in a minute the whole world was like some scene from a nightmare. A week or ten days later the attack would cease as mysteriously as it had come and they would be their old self again. LATHAM. Aren't such attacks characteristic of the stress and strain of modern life? NIEMAND. I'm afraid that old stress-and-strain theory has been badly overworked. Been hearing about it ever since I was a pre-med student at ucla . Even as a boy I can remember my grandfather deploring the stress and strain of modern life when he was a country doctor practicing in Indiana. In my opinion one of the most valuable contributions anthropologists have made in recent years is the discovery that primitive man is afflicted with essentially the same neurotic conditions as those of us who live a so-called civilized life. They have found savages displaying every symptom of a nervous breakdown among the mountain tribes of the Elgonyi and the Aruntas of Australia. No, Mr. Latham, it's time the stress-and-strain theory was relegated to the junk pile along with demoniac possession and blood letting. LATHAM. You must have done something for your patients— NIEMAND. A doctor must always do something for the patients who come to his office seeking help. First I gave them a thorough physical examination. I turned up some minor ailments—a slight heart murmur or a trace of albumin in the urine—but nothing of any significance. On the whole they were a remarkably healthy bunch of individuals, much more so than an average sample of the population. Then I made a searching inquiry into their personal life. Here again I drew a blank. They had no particular financial worries. Their sex life was generally satisfactory. There was no history of mental illness in the family. In fact, the only thing that seemed to be the matter with them was that there were times when they felt like hell. LATHAM. I suppose you tried tranquilizers? NIEMAND. Oh, yes. In a few cases in which I tried tranquilizing pills of the meprobamate type there was some slight improvement. I want to emphasize, however, that I do not believe in prescribing shotgun remedies for a patient. To my way of thinking it is a lazy slipshod way of carrying on the practice of medicine. The only thing for which I do give myself credit was that I asked my patients to keep a detailed record of their symptoms taking special care to note the time of exacerbation—increase in the severity of the symptoms—as accurately as possible. LATHAM. And this gave you a clue? NIEMAND. It was the beginning. In most instances patients reported the attack struck with almost the impact of a physical blow. The prodromal symptoms were usually slight ... a sudden feeling of uneasiness and guilt ... hot and cold flashes ... dizziness ... double vision. Then this ghastly sense of depression coupled with a blind insensate rage at life. One man said he felt as if the world were closing in on him. Another that he felt the people around him were plotting his destruction. One housewife made her husband lock her in her room for fear she would injure the children. I pored over these case histories for a long time getting absolutely nowhere. Then finally a pattern began to emerge. LATHAM. What sort of pattern? NIEMAND. The first thing that struck me was that the attacks all occurred during the daytime, between the hours of about seven in the morning and five in the evening. Then there were these coincidences— LATHAM. Coincidences? NIEMAND. Total strangers miles apart were stricken at almost the same moment. At first I thought nothing of it but as my records accumulated I became convinced it could not be attributed to chance. A mathematical analysis showed the number of coincidences followed a Poisson distribution very closely. I couldn't possibly see what daylight had to do with it. There is some evidence that mental patients are most disturbed around the time of full moon, but a search of medical literature failed to reveal any connection with the Sun. LATHAM. What did you do? NIEMAND. Naturally I said nothing of this to my patients. I did, however, take pains to impress upon them the necessity of keeping an exact record of the onset of an attack. The better records they kept the more conclusive was the evidence. Men and women were experiencing nearly simultaneous attacks of rage and depression all over southern California, which was as far as my practice extended. One day it occurred to me: if people a few miles apart could be stricken simultaneously, why not people hundreds or thousands of miles apart? It was this idea that prompted me to get in touch with an old colleague of mine I had known at UC medical school, Dr. Max Hillyard, who was in practice in Utica, New York. LATHAM. With what result? NIEMAND. I was afraid the result would be that my old roommate would think I had gone completely crazy. Imagine my surprise and gratification on receiving an answer by return mail to the effect that he also had been getting an increasing number of patients suffering with the same identical symptoms as my own. Furthermore, upon exchanging records we did find that in many cases patients three thousand miles apart had been stricken simultaneously— LATHAM. Just a minute. I would like to know how you define "simultaneous." NIEMAND. We say an attack is simultaneous when one occurred on the east coast, for example, not earlier or later than five minutes of an attack on the west coast. That is about as close as you can hope to time a subjective effect of this nature. And now another fact emerged which gave us another clue. LATHAM. Which was? NIEMAND. In every case of a simultaneous attack the Sun was shining at both New York and California. LATHAM. You mean if it was cloudy— NIEMAND. No, no. The weather had nothing to do with it. I mean the Sun had to be above the horizon at both places. A person might undergo an attack soon after sunrise in New York but there would be no corresponding record of an attack in California where it was still dark. Conversely, a person might be stricken late in the afternoon in California without a corresponding attack in New York where the Sun had set. Dr. Hillyard and I had been searching desperately for a clue. We had both noticed that the attacks occurred only during the daylight hours but this had not seemed especially significant. Here we had evidence pointing directly to the source of trouble. It must have some connection with the Sun. LATHAM. That must have had you badly puzzled at first. NIEMAND. It certainly did. It looked as if we were headed back to the Middle Ages when astrology and medicine went hand in hand. But since it was our only lead we had no other choice but to follow it regardless of the consequences. Here luck played somewhat of a part, for Hillyard happened to have a contact that proved invaluable to us. Several years before Hillyard had gotten to know a young astrophysicist, Henry Middletown, who had come to him suffering from a severe case of myositis in the arms and shoulders. Hillyard had been able to effect a complete cure for which the boy was very grateful, and they had kept up a desultory correspondence. Middletown was now specializing in radio astronomy at the government's new solar observatory on Turtle Back Mountain in Arizona. If it had not been for Middletown's help I'm afraid our investigation would never have gotten past the clinical stage. LATHAM. In what way was Middletown of assistance? NIEMAND. It was the old case of workers in one field of science being completely ignorant of what was going on in another field. Someday we will have to establish a clearing house in science instead of keeping it in tight little compartments as we do at present. Well, Hillyard and I packed up for Arizona with considerable misgivings. We were afraid Middletown wouldn't take our findings seriously but somewhat to our surprise he heard our story with the closest attention. I guess astronomers have gotten so used to hearing from flying saucer enthusiasts and science-fiction addicts that nothing surprises them any more. When we had finished he asked to see our records. Hillyard had them all set down for easy numerical tabulation. Middletown went to work with scarcely a word. Within an hour he had produced a chart that was simply astounding. LATHAM. Can you describe this chart for us? NIEMAND. It was really quite simple. But if it had not been for Middletown's experience in charting other solar phenomena it would never have occurred to us to do it. First, he laid out a series of about thirty squares horizontally across a sheet of graph paper. He dated these beginning March 1, 1955, when our records began. In each square he put a number from 1 to 10 that was a rough index of the number and intensity of the attacks reported on that day. Then he laid out another horizontal row below the first one dated twenty-seven days later. That is, the square under March 1st in the top row was dated March 28th in the row below it. He filled in the chart until he had an array of dozens of rows that included all our data down to May, 1958. When Middletown had finished it was easy to see that the squares of highest index number did not fall at random on the chart. Instead they fell in slightly slanting parallel series so that you could draw straight lines down through them. The connection with the Sun was obvious. LATHAM. In what way? NIEMAND. Why, because twenty-seven days is about the synodic period of solar rotation. That is, if you see a large spot at the center of the Sun's disk today, there is a good chance if it survives that you will see it at the same place twenty-seven days later. But that night Middletown produced another chart that showed the connection with the Sun in a way that was even more convincing. LATHAM. How was that? NIEMAND. I said that the lines drawn down through the days of greatest mental disturbance slanted slightly. On this second chart the squares were dated under one another not at intervals of twenty-seven days, but at intervals of twenty-seven point three days. LATHAM. Why is that so important? NIEMAND. Because the average period of solar rotation in the sunspot zone is not twenty-seven days but twenty-seven point three days. And on this chart the lines did not slant but went vertically downward. The correlation with the synodic rotation of the Sun was practically perfect. LATHAM. But how did you get onto the S-Regions? NIEMAND. Middletown was immediately struck by the resemblance between the chart of mental disturbance and one he had been plotting over the years from his radio observations. Now when he compared the two charts the resemblance between the two was unmistakable. The pattern shown by the chart of mental disturbance corresponded in a striking way with the solar chart but with this difference. The disturbances on the Earth started two days later on the average than the disturbances due to the S-Regions on the Sun. In other words, there was a lag of about forty-eight hours between the two. But otherwise they were almost identical. LATHAM. But if these S-Regions of Middletown's are invisible how could he detect them? NIEMAND. The S-Regions are invisible to the eye through an optical telescope, but are detected with ease by a radio telescope. Middletown had discovered them when he was a graduate student working on radio astronomy in Australia, and he had followed up his researches with the more powerful equipment at Turtle Back Mountain. The formation of an S-Region is heralded by a long series of bursts of a few seconds duration, when the radiation may increase up to several thousand times that of the background intensity. These noise storms have been recorded simultaneously on wavelengths of from one to fifteen meters, which so far is the upper limit of the observations. In a few instances, however, intense bursts have also been detected down to fifty cm. LATHAM. I believe you said the periods of mental disturbance last for about ten or twelve days. How does that tie-in with the S-Regions? NIEMAND. Very closely. You see it takes about twelve days for an S-Region to pass across the face of the Sun, since the synodic rotation is twenty-seven point three days. LATHAM. I should think it would be nearer thirteen or fourteen days. NIEMAND. Apparently an S-Region is not particularly effective when it is just coming on or just going off the disk of the Sun. LATHAM. Are the S-Regions associated with sunspots? NIEMAND. They are connected in this way: that sunspot activity and S-Region activity certainly go together. The more sunspots the more violent and intense is the S-Region activity. But there is not a one-to-one correspondence between sunspots and S-Regions. That is, you cannot connect a particular sunspot group with a particular S-Region. The same thing is true of sunspots and magnetic storms. LATHAM. How do you account for this? NIEMAND. We don't account for it. LATHAM. What other properties of the S-Regions have you discovered? NIEMAND. Middletown says that the radio waves emanating from them are strongly circularly polarized. Moreover, the sense of rotation remains constant while one is passing across the Sun. If the magnetic field associated with an S-Region extends into the high solar corona through which the rays pass, then the sense of rotation corresponds to the ordinary ray of the magneto-ionic theory. LATHAM. Does this mean that the mental disturbances arise from some form of electromagnetic radiation? NIEMAND. We doubt it. As I said before, the charts show a lag of about forty-eight hours between the development of an S-Region and the onset of mental disturbance. This indicates that the malignant energy emanating from an S-Region consists of some highly penetrating form of corpuscular radiation, as yet unidentified. [A] LATHAM. A question that puzzles me is why some people are affected by the S-Regions while others are not. NIEMAND. Our latest results indicate that probably no one is completely immune. All are affected in some degree. Just why some should be affected so much more than others is still a matter of speculation. LATHAM. How long does an S-Region last? NIEMAND. An S-Region may have a lifetime of from three to perhaps a dozen solar rotations. Then it dies out and for a time we are free from this malignant radiation. Then a new region develops in perhaps an entirely different region of the Sun. Sometimes there may be several different S-Regions all going at once. LATHAM. Why were not the S-Regions discovered long ago? NIEMAND. Because the radio exploration of the Sun only began since the end of World War II. LATHAM. How does it happen that you only got patients suffering from S-radiation since about 1955? NIEMAND. I think we did get such patients previously but not in large enough numbers to attract attention. Also the present sunspot cycle started its rise to maximum about 1954. LATHAM. Is there no way of escaping the S-radiation? NIEMAND. I'm afraid the only sure way is to keep on the unilluminated side of the Earth which is rather difficult to do. Apparently the corpuscular beam from an S-Region is several degrees wide and not very sharply defined, since its effects are felt simultaneously over the entire continent. Hillyard and Middletown are working on some form of shielding device but so far without success. LATHAM. What is the present state of S-Region activity? NIEMAND. At the present moment there happens to be no S-Region activity on the Sun. But a new one may develop at any time. Also, the outlook for a decrease in activity is not very favorable. Sunspot activity continues at a high level and is steadily mounting in violence. The last sunspot cycle had the highest maximum of any since 1780, but the present cycle bids fair to set an all time record. LATHAM. And so you believe that the S-Regions are the cause of most of the present trouble in the world. That it is not ourselves but something outside ourselves— NIEMAND. That is the logical outcome of our investigation. We are controlled and swayed by forces which in many cases we are powerless to resist. LATHAM. Could we not be warned of the presence of an S-Region? NIEMAND. The trouble is they seem to develop at random on the Sun. I'm afraid any warning system would be worse than useless. We would be crying WOLF! all the time. LATHAM. How may a person who is not particularly susceptible to this malignant radiation know that one of these regions is active? NIEMAND. If you have a feeling of restlessness and anxiety, if you are unable to concentrate, if you feel suddenly depressed and discouraged about yourself, or are filled with resentment toward the world, then you may be pretty sure that an S-Region is passing across the face of the Sun. Keep a tight rein on yourself. For it seems that evil will always be with us ... as long as the Sun shall continue to shine upon this little world. THE END [A] Middletown believes that the Intense radiation recently discovered from information derived from Explorer I and III has no connection with the corpuscular S-radiation.

Inconsistent

Ambiguous

Dismissive

Vehement

24150_K0VE3QFL_5

In observing the sunspot-related disturbances, what pattern did Niemand notice? What pattern did Niemand notice of the disturbances? (daytime, strangers)

DISTURBING SUN By PHILIP LATHAM Illustrated by Freas This, be it understood, is fiction—nothing but fiction—and not, under any circumstances, to be considered as having any truth whatever to it. It's obviously utterly impossible ... isn't it? An interview with Dr. I. M. Niemand, Director of the Psychophysical Institute of Solar and Terrestrial Relations, Camarillo, California. In the closing days of December, 1957, at the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in New York, Dr. Niemand delivered a paper entitled simply, "On the Nature of the Solar S-Regions." Owing to its unassuming title the startling implications contained in the paper were completely overlooked by the press. These implications are discussed here in an exclusive interview with Dr. Niemand by Philip Latham. LATHAM. Dr. Niemand, what would you say is your main job? NIEMAND. I suppose you might say my main job today is to find out all I can between activity on the Sun and various forms of activity on the Earth. LATHAM. What do you mean by activity on the Sun? NIEMAND. Well, a sunspot is a form of solar activity. LATHAM. Just what is a sunspot? NIEMAND. I'm afraid I can't say just what a sunspot is. I can only describe it. A sunspot is a region on the Sun that is cooler than its surroundings. That's why it looks dark. It isn't so hot. Therefore not so bright. LATHAM. Isn't it true that the number of spots on the Sun rises and falls in a cycle of eleven years? NIEMAND. The number of spots on the Sun rises and falls in a cycle of about eleven years. That word about makes quite a difference. LATHAM. In what way? NIEMAND. It means you can only approximately predict the future course of sunspot activity. Sunspots are mighty treacherous things. LATHAM. Haven't there been a great many correlations announced between sunspots and various effects on the Earth? NIEMAND. Scores of them. LATHAM. What is your opinion of these correlations? NIEMAND. Pure bosh in most cases. LATHAM. But some are valid? NIEMAND. A few. There is unquestionably a correlation between sunspots and disturbances of the Earth's magnetic field ... radio fade-outs ... auroras ... things like that. LATHAM. Now, Dr. Niemand, I understand that you have been investigating solar and terrestrial relationships along rather unorthodox lines. NIEMAND. Yes, I suppose some people would say so. LATHAM. You have broken new ground? NIEMAND. That's true. LATHAM. In what way have your investigations differed from those of others? NIEMAND. I think our biggest advance was the discovery that sunspots themselves are not the direct cause of the disturbances we have been studying on the Earth. It's something like the eruptions in rubeola. Attention is concentrated on the bright red papules because they're such a conspicuous symptom of the disease. Whereas the real cause is an invisible filterable virus. In the solar case it turned out to be these S-Regions. LATHAM. Why S-Regions? NIEMAND. We had to call them something. Named after the Sun, I suppose. LATHAM. You say an S-Region is invisible? NIEMAND. It is quite invisible to the eye but readily detected by suitable instrumental methods. It is extremely doubtful, however, if the radiation we detect is the actual cause of the disturbing effects observed. LATHAM. Just what are these effects? NIEMAND. Well, they're common enough, goodness knows. As old as the world, in fact. Yet strangely enough it's hard to describe them in exact terms. LATHAM. Can you give us a general idea? NIEMAND. I'll try. Let's see ... remember that speech from "Julius Caesar" where Cassius is bewailing the evil times that beset ancient Rome? I believe it went like this: "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves that we are underlings." LATHAM. I'm afraid I don't see— NIEMAND. Well, Shakespeare would have been nearer the truth if he had put it the other way around. "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in ourselves but in our stars" or better "in the Sun." LATHAM. In the Sun? NIEMAND. That's right, in the Sun. I suppose the oldest problem in the world is the origin of human evil. Philosophers have wrestled with it ever since the days of Job. And like Job they have usually given up in despair, convinced that the origin of evil is too deep for the human mind to solve. Generally they have concluded that man is inherently wicked and sinful and that is the end of it. Now for the first time science has thrown new light on this subject. LATHAM. How is that? NIEMAND. Consider the record of history. There are occasional periods when conditions are fairly calm and peaceful. Art and industry flourished. Man at last seemed to be making progress toward some higher goal. Then suddenly— for no detectable reason —conditions are reversed. Wars rage. People go mad. The world is plunged into an orgy of bloodshed and misery. LATHAM. But weren't there reasons? NIEMAND. What reasons? LATHAM. Well, disputes over boundaries ... economic rivalry ... border incidents.... NIEMAND. Nonsense. Men always make some flimsy excuse for going to war. The truth of the matter is that men go to war because they want to go to war. They can't help themselves. They are impelled by forces over which they have no control. By forces outside of themselves. LATHAM. Those are broad, sweeping statements. Can't you be more specific? NIEMAND. Perhaps I'd better go back to the beginning. Let me see.... It all started back in March, 1955, when I started getting patients suffering from a complex of symptoms, such as profound mental depression, anxiety, insomnia, alternating with fits of violent rage and resentment against life and the world in general. These people were deeply disturbed. No doubt about that. Yet they were not psychotic and hardly more than mildly neurotic. Now every doctor gets a good many patients of this type. Such a syndrome is characteristic of menopausal women and some men during the climacteric, but these people failed to fit into this picture. They were married and single persons of both sexes and of all ages. They came from all walks of life. The onset of their attack was invariably sudden and with scarcely any warning. They would be going about their work feeling perfectly all right. Then in a minute the whole world was like some scene from a nightmare. A week or ten days later the attack would cease as mysteriously as it had come and they would be their old self again. LATHAM. Aren't such attacks characteristic of the stress and strain of modern life? NIEMAND. I'm afraid that old stress-and-strain theory has been badly overworked. Been hearing about it ever since I was a pre-med student at ucla . Even as a boy I can remember my grandfather deploring the stress and strain of modern life when he was a country doctor practicing in Indiana. In my opinion one of the most valuable contributions anthropologists have made in recent years is the discovery that primitive man is afflicted with essentially the same neurotic conditions as those of us who live a so-called civilized life. They have found savages displaying every symptom of a nervous breakdown among the mountain tribes of the Elgonyi and the Aruntas of Australia. No, Mr. Latham, it's time the stress-and-strain theory was relegated to the junk pile along with demoniac possession and blood letting. LATHAM. You must have done something for your patients— NIEMAND. A doctor must always do something for the patients who come to his office seeking help. First I gave them a thorough physical examination. I turned up some minor ailments—a slight heart murmur or a trace of albumin in the urine—but nothing of any significance. On the whole they were a remarkably healthy bunch of individuals, much more so than an average sample of the population. Then I made a searching inquiry into their personal life. Here again I drew a blank. They had no particular financial worries. Their sex life was generally satisfactory. There was no history of mental illness in the family. In fact, the only thing that seemed to be the matter with them was that there were times when they felt like hell. LATHAM. I suppose you tried tranquilizers? NIEMAND. Oh, yes. In a few cases in which I tried tranquilizing pills of the meprobamate type there was some slight improvement. I want to emphasize, however, that I do not believe in prescribing shotgun remedies for a patient. To my way of thinking it is a lazy slipshod way of carrying on the practice of medicine. The only thing for which I do give myself credit was that I asked my patients to keep a detailed record of their symptoms taking special care to note the time of exacerbation—increase in the severity of the symptoms—as accurately as possible. LATHAM. And this gave you a clue? NIEMAND. It was the beginning. In most instances patients reported the attack struck with almost the impact of a physical blow. The prodromal symptoms were usually slight ... a sudden feeling of uneasiness and guilt ... hot and cold flashes ... dizziness ... double vision. Then this ghastly sense of depression coupled with a blind insensate rage at life. One man said he felt as if the world were closing in on him. Another that he felt the people around him were plotting his destruction. One housewife made her husband lock her in her room for fear she would injure the children. I pored over these case histories for a long time getting absolutely nowhere. Then finally a pattern began to emerge. LATHAM. What sort of pattern? NIEMAND. The first thing that struck me was that the attacks all occurred during the daytime, between the hours of about seven in the morning and five in the evening. Then there were these coincidences— LATHAM. Coincidences? NIEMAND. Total strangers miles apart were stricken at almost the same moment. At first I thought nothing of it but as my records accumulated I became convinced it could not be attributed to chance. A mathematical analysis showed the number of coincidences followed a Poisson distribution very closely. I couldn't possibly see what daylight had to do with it. There is some evidence that mental patients are most disturbed around the time of full moon, but a search of medical literature failed to reveal any connection with the Sun. LATHAM. What did you do? NIEMAND. Naturally I said nothing of this to my patients. I did, however, take pains to impress upon them the necessity of keeping an exact record of the onset of an attack. The better records they kept the more conclusive was the evidence. Men and women were experiencing nearly simultaneous attacks of rage and depression all over southern California, which was as far as my practice extended. One day it occurred to me: if people a few miles apart could be stricken simultaneously, why not people hundreds or thousands of miles apart? It was this idea that prompted me to get in touch with an old colleague of mine I had known at UC medical school, Dr. Max Hillyard, who was in practice in Utica, New York. LATHAM. With what result? NIEMAND. I was afraid the result would be that my old roommate would think I had gone completely crazy. Imagine my surprise and gratification on receiving an answer by return mail to the effect that he also had been getting an increasing number of patients suffering with the same identical symptoms as my own. Furthermore, upon exchanging records we did find that in many cases patients three thousand miles apart had been stricken simultaneously— LATHAM. Just a minute. I would like to know how you define "simultaneous." NIEMAND. We say an attack is simultaneous when one occurred on the east coast, for example, not earlier or later than five minutes of an attack on the west coast. That is about as close as you can hope to time a subjective effect of this nature. And now another fact emerged which gave us another clue. LATHAM. Which was? NIEMAND. In every case of a simultaneous attack the Sun was shining at both New York and California. LATHAM. You mean if it was cloudy— NIEMAND. No, no. The weather had nothing to do with it. I mean the Sun had to be above the horizon at both places. A person might undergo an attack soon after sunrise in New York but there would be no corresponding record of an attack in California where it was still dark. Conversely, a person might be stricken late in the afternoon in California without a corresponding attack in New York where the Sun had set. Dr. Hillyard and I had been searching desperately for a clue. We had both noticed that the attacks occurred only during the daylight hours but this had not seemed especially significant. Here we had evidence pointing directly to the source of trouble. It must have some connection with the Sun. LATHAM. That must have had you badly puzzled at first. NIEMAND. It certainly did. It looked as if we were headed back to the Middle Ages when astrology and medicine went hand in hand. But since it was our only lead we had no other choice but to follow it regardless of the consequences. Here luck played somewhat of a part, for Hillyard happened to have a contact that proved invaluable to us. Several years before Hillyard had gotten to know a young astrophysicist, Henry Middletown, who had come to him suffering from a severe case of myositis in the arms and shoulders. Hillyard had been able to effect a complete cure for which the boy was very grateful, and they had kept up a desultory correspondence. Middletown was now specializing in radio astronomy at the government's new solar observatory on Turtle Back Mountain in Arizona. If it had not been for Middletown's help I'm afraid our investigation would never have gotten past the clinical stage. LATHAM. In what way was Middletown of assistance? NIEMAND. It was the old case of workers in one field of science being completely ignorant of what was going on in another field. Someday we will have to establish a clearing house in science instead of keeping it in tight little compartments as we do at present. Well, Hillyard and I packed up for Arizona with considerable misgivings. We were afraid Middletown wouldn't take our findings seriously but somewhat to our surprise he heard our story with the closest attention. I guess astronomers have gotten so used to hearing from flying saucer enthusiasts and science-fiction addicts that nothing surprises them any more. When we had finished he asked to see our records. Hillyard had them all set down for easy numerical tabulation. Middletown went to work with scarcely a word. Within an hour he had produced a chart that was simply astounding. LATHAM. Can you describe this chart for us? NIEMAND. It was really quite simple. But if it had not been for Middletown's experience in charting other solar phenomena it would never have occurred to us to do it. First, he laid out a series of about thirty squares horizontally across a sheet of graph paper. He dated these beginning March 1, 1955, when our records began. In each square he put a number from 1 to 10 that was a rough index of the number and intensity of the attacks reported on that day. Then he laid out another horizontal row below the first one dated twenty-seven days later. That is, the square under March 1st in the top row was dated March 28th in the row below it. He filled in the chart until he had an array of dozens of rows that included all our data down to May, 1958. When Middletown had finished it was easy to see that the squares of highest index number did not fall at random on the chart. Instead they fell in slightly slanting parallel series so that you could draw straight lines down through them. The connection with the Sun was obvious. LATHAM. In what way? NIEMAND. Why, because twenty-seven days is about the synodic period of solar rotation. That is, if you see a large spot at the center of the Sun's disk today, there is a good chance if it survives that you will see it at the same place twenty-seven days later. But that night Middletown produced another chart that showed the connection with the Sun in a way that was even more convincing. LATHAM. How was that? NIEMAND. I said that the lines drawn down through the days of greatest mental disturbance slanted slightly. On this second chart the squares were dated under one another not at intervals of twenty-seven days, but at intervals of twenty-seven point three days. LATHAM. Why is that so important? NIEMAND. Because the average period of solar rotation in the sunspot zone is not twenty-seven days but twenty-seven point three days. And on this chart the lines did not slant but went vertically downward. The correlation with the synodic rotation of the Sun was practically perfect. LATHAM. But how did you get onto the S-Regions? NIEMAND. Middletown was immediately struck by the resemblance between the chart of mental disturbance and one he had been plotting over the years from his radio observations. Now when he compared the two charts the resemblance between the two was unmistakable. The pattern shown by the chart of mental disturbance corresponded in a striking way with the solar chart but with this difference. The disturbances on the Earth started two days later on the average than the disturbances due to the S-Regions on the Sun. In other words, there was a lag of about forty-eight hours between the two. But otherwise they were almost identical. LATHAM. But if these S-Regions of Middletown's are invisible how could he detect them? NIEMAND. The S-Regions are invisible to the eye through an optical telescope, but are detected with ease by a radio telescope. Middletown had discovered them when he was a graduate student working on radio astronomy in Australia, and he had followed up his researches with the more powerful equipment at Turtle Back Mountain. The formation of an S-Region is heralded by a long series of bursts of a few seconds duration, when the radiation may increase up to several thousand times that of the background intensity. These noise storms have been recorded simultaneously on wavelengths of from one to fifteen meters, which so far is the upper limit of the observations. In a few instances, however, intense bursts have also been detected down to fifty cm. LATHAM. I believe you said the periods of mental disturbance last for about ten or twelve days. How does that tie-in with the S-Regions? NIEMAND. Very closely. You see it takes about twelve days for an S-Region to pass across the face of the Sun, since the synodic rotation is twenty-seven point three days. LATHAM. I should think it would be nearer thirteen or fourteen days. NIEMAND. Apparently an S-Region is not particularly effective when it is just coming on or just going off the disk of the Sun. LATHAM. Are the S-Regions associated with sunspots? NIEMAND. They are connected in this way: that sunspot activity and S-Region activity certainly go together. The more sunspots the more violent and intense is the S-Region activity. But there is not a one-to-one correspondence between sunspots and S-Regions. That is, you cannot connect a particular sunspot group with a particular S-Region. The same thing is true of sunspots and magnetic storms. LATHAM. How do you account for this? NIEMAND. We don't account for it. LATHAM. What other properties of the S-Regions have you discovered? NIEMAND. Middletown says that the radio waves emanating from them are strongly circularly polarized. Moreover, the sense of rotation remains constant while one is passing across the Sun. If the magnetic field associated with an S-Region extends into the high solar corona through which the rays pass, then the sense of rotation corresponds to the ordinary ray of the magneto-ionic theory. LATHAM. Does this mean that the mental disturbances arise from some form of electromagnetic radiation? NIEMAND. We doubt it. As I said before, the charts show a lag of about forty-eight hours between the development of an S-Region and the onset of mental disturbance. This indicates that the malignant energy emanating from an S-Region consists of some highly penetrating form of corpuscular radiation, as yet unidentified. [A] LATHAM. A question that puzzles me is why some people are affected by the S-Regions while others are not. NIEMAND. Our latest results indicate that probably no one is completely immune. All are affected in some degree. Just why some should be affected so much more than others is still a matter of speculation. LATHAM. How long does an S-Region last? NIEMAND. An S-Region may have a lifetime of from three to perhaps a dozen solar rotations. Then it dies out and for a time we are free from this malignant radiation. Then a new region develops in perhaps an entirely different region of the Sun. Sometimes there may be several different S-Regions all going at once. LATHAM. Why were not the S-Regions discovered long ago? NIEMAND. Because the radio exploration of the Sun only began since the end of World War II. LATHAM. How does it happen that you only got patients suffering from S-radiation since about 1955? NIEMAND. I think we did get such patients previously but not in large enough numbers to attract attention. Also the present sunspot cycle started its rise to maximum about 1954. LATHAM. Is there no way of escaping the S-radiation? NIEMAND. I'm afraid the only sure way is to keep on the unilluminated side of the Earth which is rather difficult to do. Apparently the corpuscular beam from an S-Region is several degrees wide and not very sharply defined, since its effects are felt simultaneously over the entire continent. Hillyard and Middletown are working on some form of shielding device but so far without success. LATHAM. What is the present state of S-Region activity? NIEMAND. At the present moment there happens to be no S-Region activity on the Sun. But a new one may develop at any time. Also, the outlook for a decrease in activity is not very favorable. Sunspot activity continues at a high level and is steadily mounting in violence. The last sunspot cycle had the highest maximum of any since 1780, but the present cycle bids fair to set an all time record. LATHAM. And so you believe that the S-Regions are the cause of most of the present trouble in the world. That it is not ourselves but something outside ourselves— NIEMAND. That is the logical outcome of our investigation. We are controlled and swayed by forces which in many cases we are powerless to resist. LATHAM. Could we not be warned of the presence of an S-Region? NIEMAND. The trouble is they seem to develop at random on the Sun. I'm afraid any warning system would be worse than useless. We would be crying WOLF! all the time. LATHAM. How may a person who is not particularly susceptible to this malignant radiation know that one of these regions is active? NIEMAND. If you have a feeling of restlessness and anxiety, if you are unable to concentrate, if you feel suddenly depressed and discouraged about yourself, or are filled with resentment toward the world, then you may be pretty sure that an S-Region is passing across the face of the Sun. Keep a tight rein on yourself. For it seems that evil will always be with us ... as long as the Sun shall continue to shine upon this little world. THE END [A] Middletown believes that the Intense radiation recently discovered from information derived from Explorer I and III has no connection with the corpuscular S-radiation.

They occurred during the daytime and among complete strangers

They occurred during the daytime and among peers or those with mutual contacts

They occurred during the nighttime and among complete strangers

They occurred during the nighttime and among peers or those with mutual contacts

24150_K0VE3QFL_6

Which decision was pivotal in moving the inquiry past the initial plateau?

DISTURBING SUN By PHILIP LATHAM Illustrated by Freas This, be it understood, is fiction—nothing but fiction—and not, under any circumstances, to be considered as having any truth whatever to it. It's obviously utterly impossible ... isn't it? An interview with Dr. I. M. Niemand, Director of the Psychophysical Institute of Solar and Terrestrial Relations, Camarillo, California. In the closing days of December, 1957, at the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in New York, Dr. Niemand delivered a paper entitled simply, "On the Nature of the Solar S-Regions." Owing to its unassuming title the startling implications contained in the paper were completely overlooked by the press. These implications are discussed here in an exclusive interview with Dr. Niemand by Philip Latham. LATHAM. Dr. Niemand, what would you say is your main job? NIEMAND. I suppose you might say my main job today is to find out all I can between activity on the Sun and various forms of activity on the Earth. LATHAM. What do you mean by activity on the Sun? NIEMAND. Well, a sunspot is a form of solar activity. LATHAM. Just what is a sunspot? NIEMAND. I'm afraid I can't say just what a sunspot is. I can only describe it. A sunspot is a region on the Sun that is cooler than its surroundings. That's why it looks dark. It isn't so hot. Therefore not so bright. LATHAM. Isn't it true that the number of spots on the Sun rises and falls in a cycle of eleven years? NIEMAND. The number of spots on the Sun rises and falls in a cycle of about eleven years. That word about makes quite a difference. LATHAM. In what way? NIEMAND. It means you can only approximately predict the future course of sunspot activity. Sunspots are mighty treacherous things. LATHAM. Haven't there been a great many correlations announced between sunspots and various effects on the Earth? NIEMAND. Scores of them. LATHAM. What is your opinion of these correlations? NIEMAND. Pure bosh in most cases. LATHAM. But some are valid? NIEMAND. A few. There is unquestionably a correlation between sunspots and disturbances of the Earth's magnetic field ... radio fade-outs ... auroras ... things like that. LATHAM. Now, Dr. Niemand, I understand that you have been investigating solar and terrestrial relationships along rather unorthodox lines. NIEMAND. Yes, I suppose some people would say so. LATHAM. You have broken new ground? NIEMAND. That's true. LATHAM. In what way have your investigations differed from those of others? NIEMAND. I think our biggest advance was the discovery that sunspots themselves are not the direct cause of the disturbances we have been studying on the Earth. It's something like the eruptions in rubeola. Attention is concentrated on the bright red papules because they're such a conspicuous symptom of the disease. Whereas the real cause is an invisible filterable virus. In the solar case it turned out to be these S-Regions. LATHAM. Why S-Regions? NIEMAND. We had to call them something. Named after the Sun, I suppose. LATHAM. You say an S-Region is invisible? NIEMAND. It is quite invisible to the eye but readily detected by suitable instrumental methods. It is extremely doubtful, however, if the radiation we detect is the actual cause of the disturbing effects observed. LATHAM. Just what are these effects? NIEMAND. Well, they're common enough, goodness knows. As old as the world, in fact. Yet strangely enough it's hard to describe them in exact terms. LATHAM. Can you give us a general idea? NIEMAND. I'll try. Let's see ... remember that speech from "Julius Caesar" where Cassius is bewailing the evil times that beset ancient Rome? I believe it went like this: "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves that we are underlings." LATHAM. I'm afraid I don't see— NIEMAND. Well, Shakespeare would have been nearer the truth if he had put it the other way around. "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in ourselves but in our stars" or better "in the Sun." LATHAM. In the Sun? NIEMAND. That's right, in the Sun. I suppose the oldest problem in the world is the origin of human evil. Philosophers have wrestled with it ever since the days of Job. And like Job they have usually given up in despair, convinced that the origin of evil is too deep for the human mind to solve. Generally they have concluded that man is inherently wicked and sinful and that is the end of it. Now for the first time science has thrown new light on this subject. LATHAM. How is that? NIEMAND. Consider the record of history. There are occasional periods when conditions are fairly calm and peaceful. Art and industry flourished. Man at last seemed to be making progress toward some higher goal. Then suddenly— for no detectable reason —conditions are reversed. Wars rage. People go mad. The world is plunged into an orgy of bloodshed and misery. LATHAM. But weren't there reasons? NIEMAND. What reasons? LATHAM. Well, disputes over boundaries ... economic rivalry ... border incidents.... NIEMAND. Nonsense. Men always make some flimsy excuse for going to war. The truth of the matter is that men go to war because they want to go to war. They can't help themselves. They are impelled by forces over which they have no control. By forces outside of themselves. LATHAM. Those are broad, sweeping statements. Can't you be more specific? NIEMAND. Perhaps I'd better go back to the beginning. Let me see.... It all started back in March, 1955, when I started getting patients suffering from a complex of symptoms, such as profound mental depression, anxiety, insomnia, alternating with fits of violent rage and resentment against life and the world in general. These people were deeply disturbed. No doubt about that. Yet they were not psychotic and hardly more than mildly neurotic. Now every doctor gets a good many patients of this type. Such a syndrome is characteristic of menopausal women and some men during the climacteric, but these people failed to fit into this picture. They were married and single persons of both sexes and of all ages. They came from all walks of life. The onset of their attack was invariably sudden and with scarcely any warning. They would be going about their work feeling perfectly all right. Then in a minute the whole world was like some scene from a nightmare. A week or ten days later the attack would cease as mysteriously as it had come and they would be their old self again. LATHAM. Aren't such attacks characteristic of the stress and strain of modern life? NIEMAND. I'm afraid that old stress-and-strain theory has been badly overworked. Been hearing about it ever since I was a pre-med student at ucla . Even as a boy I can remember my grandfather deploring the stress and strain of modern life when he was a country doctor practicing in Indiana. In my opinion one of the most valuable contributions anthropologists have made in recent years is the discovery that primitive man is afflicted with essentially the same neurotic conditions as those of us who live a so-called civilized life. They have found savages displaying every symptom of a nervous breakdown among the mountain tribes of the Elgonyi and the Aruntas of Australia. No, Mr. Latham, it's time the stress-and-strain theory was relegated to the junk pile along with demoniac possession and blood letting. LATHAM. You must have done something for your patients— NIEMAND. A doctor must always do something for the patients who come to his office seeking help. First I gave them a thorough physical examination. I turned up some minor ailments—a slight heart murmur or a trace of albumin in the urine—but nothing of any significance. On the whole they were a remarkably healthy bunch of individuals, much more so than an average sample of the population. Then I made a searching inquiry into their personal life. Here again I drew a blank. They had no particular financial worries. Their sex life was generally satisfactory. There was no history of mental illness in the family. In fact, the only thing that seemed to be the matter with them was that there were times when they felt like hell. LATHAM. I suppose you tried tranquilizers? NIEMAND. Oh, yes. In a few cases in which I tried tranquilizing pills of the meprobamate type there was some slight improvement. I want to emphasize, however, that I do not believe in prescribing shotgun remedies for a patient. To my way of thinking it is a lazy slipshod way of carrying on the practice of medicine. The only thing for which I do give myself credit was that I asked my patients to keep a detailed record of their symptoms taking special care to note the time of exacerbation—increase in the severity of the symptoms—as accurately as possible. LATHAM. And this gave you a clue? NIEMAND. It was the beginning. In most instances patients reported the attack struck with almost the impact of a physical blow. The prodromal symptoms were usually slight ... a sudden feeling of uneasiness and guilt ... hot and cold flashes ... dizziness ... double vision. Then this ghastly sense of depression coupled with a blind insensate rage at life. One man said he felt as if the world were closing in on him. Another that he felt the people around him were plotting his destruction. One housewife made her husband lock her in her room for fear she would injure the children. I pored over these case histories for a long time getting absolutely nowhere. Then finally a pattern began to emerge. LATHAM. What sort of pattern? NIEMAND. The first thing that struck me was that the attacks all occurred during the daytime, between the hours of about seven in the morning and five in the evening. Then there were these coincidences— LATHAM. Coincidences? NIEMAND. Total strangers miles apart were stricken at almost the same moment. At first I thought nothing of it but as my records accumulated I became convinced it could not be attributed to chance. A mathematical analysis showed the number of coincidences followed a Poisson distribution very closely. I couldn't possibly see what daylight had to do with it. There is some evidence that mental patients are most disturbed around the time of full moon, but a search of medical literature failed to reveal any connection with the Sun. LATHAM. What did you do? NIEMAND. Naturally I said nothing of this to my patients. I did, however, take pains to impress upon them the necessity of keeping an exact record of the onset of an attack. The better records they kept the more conclusive was the evidence. Men and women were experiencing nearly simultaneous attacks of rage and depression all over southern California, which was as far as my practice extended. One day it occurred to me: if people a few miles apart could be stricken simultaneously, why not people hundreds or thousands of miles apart? It was this idea that prompted me to get in touch with an old colleague of mine I had known at UC medical school, Dr. Max Hillyard, who was in practice in Utica, New York. LATHAM. With what result? NIEMAND. I was afraid the result would be that my old roommate would think I had gone completely crazy. Imagine my surprise and gratification on receiving an answer by return mail to the effect that he also had been getting an increasing number of patients suffering with the same identical symptoms as my own. Furthermore, upon exchanging records we did find that in many cases patients three thousand miles apart had been stricken simultaneously— LATHAM. Just a minute. I would like to know how you define "simultaneous." NIEMAND. We say an attack is simultaneous when one occurred on the east coast, for example, not earlier or later than five minutes of an attack on the west coast. That is about as close as you can hope to time a subjective effect of this nature. And now another fact emerged which gave us another clue. LATHAM. Which was? NIEMAND. In every case of a simultaneous attack the Sun was shining at both New York and California. LATHAM. You mean if it was cloudy— NIEMAND. No, no. The weather had nothing to do with it. I mean the Sun had to be above the horizon at both places. A person might undergo an attack soon after sunrise in New York but there would be no corresponding record of an attack in California where it was still dark. Conversely, a person might be stricken late in the afternoon in California without a corresponding attack in New York where the Sun had set. Dr. Hillyard and I had been searching desperately for a clue. We had both noticed that the attacks occurred only during the daylight hours but this had not seemed especially significant. Here we had evidence pointing directly to the source of trouble. It must have some connection with the Sun. LATHAM. That must have had you badly puzzled at first. NIEMAND. It certainly did. It looked as if we were headed back to the Middle Ages when astrology and medicine went hand in hand. But since it was our only lead we had no other choice but to follow it regardless of the consequences. Here luck played somewhat of a part, for Hillyard happened to have a contact that proved invaluable to us. Several years before Hillyard had gotten to know a young astrophysicist, Henry Middletown, who had come to him suffering from a severe case of myositis in the arms and shoulders. Hillyard had been able to effect a complete cure for which the boy was very grateful, and they had kept up a desultory correspondence. Middletown was now specializing in radio astronomy at the government's new solar observatory on Turtle Back Mountain in Arizona. If it had not been for Middletown's help I'm afraid our investigation would never have gotten past the clinical stage. LATHAM. In what way was Middletown of assistance? NIEMAND. It was the old case of workers in one field of science being completely ignorant of what was going on in another field. Someday we will have to establish a clearing house in science instead of keeping it in tight little compartments as we do at present. Well, Hillyard and I packed up for Arizona with considerable misgivings. We were afraid Middletown wouldn't take our findings seriously but somewhat to our surprise he heard our story with the closest attention. I guess astronomers have gotten so used to hearing from flying saucer enthusiasts and science-fiction addicts that nothing surprises them any more. When we had finished he asked to see our records. Hillyard had them all set down for easy numerical tabulation. Middletown went to work with scarcely a word. Within an hour he had produced a chart that was simply astounding. LATHAM. Can you describe this chart for us? NIEMAND. It was really quite simple. But if it had not been for Middletown's experience in charting other solar phenomena it would never have occurred to us to do it. First, he laid out a series of about thirty squares horizontally across a sheet of graph paper. He dated these beginning March 1, 1955, when our records began. In each square he put a number from 1 to 10 that was a rough index of the number and intensity of the attacks reported on that day. Then he laid out another horizontal row below the first one dated twenty-seven days later. That is, the square under March 1st in the top row was dated March 28th in the row below it. He filled in the chart until he had an array of dozens of rows that included all our data down to May, 1958. When Middletown had finished it was easy to see that the squares of highest index number did not fall at random on the chart. Instead they fell in slightly slanting parallel series so that you could draw straight lines down through them. The connection with the Sun was obvious. LATHAM. In what way? NIEMAND. Why, because twenty-seven days is about the synodic period of solar rotation. That is, if you see a large spot at the center of the Sun's disk today, there is a good chance if it survives that you will see it at the same place twenty-seven days later. But that night Middletown produced another chart that showed the connection with the Sun in a way that was even more convincing. LATHAM. How was that? NIEMAND. I said that the lines drawn down through the days of greatest mental disturbance slanted slightly. On this second chart the squares were dated under one another not at intervals of twenty-seven days, but at intervals of twenty-seven point three days. LATHAM. Why is that so important? NIEMAND. Because the average period of solar rotation in the sunspot zone is not twenty-seven days but twenty-seven point three days. And on this chart the lines did not slant but went vertically downward. The correlation with the synodic rotation of the Sun was practically perfect. LATHAM. But how did you get onto the S-Regions? NIEMAND. Middletown was immediately struck by the resemblance between the chart of mental disturbance and one he had been plotting over the years from his radio observations. Now when he compared the two charts the resemblance between the two was unmistakable. The pattern shown by the chart of mental disturbance corresponded in a striking way with the solar chart but with this difference. The disturbances on the Earth started two days later on the average than the disturbances due to the S-Regions on the Sun. In other words, there was a lag of about forty-eight hours between the two. But otherwise they were almost identical. LATHAM. But if these S-Regions of Middletown's are invisible how could he detect them? NIEMAND. The S-Regions are invisible to the eye through an optical telescope, but are detected with ease by a radio telescope. Middletown had discovered them when he was a graduate student working on radio astronomy in Australia, and he had followed up his researches with the more powerful equipment at Turtle Back Mountain. The formation of an S-Region is heralded by a long series of bursts of a few seconds duration, when the radiation may increase up to several thousand times that of the background intensity. These noise storms have been recorded simultaneously on wavelengths of from one to fifteen meters, which so far is the upper limit of the observations. In a few instances, however, intense bursts have also been detected down to fifty cm. LATHAM. I believe you said the periods of mental disturbance last for about ten or twelve days. How does that tie-in with the S-Regions? NIEMAND. Very closely. You see it takes about twelve days for an S-Region to pass across the face of the Sun, since the synodic rotation is twenty-seven point three days. LATHAM. I should think it would be nearer thirteen or fourteen days. NIEMAND. Apparently an S-Region is not particularly effective when it is just coming on or just going off the disk of the Sun. LATHAM. Are the S-Regions associated with sunspots? NIEMAND. They are connected in this way: that sunspot activity and S-Region activity certainly go together. The more sunspots the more violent and intense is the S-Region activity. But there is not a one-to-one correspondence between sunspots and S-Regions. That is, you cannot connect a particular sunspot group with a particular S-Region. The same thing is true of sunspots and magnetic storms. LATHAM. How do you account for this? NIEMAND. We don't account for it. LATHAM. What other properties of the S-Regions have you discovered? NIEMAND. Middletown says that the radio waves emanating from them are strongly circularly polarized. Moreover, the sense of rotation remains constant while one is passing across the Sun. If the magnetic field associated with an S-Region extends into the high solar corona through which the rays pass, then the sense of rotation corresponds to the ordinary ray of the magneto-ionic theory. LATHAM. Does this mean that the mental disturbances arise from some form of electromagnetic radiation? NIEMAND. We doubt it. As I said before, the charts show a lag of about forty-eight hours between the development of an S-Region and the onset of mental disturbance. This indicates that the malignant energy emanating from an S-Region consists of some highly penetrating form of corpuscular radiation, as yet unidentified. [A] LATHAM. A question that puzzles me is why some people are affected by the S-Regions while others are not. NIEMAND. Our latest results indicate that probably no one is completely immune. All are affected in some degree. Just why some should be affected so much more than others is still a matter of speculation. LATHAM. How long does an S-Region last? NIEMAND. An S-Region may have a lifetime of from three to perhaps a dozen solar rotations. Then it dies out and for a time we are free from this malignant radiation. Then a new region develops in perhaps an entirely different region of the Sun. Sometimes there may be several different S-Regions all going at once. LATHAM. Why were not the S-Regions discovered long ago? NIEMAND. Because the radio exploration of the Sun only began since the end of World War II. LATHAM. How does it happen that you only got patients suffering from S-radiation since about 1955? NIEMAND. I think we did get such patients previously but not in large enough numbers to attract attention. Also the present sunspot cycle started its rise to maximum about 1954. LATHAM. Is there no way of escaping the S-radiation? NIEMAND. I'm afraid the only sure way is to keep on the unilluminated side of the Earth which is rather difficult to do. Apparently the corpuscular beam from an S-Region is several degrees wide and not very sharply defined, since its effects are felt simultaneously over the entire continent. Hillyard and Middletown are working on some form of shielding device but so far without success. LATHAM. What is the present state of S-Region activity? NIEMAND. At the present moment there happens to be no S-Region activity on the Sun. But a new one may develop at any time. Also, the outlook for a decrease in activity is not very favorable. Sunspot activity continues at a high level and is steadily mounting in violence. The last sunspot cycle had the highest maximum of any since 1780, but the present cycle bids fair to set an all time record. LATHAM. And so you believe that the S-Regions are the cause of most of the present trouble in the world. That it is not ourselves but something outside ourselves— NIEMAND. That is the logical outcome of our investigation. We are controlled and swayed by forces which in many cases we are powerless to resist. LATHAM. Could we not be warned of the presence of an S-Region? NIEMAND. The trouble is they seem to develop at random on the Sun. I'm afraid any warning system would be worse than useless. We would be crying WOLF! all the time. LATHAM. How may a person who is not particularly susceptible to this malignant radiation know that one of these regions is active? NIEMAND. If you have a feeling of restlessness and anxiety, if you are unable to concentrate, if you feel suddenly depressed and discouraged about yourself, or are filled with resentment toward the world, then you may be pretty sure that an S-Region is passing across the face of the Sun. Keep a tight rein on yourself. For it seems that evil will always be with us ... as long as the Sun shall continue to shine upon this little world. THE END [A] Middletown believes that the Intense radiation recently discovered from information derived from Explorer I and III has no connection with the corpuscular S-radiation.

Rethinking Shakespeare's quote from Julius Caesar

Collaborating with Middletown

Noticing the specific time frames of the attacks

Reaching out to Hillyard

24150_K0VE3QFL_7

Based on Latham's interview with Niemand, what might a listener be able to predict?

DISTURBING SUN By PHILIP LATHAM Illustrated by Freas This, be it understood, is fiction—nothing but fiction—and not, under any circumstances, to be considered as having any truth whatever to it. It's obviously utterly impossible ... isn't it? An interview with Dr. I. M. Niemand, Director of the Psychophysical Institute of Solar and Terrestrial Relations, Camarillo, California. In the closing days of December, 1957, at the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in New York, Dr. Niemand delivered a paper entitled simply, "On the Nature of the Solar S-Regions." Owing to its unassuming title the startling implications contained in the paper were completely overlooked by the press. These implications are discussed here in an exclusive interview with Dr. Niemand by Philip Latham. LATHAM. Dr. Niemand, what would you say is your main job? NIEMAND. I suppose you might say my main job today is to find out all I can between activity on the Sun and various forms of activity on the Earth. LATHAM. What do you mean by activity on the Sun? NIEMAND. Well, a sunspot is a form of solar activity. LATHAM. Just what is a sunspot? NIEMAND. I'm afraid I can't say just what a sunspot is. I can only describe it. A sunspot is a region on the Sun that is cooler than its surroundings. That's why it looks dark. It isn't so hot. Therefore not so bright. LATHAM. Isn't it true that the number of spots on the Sun rises and falls in a cycle of eleven years? NIEMAND. The number of spots on the Sun rises and falls in a cycle of about eleven years. That word about makes quite a difference. LATHAM. In what way? NIEMAND. It means you can only approximately predict the future course of sunspot activity. Sunspots are mighty treacherous things. LATHAM. Haven't there been a great many correlations announced between sunspots and various effects on the Earth? NIEMAND. Scores of them. LATHAM. What is your opinion of these correlations? NIEMAND. Pure bosh in most cases. LATHAM. But some are valid? NIEMAND. A few. There is unquestionably a correlation between sunspots and disturbances of the Earth's magnetic field ... radio fade-outs ... auroras ... things like that. LATHAM. Now, Dr. Niemand, I understand that you have been investigating solar and terrestrial relationships along rather unorthodox lines. NIEMAND. Yes, I suppose some people would say so. LATHAM. You have broken new ground? NIEMAND. That's true. LATHAM. In what way have your investigations differed from those of others? NIEMAND. I think our biggest advance was the discovery that sunspots themselves are not the direct cause of the disturbances we have been studying on the Earth. It's something like the eruptions in rubeola. Attention is concentrated on the bright red papules because they're such a conspicuous symptom of the disease. Whereas the real cause is an invisible filterable virus. In the solar case it turned out to be these S-Regions. LATHAM. Why S-Regions? NIEMAND. We had to call them something. Named after the Sun, I suppose. LATHAM. You say an S-Region is invisible? NIEMAND. It is quite invisible to the eye but readily detected by suitable instrumental methods. It is extremely doubtful, however, if the radiation we detect is the actual cause of the disturbing effects observed. LATHAM. Just what are these effects? NIEMAND. Well, they're common enough, goodness knows. As old as the world, in fact. Yet strangely enough it's hard to describe them in exact terms. LATHAM. Can you give us a general idea? NIEMAND. I'll try. Let's see ... remember that speech from "Julius Caesar" where Cassius is bewailing the evil times that beset ancient Rome? I believe it went like this: "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves that we are underlings." LATHAM. I'm afraid I don't see— NIEMAND. Well, Shakespeare would have been nearer the truth if he had put it the other way around. "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in ourselves but in our stars" or better "in the Sun." LATHAM. In the Sun? NIEMAND. That's right, in the Sun. I suppose the oldest problem in the world is the origin of human evil. Philosophers have wrestled with it ever since the days of Job. And like Job they have usually given up in despair, convinced that the origin of evil is too deep for the human mind to solve. Generally they have concluded that man is inherently wicked and sinful and that is the end of it. Now for the first time science has thrown new light on this subject. LATHAM. How is that? NIEMAND. Consider the record of history. There are occasional periods when conditions are fairly calm and peaceful. Art and industry flourished. Man at last seemed to be making progress toward some higher goal. Then suddenly— for no detectable reason —conditions are reversed. Wars rage. People go mad. The world is plunged into an orgy of bloodshed and misery. LATHAM. But weren't there reasons? NIEMAND. What reasons? LATHAM. Well, disputes over boundaries ... economic rivalry ... border incidents.... NIEMAND. Nonsense. Men always make some flimsy excuse for going to war. The truth of the matter is that men go to war because they want to go to war. They can't help themselves. They are impelled by forces over which they have no control. By forces outside of themselves. LATHAM. Those are broad, sweeping statements. Can't you be more specific? NIEMAND. Perhaps I'd better go back to the beginning. Let me see.... It all started back in March, 1955, when I started getting patients suffering from a complex of symptoms, such as profound mental depression, anxiety, insomnia, alternating with fits of violent rage and resentment against life and the world in general. These people were deeply disturbed. No doubt about that. Yet they were not psychotic and hardly more than mildly neurotic. Now every doctor gets a good many patients of this type. Such a syndrome is characteristic of menopausal women and some men during the climacteric, but these people failed to fit into this picture. They were married and single persons of both sexes and of all ages. They came from all walks of life. The onset of their attack was invariably sudden and with scarcely any warning. They would be going about their work feeling perfectly all right. Then in a minute the whole world was like some scene from a nightmare. A week or ten days later the attack would cease as mysteriously as it had come and they would be their old self again. LATHAM. Aren't such attacks characteristic of the stress and strain of modern life? NIEMAND. I'm afraid that old stress-and-strain theory has been badly overworked. Been hearing about it ever since I was a pre-med student at ucla . Even as a boy I can remember my grandfather deploring the stress and strain of modern life when he was a country doctor practicing in Indiana. In my opinion one of the most valuable contributions anthropologists have made in recent years is the discovery that primitive man is afflicted with essentially the same neurotic conditions as those of us who live a so-called civilized life. They have found savages displaying every symptom of a nervous breakdown among the mountain tribes of the Elgonyi and the Aruntas of Australia. No, Mr. Latham, it's time the stress-and-strain theory was relegated to the junk pile along with demoniac possession and blood letting. LATHAM. You must have done something for your patients— NIEMAND. A doctor must always do something for the patients who come to his office seeking help. First I gave them a thorough physical examination. I turned up some minor ailments—a slight heart murmur or a trace of albumin in the urine—but nothing of any significance. On the whole they were a remarkably healthy bunch of individuals, much more so than an average sample of the population. Then I made a searching inquiry into their personal life. Here again I drew a blank. They had no particular financial worries. Their sex life was generally satisfactory. There was no history of mental illness in the family. In fact, the only thing that seemed to be the matter with them was that there were times when they felt like hell. LATHAM. I suppose you tried tranquilizers? NIEMAND. Oh, yes. In a few cases in which I tried tranquilizing pills of the meprobamate type there was some slight improvement. I want to emphasize, however, that I do not believe in prescribing shotgun remedies for a patient. To my way of thinking it is a lazy slipshod way of carrying on the practice of medicine. The only thing for which I do give myself credit was that I asked my patients to keep a detailed record of their symptoms taking special care to note the time of exacerbation—increase in the severity of the symptoms—as accurately as possible. LATHAM. And this gave you a clue? NIEMAND. It was the beginning. In most instances patients reported the attack struck with almost the impact of a physical blow. The prodromal symptoms were usually slight ... a sudden feeling of uneasiness and guilt ... hot and cold flashes ... dizziness ... double vision. Then this ghastly sense of depression coupled with a blind insensate rage at life. One man said he felt as if the world were closing in on him. Another that he felt the people around him were plotting his destruction. One housewife made her husband lock her in her room for fear she would injure the children. I pored over these case histories for a long time getting absolutely nowhere. Then finally a pattern began to emerge. LATHAM. What sort of pattern? NIEMAND. The first thing that struck me was that the attacks all occurred during the daytime, between the hours of about seven in the morning and five in the evening. Then there were these coincidences— LATHAM. Coincidences? NIEMAND. Total strangers miles apart were stricken at almost the same moment. At first I thought nothing of it but as my records accumulated I became convinced it could not be attributed to chance. A mathematical analysis showed the number of coincidences followed a Poisson distribution very closely. I couldn't possibly see what daylight had to do with it. There is some evidence that mental patients are most disturbed around the time of full moon, but a search of medical literature failed to reveal any connection with the Sun. LATHAM. What did you do? NIEMAND. Naturally I said nothing of this to my patients. I did, however, take pains to impress upon them the necessity of keeping an exact record of the onset of an attack. The better records they kept the more conclusive was the evidence. Men and women were experiencing nearly simultaneous attacks of rage and depression all over southern California, which was as far as my practice extended. One day it occurred to me: if people a few miles apart could be stricken simultaneously, why not people hundreds or thousands of miles apart? It was this idea that prompted me to get in touch with an old colleague of mine I had known at UC medical school, Dr. Max Hillyard, who was in practice in Utica, New York. LATHAM. With what result? NIEMAND. I was afraid the result would be that my old roommate would think I had gone completely crazy. Imagine my surprise and gratification on receiving an answer by return mail to the effect that he also had been getting an increasing number of patients suffering with the same identical symptoms as my own. Furthermore, upon exchanging records we did find that in many cases patients three thousand miles apart had been stricken simultaneously— LATHAM. Just a minute. I would like to know how you define "simultaneous." NIEMAND. We say an attack is simultaneous when one occurred on the east coast, for example, not earlier or later than five minutes of an attack on the west coast. That is about as close as you can hope to time a subjective effect of this nature. And now another fact emerged which gave us another clue. LATHAM. Which was? NIEMAND. In every case of a simultaneous attack the Sun was shining at both New York and California. LATHAM. You mean if it was cloudy— NIEMAND. No, no. The weather had nothing to do with it. I mean the Sun had to be above the horizon at both places. A person might undergo an attack soon after sunrise in New York but there would be no corresponding record of an attack in California where it was still dark. Conversely, a person might be stricken late in the afternoon in California without a corresponding attack in New York where the Sun had set. Dr. Hillyard and I had been searching desperately for a clue. We had both noticed that the attacks occurred only during the daylight hours but this had not seemed especially significant. Here we had evidence pointing directly to the source of trouble. It must have some connection with the Sun. LATHAM. That must have had you badly puzzled at first. NIEMAND. It certainly did. It looked as if we were headed back to the Middle Ages when astrology and medicine went hand in hand. But since it was our only lead we had no other choice but to follow it regardless of the consequences. Here luck played somewhat of a part, for Hillyard happened to have a contact that proved invaluable to us. Several years before Hillyard had gotten to know a young astrophysicist, Henry Middletown, who had come to him suffering from a severe case of myositis in the arms and shoulders. Hillyard had been able to effect a complete cure for which the boy was very grateful, and they had kept up a desultory correspondence. Middletown was now specializing in radio astronomy at the government's new solar observatory on Turtle Back Mountain in Arizona. If it had not been for Middletown's help I'm afraid our investigation would never have gotten past the clinical stage. LATHAM. In what way was Middletown of assistance? NIEMAND. It was the old case of workers in one field of science being completely ignorant of what was going on in another field. Someday we will have to establish a clearing house in science instead of keeping it in tight little compartments as we do at present. Well, Hillyard and I packed up for Arizona with considerable misgivings. We were afraid Middletown wouldn't take our findings seriously but somewhat to our surprise he heard our story with the closest attention. I guess astronomers have gotten so used to hearing from flying saucer enthusiasts and science-fiction addicts that nothing surprises them any more. When we had finished he asked to see our records. Hillyard had them all set down for easy numerical tabulation. Middletown went to work with scarcely a word. Within an hour he had produced a chart that was simply astounding. LATHAM. Can you describe this chart for us? NIEMAND. It was really quite simple. But if it had not been for Middletown's experience in charting other solar phenomena it would never have occurred to us to do it. First, he laid out a series of about thirty squares horizontally across a sheet of graph paper. He dated these beginning March 1, 1955, when our records began. In each square he put a number from 1 to 10 that was a rough index of the number and intensity of the attacks reported on that day. Then he laid out another horizontal row below the first one dated twenty-seven days later. That is, the square under March 1st in the top row was dated March 28th in the row below it. He filled in the chart until he had an array of dozens of rows that included all our data down to May, 1958. When Middletown had finished it was easy to see that the squares of highest index number did not fall at random on the chart. Instead they fell in slightly slanting parallel series so that you could draw straight lines down through them. The connection with the Sun was obvious. LATHAM. In what way? NIEMAND. Why, because twenty-seven days is about the synodic period of solar rotation. That is, if you see a large spot at the center of the Sun's disk today, there is a good chance if it survives that you will see it at the same place twenty-seven days later. But that night Middletown produced another chart that showed the connection with the Sun in a way that was even more convincing. LATHAM. How was that? NIEMAND. I said that the lines drawn down through the days of greatest mental disturbance slanted slightly. On this second chart the squares were dated under one another not at intervals of twenty-seven days, but at intervals of twenty-seven point three days. LATHAM. Why is that so important? NIEMAND. Because the average period of solar rotation in the sunspot zone is not twenty-seven days but twenty-seven point three days. And on this chart the lines did not slant but went vertically downward. The correlation with the synodic rotation of the Sun was practically perfect. LATHAM. But how did you get onto the S-Regions? NIEMAND. Middletown was immediately struck by the resemblance between the chart of mental disturbance and one he had been plotting over the years from his radio observations. Now when he compared the two charts the resemblance between the two was unmistakable. The pattern shown by the chart of mental disturbance corresponded in a striking way with the solar chart but with this difference. The disturbances on the Earth started two days later on the average than the disturbances due to the S-Regions on the Sun. In other words, there was a lag of about forty-eight hours between the two. But otherwise they were almost identical. LATHAM. But if these S-Regions of Middletown's are invisible how could he detect them? NIEMAND. The S-Regions are invisible to the eye through an optical telescope, but are detected with ease by a radio telescope. Middletown had discovered them when he was a graduate student working on radio astronomy in Australia, and he had followed up his researches with the more powerful equipment at Turtle Back Mountain. The formation of an S-Region is heralded by a long series of bursts of a few seconds duration, when the radiation may increase up to several thousand times that of the background intensity. These noise storms have been recorded simultaneously on wavelengths of from one to fifteen meters, which so far is the upper limit of the observations. In a few instances, however, intense bursts have also been detected down to fifty cm. LATHAM. I believe you said the periods of mental disturbance last for about ten or twelve days. How does that tie-in with the S-Regions? NIEMAND. Very closely. You see it takes about twelve days for an S-Region to pass across the face of the Sun, since the synodic rotation is twenty-seven point three days. LATHAM. I should think it would be nearer thirteen or fourteen days. NIEMAND. Apparently an S-Region is not particularly effective when it is just coming on or just going off the disk of the Sun. LATHAM. Are the S-Regions associated with sunspots? NIEMAND. They are connected in this way: that sunspot activity and S-Region activity certainly go together. The more sunspots the more violent and intense is the S-Region activity. But there is not a one-to-one correspondence between sunspots and S-Regions. That is, you cannot connect a particular sunspot group with a particular S-Region. The same thing is true of sunspots and magnetic storms. LATHAM. How do you account for this? NIEMAND. We don't account for it. LATHAM. What other properties of the S-Regions have you discovered? NIEMAND. Middletown says that the radio waves emanating from them are strongly circularly polarized. Moreover, the sense of rotation remains constant while one is passing across the Sun. If the magnetic field associated with an S-Region extends into the high solar corona through which the rays pass, then the sense of rotation corresponds to the ordinary ray of the magneto-ionic theory. LATHAM. Does this mean that the mental disturbances arise from some form of electromagnetic radiation? NIEMAND. We doubt it. As I said before, the charts show a lag of about forty-eight hours between the development of an S-Region and the onset of mental disturbance. This indicates that the malignant energy emanating from an S-Region consists of some highly penetrating form of corpuscular radiation, as yet unidentified. [A] LATHAM. A question that puzzles me is why some people are affected by the S-Regions while others are not. NIEMAND. Our latest results indicate that probably no one is completely immune. All are affected in some degree. Just why some should be affected so much more than others is still a matter of speculation. LATHAM. How long does an S-Region last? NIEMAND. An S-Region may have a lifetime of from three to perhaps a dozen solar rotations. Then it dies out and for a time we are free from this malignant radiation. Then a new region develops in perhaps an entirely different region of the Sun. Sometimes there may be several different S-Regions all going at once. LATHAM. Why were not the S-Regions discovered long ago? NIEMAND. Because the radio exploration of the Sun only began since the end of World War II. LATHAM. How does it happen that you only got patients suffering from S-radiation since about 1955? NIEMAND. I think we did get such patients previously but not in large enough numbers to attract attention. Also the present sunspot cycle started its rise to maximum about 1954. LATHAM. Is there no way of escaping the S-radiation? NIEMAND. I'm afraid the only sure way is to keep on the unilluminated side of the Earth which is rather difficult to do. Apparently the corpuscular beam from an S-Region is several degrees wide and not very sharply defined, since its effects are felt simultaneously over the entire continent. Hillyard and Middletown are working on some form of shielding device but so far without success. LATHAM. What is the present state of S-Region activity? NIEMAND. At the present moment there happens to be no S-Region activity on the Sun. But a new one may develop at any time. Also, the outlook for a decrease in activity is not very favorable. Sunspot activity continues at a high level and is steadily mounting in violence. The last sunspot cycle had the highest maximum of any since 1780, but the present cycle bids fair to set an all time record. LATHAM. And so you believe that the S-Regions are the cause of most of the present trouble in the world. That it is not ourselves but something outside ourselves— NIEMAND. That is the logical outcome of our investigation. We are controlled and swayed by forces which in many cases we are powerless to resist. LATHAM. Could we not be warned of the presence of an S-Region? NIEMAND. The trouble is they seem to develop at random on the Sun. I'm afraid any warning system would be worse than useless. We would be crying WOLF! all the time. LATHAM. How may a person who is not particularly susceptible to this malignant radiation know that one of these regions is active? NIEMAND. If you have a feeling of restlessness and anxiety, if you are unable to concentrate, if you feel suddenly depressed and discouraged about yourself, or are filled with resentment toward the world, then you may be pretty sure that an S-Region is passing across the face of the Sun. Keep a tight rein on yourself. For it seems that evil will always be with us ... as long as the Sun shall continue to shine upon this little world. THE END [A] Middletown believes that the Intense radiation recently discovered from information derived from Explorer I and III has no connection with the corpuscular S-radiation.

In the future, there will be an increase in the frequency and intensity of brutal disturbances on Earth

There is not much time left before humans will destroy the planet as a result of their infighting

In the future, the frequency and intensity of brutal disturbances on Earth will plateau

In the future, there will be a decrease in the frequency and intensity of brutal disturbances on Earth

24161_INDOEF2N_1

How do moon inhabitants tell the time of day?

ALL DAY SEPTEMBER By ROGER KUYKENDALL Illustrated by van Dongen Some men just haven't got good sense. They just can't seem to learn the most fundamental things. Like when there's no use trying—when it's time to give up because it's hopeless.... The meteor, a pebble, a little larger than a match head, traveled through space and time since it came into being. The light from the star that died when the meteor was created fell on Earth before the first lungfish ventured from the sea. In its last instant, the meteor fell on the Moon. It was impeded by Evans' tractor. It drilled a small, neat hole through the casing of the steam turbine, and volitized upon striking the blades. Portions of the turbine also volitized; idling at eight thousand RPM, it became unstable. The shaft tried to tie itself into a knot, and the blades, damaged and undamaged were spit through the casing. The turbine again reached a stable state, that is, stopped. Permanently stopped. It was two days to sunrise, where Evans stood. It was just before sunset on a spring evening in September in Sydney. The shadow line between day and night could be seen from the Moon to be drifting across Australia. Evans, who had no watch, thought of the time as a quarter after Australia. Evans was a prospector, and like all prospectors, a sort of jackknife geologist, selenologist, rather. His tractor and equipment cost two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Fifty thousand was paid for. The rest was promissory notes and grubstake shares. When he was broke, which was usually, he used his tractor to haul uranium ore and metallic sodium from the mines at Potter's dike to Williamson Town, where the rockets landed. When he was flush, he would prospect for a couple of weeks. Once he followed a stampede to Yellow Crater, where he thought for a while that he had a fortune in chromium. The chromite petered out in a month and a half, and he was lucky to break even. Evans was about three hundred miles east of Williamson Town, the site of the first landing on the Moon. Evans was due back at Williamson Town at about sunset, that is, in about sixteen days. When he saw the wrecked turbine, he knew that he wouldn't make it. By careful rationing, he could probably stretch his food out to more than a month. His drinking water—kept separate from the water in the reactor—might conceivably last just as long. But his oxygen was too carefully measured; there was a four-day reserve. By diligent conservation, he might make it last an extra day. Four days reserve—plus one is five—plus sixteen days normal supply equals twenty-one days to live. In seventeen days he might be missed, but in seventeen days it would be dark again, and the search for him, if it ever began, could not begin for thirteen more days. At the earliest it would be eight days too late. "Well, man, 'tis a fine spot you're in now," he told himself. "Let's find out how bad it is indeed," he answered. He reached for the light switch and tried to turn it on. The switch was already in the "on" position. "Batteries must be dead," he told himself. "What batteries?" he asked. "There're no batteries in here, the power comes from the generator." "Why isn't the generator working, man?" he asked. He thought this one out carefully. The generator was not turned by the main turbine, but by a small reciprocating engine. The steam, however, came from the same boiler. And the boiler, of course, had emptied itself through the hole in the turbine. And the condenser, of course— "The condenser!" he shouted. He fumbled for a while, until he found a small flashlight. By the light of this, he reinspected the steam system, and found about three gallons of water frozen in the condenser. The condenser, like all condensers, was a device to convert steam into water, so that it could be reused in the boiler. This one had a tank and coils of tubing in the center of a curved reflector that was positioned to radiate the heat of the steam into the cold darkness of space. When the meteor pierced the turbine, the water in the condenser began to boil. This boiling lowered the temperature, and the condenser demonstrated its efficiency by quickly freezing the water in the tank. Evans sealed the turbine from the rest of the steam system by closing the shut-off valves. If there was any water in the boiler, it would operate the engine that drove the generator. The water would condense in the condenser, and with a little luck, melt the ice in there. Then, if the pump wasn't blocked by ice, it would return the water to the boiler. But there was no water in the boiler. Carefully he poured a cup of his drinking water into a pipe that led to the boiler, and resealed the pipe. He pulled on a knob marked "Nuclear Start/Safety Bypass." The water that he had poured into the boiler quickly turned into steam, and the steam turned the generator briefly. Evans watched the lights flicker and go out, and he guessed what the trouble was. "The water, man," he said, "there is not enough to melt the ice in the condenser." He opened the pipe again and poured nearly a half-gallon of water into the boiler. It was three days' supply of water, if it had been carefully used. It was one day's supply if used wastefully. It was ostentatious luxury for a man with a month's supply of water and twenty-one days to live. The generator started again, and the lights came on. They flickered as the boiler pressure began to fail, but the steam had melted some of the ice in the condenser, and the water pump began to function. "Well, man," he breathed, "there's a light to die by." The sun rose on Williamson Town at about the same time it rose on Evans. It was an incredibly brilliant disk in a black sky. The stars next to the sun shone as brightly as though there were no sun. They might have appeared to waver slightly, if they were behind outflung corona flares. If they did, no one noticed. No one looked toward the sun without dark filters. When Director McIlroy came into his office, he found it lighted by the rising sun. The light was a hot, brilliant white that seemed to pierce the darkest shadows of the room. He moved to the round window, screening his eyes from the light, and adjusted the polaroid shade to maximum density. The sun became an angry red brown, and the room was dark again. McIlroy decreased the density again until the room was comfortably lighted. The room felt stuffy, so he decided to leave the door to the inner office open. He felt a little guilty about this, because he had ordered that all doors in the survey building should remain closed except when someone was passing through them. This was to allow the air-conditioning system to function properly, and to prevent air loss in case of the highly improbable meteor damage. McIlroy thought that on the whole, he was disobeying his own orders no more flagrantly than anyone else in the survey. McIlroy had no illusions about his ability to lead men. Or rather, he did have one illusion; he thought that he was completely unfit as a leader. It was true that his strictest orders were disobeyed with cheerful contempt, but it was also true his mildest requests were complied with eagerly and smoothly. Everyone in the survey except McIlroy realized this, and even he accepted this without thinking about it. He had fallen into the habit of suggesting mildly anything that he wanted done, and writing orders he didn't particularly care to have obeyed. For example, because of an order of his stating that there would be no alcoholic beverages within the survey building, the entire survey was assured of a constant supply of home-made, but passably good liquor. Even McIlroy enjoyed the surreptitious drinking. "Good morning, Mr. McIlroy," said Mrs. Garth, his secretary. Morning to Mrs. Garth was simply the first four hours after waking. "Good morning indeed," answered McIlroy. Morning to him had no meaning at all, but he thought in the strictest sense that it would be morning on the Moon for another week. "Has the power crew set up the solar furnace?" he asked. The solar furnace was a rough parabola of mirrors used to focus the sun's heat on anything that it was desirable to heat. It was used mostly, from sun-up to sun-down, to supplement the nuclear power plant. "They went out about an hour ago," she answered, "I suppose that's what they were going to do." "Very good, what's first on the schedule?" "A Mr. Phelps to see you," she said. "How do you do, Mr. Phelps," McIlroy greeted him. "Good afternoon," Mr. Phelps replied. "I'm here representing the Merchants' Bank Association." "Fine," McIlroy said, "I suppose you're here to set up a bank." "That's right, I just got in from Muroc last night, and I've been going over the assets of the Survey Credit Association all morning." "I'll certainly be glad to get them off my hands," McIlroy said. "I hope they're in good order." "There doesn't seem to be any profit," Mr. Phelps said. "That's par for a nonprofit organization," said McIlroy. "But we're amateurs, and we're turning this operation over to professionals. I'm sure it will be to everyone's satisfaction." "I know this seems like a silly question. What day is this?" "Well," said McIlroy, "that's not so silly. I don't know either." "Mrs. Garth," he called, "what day is this?" "Why, September, I think," she answered. "I mean what day ." "I don't know, I'll call the observatory." There was a pause. "They say what day where?" she asked. "Greenwich, I guess, our official time is supposed to be Greenwich Mean Time." There was another pause. "They say it's September fourth, one thirty a.m. " "Well, there you are," laughed McIlroy, "it isn't that time doesn't mean anything here, it just doesn't mean the same thing." Mr. Phelps joined the laughter. "Bankers' hours don't mean much, at any rate," he said. The power crew was having trouble with the solar furnace. Three of the nine banks of mirrors would not respond to the electric controls, and one bank moved so jerkily that it could not be focused, and it threatened to tear several of the mirrors loose. "What happened here?" Spotty Cade, one of the electrical technicians asked his foreman, Cowalczk, over the intercommunications radio. "I've got about a hundred pinholes in the cables out here. It's no wonder they don't work." "Meteor shower," Cowalczk answered, "and that's not half of it. Walker says he's got a half dozen mirrors cracked or pitted, and Hoffman on bank three wants you to replace a servo motor. He says the bearing was hit." "When did it happen?" Cade wanted to know. "Must have been last night, at least two or three days ago. All of 'em too small for Radar to pick up, and not enough for Seismo to get a rumble." "Sounds pretty bad." "Could have been worse," said Cowalczk. "How's that?" "Wasn't anybody out in it." "Hey, Chuck," another technician, Lehman, broke in, "you could maybe get hurt that way." "I doubt it," Cowalczk answered, "most of these were pinhead size, and they wouldn't go through a suit." "It would take a pretty big one to damage a servo bearing," Cade commented. "That could hurt," Cowalczk admitted, "but there was only one of them." "You mean only one hit our gear," Lehman said. "How many missed?" Nobody answered. They could all see the Moon under their feet. Small craters overlapped and touched each other. There was—except in the places that men had obscured them with footprints—not a square foot that didn't contain a crater at least ten inches across, there was not a square inch without its half-inch crater. Nearly all of these had been made millions of years ago, but here and there, the rim of a crater covered part of a footprint, clear evidence that it was a recent one. After the sun rose, Evans returned to the lava cave that he had been exploring when the meteor hit. Inside, he lifted his filter visor, and found that the light reflected from the small ray that peered into the cave door lighted the cave adequately. He tapped loose some white crystals on the cave wall with his geologist's hammer, and put them into a collector's bag. "A few mineral specimens would give us something to think about, man. These crystals," he said, "look a little like zeolites, but that can't be, zeolites need water to form, and there's no water on the Moon." He chipped a number of other crystals loose and put them in bags. One of them he found in a dark crevice had a hexagonal shape that puzzled him. One at a time, back in the tractor, he took the crystals out of the bags and analyzed them as well as he could without using a flame which would waste oxygen. The ones that looked like zeolites were zeolites, all right, or something very much like it. One of the crystals that he thought was quartz turned out to be calcite, and one of the ones that he was sure could be nothing but calcite was actually potassium nitrate. "Well, now," he said, "it's probably the largest natural crystal of potassium nitrate that anyone has ever seen. Man, it's a full inch across." All of these needed water to form, and their existence on the Moon puzzled him for a while. Then he opened the bag that had contained the unusual hexagonal crystals, and the puzzle resolved itself. There was nothing in the bag but a few drops of water. What he had taken to be a type of rock was ice, frozen in a niche that had never been warmed by the sun. The sun rose to the meridian slowly. It was a week after sunrise. The stars shone coldly, and wheeled in their slow course with the sun. Only Earth remained in the same spot in the black sky. The shadow line crept around until Earth was nearly dark, and then the rim of light appeared on the opposite side. For a while Earth was a dark disk in a thin halo, and then the light came to be a crescent, and the line of dawn began to move around Earth. The continents drifted across the dark disk and into the crescent. The people on Earth saw the full moon set about the same time that the sun rose. Nickel Jones was the captain of a supply rocket. He made trips from and to the Moon about once a month, carrying supplies in and metal and ores out. At this time he was visiting with his old friend McIlroy. "I swear, Mac," said Jones, "another season like this, and I'm going back to mining." "I thought you were doing pretty well," said McIlroy, as he poured two drinks from a bottle of Scotch that Jones had brought him. "Oh, the money I like, but I will say that I'd have more if I didn't have to fight the union and the Lunar Trade Commission." McIlroy had heard all of this before. "How's that?" he asked politely. "You may think it's myself running the ship," Jones started on his tirade, "but it's not. The union it is that says who I can hire. The union it is that says how much I must pay, and how large a crew I need. And then the Commission ..." The word seemed to give Jones an unpleasant taste in his mouth, which he hurriedly rinsed with a sip of Scotch. "The Commission," he continued, making the word sound like an obscenity, "it is that tells me how much I can charge for freight." McIlroy noticed that his friend's glass was empty, and he quietly filled it again. "And then," continued Jones, "if I buy a cargo up here, the Commission it is that says what I'll sell it for. If I had my way, I'd charge only fifty cents a pound for freight instead of the dollar forty that the Commission insists on. That's from here to Earth, of course. There's no profit I could make by cutting rates the other way." "Why not?" asked McIlroy. He knew the answer, but he liked to listen to the slightly Welsh voice of Jones. "Near cost it is now at a dollar forty. But what sense is there in charging the same rate to go either way when it takes about a seventh of the fuel to get from here to Earth as it does to get from there to here?" "What good would it do to charge fifty cents a pound?" asked McIlroy. "The nickel, man, the tons of nickel worth a dollar and a half on Earth, and not worth mining here; the low-grade ores of uranium and vanadium, they need these things on Earth, but they can't get them as long as it isn't worth the carrying of them. And then, of course, there's the water we haven't got. We could afford to bring more water for more people, and set up more distilling plants if we had the money from the nickel. "Even though I say it who shouldn't, two-eighty a quart is too much to pay for water." Both men fell silent for a while. Then Jones spoke again: "Have you seen our friend Evans lately? The price of chromium has gone up, and I think he could ship some of his ore from Yellow Crater at a profit." "He's out prospecting again. I don't expect to see him until sun-down." "I'll likely see him then. I won't be loaded for another week and a half. Can't you get in touch with him by radio?" "He isn't carrying one. Most of the prospectors don't. They claim that a radio that won't carry beyond the horizon isn't any good, and one that will bounce messages from Earth takes up too much room." "Well, if I don't see him, you let him know about the chromium." "Anything to help another Welshman, is that the idea?" "Well, protection it is that a poor Welshman needs from all the English and Scots. Speaking of which—" "Oh, of course," McIlroy grinned as he refilled the glasses. " Slainte, McIlroy, bach. " [Health, McIlroy, man.] " Slainte mhor, bach. " [Great Health, man.] The sun was halfway to the horizon, and Earth was a crescent in the sky when Evans had quarried all the ice that was available in the cave. The thought grew on him as he worked that this couldn't be the only such cave in the area. There must be several more bubbles in the lava flow. Part of his reasoning proved correct. That is, he found that by chipping, he could locate small bubbles up to an inch in diameter, each one with its droplet of water. The average was about one per cent of the volume of each bubble filled with ice. A quarter of a mile from the tractor, Evans found a promising looking mound of lava. It was rounded on top, and it could easily be the dome of a bubble. Suddenly, Evans noticed that the gauge on the oxygen tank of his suit was reading dangerously near empty. He turned back to his tractor, moving as slowly as he felt safe in doing. Running would use up oxygen too fast. He was halfway there when the pressure warning light went on, and the signal sounded inside his helmet. He turned on his ten-minute reserve supply, and made it to the tractor with about five minutes left. The air purifying apparatus in the suit was not as efficient as the one in the tractor; it wasted oxygen. By using the suit so much, Evans had already shortened his life by several days. He resolved not to leave the tractor again, and reluctantly abandoned his plan to search for a large bubble. The sun stood at half its diameter above the horizon. The shadows of the mountains stretched out to touch the shadows of the other mountains. The dawning line of light covered half of Earth, and Earth turned beneath it. Cowalczk itched under his suit, and the sweat on his face prickled maddeningly because he couldn't reach it through his helmet. He pushed his forehead against the faceplate of his helmet and rubbed off some of the sweat. It didn't help much, and it left a blurred spot in his vision. That annoyed him. "Is everyone clear of the outlet?" he asked. "All clear," he heard Cade report through the intercom. "How come we have to blow the boilers now?" asked Lehman. "Because I say so," Cowalczk shouted, surprised at his outburst and ashamed of it. "Boiler scale," he continued, much calmer. "We've got to clean out the boilers once a year to make sure the tubes in the reactor don't clog up." He squinted through his dark visor at the reactor building, a gray concrete structure a quarter of a mile distant. "It would be pretty bad if they clogged up some night." "Pressure's ten and a half pounds," said Cade. "Right, let her go," said Cowalczk. Cade threw a switch. In the reactor building, a relay closed. A motor started turning, and the worm gear on the motor opened a valve on the boiler. A stream of muddy water gushed into a closed vat. When the vat was about half full, the water began to run nearly clear. An electric eye noted that fact and a light in front of Cade turned on. Cade threw the switch back the other way, and the relay in the reactor building opened. The motor turned and the gears started to close the valve. But a fragment of boiler scale held the valve open. "Valve's stuck," said Cade. "Open it and close it again," said Cowalczk. The sweat on his forehead started to run into his eyes. He banged his hand on his faceplate in an unconscious attempt to wipe it off. He cursed silently, and wiped it off on the inside of his helmet again. This time, two drops ran down the inside of his faceplate. "Still don't work," said Cade. "Keep trying," Cowalczk ordered. "Lehman, get a Geiger counter and come with me, we've got to fix this thing." Lehman and Cowalczk, who were already suited up started across to the reactor building. Cade, who was in the pressurized control room without a suit on, kept working the switch back and forth. There was light that indicated when the valve was open. It was on, and it stayed on, no matter what Cade did. "The vat pressure's too high," Cade said. "Let me know when it reaches six pounds," Cowalczk requested. "Because it'll probably blow at seven." The vat was a light plastic container used only to decant sludge out of the water. It neither needed nor had much strength. "Six now," said Cade. Cowalczk and Lehman stopped halfway to the reactor. The vat bulged and ruptured. A stream of mud gushed out and boiled dry on the face of the Moon. Cowalczk and Lehman rushed forward again. They could see the trickle of water from the discharge pipe. The motor turned the valve back and forth in response to Cade's signals. "What's going on out there?" demanded McIlroy on the intercom. "Scale stuck in the valve," Cowalczk answered. "Are the reactors off?" "Yes. Vat blew. Shut up! Let me work, Mac!" "Sorry," McIlroy said, realizing that this was no time for officials. "Let me know when it's fixed." "Geiger's off scale," Lehman said. "We're probably O.K. in these suits for an hour," Cowalczk answered. "Is there a manual shut-off?" "Not that I know of," Lehman answered. "What about it, Cade?" "I don't think so," Cade said. "I'll get on the blower and rouse out an engineer." "O.K., but keep working that switch." "I checked the line as far as it's safe," said Lehman. "No valve." "O.K.," Cowalczk said. "Listen, Cade, are the injectors still on?" "Yeah. There's still enough heat in these reactors to do some damage. I'll cut 'em in about fifteen minutes." "I've found the trouble," Lehman said. "The worm gear's loose on its shaft. It's slipping every time the valve closes. There's not enough power in it to crush the scale." "Right," Cowalczk said. "Cade, open the valve wide. Lehman, hand me that pipe wrench!" Cowalczk hit the shaft with the back of the pipe wrench, and it broke at the motor bearing. Cowalczk and Lehman fitted the pipe wrench to the gear on the valve, and turned it. "Is the light off?" Cowalczk asked. "No," Cade answered. "Water's stopped. Give us some pressure, we'll see if it holds." "Twenty pounds," Cade answered after a couple of minutes. "Take her up to ... no, wait, it's still leaking," Cowalczk said. "Hold it there, we'll open the valve again." "O.K.," said Cade. "An engineer here says there's no manual cutoff." "Like Hell," said Lehman. Cowalczk and Lehman opened the valve again. Water spurted out, and dwindled as they closed the valve. "What did you do?" asked Cade. "The light went out and came on again." "Check that circuit and see if it works," Cowalczk instructed. There was a pause. "It's O.K.," Cade said. Cowalczk and Lehman opened and closed the valve again. "Light is off now," Cade said. "Good," said Cowalczk, "take the pressure up all the way, and we'll see what happens." "Eight hundred pounds," Cade said, after a short wait. "Good enough," Cowalczk said. "Tell that engineer to hold up a while, he can fix this thing as soon as he gets parts. Come on, Lehman, let's get out of here." "Well, I'm glad that's over," said Cade. "You guys had me worried for a while." "Think we weren't worried?" Lehman asked. "And it's not over." "What?" Cade asked. "Oh, you mean the valve servo you two bashed up?" "No," said Lehman, "I mean the two thousand gallons of water that we lost." "Two thousand?" Cade asked. "We only had seven hundred gallons reserve. How come we can operate now?" "We picked up twelve hundred from the town sewage plant. What with using the solar furnace as a radiator, we can make do." "Oh, God, I suppose this means water rationing again." "You're probably right, at least until the next rocket lands in a couple of weeks." PROSPECTOR FEARED LOST ON MOON IPP Williamson Town, Moon, Sept. 21st. Scientific survey director McIlroy released a statement today that Howard Evans, a prospector is missing and presumed lost. Evans, who was apparently exploring the Moon in search of minerals was due two days ago, but it was presumed that he was merely temporarily delayed. Evans began his exploration on August 25th, and was known to be carrying several days reserve of oxygen and supplies. Director McIlroy has expressed a hope that Evans will be found before his oxygen runs out. Search parties have started from Williamson Town, but telescopic search from Palomar and the new satellite observatory are hindered by the fact that Evans is lost on the part of the Moon which is now dark. Little hope is held for radio contact with the missing man as it is believed he was carrying only short-range, intercommunications equipment. Nevertheless, receivers are ... Captain Nickel Jones was also expressing a hope: "Anyway, Mac," he was saying to McIlroy, "a Welshman knows when his luck's run out. And never a word did he say." "Like as not, you're right," McIlroy replied, "but if I know Evans, he'd never say a word about any forebodings." "Well, happen I might have a bit of Welsh second sight about me, and it tells me that Evans will be found." McIlroy chuckled for the first time in several days. "So that's the reason you didn't take off when you were scheduled," he said. "Well, yes," Jones answered. "I thought that it might happen that a rocket would be needed in the search." The light from Earth lighted the Moon as the Moon had never lighted Earth. The great blue globe of Earth, the only thing larger than the stars, wheeled silently in the sky. As it turned, the shadow of sunset crept across the face that could be seen from the Moon. From full Earth, as you might say, it moved toward last quarter. The rising sun shone into Director McIlroy's office. The hot light formed a circle on the wall opposite the window, and the light became more intense as the sun slowly pulled over the horizon. Mrs. Garth walked into the director's office, and saw the director sleeping with his head cradled in his arms on the desk. She walked softly to the window and adjusted the shade to darken the office. She stood looking at McIlroy for a moment, and when he moved slightly in his sleep, she walked softly out of the office. A few minutes later she was back with a cup of coffee. She placed it in front of the director, and shook his shoulder gently. "Wake up, Mr. McIlroy," she said, "you told me to wake you at sunrise, and there it is, and here's Mr. Phelps." McIlroy woke up slowly. He leaned back in his chair and stretched. His neck was stiff from sleeping in such an awkward position. "'Morning, Mr. Phelps," he said. "Good morning," Phelps answered, dropping tiredly into a chair. "Have some coffee, Mr. Phelps," said Mrs. Garth, handing him a cup. "Any news?" asked McIlroy. "About Evans?" Phelps shook his head slowly. "Palomar called in a few minutes back. Nothing to report and the sun was rising there. Australia will be in position pretty soon. Several observatories there. Then Capetown. There are lots of observatories in Europe, but most of them are clouded over. Anyway the satellite observatory will be in position by the time Europe is." McIlroy was fully awake. He glanced at Phelps and wondered how long it had been since he had slept last. More than that, McIlroy wondered why this banker, who had never met Evans, was losing so much sleep about finding him. It began to dawn on McIlroy that nearly the whole population of Williamson Town was involved, one way or another, in the search. The director turned to ask Phelps about this fact, but the banker was slumped in his chair, fast asleep with his coffee untouched. It was three hours later that McIlroy woke Phelps. "They've found the tractor," McIlroy said. "Good," Phelps mumbled, and then as comprehension came; "That's fine! That's just line! Is Evans—?" "Can't tell yet. They spotted the tractor from the satellite observatory. Captain Jones took off a few minutes ago, and he'll report back as soon as he lands. Hadn't you better get some sleep?" Evans was carrying a block of ice into the tractor when he saw the rocket coming in for a landing. He dropped the block and stood waiting. When the dust settled from around the tail of the rocket, he started to run forward. The air lock opened, and Evans recognized the vacuum suited figure of Nickel Jones. "Evans, man!" said Jones' voice in the intercom. "Alive you are!" "A Welshman takes a lot of killing," Evans answered. Later, in Evans' tractor, he was telling his story: "... And I don't know how long I sat there after I found the water." He looked at the Goldburgian device he had made out of wire and tubing. "Finally I built this thing. These caves were made of lava. They must have been formed by steam some time, because there's a floor of ice in all of 'em. "The idea didn't come all at once, it took a long time for me to remember that water is made out of oxygen and hydrogen. When I remembered that, of course, I remembered that it can be separated with electricity. So I built this thing. "It runs an electric current through water, lets the oxygen loose in the room, and pipes the hydrogen outside. It doesn't work automatically, of course, so I run it about an hour a day. My oxygen level gauge shows how long." "You're a genius, man!" Jones exclaimed. "No," Evans answered, "a Welshman, nothing more." "Well, then," said Jones, "are you ready to start back?" "Back?" "Well, it was to rescue you that I came." "I don't need rescuing, man," Evans said. Jones stared at him blankly. "You might let me have some food," Evans continued. "I'm getting short of that. And you might have someone send out a mechanic with parts to fix my tractor. Then maybe you'll let me use your radio to file my claim." "Claim?" "Sure, man, I've thousands of tons of water here. It's the richest mine on the Moon!" THE END

Identifying the shadow line as it relates to Earth's continents

Identifying the shadow line as it relates to the moon's time zones

Identifying the shadow line as it relates to the moon's continents

Identifying the shadow line as it relates to the Earth's time zones

24161_INDOEF2N_2

Of the options presented, which represents McIlroy's greatest flaw as a leader?

ALL DAY SEPTEMBER By ROGER KUYKENDALL Illustrated by van Dongen Some men just haven't got good sense. They just can't seem to learn the most fundamental things. Like when there's no use trying—when it's time to give up because it's hopeless.... The meteor, a pebble, a little larger than a match head, traveled through space and time since it came into being. The light from the star that died when the meteor was created fell on Earth before the first lungfish ventured from the sea. In its last instant, the meteor fell on the Moon. It was impeded by Evans' tractor. It drilled a small, neat hole through the casing of the steam turbine, and volitized upon striking the blades. Portions of the turbine also volitized; idling at eight thousand RPM, it became unstable. The shaft tried to tie itself into a knot, and the blades, damaged and undamaged were spit through the casing. The turbine again reached a stable state, that is, stopped. Permanently stopped. It was two days to sunrise, where Evans stood. It was just before sunset on a spring evening in September in Sydney. The shadow line between day and night could be seen from the Moon to be drifting across Australia. Evans, who had no watch, thought of the time as a quarter after Australia. Evans was a prospector, and like all prospectors, a sort of jackknife geologist, selenologist, rather. His tractor and equipment cost two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Fifty thousand was paid for. The rest was promissory notes and grubstake shares. When he was broke, which was usually, he used his tractor to haul uranium ore and metallic sodium from the mines at Potter's dike to Williamson Town, where the rockets landed. When he was flush, he would prospect for a couple of weeks. Once he followed a stampede to Yellow Crater, where he thought for a while that he had a fortune in chromium. The chromite petered out in a month and a half, and he was lucky to break even. Evans was about three hundred miles east of Williamson Town, the site of the first landing on the Moon. Evans was due back at Williamson Town at about sunset, that is, in about sixteen days. When he saw the wrecked turbine, he knew that he wouldn't make it. By careful rationing, he could probably stretch his food out to more than a month. His drinking water—kept separate from the water in the reactor—might conceivably last just as long. But his oxygen was too carefully measured; there was a four-day reserve. By diligent conservation, he might make it last an extra day. Four days reserve—plus one is five—plus sixteen days normal supply equals twenty-one days to live. In seventeen days he might be missed, but in seventeen days it would be dark again, and the search for him, if it ever began, could not begin for thirteen more days. At the earliest it would be eight days too late. "Well, man, 'tis a fine spot you're in now," he told himself. "Let's find out how bad it is indeed," he answered. He reached for the light switch and tried to turn it on. The switch was already in the "on" position. "Batteries must be dead," he told himself. "What batteries?" he asked. "There're no batteries in here, the power comes from the generator." "Why isn't the generator working, man?" he asked. He thought this one out carefully. The generator was not turned by the main turbine, but by a small reciprocating engine. The steam, however, came from the same boiler. And the boiler, of course, had emptied itself through the hole in the turbine. And the condenser, of course— "The condenser!" he shouted. He fumbled for a while, until he found a small flashlight. By the light of this, he reinspected the steam system, and found about three gallons of water frozen in the condenser. The condenser, like all condensers, was a device to convert steam into water, so that it could be reused in the boiler. This one had a tank and coils of tubing in the center of a curved reflector that was positioned to radiate the heat of the steam into the cold darkness of space. When the meteor pierced the turbine, the water in the condenser began to boil. This boiling lowered the temperature, and the condenser demonstrated its efficiency by quickly freezing the water in the tank. Evans sealed the turbine from the rest of the steam system by closing the shut-off valves. If there was any water in the boiler, it would operate the engine that drove the generator. The water would condense in the condenser, and with a little luck, melt the ice in there. Then, if the pump wasn't blocked by ice, it would return the water to the boiler. But there was no water in the boiler. Carefully he poured a cup of his drinking water into a pipe that led to the boiler, and resealed the pipe. He pulled on a knob marked "Nuclear Start/Safety Bypass." The water that he had poured into the boiler quickly turned into steam, and the steam turned the generator briefly. Evans watched the lights flicker and go out, and he guessed what the trouble was. "The water, man," he said, "there is not enough to melt the ice in the condenser." He opened the pipe again and poured nearly a half-gallon of water into the boiler. It was three days' supply of water, if it had been carefully used. It was one day's supply if used wastefully. It was ostentatious luxury for a man with a month's supply of water and twenty-one days to live. The generator started again, and the lights came on. They flickered as the boiler pressure began to fail, but the steam had melted some of the ice in the condenser, and the water pump began to function. "Well, man," he breathed, "there's a light to die by." The sun rose on Williamson Town at about the same time it rose on Evans. It was an incredibly brilliant disk in a black sky. The stars next to the sun shone as brightly as though there were no sun. They might have appeared to waver slightly, if they were behind outflung corona flares. If they did, no one noticed. No one looked toward the sun without dark filters. When Director McIlroy came into his office, he found it lighted by the rising sun. The light was a hot, brilliant white that seemed to pierce the darkest shadows of the room. He moved to the round window, screening his eyes from the light, and adjusted the polaroid shade to maximum density. The sun became an angry red brown, and the room was dark again. McIlroy decreased the density again until the room was comfortably lighted. The room felt stuffy, so he decided to leave the door to the inner office open. He felt a little guilty about this, because he had ordered that all doors in the survey building should remain closed except when someone was passing through them. This was to allow the air-conditioning system to function properly, and to prevent air loss in case of the highly improbable meteor damage. McIlroy thought that on the whole, he was disobeying his own orders no more flagrantly than anyone else in the survey. McIlroy had no illusions about his ability to lead men. Or rather, he did have one illusion; he thought that he was completely unfit as a leader. It was true that his strictest orders were disobeyed with cheerful contempt, but it was also true his mildest requests were complied with eagerly and smoothly. Everyone in the survey except McIlroy realized this, and even he accepted this without thinking about it. He had fallen into the habit of suggesting mildly anything that he wanted done, and writing orders he didn't particularly care to have obeyed. For example, because of an order of his stating that there would be no alcoholic beverages within the survey building, the entire survey was assured of a constant supply of home-made, but passably good liquor. Even McIlroy enjoyed the surreptitious drinking. "Good morning, Mr. McIlroy," said Mrs. Garth, his secretary. Morning to Mrs. Garth was simply the first four hours after waking. "Good morning indeed," answered McIlroy. Morning to him had no meaning at all, but he thought in the strictest sense that it would be morning on the Moon for another week. "Has the power crew set up the solar furnace?" he asked. The solar furnace was a rough parabola of mirrors used to focus the sun's heat on anything that it was desirable to heat. It was used mostly, from sun-up to sun-down, to supplement the nuclear power plant. "They went out about an hour ago," she answered, "I suppose that's what they were going to do." "Very good, what's first on the schedule?" "A Mr. Phelps to see you," she said. "How do you do, Mr. Phelps," McIlroy greeted him. "Good afternoon," Mr. Phelps replied. "I'm here representing the Merchants' Bank Association." "Fine," McIlroy said, "I suppose you're here to set up a bank." "That's right, I just got in from Muroc last night, and I've been going over the assets of the Survey Credit Association all morning." "I'll certainly be glad to get them off my hands," McIlroy said. "I hope they're in good order." "There doesn't seem to be any profit," Mr. Phelps said. "That's par for a nonprofit organization," said McIlroy. "But we're amateurs, and we're turning this operation over to professionals. I'm sure it will be to everyone's satisfaction." "I know this seems like a silly question. What day is this?" "Well," said McIlroy, "that's not so silly. I don't know either." "Mrs. Garth," he called, "what day is this?" "Why, September, I think," she answered. "I mean what day ." "I don't know, I'll call the observatory." There was a pause. "They say what day where?" she asked. "Greenwich, I guess, our official time is supposed to be Greenwich Mean Time." There was another pause. "They say it's September fourth, one thirty a.m. " "Well, there you are," laughed McIlroy, "it isn't that time doesn't mean anything here, it just doesn't mean the same thing." Mr. Phelps joined the laughter. "Bankers' hours don't mean much, at any rate," he said. The power crew was having trouble with the solar furnace. Three of the nine banks of mirrors would not respond to the electric controls, and one bank moved so jerkily that it could not be focused, and it threatened to tear several of the mirrors loose. "What happened here?" Spotty Cade, one of the electrical technicians asked his foreman, Cowalczk, over the intercommunications radio. "I've got about a hundred pinholes in the cables out here. It's no wonder they don't work." "Meteor shower," Cowalczk answered, "and that's not half of it. Walker says he's got a half dozen mirrors cracked or pitted, and Hoffman on bank three wants you to replace a servo motor. He says the bearing was hit." "When did it happen?" Cade wanted to know. "Must have been last night, at least two or three days ago. All of 'em too small for Radar to pick up, and not enough for Seismo to get a rumble." "Sounds pretty bad." "Could have been worse," said Cowalczk. "How's that?" "Wasn't anybody out in it." "Hey, Chuck," another technician, Lehman, broke in, "you could maybe get hurt that way." "I doubt it," Cowalczk answered, "most of these were pinhead size, and they wouldn't go through a suit." "It would take a pretty big one to damage a servo bearing," Cade commented. "That could hurt," Cowalczk admitted, "but there was only one of them." "You mean only one hit our gear," Lehman said. "How many missed?" Nobody answered. They could all see the Moon under their feet. Small craters overlapped and touched each other. There was—except in the places that men had obscured them with footprints—not a square foot that didn't contain a crater at least ten inches across, there was not a square inch without its half-inch crater. Nearly all of these had been made millions of years ago, but here and there, the rim of a crater covered part of a footprint, clear evidence that it was a recent one. After the sun rose, Evans returned to the lava cave that he had been exploring when the meteor hit. Inside, he lifted his filter visor, and found that the light reflected from the small ray that peered into the cave door lighted the cave adequately. He tapped loose some white crystals on the cave wall with his geologist's hammer, and put them into a collector's bag. "A few mineral specimens would give us something to think about, man. These crystals," he said, "look a little like zeolites, but that can't be, zeolites need water to form, and there's no water on the Moon." He chipped a number of other crystals loose and put them in bags. One of them he found in a dark crevice had a hexagonal shape that puzzled him. One at a time, back in the tractor, he took the crystals out of the bags and analyzed them as well as he could without using a flame which would waste oxygen. The ones that looked like zeolites were zeolites, all right, or something very much like it. One of the crystals that he thought was quartz turned out to be calcite, and one of the ones that he was sure could be nothing but calcite was actually potassium nitrate. "Well, now," he said, "it's probably the largest natural crystal of potassium nitrate that anyone has ever seen. Man, it's a full inch across." All of these needed water to form, and their existence on the Moon puzzled him for a while. Then he opened the bag that had contained the unusual hexagonal crystals, and the puzzle resolved itself. There was nothing in the bag but a few drops of water. What he had taken to be a type of rock was ice, frozen in a niche that had never been warmed by the sun. The sun rose to the meridian slowly. It was a week after sunrise. The stars shone coldly, and wheeled in their slow course with the sun. Only Earth remained in the same spot in the black sky. The shadow line crept around until Earth was nearly dark, and then the rim of light appeared on the opposite side. For a while Earth was a dark disk in a thin halo, and then the light came to be a crescent, and the line of dawn began to move around Earth. The continents drifted across the dark disk and into the crescent. The people on Earth saw the full moon set about the same time that the sun rose. Nickel Jones was the captain of a supply rocket. He made trips from and to the Moon about once a month, carrying supplies in and metal and ores out. At this time he was visiting with his old friend McIlroy. "I swear, Mac," said Jones, "another season like this, and I'm going back to mining." "I thought you were doing pretty well," said McIlroy, as he poured two drinks from a bottle of Scotch that Jones had brought him. "Oh, the money I like, but I will say that I'd have more if I didn't have to fight the union and the Lunar Trade Commission." McIlroy had heard all of this before. "How's that?" he asked politely. "You may think it's myself running the ship," Jones started on his tirade, "but it's not. The union it is that says who I can hire. The union it is that says how much I must pay, and how large a crew I need. And then the Commission ..." The word seemed to give Jones an unpleasant taste in his mouth, which he hurriedly rinsed with a sip of Scotch. "The Commission," he continued, making the word sound like an obscenity, "it is that tells me how much I can charge for freight." McIlroy noticed that his friend's glass was empty, and he quietly filled it again. "And then," continued Jones, "if I buy a cargo up here, the Commission it is that says what I'll sell it for. If I had my way, I'd charge only fifty cents a pound for freight instead of the dollar forty that the Commission insists on. That's from here to Earth, of course. There's no profit I could make by cutting rates the other way." "Why not?" asked McIlroy. He knew the answer, but he liked to listen to the slightly Welsh voice of Jones. "Near cost it is now at a dollar forty. But what sense is there in charging the same rate to go either way when it takes about a seventh of the fuel to get from here to Earth as it does to get from there to here?" "What good would it do to charge fifty cents a pound?" asked McIlroy. "The nickel, man, the tons of nickel worth a dollar and a half on Earth, and not worth mining here; the low-grade ores of uranium and vanadium, they need these things on Earth, but they can't get them as long as it isn't worth the carrying of them. And then, of course, there's the water we haven't got. We could afford to bring more water for more people, and set up more distilling plants if we had the money from the nickel. "Even though I say it who shouldn't, two-eighty a quart is too much to pay for water." Both men fell silent for a while. Then Jones spoke again: "Have you seen our friend Evans lately? The price of chromium has gone up, and I think he could ship some of his ore from Yellow Crater at a profit." "He's out prospecting again. I don't expect to see him until sun-down." "I'll likely see him then. I won't be loaded for another week and a half. Can't you get in touch with him by radio?" "He isn't carrying one. Most of the prospectors don't. They claim that a radio that won't carry beyond the horizon isn't any good, and one that will bounce messages from Earth takes up too much room." "Well, if I don't see him, you let him know about the chromium." "Anything to help another Welshman, is that the idea?" "Well, protection it is that a poor Welshman needs from all the English and Scots. Speaking of which—" "Oh, of course," McIlroy grinned as he refilled the glasses. " Slainte, McIlroy, bach. " [Health, McIlroy, man.] " Slainte mhor, bach. " [Great Health, man.] The sun was halfway to the horizon, and Earth was a crescent in the sky when Evans had quarried all the ice that was available in the cave. The thought grew on him as he worked that this couldn't be the only such cave in the area. There must be several more bubbles in the lava flow. Part of his reasoning proved correct. That is, he found that by chipping, he could locate small bubbles up to an inch in diameter, each one with its droplet of water. The average was about one per cent of the volume of each bubble filled with ice. A quarter of a mile from the tractor, Evans found a promising looking mound of lava. It was rounded on top, and it could easily be the dome of a bubble. Suddenly, Evans noticed that the gauge on the oxygen tank of his suit was reading dangerously near empty. He turned back to his tractor, moving as slowly as he felt safe in doing. Running would use up oxygen too fast. He was halfway there when the pressure warning light went on, and the signal sounded inside his helmet. He turned on his ten-minute reserve supply, and made it to the tractor with about five minutes left. The air purifying apparatus in the suit was not as efficient as the one in the tractor; it wasted oxygen. By using the suit so much, Evans had already shortened his life by several days. He resolved not to leave the tractor again, and reluctantly abandoned his plan to search for a large bubble. The sun stood at half its diameter above the horizon. The shadows of the mountains stretched out to touch the shadows of the other mountains. The dawning line of light covered half of Earth, and Earth turned beneath it. Cowalczk itched under his suit, and the sweat on his face prickled maddeningly because he couldn't reach it through his helmet. He pushed his forehead against the faceplate of his helmet and rubbed off some of the sweat. It didn't help much, and it left a blurred spot in his vision. That annoyed him. "Is everyone clear of the outlet?" he asked. "All clear," he heard Cade report through the intercom. "How come we have to blow the boilers now?" asked Lehman. "Because I say so," Cowalczk shouted, surprised at his outburst and ashamed of it. "Boiler scale," he continued, much calmer. "We've got to clean out the boilers once a year to make sure the tubes in the reactor don't clog up." He squinted through his dark visor at the reactor building, a gray concrete structure a quarter of a mile distant. "It would be pretty bad if they clogged up some night." "Pressure's ten and a half pounds," said Cade. "Right, let her go," said Cowalczk. Cade threw a switch. In the reactor building, a relay closed. A motor started turning, and the worm gear on the motor opened a valve on the boiler. A stream of muddy water gushed into a closed vat. When the vat was about half full, the water began to run nearly clear. An electric eye noted that fact and a light in front of Cade turned on. Cade threw the switch back the other way, and the relay in the reactor building opened. The motor turned and the gears started to close the valve. But a fragment of boiler scale held the valve open. "Valve's stuck," said Cade. "Open it and close it again," said Cowalczk. The sweat on his forehead started to run into his eyes. He banged his hand on his faceplate in an unconscious attempt to wipe it off. He cursed silently, and wiped it off on the inside of his helmet again. This time, two drops ran down the inside of his faceplate. "Still don't work," said Cade. "Keep trying," Cowalczk ordered. "Lehman, get a Geiger counter and come with me, we've got to fix this thing." Lehman and Cowalczk, who were already suited up started across to the reactor building. Cade, who was in the pressurized control room without a suit on, kept working the switch back and forth. There was light that indicated when the valve was open. It was on, and it stayed on, no matter what Cade did. "The vat pressure's too high," Cade said. "Let me know when it reaches six pounds," Cowalczk requested. "Because it'll probably blow at seven." The vat was a light plastic container used only to decant sludge out of the water. It neither needed nor had much strength. "Six now," said Cade. Cowalczk and Lehman stopped halfway to the reactor. The vat bulged and ruptured. A stream of mud gushed out and boiled dry on the face of the Moon. Cowalczk and Lehman rushed forward again. They could see the trickle of water from the discharge pipe. The motor turned the valve back and forth in response to Cade's signals. "What's going on out there?" demanded McIlroy on the intercom. "Scale stuck in the valve," Cowalczk answered. "Are the reactors off?" "Yes. Vat blew. Shut up! Let me work, Mac!" "Sorry," McIlroy said, realizing that this was no time for officials. "Let me know when it's fixed." "Geiger's off scale," Lehman said. "We're probably O.K. in these suits for an hour," Cowalczk answered. "Is there a manual shut-off?" "Not that I know of," Lehman answered. "What about it, Cade?" "I don't think so," Cade said. "I'll get on the blower and rouse out an engineer." "O.K., but keep working that switch." "I checked the line as far as it's safe," said Lehman. "No valve." "O.K.," Cowalczk said. "Listen, Cade, are the injectors still on?" "Yeah. There's still enough heat in these reactors to do some damage. I'll cut 'em in about fifteen minutes." "I've found the trouble," Lehman said. "The worm gear's loose on its shaft. It's slipping every time the valve closes. There's not enough power in it to crush the scale." "Right," Cowalczk said. "Cade, open the valve wide. Lehman, hand me that pipe wrench!" Cowalczk hit the shaft with the back of the pipe wrench, and it broke at the motor bearing. Cowalczk and Lehman fitted the pipe wrench to the gear on the valve, and turned it. "Is the light off?" Cowalczk asked. "No," Cade answered. "Water's stopped. Give us some pressure, we'll see if it holds." "Twenty pounds," Cade answered after a couple of minutes. "Take her up to ... no, wait, it's still leaking," Cowalczk said. "Hold it there, we'll open the valve again." "O.K.," said Cade. "An engineer here says there's no manual cutoff." "Like Hell," said Lehman. Cowalczk and Lehman opened the valve again. Water spurted out, and dwindled as they closed the valve. "What did you do?" asked Cade. "The light went out and came on again." "Check that circuit and see if it works," Cowalczk instructed. There was a pause. "It's O.K.," Cade said. Cowalczk and Lehman opened and closed the valve again. "Light is off now," Cade said. "Good," said Cowalczk, "take the pressure up all the way, and we'll see what happens." "Eight hundred pounds," Cade said, after a short wait. "Good enough," Cowalczk said. "Tell that engineer to hold up a while, he can fix this thing as soon as he gets parts. Come on, Lehman, let's get out of here." "Well, I'm glad that's over," said Cade. "You guys had me worried for a while." "Think we weren't worried?" Lehman asked. "And it's not over." "What?" Cade asked. "Oh, you mean the valve servo you two bashed up?" "No," said Lehman, "I mean the two thousand gallons of water that we lost." "Two thousand?" Cade asked. "We only had seven hundred gallons reserve. How come we can operate now?" "We picked up twelve hundred from the town sewage plant. What with using the solar furnace as a radiator, we can make do." "Oh, God, I suppose this means water rationing again." "You're probably right, at least until the next rocket lands in a couple of weeks." PROSPECTOR FEARED LOST ON MOON IPP Williamson Town, Moon, Sept. 21st. Scientific survey director McIlroy released a statement today that Howard Evans, a prospector is missing and presumed lost. Evans, who was apparently exploring the Moon in search of minerals was due two days ago, but it was presumed that he was merely temporarily delayed. Evans began his exploration on August 25th, and was known to be carrying several days reserve of oxygen and supplies. Director McIlroy has expressed a hope that Evans will be found before his oxygen runs out. Search parties have started from Williamson Town, but telescopic search from Palomar and the new satellite observatory are hindered by the fact that Evans is lost on the part of the Moon which is now dark. Little hope is held for radio contact with the missing man as it is believed he was carrying only short-range, intercommunications equipment. Nevertheless, receivers are ... Captain Nickel Jones was also expressing a hope: "Anyway, Mac," he was saying to McIlroy, "a Welshman knows when his luck's run out. And never a word did he say." "Like as not, you're right," McIlroy replied, "but if I know Evans, he'd never say a word about any forebodings." "Well, happen I might have a bit of Welsh second sight about me, and it tells me that Evans will be found." McIlroy chuckled for the first time in several days. "So that's the reason you didn't take off when you were scheduled," he said. "Well, yes," Jones answered. "I thought that it might happen that a rocket would be needed in the search." The light from Earth lighted the Moon as the Moon had never lighted Earth. The great blue globe of Earth, the only thing larger than the stars, wheeled silently in the sky. As it turned, the shadow of sunset crept across the face that could be seen from the Moon. From full Earth, as you might say, it moved toward last quarter. The rising sun shone into Director McIlroy's office. The hot light formed a circle on the wall opposite the window, and the light became more intense as the sun slowly pulled over the horizon. Mrs. Garth walked into the director's office, and saw the director sleeping with his head cradled in his arms on the desk. She walked softly to the window and adjusted the shade to darken the office. She stood looking at McIlroy for a moment, and when he moved slightly in his sleep, she walked softly out of the office. A few minutes later she was back with a cup of coffee. She placed it in front of the director, and shook his shoulder gently. "Wake up, Mr. McIlroy," she said, "you told me to wake you at sunrise, and there it is, and here's Mr. Phelps." McIlroy woke up slowly. He leaned back in his chair and stretched. His neck was stiff from sleeping in such an awkward position. "'Morning, Mr. Phelps," he said. "Good morning," Phelps answered, dropping tiredly into a chair. "Have some coffee, Mr. Phelps," said Mrs. Garth, handing him a cup. "Any news?" asked McIlroy. "About Evans?" Phelps shook his head slowly. "Palomar called in a few minutes back. Nothing to report and the sun was rising there. Australia will be in position pretty soon. Several observatories there. Then Capetown. There are lots of observatories in Europe, but most of them are clouded over. Anyway the satellite observatory will be in position by the time Europe is." McIlroy was fully awake. He glanced at Phelps and wondered how long it had been since he had slept last. More than that, McIlroy wondered why this banker, who had never met Evans, was losing so much sleep about finding him. It began to dawn on McIlroy that nearly the whole population of Williamson Town was involved, one way or another, in the search. The director turned to ask Phelps about this fact, but the banker was slumped in his chair, fast asleep with his coffee untouched. It was three hours later that McIlroy woke Phelps. "They've found the tractor," McIlroy said. "Good," Phelps mumbled, and then as comprehension came; "That's fine! That's just line! Is Evans—?" "Can't tell yet. They spotted the tractor from the satellite observatory. Captain Jones took off a few minutes ago, and he'll report back as soon as he lands. Hadn't you better get some sleep?" Evans was carrying a block of ice into the tractor when he saw the rocket coming in for a landing. He dropped the block and stood waiting. When the dust settled from around the tail of the rocket, he started to run forward. The air lock opened, and Evans recognized the vacuum suited figure of Nickel Jones. "Evans, man!" said Jones' voice in the intercom. "Alive you are!" "A Welshman takes a lot of killing," Evans answered. Later, in Evans' tractor, he was telling his story: "... And I don't know how long I sat there after I found the water." He looked at the Goldburgian device he had made out of wire and tubing. "Finally I built this thing. These caves were made of lava. They must have been formed by steam some time, because there's a floor of ice in all of 'em. "The idea didn't come all at once, it took a long time for me to remember that water is made out of oxygen and hydrogen. When I remembered that, of course, I remembered that it can be separated with electricity. So I built this thing. "It runs an electric current through water, lets the oxygen loose in the room, and pipes the hydrogen outside. It doesn't work automatically, of course, so I run it about an hour a day. My oxygen level gauge shows how long." "You're a genius, man!" Jones exclaimed. "No," Evans answered, "a Welshman, nothing more." "Well, then," said Jones, "are you ready to start back?" "Back?" "Well, it was to rescue you that I came." "I don't need rescuing, man," Evans said. Jones stared at him blankly. "You might let me have some food," Evans continued. "I'm getting short of that. And you might have someone send out a mechanic with parts to fix my tractor. Then maybe you'll let me use your radio to file my claim." "Claim?" "Sure, man, I've thousands of tons of water here. It's the richest mine on the Moon!" THE END

He is too lenient

He is hypocritical

He is too strict

He is untrustworthy

24161_INDOEF2N_3

What clue proves the natural existence of water on the moon?

ALL DAY SEPTEMBER By ROGER KUYKENDALL Illustrated by van Dongen Some men just haven't got good sense. They just can't seem to learn the most fundamental things. Like when there's no use trying—when it's time to give up because it's hopeless.... The meteor, a pebble, a little larger than a match head, traveled through space and time since it came into being. The light from the star that died when the meteor was created fell on Earth before the first lungfish ventured from the sea. In its last instant, the meteor fell on the Moon. It was impeded by Evans' tractor. It drilled a small, neat hole through the casing of the steam turbine, and volitized upon striking the blades. Portions of the turbine also volitized; idling at eight thousand RPM, it became unstable. The shaft tried to tie itself into a knot, and the blades, damaged and undamaged were spit through the casing. The turbine again reached a stable state, that is, stopped. Permanently stopped. It was two days to sunrise, where Evans stood. It was just before sunset on a spring evening in September in Sydney. The shadow line between day and night could be seen from the Moon to be drifting across Australia. Evans, who had no watch, thought of the time as a quarter after Australia. Evans was a prospector, and like all prospectors, a sort of jackknife geologist, selenologist, rather. His tractor and equipment cost two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Fifty thousand was paid for. The rest was promissory notes and grubstake shares. When he was broke, which was usually, he used his tractor to haul uranium ore and metallic sodium from the mines at Potter's dike to Williamson Town, where the rockets landed. When he was flush, he would prospect for a couple of weeks. Once he followed a stampede to Yellow Crater, where he thought for a while that he had a fortune in chromium. The chromite petered out in a month and a half, and he was lucky to break even. Evans was about three hundred miles east of Williamson Town, the site of the first landing on the Moon. Evans was due back at Williamson Town at about sunset, that is, in about sixteen days. When he saw the wrecked turbine, he knew that he wouldn't make it. By careful rationing, he could probably stretch his food out to more than a month. His drinking water—kept separate from the water in the reactor—might conceivably last just as long. But his oxygen was too carefully measured; there was a four-day reserve. By diligent conservation, he might make it last an extra day. Four days reserve—plus one is five—plus sixteen days normal supply equals twenty-one days to live. In seventeen days he might be missed, but in seventeen days it would be dark again, and the search for him, if it ever began, could not begin for thirteen more days. At the earliest it would be eight days too late. "Well, man, 'tis a fine spot you're in now," he told himself. "Let's find out how bad it is indeed," he answered. He reached for the light switch and tried to turn it on. The switch was already in the "on" position. "Batteries must be dead," he told himself. "What batteries?" he asked. "There're no batteries in here, the power comes from the generator." "Why isn't the generator working, man?" he asked. He thought this one out carefully. The generator was not turned by the main turbine, but by a small reciprocating engine. The steam, however, came from the same boiler. And the boiler, of course, had emptied itself through the hole in the turbine. And the condenser, of course— "The condenser!" he shouted. He fumbled for a while, until he found a small flashlight. By the light of this, he reinspected the steam system, and found about three gallons of water frozen in the condenser. The condenser, like all condensers, was a device to convert steam into water, so that it could be reused in the boiler. This one had a tank and coils of tubing in the center of a curved reflector that was positioned to radiate the heat of the steam into the cold darkness of space. When the meteor pierced the turbine, the water in the condenser began to boil. This boiling lowered the temperature, and the condenser demonstrated its efficiency by quickly freezing the water in the tank. Evans sealed the turbine from the rest of the steam system by closing the shut-off valves. If there was any water in the boiler, it would operate the engine that drove the generator. The water would condense in the condenser, and with a little luck, melt the ice in there. Then, if the pump wasn't blocked by ice, it would return the water to the boiler. But there was no water in the boiler. Carefully he poured a cup of his drinking water into a pipe that led to the boiler, and resealed the pipe. He pulled on a knob marked "Nuclear Start/Safety Bypass." The water that he had poured into the boiler quickly turned into steam, and the steam turned the generator briefly. Evans watched the lights flicker and go out, and he guessed what the trouble was. "The water, man," he said, "there is not enough to melt the ice in the condenser." He opened the pipe again and poured nearly a half-gallon of water into the boiler. It was three days' supply of water, if it had been carefully used. It was one day's supply if used wastefully. It was ostentatious luxury for a man with a month's supply of water and twenty-one days to live. The generator started again, and the lights came on. They flickered as the boiler pressure began to fail, but the steam had melted some of the ice in the condenser, and the water pump began to function. "Well, man," he breathed, "there's a light to die by." The sun rose on Williamson Town at about the same time it rose on Evans. It was an incredibly brilliant disk in a black sky. The stars next to the sun shone as brightly as though there were no sun. They might have appeared to waver slightly, if they were behind outflung corona flares. If they did, no one noticed. No one looked toward the sun without dark filters. When Director McIlroy came into his office, he found it lighted by the rising sun. The light was a hot, brilliant white that seemed to pierce the darkest shadows of the room. He moved to the round window, screening his eyes from the light, and adjusted the polaroid shade to maximum density. The sun became an angry red brown, and the room was dark again. McIlroy decreased the density again until the room was comfortably lighted. The room felt stuffy, so he decided to leave the door to the inner office open. He felt a little guilty about this, because he had ordered that all doors in the survey building should remain closed except when someone was passing through them. This was to allow the air-conditioning system to function properly, and to prevent air loss in case of the highly improbable meteor damage. McIlroy thought that on the whole, he was disobeying his own orders no more flagrantly than anyone else in the survey. McIlroy had no illusions about his ability to lead men. Or rather, he did have one illusion; he thought that he was completely unfit as a leader. It was true that his strictest orders were disobeyed with cheerful contempt, but it was also true his mildest requests were complied with eagerly and smoothly. Everyone in the survey except McIlroy realized this, and even he accepted this without thinking about it. He had fallen into the habit of suggesting mildly anything that he wanted done, and writing orders he didn't particularly care to have obeyed. For example, because of an order of his stating that there would be no alcoholic beverages within the survey building, the entire survey was assured of a constant supply of home-made, but passably good liquor. Even McIlroy enjoyed the surreptitious drinking. "Good morning, Mr. McIlroy," said Mrs. Garth, his secretary. Morning to Mrs. Garth was simply the first four hours after waking. "Good morning indeed," answered McIlroy. Morning to him had no meaning at all, but he thought in the strictest sense that it would be morning on the Moon for another week. "Has the power crew set up the solar furnace?" he asked. The solar furnace was a rough parabola of mirrors used to focus the sun's heat on anything that it was desirable to heat. It was used mostly, from sun-up to sun-down, to supplement the nuclear power plant. "They went out about an hour ago," she answered, "I suppose that's what they were going to do." "Very good, what's first on the schedule?" "A Mr. Phelps to see you," she said. "How do you do, Mr. Phelps," McIlroy greeted him. "Good afternoon," Mr. Phelps replied. "I'm here representing the Merchants' Bank Association." "Fine," McIlroy said, "I suppose you're here to set up a bank." "That's right, I just got in from Muroc last night, and I've been going over the assets of the Survey Credit Association all morning." "I'll certainly be glad to get them off my hands," McIlroy said. "I hope they're in good order." "There doesn't seem to be any profit," Mr. Phelps said. "That's par for a nonprofit organization," said McIlroy. "But we're amateurs, and we're turning this operation over to professionals. I'm sure it will be to everyone's satisfaction." "I know this seems like a silly question. What day is this?" "Well," said McIlroy, "that's not so silly. I don't know either." "Mrs. Garth," he called, "what day is this?" "Why, September, I think," she answered. "I mean what day ." "I don't know, I'll call the observatory." There was a pause. "They say what day where?" she asked. "Greenwich, I guess, our official time is supposed to be Greenwich Mean Time." There was another pause. "They say it's September fourth, one thirty a.m. " "Well, there you are," laughed McIlroy, "it isn't that time doesn't mean anything here, it just doesn't mean the same thing." Mr. Phelps joined the laughter. "Bankers' hours don't mean much, at any rate," he said. The power crew was having trouble with the solar furnace. Three of the nine banks of mirrors would not respond to the electric controls, and one bank moved so jerkily that it could not be focused, and it threatened to tear several of the mirrors loose. "What happened here?" Spotty Cade, one of the electrical technicians asked his foreman, Cowalczk, over the intercommunications radio. "I've got about a hundred pinholes in the cables out here. It's no wonder they don't work." "Meteor shower," Cowalczk answered, "and that's not half of it. Walker says he's got a half dozen mirrors cracked or pitted, and Hoffman on bank three wants you to replace a servo motor. He says the bearing was hit." "When did it happen?" Cade wanted to know. "Must have been last night, at least two or three days ago. All of 'em too small for Radar to pick up, and not enough for Seismo to get a rumble." "Sounds pretty bad." "Could have been worse," said Cowalczk. "How's that?" "Wasn't anybody out in it." "Hey, Chuck," another technician, Lehman, broke in, "you could maybe get hurt that way." "I doubt it," Cowalczk answered, "most of these were pinhead size, and they wouldn't go through a suit." "It would take a pretty big one to damage a servo bearing," Cade commented. "That could hurt," Cowalczk admitted, "but there was only one of them." "You mean only one hit our gear," Lehman said. "How many missed?" Nobody answered. They could all see the Moon under their feet. Small craters overlapped and touched each other. There was—except in the places that men had obscured them with footprints—not a square foot that didn't contain a crater at least ten inches across, there was not a square inch without its half-inch crater. Nearly all of these had been made millions of years ago, but here and there, the rim of a crater covered part of a footprint, clear evidence that it was a recent one. After the sun rose, Evans returned to the lava cave that he had been exploring when the meteor hit. Inside, he lifted his filter visor, and found that the light reflected from the small ray that peered into the cave door lighted the cave adequately. He tapped loose some white crystals on the cave wall with his geologist's hammer, and put them into a collector's bag. "A few mineral specimens would give us something to think about, man. These crystals," he said, "look a little like zeolites, but that can't be, zeolites need water to form, and there's no water on the Moon." He chipped a number of other crystals loose and put them in bags. One of them he found in a dark crevice had a hexagonal shape that puzzled him. One at a time, back in the tractor, he took the crystals out of the bags and analyzed them as well as he could without using a flame which would waste oxygen. The ones that looked like zeolites were zeolites, all right, or something very much like it. One of the crystals that he thought was quartz turned out to be calcite, and one of the ones that he was sure could be nothing but calcite was actually potassium nitrate. "Well, now," he said, "it's probably the largest natural crystal of potassium nitrate that anyone has ever seen. Man, it's a full inch across." All of these needed water to form, and their existence on the Moon puzzled him for a while. Then he opened the bag that had contained the unusual hexagonal crystals, and the puzzle resolved itself. There was nothing in the bag but a few drops of water. What he had taken to be a type of rock was ice, frozen in a niche that had never been warmed by the sun. The sun rose to the meridian slowly. It was a week after sunrise. The stars shone coldly, and wheeled in their slow course with the sun. Only Earth remained in the same spot in the black sky. The shadow line crept around until Earth was nearly dark, and then the rim of light appeared on the opposite side. For a while Earth was a dark disk in a thin halo, and then the light came to be a crescent, and the line of dawn began to move around Earth. The continents drifted across the dark disk and into the crescent. The people on Earth saw the full moon set about the same time that the sun rose. Nickel Jones was the captain of a supply rocket. He made trips from and to the Moon about once a month, carrying supplies in and metal and ores out. At this time he was visiting with his old friend McIlroy. "I swear, Mac," said Jones, "another season like this, and I'm going back to mining." "I thought you were doing pretty well," said McIlroy, as he poured two drinks from a bottle of Scotch that Jones had brought him. "Oh, the money I like, but I will say that I'd have more if I didn't have to fight the union and the Lunar Trade Commission." McIlroy had heard all of this before. "How's that?" he asked politely. "You may think it's myself running the ship," Jones started on his tirade, "but it's not. The union it is that says who I can hire. The union it is that says how much I must pay, and how large a crew I need. And then the Commission ..." The word seemed to give Jones an unpleasant taste in his mouth, which he hurriedly rinsed with a sip of Scotch. "The Commission," he continued, making the word sound like an obscenity, "it is that tells me how much I can charge for freight." McIlroy noticed that his friend's glass was empty, and he quietly filled it again. "And then," continued Jones, "if I buy a cargo up here, the Commission it is that says what I'll sell it for. If I had my way, I'd charge only fifty cents a pound for freight instead of the dollar forty that the Commission insists on. That's from here to Earth, of course. There's no profit I could make by cutting rates the other way." "Why not?" asked McIlroy. He knew the answer, but he liked to listen to the slightly Welsh voice of Jones. "Near cost it is now at a dollar forty. But what sense is there in charging the same rate to go either way when it takes about a seventh of the fuel to get from here to Earth as it does to get from there to here?" "What good would it do to charge fifty cents a pound?" asked McIlroy. "The nickel, man, the tons of nickel worth a dollar and a half on Earth, and not worth mining here; the low-grade ores of uranium and vanadium, they need these things on Earth, but they can't get them as long as it isn't worth the carrying of them. And then, of course, there's the water we haven't got. We could afford to bring more water for more people, and set up more distilling plants if we had the money from the nickel. "Even though I say it who shouldn't, two-eighty a quart is too much to pay for water." Both men fell silent for a while. Then Jones spoke again: "Have you seen our friend Evans lately? The price of chromium has gone up, and I think he could ship some of his ore from Yellow Crater at a profit." "He's out prospecting again. I don't expect to see him until sun-down." "I'll likely see him then. I won't be loaded for another week and a half. Can't you get in touch with him by radio?" "He isn't carrying one. Most of the prospectors don't. They claim that a radio that won't carry beyond the horizon isn't any good, and one that will bounce messages from Earth takes up too much room." "Well, if I don't see him, you let him know about the chromium." "Anything to help another Welshman, is that the idea?" "Well, protection it is that a poor Welshman needs from all the English and Scots. Speaking of which—" "Oh, of course," McIlroy grinned as he refilled the glasses. " Slainte, McIlroy, bach. " [Health, McIlroy, man.] " Slainte mhor, bach. " [Great Health, man.] The sun was halfway to the horizon, and Earth was a crescent in the sky when Evans had quarried all the ice that was available in the cave. The thought grew on him as he worked that this couldn't be the only such cave in the area. There must be several more bubbles in the lava flow. Part of his reasoning proved correct. That is, he found that by chipping, he could locate small bubbles up to an inch in diameter, each one with its droplet of water. The average was about one per cent of the volume of each bubble filled with ice. A quarter of a mile from the tractor, Evans found a promising looking mound of lava. It was rounded on top, and it could easily be the dome of a bubble. Suddenly, Evans noticed that the gauge on the oxygen tank of his suit was reading dangerously near empty. He turned back to his tractor, moving as slowly as he felt safe in doing. Running would use up oxygen too fast. He was halfway there when the pressure warning light went on, and the signal sounded inside his helmet. He turned on his ten-minute reserve supply, and made it to the tractor with about five minutes left. The air purifying apparatus in the suit was not as efficient as the one in the tractor; it wasted oxygen. By using the suit so much, Evans had already shortened his life by several days. He resolved not to leave the tractor again, and reluctantly abandoned his plan to search for a large bubble. The sun stood at half its diameter above the horizon. The shadows of the mountains stretched out to touch the shadows of the other mountains. The dawning line of light covered half of Earth, and Earth turned beneath it. Cowalczk itched under his suit, and the sweat on his face prickled maddeningly because he couldn't reach it through his helmet. He pushed his forehead against the faceplate of his helmet and rubbed off some of the sweat. It didn't help much, and it left a blurred spot in his vision. That annoyed him. "Is everyone clear of the outlet?" he asked. "All clear," he heard Cade report through the intercom. "How come we have to blow the boilers now?" asked Lehman. "Because I say so," Cowalczk shouted, surprised at his outburst and ashamed of it. "Boiler scale," he continued, much calmer. "We've got to clean out the boilers once a year to make sure the tubes in the reactor don't clog up." He squinted through his dark visor at the reactor building, a gray concrete structure a quarter of a mile distant. "It would be pretty bad if they clogged up some night." "Pressure's ten and a half pounds," said Cade. "Right, let her go," said Cowalczk. Cade threw a switch. In the reactor building, a relay closed. A motor started turning, and the worm gear on the motor opened a valve on the boiler. A stream of muddy water gushed into a closed vat. When the vat was about half full, the water began to run nearly clear. An electric eye noted that fact and a light in front of Cade turned on. Cade threw the switch back the other way, and the relay in the reactor building opened. The motor turned and the gears started to close the valve. But a fragment of boiler scale held the valve open. "Valve's stuck," said Cade. "Open it and close it again," said Cowalczk. The sweat on his forehead started to run into his eyes. He banged his hand on his faceplate in an unconscious attempt to wipe it off. He cursed silently, and wiped it off on the inside of his helmet again. This time, two drops ran down the inside of his faceplate. "Still don't work," said Cade. "Keep trying," Cowalczk ordered. "Lehman, get a Geiger counter and come with me, we've got to fix this thing." Lehman and Cowalczk, who were already suited up started across to the reactor building. Cade, who was in the pressurized control room without a suit on, kept working the switch back and forth. There was light that indicated when the valve was open. It was on, and it stayed on, no matter what Cade did. "The vat pressure's too high," Cade said. "Let me know when it reaches six pounds," Cowalczk requested. "Because it'll probably blow at seven." The vat was a light plastic container used only to decant sludge out of the water. It neither needed nor had much strength. "Six now," said Cade. Cowalczk and Lehman stopped halfway to the reactor. The vat bulged and ruptured. A stream of mud gushed out and boiled dry on the face of the Moon. Cowalczk and Lehman rushed forward again. They could see the trickle of water from the discharge pipe. The motor turned the valve back and forth in response to Cade's signals. "What's going on out there?" demanded McIlroy on the intercom. "Scale stuck in the valve," Cowalczk answered. "Are the reactors off?" "Yes. Vat blew. Shut up! Let me work, Mac!" "Sorry," McIlroy said, realizing that this was no time for officials. "Let me know when it's fixed." "Geiger's off scale," Lehman said. "We're probably O.K. in these suits for an hour," Cowalczk answered. "Is there a manual shut-off?" "Not that I know of," Lehman answered. "What about it, Cade?" "I don't think so," Cade said. "I'll get on the blower and rouse out an engineer." "O.K., but keep working that switch." "I checked the line as far as it's safe," said Lehman. "No valve." "O.K.," Cowalczk said. "Listen, Cade, are the injectors still on?" "Yeah. There's still enough heat in these reactors to do some damage. I'll cut 'em in about fifteen minutes." "I've found the trouble," Lehman said. "The worm gear's loose on its shaft. It's slipping every time the valve closes. There's not enough power in it to crush the scale." "Right," Cowalczk said. "Cade, open the valve wide. Lehman, hand me that pipe wrench!" Cowalczk hit the shaft with the back of the pipe wrench, and it broke at the motor bearing. Cowalczk and Lehman fitted the pipe wrench to the gear on the valve, and turned it. "Is the light off?" Cowalczk asked. "No," Cade answered. "Water's stopped. Give us some pressure, we'll see if it holds." "Twenty pounds," Cade answered after a couple of minutes. "Take her up to ... no, wait, it's still leaking," Cowalczk said. "Hold it there, we'll open the valve again." "O.K.," said Cade. "An engineer here says there's no manual cutoff." "Like Hell," said Lehman. Cowalczk and Lehman opened the valve again. Water spurted out, and dwindled as they closed the valve. "What did you do?" asked Cade. "The light went out and came on again." "Check that circuit and see if it works," Cowalczk instructed. There was a pause. "It's O.K.," Cade said. Cowalczk and Lehman opened and closed the valve again. "Light is off now," Cade said. "Good," said Cowalczk, "take the pressure up all the way, and we'll see what happens." "Eight hundred pounds," Cade said, after a short wait. "Good enough," Cowalczk said. "Tell that engineer to hold up a while, he can fix this thing as soon as he gets parts. Come on, Lehman, let's get out of here." "Well, I'm glad that's over," said Cade. "You guys had me worried for a while." "Think we weren't worried?" Lehman asked. "And it's not over." "What?" Cade asked. "Oh, you mean the valve servo you two bashed up?" "No," said Lehman, "I mean the two thousand gallons of water that we lost." "Two thousand?" Cade asked. "We only had seven hundred gallons reserve. How come we can operate now?" "We picked up twelve hundred from the town sewage plant. What with using the solar furnace as a radiator, we can make do." "Oh, God, I suppose this means water rationing again." "You're probably right, at least until the next rocket lands in a couple of weeks." PROSPECTOR FEARED LOST ON MOON IPP Williamson Town, Moon, Sept. 21st. Scientific survey director McIlroy released a statement today that Howard Evans, a prospector is missing and presumed lost. Evans, who was apparently exploring the Moon in search of minerals was due two days ago, but it was presumed that he was merely temporarily delayed. Evans began his exploration on August 25th, and was known to be carrying several days reserve of oxygen and supplies. Director McIlroy has expressed a hope that Evans will be found before his oxygen runs out. Search parties have started from Williamson Town, but telescopic search from Palomar and the new satellite observatory are hindered by the fact that Evans is lost on the part of the Moon which is now dark. Little hope is held for radio contact with the missing man as it is believed he was carrying only short-range, intercommunications equipment. Nevertheless, receivers are ... Captain Nickel Jones was also expressing a hope: "Anyway, Mac," he was saying to McIlroy, "a Welshman knows when his luck's run out. And never a word did he say." "Like as not, you're right," McIlroy replied, "but if I know Evans, he'd never say a word about any forebodings." "Well, happen I might have a bit of Welsh second sight about me, and it tells me that Evans will be found." McIlroy chuckled for the first time in several days. "So that's the reason you didn't take off when you were scheduled," he said. "Well, yes," Jones answered. "I thought that it might happen that a rocket would be needed in the search." The light from Earth lighted the Moon as the Moon had never lighted Earth. The great blue globe of Earth, the only thing larger than the stars, wheeled silently in the sky. As it turned, the shadow of sunset crept across the face that could be seen from the Moon. From full Earth, as you might say, it moved toward last quarter. The rising sun shone into Director McIlroy's office. The hot light formed a circle on the wall opposite the window, and the light became more intense as the sun slowly pulled over the horizon. Mrs. Garth walked into the director's office, and saw the director sleeping with his head cradled in his arms on the desk. She walked softly to the window and adjusted the shade to darken the office. She stood looking at McIlroy for a moment, and when he moved slightly in his sleep, she walked softly out of the office. A few minutes later she was back with a cup of coffee. She placed it in front of the director, and shook his shoulder gently. "Wake up, Mr. McIlroy," she said, "you told me to wake you at sunrise, and there it is, and here's Mr. Phelps." McIlroy woke up slowly. He leaned back in his chair and stretched. His neck was stiff from sleeping in such an awkward position. "'Morning, Mr. Phelps," he said. "Good morning," Phelps answered, dropping tiredly into a chair. "Have some coffee, Mr. Phelps," said Mrs. Garth, handing him a cup. "Any news?" asked McIlroy. "About Evans?" Phelps shook his head slowly. "Palomar called in a few minutes back. Nothing to report and the sun was rising there. Australia will be in position pretty soon. Several observatories there. Then Capetown. There are lots of observatories in Europe, but most of them are clouded over. Anyway the satellite observatory will be in position by the time Europe is." McIlroy was fully awake. He glanced at Phelps and wondered how long it had been since he had slept last. More than that, McIlroy wondered why this banker, who had never met Evans, was losing so much sleep about finding him. It began to dawn on McIlroy that nearly the whole population of Williamson Town was involved, one way or another, in the search. The director turned to ask Phelps about this fact, but the banker was slumped in his chair, fast asleep with his coffee untouched. It was three hours later that McIlroy woke Phelps. "They've found the tractor," McIlroy said. "Good," Phelps mumbled, and then as comprehension came; "That's fine! That's just line! Is Evans—?" "Can't tell yet. They spotted the tractor from the satellite observatory. Captain Jones took off a few minutes ago, and he'll report back as soon as he lands. Hadn't you better get some sleep?" Evans was carrying a block of ice into the tractor when he saw the rocket coming in for a landing. He dropped the block and stood waiting. When the dust settled from around the tail of the rocket, he started to run forward. The air lock opened, and Evans recognized the vacuum suited figure of Nickel Jones. "Evans, man!" said Jones' voice in the intercom. "Alive you are!" "A Welshman takes a lot of killing," Evans answered. Later, in Evans' tractor, he was telling his story: "... And I don't know how long I sat there after I found the water." He looked at the Goldburgian device he had made out of wire and tubing. "Finally I built this thing. These caves were made of lava. They must have been formed by steam some time, because there's a floor of ice in all of 'em. "The idea didn't come all at once, it took a long time for me to remember that water is made out of oxygen and hydrogen. When I remembered that, of course, I remembered that it can be separated with electricity. So I built this thing. "It runs an electric current through water, lets the oxygen loose in the room, and pipes the hydrogen outside. It doesn't work automatically, of course, so I run it about an hour a day. My oxygen level gauge shows how long." "You're a genius, man!" Jones exclaimed. "No," Evans answered, "a Welshman, nothing more." "Well, then," said Jones, "are you ready to start back?" "Back?" "Well, it was to rescue you that I came." "I don't need rescuing, man," Evans said. Jones stared at him blankly. "You might let me have some food," Evans continued. "I'm getting short of that. And you might have someone send out a mechanic with parts to fix my tractor. Then maybe you'll let me use your radio to file my claim." "Claim?" "Sure, man, I've thousands of tons of water here. It's the richest mine on the Moon!" THE END

The ability to distill alcohol

Increase of meteor activity

Humans are able to survive for long periods of time

The presence of specific minerals

24161_INDOEF2N_4

Moon inhabitants must make all of the following considerations regarding their equipment EXCEPT:

ALL DAY SEPTEMBER By ROGER KUYKENDALL Illustrated by van Dongen Some men just haven't got good sense. They just can't seem to learn the most fundamental things. Like when there's no use trying—when it's time to give up because it's hopeless.... The meteor, a pebble, a little larger than a match head, traveled through space and time since it came into being. The light from the star that died when the meteor was created fell on Earth before the first lungfish ventured from the sea. In its last instant, the meteor fell on the Moon. It was impeded by Evans' tractor. It drilled a small, neat hole through the casing of the steam turbine, and volitized upon striking the blades. Portions of the turbine also volitized; idling at eight thousand RPM, it became unstable. The shaft tried to tie itself into a knot, and the blades, damaged and undamaged were spit through the casing. The turbine again reached a stable state, that is, stopped. Permanently stopped. It was two days to sunrise, where Evans stood. It was just before sunset on a spring evening in September in Sydney. The shadow line between day and night could be seen from the Moon to be drifting across Australia. Evans, who had no watch, thought of the time as a quarter after Australia. Evans was a prospector, and like all prospectors, a sort of jackknife geologist, selenologist, rather. His tractor and equipment cost two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Fifty thousand was paid for. The rest was promissory notes and grubstake shares. When he was broke, which was usually, he used his tractor to haul uranium ore and metallic sodium from the mines at Potter's dike to Williamson Town, where the rockets landed. When he was flush, he would prospect for a couple of weeks. Once he followed a stampede to Yellow Crater, where he thought for a while that he had a fortune in chromium. The chromite petered out in a month and a half, and he was lucky to break even. Evans was about three hundred miles east of Williamson Town, the site of the first landing on the Moon. Evans was due back at Williamson Town at about sunset, that is, in about sixteen days. When he saw the wrecked turbine, he knew that he wouldn't make it. By careful rationing, he could probably stretch his food out to more than a month. His drinking water—kept separate from the water in the reactor—might conceivably last just as long. But his oxygen was too carefully measured; there was a four-day reserve. By diligent conservation, he might make it last an extra day. Four days reserve—plus one is five—plus sixteen days normal supply equals twenty-one days to live. In seventeen days he might be missed, but in seventeen days it would be dark again, and the search for him, if it ever began, could not begin for thirteen more days. At the earliest it would be eight days too late. "Well, man, 'tis a fine spot you're in now," he told himself. "Let's find out how bad it is indeed," he answered. He reached for the light switch and tried to turn it on. The switch was already in the "on" position. "Batteries must be dead," he told himself. "What batteries?" he asked. "There're no batteries in here, the power comes from the generator." "Why isn't the generator working, man?" he asked. He thought this one out carefully. The generator was not turned by the main turbine, but by a small reciprocating engine. The steam, however, came from the same boiler. And the boiler, of course, had emptied itself through the hole in the turbine. And the condenser, of course— "The condenser!" he shouted. He fumbled for a while, until he found a small flashlight. By the light of this, he reinspected the steam system, and found about three gallons of water frozen in the condenser. The condenser, like all condensers, was a device to convert steam into water, so that it could be reused in the boiler. This one had a tank and coils of tubing in the center of a curved reflector that was positioned to radiate the heat of the steam into the cold darkness of space. When the meteor pierced the turbine, the water in the condenser began to boil. This boiling lowered the temperature, and the condenser demonstrated its efficiency by quickly freezing the water in the tank. Evans sealed the turbine from the rest of the steam system by closing the shut-off valves. If there was any water in the boiler, it would operate the engine that drove the generator. The water would condense in the condenser, and with a little luck, melt the ice in there. Then, if the pump wasn't blocked by ice, it would return the water to the boiler. But there was no water in the boiler. Carefully he poured a cup of his drinking water into a pipe that led to the boiler, and resealed the pipe. He pulled on a knob marked "Nuclear Start/Safety Bypass." The water that he had poured into the boiler quickly turned into steam, and the steam turned the generator briefly. Evans watched the lights flicker and go out, and he guessed what the trouble was. "The water, man," he said, "there is not enough to melt the ice in the condenser." He opened the pipe again and poured nearly a half-gallon of water into the boiler. It was three days' supply of water, if it had been carefully used. It was one day's supply if used wastefully. It was ostentatious luxury for a man with a month's supply of water and twenty-one days to live. The generator started again, and the lights came on. They flickered as the boiler pressure began to fail, but the steam had melted some of the ice in the condenser, and the water pump began to function. "Well, man," he breathed, "there's a light to die by." The sun rose on Williamson Town at about the same time it rose on Evans. It was an incredibly brilliant disk in a black sky. The stars next to the sun shone as brightly as though there were no sun. They might have appeared to waver slightly, if they were behind outflung corona flares. If they did, no one noticed. No one looked toward the sun without dark filters. When Director McIlroy came into his office, he found it lighted by the rising sun. The light was a hot, brilliant white that seemed to pierce the darkest shadows of the room. He moved to the round window, screening his eyes from the light, and adjusted the polaroid shade to maximum density. The sun became an angry red brown, and the room was dark again. McIlroy decreased the density again until the room was comfortably lighted. The room felt stuffy, so he decided to leave the door to the inner office open. He felt a little guilty about this, because he had ordered that all doors in the survey building should remain closed except when someone was passing through them. This was to allow the air-conditioning system to function properly, and to prevent air loss in case of the highly improbable meteor damage. McIlroy thought that on the whole, he was disobeying his own orders no more flagrantly than anyone else in the survey. McIlroy had no illusions about his ability to lead men. Or rather, he did have one illusion; he thought that he was completely unfit as a leader. It was true that his strictest orders were disobeyed with cheerful contempt, but it was also true his mildest requests were complied with eagerly and smoothly. Everyone in the survey except McIlroy realized this, and even he accepted this without thinking about it. He had fallen into the habit of suggesting mildly anything that he wanted done, and writing orders he didn't particularly care to have obeyed. For example, because of an order of his stating that there would be no alcoholic beverages within the survey building, the entire survey was assured of a constant supply of home-made, but passably good liquor. Even McIlroy enjoyed the surreptitious drinking. "Good morning, Mr. McIlroy," said Mrs. Garth, his secretary. Morning to Mrs. Garth was simply the first four hours after waking. "Good morning indeed," answered McIlroy. Morning to him had no meaning at all, but he thought in the strictest sense that it would be morning on the Moon for another week. "Has the power crew set up the solar furnace?" he asked. The solar furnace was a rough parabola of mirrors used to focus the sun's heat on anything that it was desirable to heat. It was used mostly, from sun-up to sun-down, to supplement the nuclear power plant. "They went out about an hour ago," she answered, "I suppose that's what they were going to do." "Very good, what's first on the schedule?" "A Mr. Phelps to see you," she said. "How do you do, Mr. Phelps," McIlroy greeted him. "Good afternoon," Mr. Phelps replied. "I'm here representing the Merchants' Bank Association." "Fine," McIlroy said, "I suppose you're here to set up a bank." "That's right, I just got in from Muroc last night, and I've been going over the assets of the Survey Credit Association all morning." "I'll certainly be glad to get them off my hands," McIlroy said. "I hope they're in good order." "There doesn't seem to be any profit," Mr. Phelps said. "That's par for a nonprofit organization," said McIlroy. "But we're amateurs, and we're turning this operation over to professionals. I'm sure it will be to everyone's satisfaction." "I know this seems like a silly question. What day is this?" "Well," said McIlroy, "that's not so silly. I don't know either." "Mrs. Garth," he called, "what day is this?" "Why, September, I think," she answered. "I mean what day ." "I don't know, I'll call the observatory." There was a pause. "They say what day where?" she asked. "Greenwich, I guess, our official time is supposed to be Greenwich Mean Time." There was another pause. "They say it's September fourth, one thirty a.m. " "Well, there you are," laughed McIlroy, "it isn't that time doesn't mean anything here, it just doesn't mean the same thing." Mr. Phelps joined the laughter. "Bankers' hours don't mean much, at any rate," he said. The power crew was having trouble with the solar furnace. Three of the nine banks of mirrors would not respond to the electric controls, and one bank moved so jerkily that it could not be focused, and it threatened to tear several of the mirrors loose. "What happened here?" Spotty Cade, one of the electrical technicians asked his foreman, Cowalczk, over the intercommunications radio. "I've got about a hundred pinholes in the cables out here. It's no wonder they don't work." "Meteor shower," Cowalczk answered, "and that's not half of it. Walker says he's got a half dozen mirrors cracked or pitted, and Hoffman on bank three wants you to replace a servo motor. He says the bearing was hit." "When did it happen?" Cade wanted to know. "Must have been last night, at least two or three days ago. All of 'em too small for Radar to pick up, and not enough for Seismo to get a rumble." "Sounds pretty bad." "Could have been worse," said Cowalczk. "How's that?" "Wasn't anybody out in it." "Hey, Chuck," another technician, Lehman, broke in, "you could maybe get hurt that way." "I doubt it," Cowalczk answered, "most of these were pinhead size, and they wouldn't go through a suit." "It would take a pretty big one to damage a servo bearing," Cade commented. "That could hurt," Cowalczk admitted, "but there was only one of them." "You mean only one hit our gear," Lehman said. "How many missed?" Nobody answered. They could all see the Moon under their feet. Small craters overlapped and touched each other. There was—except in the places that men had obscured them with footprints—not a square foot that didn't contain a crater at least ten inches across, there was not a square inch without its half-inch crater. Nearly all of these had been made millions of years ago, but here and there, the rim of a crater covered part of a footprint, clear evidence that it was a recent one. After the sun rose, Evans returned to the lava cave that he had been exploring when the meteor hit. Inside, he lifted his filter visor, and found that the light reflected from the small ray that peered into the cave door lighted the cave adequately. He tapped loose some white crystals on the cave wall with his geologist's hammer, and put them into a collector's bag. "A few mineral specimens would give us something to think about, man. These crystals," he said, "look a little like zeolites, but that can't be, zeolites need water to form, and there's no water on the Moon." He chipped a number of other crystals loose and put them in bags. One of them he found in a dark crevice had a hexagonal shape that puzzled him. One at a time, back in the tractor, he took the crystals out of the bags and analyzed them as well as he could without using a flame which would waste oxygen. The ones that looked like zeolites were zeolites, all right, or something very much like it. One of the crystals that he thought was quartz turned out to be calcite, and one of the ones that he was sure could be nothing but calcite was actually potassium nitrate. "Well, now," he said, "it's probably the largest natural crystal of potassium nitrate that anyone has ever seen. Man, it's a full inch across." All of these needed water to form, and their existence on the Moon puzzled him for a while. Then he opened the bag that had contained the unusual hexagonal crystals, and the puzzle resolved itself. There was nothing in the bag but a few drops of water. What he had taken to be a type of rock was ice, frozen in a niche that had never been warmed by the sun. The sun rose to the meridian slowly. It was a week after sunrise. The stars shone coldly, and wheeled in their slow course with the sun. Only Earth remained in the same spot in the black sky. The shadow line crept around until Earth was nearly dark, and then the rim of light appeared on the opposite side. For a while Earth was a dark disk in a thin halo, and then the light came to be a crescent, and the line of dawn began to move around Earth. The continents drifted across the dark disk and into the crescent. The people on Earth saw the full moon set about the same time that the sun rose. Nickel Jones was the captain of a supply rocket. He made trips from and to the Moon about once a month, carrying supplies in and metal and ores out. At this time he was visiting with his old friend McIlroy. "I swear, Mac," said Jones, "another season like this, and I'm going back to mining." "I thought you were doing pretty well," said McIlroy, as he poured two drinks from a bottle of Scotch that Jones had brought him. "Oh, the money I like, but I will say that I'd have more if I didn't have to fight the union and the Lunar Trade Commission." McIlroy had heard all of this before. "How's that?" he asked politely. "You may think it's myself running the ship," Jones started on his tirade, "but it's not. The union it is that says who I can hire. The union it is that says how much I must pay, and how large a crew I need. And then the Commission ..." The word seemed to give Jones an unpleasant taste in his mouth, which he hurriedly rinsed with a sip of Scotch. "The Commission," he continued, making the word sound like an obscenity, "it is that tells me how much I can charge for freight." McIlroy noticed that his friend's glass was empty, and he quietly filled it again. "And then," continued Jones, "if I buy a cargo up here, the Commission it is that says what I'll sell it for. If I had my way, I'd charge only fifty cents a pound for freight instead of the dollar forty that the Commission insists on. That's from here to Earth, of course. There's no profit I could make by cutting rates the other way." "Why not?" asked McIlroy. He knew the answer, but he liked to listen to the slightly Welsh voice of Jones. "Near cost it is now at a dollar forty. But what sense is there in charging the same rate to go either way when it takes about a seventh of the fuel to get from here to Earth as it does to get from there to here?" "What good would it do to charge fifty cents a pound?" asked McIlroy. "The nickel, man, the tons of nickel worth a dollar and a half on Earth, and not worth mining here; the low-grade ores of uranium and vanadium, they need these things on Earth, but they can't get them as long as it isn't worth the carrying of them. And then, of course, there's the water we haven't got. We could afford to bring more water for more people, and set up more distilling plants if we had the money from the nickel. "Even though I say it who shouldn't, two-eighty a quart is too much to pay for water." Both men fell silent for a while. Then Jones spoke again: "Have you seen our friend Evans lately? The price of chromium has gone up, and I think he could ship some of his ore from Yellow Crater at a profit." "He's out prospecting again. I don't expect to see him until sun-down." "I'll likely see him then. I won't be loaded for another week and a half. Can't you get in touch with him by radio?" "He isn't carrying one. Most of the prospectors don't. They claim that a radio that won't carry beyond the horizon isn't any good, and one that will bounce messages from Earth takes up too much room." "Well, if I don't see him, you let him know about the chromium." "Anything to help another Welshman, is that the idea?" "Well, protection it is that a poor Welshman needs from all the English and Scots. Speaking of which—" "Oh, of course," McIlroy grinned as he refilled the glasses. " Slainte, McIlroy, bach. " [Health, McIlroy, man.] " Slainte mhor, bach. " [Great Health, man.] The sun was halfway to the horizon, and Earth was a crescent in the sky when Evans had quarried all the ice that was available in the cave. The thought grew on him as he worked that this couldn't be the only such cave in the area. There must be several more bubbles in the lava flow. Part of his reasoning proved correct. That is, he found that by chipping, he could locate small bubbles up to an inch in diameter, each one with its droplet of water. The average was about one per cent of the volume of each bubble filled with ice. A quarter of a mile from the tractor, Evans found a promising looking mound of lava. It was rounded on top, and it could easily be the dome of a bubble. Suddenly, Evans noticed that the gauge on the oxygen tank of his suit was reading dangerously near empty. He turned back to his tractor, moving as slowly as he felt safe in doing. Running would use up oxygen too fast. He was halfway there when the pressure warning light went on, and the signal sounded inside his helmet. He turned on his ten-minute reserve supply, and made it to the tractor with about five minutes left. The air purifying apparatus in the suit was not as efficient as the one in the tractor; it wasted oxygen. By using the suit so much, Evans had already shortened his life by several days. He resolved not to leave the tractor again, and reluctantly abandoned his plan to search for a large bubble. The sun stood at half its diameter above the horizon. The shadows of the mountains stretched out to touch the shadows of the other mountains. The dawning line of light covered half of Earth, and Earth turned beneath it. Cowalczk itched under his suit, and the sweat on his face prickled maddeningly because he couldn't reach it through his helmet. He pushed his forehead against the faceplate of his helmet and rubbed off some of the sweat. It didn't help much, and it left a blurred spot in his vision. That annoyed him. "Is everyone clear of the outlet?" he asked. "All clear," he heard Cade report through the intercom. "How come we have to blow the boilers now?" asked Lehman. "Because I say so," Cowalczk shouted, surprised at his outburst and ashamed of it. "Boiler scale," he continued, much calmer. "We've got to clean out the boilers once a year to make sure the tubes in the reactor don't clog up." He squinted through his dark visor at the reactor building, a gray concrete structure a quarter of a mile distant. "It would be pretty bad if they clogged up some night." "Pressure's ten and a half pounds," said Cade. "Right, let her go," said Cowalczk. Cade threw a switch. In the reactor building, a relay closed. A motor started turning, and the worm gear on the motor opened a valve on the boiler. A stream of muddy water gushed into a closed vat. When the vat was about half full, the water began to run nearly clear. An electric eye noted that fact and a light in front of Cade turned on. Cade threw the switch back the other way, and the relay in the reactor building opened. The motor turned and the gears started to close the valve. But a fragment of boiler scale held the valve open. "Valve's stuck," said Cade. "Open it and close it again," said Cowalczk. The sweat on his forehead started to run into his eyes. He banged his hand on his faceplate in an unconscious attempt to wipe it off. He cursed silently, and wiped it off on the inside of his helmet again. This time, two drops ran down the inside of his faceplate. "Still don't work," said Cade. "Keep trying," Cowalczk ordered. "Lehman, get a Geiger counter and come with me, we've got to fix this thing." Lehman and Cowalczk, who were already suited up started across to the reactor building. Cade, who was in the pressurized control room without a suit on, kept working the switch back and forth. There was light that indicated when the valve was open. It was on, and it stayed on, no matter what Cade did. "The vat pressure's too high," Cade said. "Let me know when it reaches six pounds," Cowalczk requested. "Because it'll probably blow at seven." The vat was a light plastic container used only to decant sludge out of the water. It neither needed nor had much strength. "Six now," said Cade. Cowalczk and Lehman stopped halfway to the reactor. The vat bulged and ruptured. A stream of mud gushed out and boiled dry on the face of the Moon. Cowalczk and Lehman rushed forward again. They could see the trickle of water from the discharge pipe. The motor turned the valve back and forth in response to Cade's signals. "What's going on out there?" demanded McIlroy on the intercom. "Scale stuck in the valve," Cowalczk answered. "Are the reactors off?" "Yes. Vat blew. Shut up! Let me work, Mac!" "Sorry," McIlroy said, realizing that this was no time for officials. "Let me know when it's fixed." "Geiger's off scale," Lehman said. "We're probably O.K. in these suits for an hour," Cowalczk answered. "Is there a manual shut-off?" "Not that I know of," Lehman answered. "What about it, Cade?" "I don't think so," Cade said. "I'll get on the blower and rouse out an engineer." "O.K., but keep working that switch." "I checked the line as far as it's safe," said Lehman. "No valve." "O.K.," Cowalczk said. "Listen, Cade, are the injectors still on?" "Yeah. There's still enough heat in these reactors to do some damage. I'll cut 'em in about fifteen minutes." "I've found the trouble," Lehman said. "The worm gear's loose on its shaft. It's slipping every time the valve closes. There's not enough power in it to crush the scale." "Right," Cowalczk said. "Cade, open the valve wide. Lehman, hand me that pipe wrench!" Cowalczk hit the shaft with the back of the pipe wrench, and it broke at the motor bearing. Cowalczk and Lehman fitted the pipe wrench to the gear on the valve, and turned it. "Is the light off?" Cowalczk asked. "No," Cade answered. "Water's stopped. Give us some pressure, we'll see if it holds." "Twenty pounds," Cade answered after a couple of minutes. "Take her up to ... no, wait, it's still leaking," Cowalczk said. "Hold it there, we'll open the valve again." "O.K.," said Cade. "An engineer here says there's no manual cutoff." "Like Hell," said Lehman. Cowalczk and Lehman opened the valve again. Water spurted out, and dwindled as they closed the valve. "What did you do?" asked Cade. "The light went out and came on again." "Check that circuit and see if it works," Cowalczk instructed. There was a pause. "It's O.K.," Cade said. Cowalczk and Lehman opened and closed the valve again. "Light is off now," Cade said. "Good," said Cowalczk, "take the pressure up all the way, and we'll see what happens." "Eight hundred pounds," Cade said, after a short wait. "Good enough," Cowalczk said. "Tell that engineer to hold up a while, he can fix this thing as soon as he gets parts. Come on, Lehman, let's get out of here." "Well, I'm glad that's over," said Cade. "You guys had me worried for a while." "Think we weren't worried?" Lehman asked. "And it's not over." "What?" Cade asked. "Oh, you mean the valve servo you two bashed up?" "No," said Lehman, "I mean the two thousand gallons of water that we lost." "Two thousand?" Cade asked. "We only had seven hundred gallons reserve. How come we can operate now?" "We picked up twelve hundred from the town sewage plant. What with using the solar furnace as a radiator, we can make do." "Oh, God, I suppose this means water rationing again." "You're probably right, at least until the next rocket lands in a couple of weeks." PROSPECTOR FEARED LOST ON MOON IPP Williamson Town, Moon, Sept. 21st. Scientific survey director McIlroy released a statement today that Howard Evans, a prospector is missing and presumed lost. Evans, who was apparently exploring the Moon in search of minerals was due two days ago, but it was presumed that he was merely temporarily delayed. Evans began his exploration on August 25th, and was known to be carrying several days reserve of oxygen and supplies. Director McIlroy has expressed a hope that Evans will be found before his oxygen runs out. Search parties have started from Williamson Town, but telescopic search from Palomar and the new satellite observatory are hindered by the fact that Evans is lost on the part of the Moon which is now dark. Little hope is held for radio contact with the missing man as it is believed he was carrying only short-range, intercommunications equipment. Nevertheless, receivers are ... Captain Nickel Jones was also expressing a hope: "Anyway, Mac," he was saying to McIlroy, "a Welshman knows when his luck's run out. And never a word did he say." "Like as not, you're right," McIlroy replied, "but if I know Evans, he'd never say a word about any forebodings." "Well, happen I might have a bit of Welsh second sight about me, and it tells me that Evans will be found." McIlroy chuckled for the first time in several days. "So that's the reason you didn't take off when you were scheduled," he said. "Well, yes," Jones answered. "I thought that it might happen that a rocket would be needed in the search." The light from Earth lighted the Moon as the Moon had never lighted Earth. The great blue globe of Earth, the only thing larger than the stars, wheeled silently in the sky. As it turned, the shadow of sunset crept across the face that could be seen from the Moon. From full Earth, as you might say, it moved toward last quarter. The rising sun shone into Director McIlroy's office. The hot light formed a circle on the wall opposite the window, and the light became more intense as the sun slowly pulled over the horizon. Mrs. Garth walked into the director's office, and saw the director sleeping with his head cradled in his arms on the desk. She walked softly to the window and adjusted the shade to darken the office. She stood looking at McIlroy for a moment, and when he moved slightly in his sleep, she walked softly out of the office. A few minutes later she was back with a cup of coffee. She placed it in front of the director, and shook his shoulder gently. "Wake up, Mr. McIlroy," she said, "you told me to wake you at sunrise, and there it is, and here's Mr. Phelps." McIlroy woke up slowly. He leaned back in his chair and stretched. His neck was stiff from sleeping in such an awkward position. "'Morning, Mr. Phelps," he said. "Good morning," Phelps answered, dropping tiredly into a chair. "Have some coffee, Mr. Phelps," said Mrs. Garth, handing him a cup. "Any news?" asked McIlroy. "About Evans?" Phelps shook his head slowly. "Palomar called in a few minutes back. Nothing to report and the sun was rising there. Australia will be in position pretty soon. Several observatories there. Then Capetown. There are lots of observatories in Europe, but most of them are clouded over. Anyway the satellite observatory will be in position by the time Europe is." McIlroy was fully awake. He glanced at Phelps and wondered how long it had been since he had slept last. More than that, McIlroy wondered why this banker, who had never met Evans, was losing so much sleep about finding him. It began to dawn on McIlroy that nearly the whole population of Williamson Town was involved, one way or another, in the search. The director turned to ask Phelps about this fact, but the banker was slumped in his chair, fast asleep with his coffee untouched. It was three hours later that McIlroy woke Phelps. "They've found the tractor," McIlroy said. "Good," Phelps mumbled, and then as comprehension came; "That's fine! That's just line! Is Evans—?" "Can't tell yet. They spotted the tractor from the satellite observatory. Captain Jones took off a few minutes ago, and he'll report back as soon as he lands. Hadn't you better get some sleep?" Evans was carrying a block of ice into the tractor when he saw the rocket coming in for a landing. He dropped the block and stood waiting. When the dust settled from around the tail of the rocket, he started to run forward. The air lock opened, and Evans recognized the vacuum suited figure of Nickel Jones. "Evans, man!" said Jones' voice in the intercom. "Alive you are!" "A Welshman takes a lot of killing," Evans answered. Later, in Evans' tractor, he was telling his story: "... And I don't know how long I sat there after I found the water." He looked at the Goldburgian device he had made out of wire and tubing. "Finally I built this thing. These caves were made of lava. They must have been formed by steam some time, because there's a floor of ice in all of 'em. "The idea didn't come all at once, it took a long time for me to remember that water is made out of oxygen and hydrogen. When I remembered that, of course, I remembered that it can be separated with electricity. So I built this thing. "It runs an electric current through water, lets the oxygen loose in the room, and pipes the hydrogen outside. It doesn't work automatically, of course, so I run it about an hour a day. My oxygen level gauge shows how long." "You're a genius, man!" Jones exclaimed. "No," Evans answered, "a Welshman, nothing more." "Well, then," said Jones, "are you ready to start back?" "Back?" "Well, it was to rescue you that I came." "I don't need rescuing, man," Evans said. Jones stared at him blankly. "You might let me have some food," Evans continued. "I'm getting short of that. And you might have someone send out a mechanic with parts to fix my tractor. Then maybe you'll let me use your radio to file my claim." "Claim?" "Sure, man, I've thousands of tons of water here. It's the richest mine on the Moon!" THE END

Protection from meteor showers and volcanic eruptions

The cost of rare materials imported from Earth

Protection from extreme temperatures

The ability to function with minimal water use

24161_INDOEF2N_5

What is a significant irony in the successful colonization of the moon?

ALL DAY SEPTEMBER By ROGER KUYKENDALL Illustrated by van Dongen Some men just haven't got good sense. They just can't seem to learn the most fundamental things. Like when there's no use trying—when it's time to give up because it's hopeless.... The meteor, a pebble, a little larger than a match head, traveled through space and time since it came into being. The light from the star that died when the meteor was created fell on Earth before the first lungfish ventured from the sea. In its last instant, the meteor fell on the Moon. It was impeded by Evans' tractor. It drilled a small, neat hole through the casing of the steam turbine, and volitized upon striking the blades. Portions of the turbine also volitized; idling at eight thousand RPM, it became unstable. The shaft tried to tie itself into a knot, and the blades, damaged and undamaged were spit through the casing. The turbine again reached a stable state, that is, stopped. Permanently stopped. It was two days to sunrise, where Evans stood. It was just before sunset on a spring evening in September in Sydney. The shadow line between day and night could be seen from the Moon to be drifting across Australia. Evans, who had no watch, thought of the time as a quarter after Australia. Evans was a prospector, and like all prospectors, a sort of jackknife geologist, selenologist, rather. His tractor and equipment cost two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Fifty thousand was paid for. The rest was promissory notes and grubstake shares. When he was broke, which was usually, he used his tractor to haul uranium ore and metallic sodium from the mines at Potter's dike to Williamson Town, where the rockets landed. When he was flush, he would prospect for a couple of weeks. Once he followed a stampede to Yellow Crater, where he thought for a while that he had a fortune in chromium. The chromite petered out in a month and a half, and he was lucky to break even. Evans was about three hundred miles east of Williamson Town, the site of the first landing on the Moon. Evans was due back at Williamson Town at about sunset, that is, in about sixteen days. When he saw the wrecked turbine, he knew that he wouldn't make it. By careful rationing, he could probably stretch his food out to more than a month. His drinking water—kept separate from the water in the reactor—might conceivably last just as long. But his oxygen was too carefully measured; there was a four-day reserve. By diligent conservation, he might make it last an extra day. Four days reserve—plus one is five—plus sixteen days normal supply equals twenty-one days to live. In seventeen days he might be missed, but in seventeen days it would be dark again, and the search for him, if it ever began, could not begin for thirteen more days. At the earliest it would be eight days too late. "Well, man, 'tis a fine spot you're in now," he told himself. "Let's find out how bad it is indeed," he answered. He reached for the light switch and tried to turn it on. The switch was already in the "on" position. "Batteries must be dead," he told himself. "What batteries?" he asked. "There're no batteries in here, the power comes from the generator." "Why isn't the generator working, man?" he asked. He thought this one out carefully. The generator was not turned by the main turbine, but by a small reciprocating engine. The steam, however, came from the same boiler. And the boiler, of course, had emptied itself through the hole in the turbine. And the condenser, of course— "The condenser!" he shouted. He fumbled for a while, until he found a small flashlight. By the light of this, he reinspected the steam system, and found about three gallons of water frozen in the condenser. The condenser, like all condensers, was a device to convert steam into water, so that it could be reused in the boiler. This one had a tank and coils of tubing in the center of a curved reflector that was positioned to radiate the heat of the steam into the cold darkness of space. When the meteor pierced the turbine, the water in the condenser began to boil. This boiling lowered the temperature, and the condenser demonstrated its efficiency by quickly freezing the water in the tank. Evans sealed the turbine from the rest of the steam system by closing the shut-off valves. If there was any water in the boiler, it would operate the engine that drove the generator. The water would condense in the condenser, and with a little luck, melt the ice in there. Then, if the pump wasn't blocked by ice, it would return the water to the boiler. But there was no water in the boiler. Carefully he poured a cup of his drinking water into a pipe that led to the boiler, and resealed the pipe. He pulled on a knob marked "Nuclear Start/Safety Bypass." The water that he had poured into the boiler quickly turned into steam, and the steam turned the generator briefly. Evans watched the lights flicker and go out, and he guessed what the trouble was. "The water, man," he said, "there is not enough to melt the ice in the condenser." He opened the pipe again and poured nearly a half-gallon of water into the boiler. It was three days' supply of water, if it had been carefully used. It was one day's supply if used wastefully. It was ostentatious luxury for a man with a month's supply of water and twenty-one days to live. The generator started again, and the lights came on. They flickered as the boiler pressure began to fail, but the steam had melted some of the ice in the condenser, and the water pump began to function. "Well, man," he breathed, "there's a light to die by." The sun rose on Williamson Town at about the same time it rose on Evans. It was an incredibly brilliant disk in a black sky. The stars next to the sun shone as brightly as though there were no sun. They might have appeared to waver slightly, if they were behind outflung corona flares. If they did, no one noticed. No one looked toward the sun without dark filters. When Director McIlroy came into his office, he found it lighted by the rising sun. The light was a hot, brilliant white that seemed to pierce the darkest shadows of the room. He moved to the round window, screening his eyes from the light, and adjusted the polaroid shade to maximum density. The sun became an angry red brown, and the room was dark again. McIlroy decreased the density again until the room was comfortably lighted. The room felt stuffy, so he decided to leave the door to the inner office open. He felt a little guilty about this, because he had ordered that all doors in the survey building should remain closed except when someone was passing through them. This was to allow the air-conditioning system to function properly, and to prevent air loss in case of the highly improbable meteor damage. McIlroy thought that on the whole, he was disobeying his own orders no more flagrantly than anyone else in the survey. McIlroy had no illusions about his ability to lead men. Or rather, he did have one illusion; he thought that he was completely unfit as a leader. It was true that his strictest orders were disobeyed with cheerful contempt, but it was also true his mildest requests were complied with eagerly and smoothly. Everyone in the survey except McIlroy realized this, and even he accepted this without thinking about it. He had fallen into the habit of suggesting mildly anything that he wanted done, and writing orders he didn't particularly care to have obeyed. For example, because of an order of his stating that there would be no alcoholic beverages within the survey building, the entire survey was assured of a constant supply of home-made, but passably good liquor. Even McIlroy enjoyed the surreptitious drinking. "Good morning, Mr. McIlroy," said Mrs. Garth, his secretary. Morning to Mrs. Garth was simply the first four hours after waking. "Good morning indeed," answered McIlroy. Morning to him had no meaning at all, but he thought in the strictest sense that it would be morning on the Moon for another week. "Has the power crew set up the solar furnace?" he asked. The solar furnace was a rough parabola of mirrors used to focus the sun's heat on anything that it was desirable to heat. It was used mostly, from sun-up to sun-down, to supplement the nuclear power plant. "They went out about an hour ago," she answered, "I suppose that's what they were going to do." "Very good, what's first on the schedule?" "A Mr. Phelps to see you," she said. "How do you do, Mr. Phelps," McIlroy greeted him. "Good afternoon," Mr. Phelps replied. "I'm here representing the Merchants' Bank Association." "Fine," McIlroy said, "I suppose you're here to set up a bank." "That's right, I just got in from Muroc last night, and I've been going over the assets of the Survey Credit Association all morning." "I'll certainly be glad to get them off my hands," McIlroy said. "I hope they're in good order." "There doesn't seem to be any profit," Mr. Phelps said. "That's par for a nonprofit organization," said McIlroy. "But we're amateurs, and we're turning this operation over to professionals. I'm sure it will be to everyone's satisfaction." "I know this seems like a silly question. What day is this?" "Well," said McIlroy, "that's not so silly. I don't know either." "Mrs. Garth," he called, "what day is this?" "Why, September, I think," she answered. "I mean what day ." "I don't know, I'll call the observatory." There was a pause. "They say what day where?" she asked. "Greenwich, I guess, our official time is supposed to be Greenwich Mean Time." There was another pause. "They say it's September fourth, one thirty a.m. " "Well, there you are," laughed McIlroy, "it isn't that time doesn't mean anything here, it just doesn't mean the same thing." Mr. Phelps joined the laughter. "Bankers' hours don't mean much, at any rate," he said. The power crew was having trouble with the solar furnace. Three of the nine banks of mirrors would not respond to the electric controls, and one bank moved so jerkily that it could not be focused, and it threatened to tear several of the mirrors loose. "What happened here?" Spotty Cade, one of the electrical technicians asked his foreman, Cowalczk, over the intercommunications radio. "I've got about a hundred pinholes in the cables out here. It's no wonder they don't work." "Meteor shower," Cowalczk answered, "and that's not half of it. Walker says he's got a half dozen mirrors cracked or pitted, and Hoffman on bank three wants you to replace a servo motor. He says the bearing was hit." "When did it happen?" Cade wanted to know. "Must have been last night, at least two or three days ago. All of 'em too small for Radar to pick up, and not enough for Seismo to get a rumble." "Sounds pretty bad." "Could have been worse," said Cowalczk. "How's that?" "Wasn't anybody out in it." "Hey, Chuck," another technician, Lehman, broke in, "you could maybe get hurt that way." "I doubt it," Cowalczk answered, "most of these were pinhead size, and they wouldn't go through a suit." "It would take a pretty big one to damage a servo bearing," Cade commented. "That could hurt," Cowalczk admitted, "but there was only one of them." "You mean only one hit our gear," Lehman said. "How many missed?" Nobody answered. They could all see the Moon under their feet. Small craters overlapped and touched each other. There was—except in the places that men had obscured them with footprints—not a square foot that didn't contain a crater at least ten inches across, there was not a square inch without its half-inch crater. Nearly all of these had been made millions of years ago, but here and there, the rim of a crater covered part of a footprint, clear evidence that it was a recent one. After the sun rose, Evans returned to the lava cave that he had been exploring when the meteor hit. Inside, he lifted his filter visor, and found that the light reflected from the small ray that peered into the cave door lighted the cave adequately. He tapped loose some white crystals on the cave wall with his geologist's hammer, and put them into a collector's bag. "A few mineral specimens would give us something to think about, man. These crystals," he said, "look a little like zeolites, but that can't be, zeolites need water to form, and there's no water on the Moon." He chipped a number of other crystals loose and put them in bags. One of them he found in a dark crevice had a hexagonal shape that puzzled him. One at a time, back in the tractor, he took the crystals out of the bags and analyzed them as well as he could without using a flame which would waste oxygen. The ones that looked like zeolites were zeolites, all right, or something very much like it. One of the crystals that he thought was quartz turned out to be calcite, and one of the ones that he was sure could be nothing but calcite was actually potassium nitrate. "Well, now," he said, "it's probably the largest natural crystal of potassium nitrate that anyone has ever seen. Man, it's a full inch across." All of these needed water to form, and their existence on the Moon puzzled him for a while. Then he opened the bag that had contained the unusual hexagonal crystals, and the puzzle resolved itself. There was nothing in the bag but a few drops of water. What he had taken to be a type of rock was ice, frozen in a niche that had never been warmed by the sun. The sun rose to the meridian slowly. It was a week after sunrise. The stars shone coldly, and wheeled in their slow course with the sun. Only Earth remained in the same spot in the black sky. The shadow line crept around until Earth was nearly dark, and then the rim of light appeared on the opposite side. For a while Earth was a dark disk in a thin halo, and then the light came to be a crescent, and the line of dawn began to move around Earth. The continents drifted across the dark disk and into the crescent. The people on Earth saw the full moon set about the same time that the sun rose. Nickel Jones was the captain of a supply rocket. He made trips from and to the Moon about once a month, carrying supplies in and metal and ores out. At this time he was visiting with his old friend McIlroy. "I swear, Mac," said Jones, "another season like this, and I'm going back to mining." "I thought you were doing pretty well," said McIlroy, as he poured two drinks from a bottle of Scotch that Jones had brought him. "Oh, the money I like, but I will say that I'd have more if I didn't have to fight the union and the Lunar Trade Commission." McIlroy had heard all of this before. "How's that?" he asked politely. "You may think it's myself running the ship," Jones started on his tirade, "but it's not. The union it is that says who I can hire. The union it is that says how much I must pay, and how large a crew I need. And then the Commission ..." The word seemed to give Jones an unpleasant taste in his mouth, which he hurriedly rinsed with a sip of Scotch. "The Commission," he continued, making the word sound like an obscenity, "it is that tells me how much I can charge for freight." McIlroy noticed that his friend's glass was empty, and he quietly filled it again. "And then," continued Jones, "if I buy a cargo up here, the Commission it is that says what I'll sell it for. If I had my way, I'd charge only fifty cents a pound for freight instead of the dollar forty that the Commission insists on. That's from here to Earth, of course. There's no profit I could make by cutting rates the other way." "Why not?" asked McIlroy. He knew the answer, but he liked to listen to the slightly Welsh voice of Jones. "Near cost it is now at a dollar forty. But what sense is there in charging the same rate to go either way when it takes about a seventh of the fuel to get from here to Earth as it does to get from there to here?" "What good would it do to charge fifty cents a pound?" asked McIlroy. "The nickel, man, the tons of nickel worth a dollar and a half on Earth, and not worth mining here; the low-grade ores of uranium and vanadium, they need these things on Earth, but they can't get them as long as it isn't worth the carrying of them. And then, of course, there's the water we haven't got. We could afford to bring more water for more people, and set up more distilling plants if we had the money from the nickel. "Even though I say it who shouldn't, two-eighty a quart is too much to pay for water." Both men fell silent for a while. Then Jones spoke again: "Have you seen our friend Evans lately? The price of chromium has gone up, and I think he could ship some of his ore from Yellow Crater at a profit." "He's out prospecting again. I don't expect to see him until sun-down." "I'll likely see him then. I won't be loaded for another week and a half. Can't you get in touch with him by radio?" "He isn't carrying one. Most of the prospectors don't. They claim that a radio that won't carry beyond the horizon isn't any good, and one that will bounce messages from Earth takes up too much room." "Well, if I don't see him, you let him know about the chromium." "Anything to help another Welshman, is that the idea?" "Well, protection it is that a poor Welshman needs from all the English and Scots. Speaking of which—" "Oh, of course," McIlroy grinned as he refilled the glasses. " Slainte, McIlroy, bach. " [Health, McIlroy, man.] " Slainte mhor, bach. " [Great Health, man.] The sun was halfway to the horizon, and Earth was a crescent in the sky when Evans had quarried all the ice that was available in the cave. The thought grew on him as he worked that this couldn't be the only such cave in the area. There must be several more bubbles in the lava flow. Part of his reasoning proved correct. That is, he found that by chipping, he could locate small bubbles up to an inch in diameter, each one with its droplet of water. The average was about one per cent of the volume of each bubble filled with ice. A quarter of a mile from the tractor, Evans found a promising looking mound of lava. It was rounded on top, and it could easily be the dome of a bubble. Suddenly, Evans noticed that the gauge on the oxygen tank of his suit was reading dangerously near empty. He turned back to his tractor, moving as slowly as he felt safe in doing. Running would use up oxygen too fast. He was halfway there when the pressure warning light went on, and the signal sounded inside his helmet. He turned on his ten-minute reserve supply, and made it to the tractor with about five minutes left. The air purifying apparatus in the suit was not as efficient as the one in the tractor; it wasted oxygen. By using the suit so much, Evans had already shortened his life by several days. He resolved not to leave the tractor again, and reluctantly abandoned his plan to search for a large bubble. The sun stood at half its diameter above the horizon. The shadows of the mountains stretched out to touch the shadows of the other mountains. The dawning line of light covered half of Earth, and Earth turned beneath it. Cowalczk itched under his suit, and the sweat on his face prickled maddeningly because he couldn't reach it through his helmet. He pushed his forehead against the faceplate of his helmet and rubbed off some of the sweat. It didn't help much, and it left a blurred spot in his vision. That annoyed him. "Is everyone clear of the outlet?" he asked. "All clear," he heard Cade report through the intercom. "How come we have to blow the boilers now?" asked Lehman. "Because I say so," Cowalczk shouted, surprised at his outburst and ashamed of it. "Boiler scale," he continued, much calmer. "We've got to clean out the boilers once a year to make sure the tubes in the reactor don't clog up." He squinted through his dark visor at the reactor building, a gray concrete structure a quarter of a mile distant. "It would be pretty bad if they clogged up some night." "Pressure's ten and a half pounds," said Cade. "Right, let her go," said Cowalczk. Cade threw a switch. In the reactor building, a relay closed. A motor started turning, and the worm gear on the motor opened a valve on the boiler. A stream of muddy water gushed into a closed vat. When the vat was about half full, the water began to run nearly clear. An electric eye noted that fact and a light in front of Cade turned on. Cade threw the switch back the other way, and the relay in the reactor building opened. The motor turned and the gears started to close the valve. But a fragment of boiler scale held the valve open. "Valve's stuck," said Cade. "Open it and close it again," said Cowalczk. The sweat on his forehead started to run into his eyes. He banged his hand on his faceplate in an unconscious attempt to wipe it off. He cursed silently, and wiped it off on the inside of his helmet again. This time, two drops ran down the inside of his faceplate. "Still don't work," said Cade. "Keep trying," Cowalczk ordered. "Lehman, get a Geiger counter and come with me, we've got to fix this thing." Lehman and Cowalczk, who were already suited up started across to the reactor building. Cade, who was in the pressurized control room without a suit on, kept working the switch back and forth. There was light that indicated when the valve was open. It was on, and it stayed on, no matter what Cade did. "The vat pressure's too high," Cade said. "Let me know when it reaches six pounds," Cowalczk requested. "Because it'll probably blow at seven." The vat was a light plastic container used only to decant sludge out of the water. It neither needed nor had much strength. "Six now," said Cade. Cowalczk and Lehman stopped halfway to the reactor. The vat bulged and ruptured. A stream of mud gushed out and boiled dry on the face of the Moon. Cowalczk and Lehman rushed forward again. They could see the trickle of water from the discharge pipe. The motor turned the valve back and forth in response to Cade's signals. "What's going on out there?" demanded McIlroy on the intercom. "Scale stuck in the valve," Cowalczk answered. "Are the reactors off?" "Yes. Vat blew. Shut up! Let me work, Mac!" "Sorry," McIlroy said, realizing that this was no time for officials. "Let me know when it's fixed." "Geiger's off scale," Lehman said. "We're probably O.K. in these suits for an hour," Cowalczk answered. "Is there a manual shut-off?" "Not that I know of," Lehman answered. "What about it, Cade?" "I don't think so," Cade said. "I'll get on the blower and rouse out an engineer." "O.K., but keep working that switch." "I checked the line as far as it's safe," said Lehman. "No valve." "O.K.," Cowalczk said. "Listen, Cade, are the injectors still on?" "Yeah. There's still enough heat in these reactors to do some damage. I'll cut 'em in about fifteen minutes." "I've found the trouble," Lehman said. "The worm gear's loose on its shaft. It's slipping every time the valve closes. There's not enough power in it to crush the scale." "Right," Cowalczk said. "Cade, open the valve wide. Lehman, hand me that pipe wrench!" Cowalczk hit the shaft with the back of the pipe wrench, and it broke at the motor bearing. Cowalczk and Lehman fitted the pipe wrench to the gear on the valve, and turned it. "Is the light off?" Cowalczk asked. "No," Cade answered. "Water's stopped. Give us some pressure, we'll see if it holds." "Twenty pounds," Cade answered after a couple of minutes. "Take her up to ... no, wait, it's still leaking," Cowalczk said. "Hold it there, we'll open the valve again." "O.K.," said Cade. "An engineer here says there's no manual cutoff." "Like Hell," said Lehman. Cowalczk and Lehman opened the valve again. Water spurted out, and dwindled as they closed the valve. "What did you do?" asked Cade. "The light went out and came on again." "Check that circuit and see if it works," Cowalczk instructed. There was a pause. "It's O.K.," Cade said. Cowalczk and Lehman opened and closed the valve again. "Light is off now," Cade said. "Good," said Cowalczk, "take the pressure up all the way, and we'll see what happens." "Eight hundred pounds," Cade said, after a short wait. "Good enough," Cowalczk said. "Tell that engineer to hold up a while, he can fix this thing as soon as he gets parts. Come on, Lehman, let's get out of here." "Well, I'm glad that's over," said Cade. "You guys had me worried for a while." "Think we weren't worried?" Lehman asked. "And it's not over." "What?" Cade asked. "Oh, you mean the valve servo you two bashed up?" "No," said Lehman, "I mean the two thousand gallons of water that we lost." "Two thousand?" Cade asked. "We only had seven hundred gallons reserve. How come we can operate now?" "We picked up twelve hundred from the town sewage plant. What with using the solar furnace as a radiator, we can make do." "Oh, God, I suppose this means water rationing again." "You're probably right, at least until the next rocket lands in a couple of weeks." PROSPECTOR FEARED LOST ON MOON IPP Williamson Town, Moon, Sept. 21st. Scientific survey director McIlroy released a statement today that Howard Evans, a prospector is missing and presumed lost. Evans, who was apparently exploring the Moon in search of minerals was due two days ago, but it was presumed that he was merely temporarily delayed. Evans began his exploration on August 25th, and was known to be carrying several days reserve of oxygen and supplies. Director McIlroy has expressed a hope that Evans will be found before his oxygen runs out. Search parties have started from Williamson Town, but telescopic search from Palomar and the new satellite observatory are hindered by the fact that Evans is lost on the part of the Moon which is now dark. Little hope is held for radio contact with the missing man as it is believed he was carrying only short-range, intercommunications equipment. Nevertheless, receivers are ... Captain Nickel Jones was also expressing a hope: "Anyway, Mac," he was saying to McIlroy, "a Welshman knows when his luck's run out. And never a word did he say." "Like as not, you're right," McIlroy replied, "but if I know Evans, he'd never say a word about any forebodings." "Well, happen I might have a bit of Welsh second sight about me, and it tells me that Evans will be found." McIlroy chuckled for the first time in several days. "So that's the reason you didn't take off when you were scheduled," he said. "Well, yes," Jones answered. "I thought that it might happen that a rocket would be needed in the search." The light from Earth lighted the Moon as the Moon had never lighted Earth. The great blue globe of Earth, the only thing larger than the stars, wheeled silently in the sky. As it turned, the shadow of sunset crept across the face that could be seen from the Moon. From full Earth, as you might say, it moved toward last quarter. The rising sun shone into Director McIlroy's office. The hot light formed a circle on the wall opposite the window, and the light became more intense as the sun slowly pulled over the horizon. Mrs. Garth walked into the director's office, and saw the director sleeping with his head cradled in his arms on the desk. She walked softly to the window and adjusted the shade to darken the office. She stood looking at McIlroy for a moment, and when he moved slightly in his sleep, she walked softly out of the office. A few minutes later she was back with a cup of coffee. She placed it in front of the director, and shook his shoulder gently. "Wake up, Mr. McIlroy," she said, "you told me to wake you at sunrise, and there it is, and here's Mr. Phelps." McIlroy woke up slowly. He leaned back in his chair and stretched. His neck was stiff from sleeping in such an awkward position. "'Morning, Mr. Phelps," he said. "Good morning," Phelps answered, dropping tiredly into a chair. "Have some coffee, Mr. Phelps," said Mrs. Garth, handing him a cup. "Any news?" asked McIlroy. "About Evans?" Phelps shook his head slowly. "Palomar called in a few minutes back. Nothing to report and the sun was rising there. Australia will be in position pretty soon. Several observatories there. Then Capetown. There are lots of observatories in Europe, but most of them are clouded over. Anyway the satellite observatory will be in position by the time Europe is." McIlroy was fully awake. He glanced at Phelps and wondered how long it had been since he had slept last. More than that, McIlroy wondered why this banker, who had never met Evans, was losing so much sleep about finding him. It began to dawn on McIlroy that nearly the whole population of Williamson Town was involved, one way or another, in the search. The director turned to ask Phelps about this fact, but the banker was slumped in his chair, fast asleep with his coffee untouched. It was three hours later that McIlroy woke Phelps. "They've found the tractor," McIlroy said. "Good," Phelps mumbled, and then as comprehension came; "That's fine! That's just line! Is Evans—?" "Can't tell yet. They spotted the tractor from the satellite observatory. Captain Jones took off a few minutes ago, and he'll report back as soon as he lands. Hadn't you better get some sleep?" Evans was carrying a block of ice into the tractor when he saw the rocket coming in for a landing. He dropped the block and stood waiting. When the dust settled from around the tail of the rocket, he started to run forward. The air lock opened, and Evans recognized the vacuum suited figure of Nickel Jones. "Evans, man!" said Jones' voice in the intercom. "Alive you are!" "A Welshman takes a lot of killing," Evans answered. Later, in Evans' tractor, he was telling his story: "... And I don't know how long I sat there after I found the water." He looked at the Goldburgian device he had made out of wire and tubing. "Finally I built this thing. These caves were made of lava. They must have been formed by steam some time, because there's a floor of ice in all of 'em. "The idea didn't come all at once, it took a long time for me to remember that water is made out of oxygen and hydrogen. When I remembered that, of course, I remembered that it can be separated with electricity. So I built this thing. "It runs an electric current through water, lets the oxygen loose in the room, and pipes the hydrogen outside. It doesn't work automatically, of course, so I run it about an hour a day. My oxygen level gauge shows how long." "You're a genius, man!" Jones exclaimed. "No," Evans answered, "a Welshman, nothing more." "Well, then," said Jones, "are you ready to start back?" "Back?" "Well, it was to rescue you that I came." "I don't need rescuing, man," Evans said. Jones stared at him blankly. "You might let me have some food," Evans continued. "I'm getting short of that. And you might have someone send out a mechanic with parts to fix my tractor. Then maybe you'll let me use your radio to file my claim." "Claim?" "Sure, man, I've thousands of tons of water here. It's the richest mine on the Moon!" THE END

Earth needs materials from the moon to survive, while the moon needs materials from the Earth

The government is just as ineffective on the moon as it is on Earth

Moon inhabitants are less free on the moon than they used to be on Earth

The greed of humankind is destroying the newly colonized moon just as it is destroying Earth

24161_INDOEF2N_6

What is Evans' primary dilemma?

ALL DAY SEPTEMBER By ROGER KUYKENDALL Illustrated by van Dongen Some men just haven't got good sense. They just can't seem to learn the most fundamental things. Like when there's no use trying—when it's time to give up because it's hopeless.... The meteor, a pebble, a little larger than a match head, traveled through space and time since it came into being. The light from the star that died when the meteor was created fell on Earth before the first lungfish ventured from the sea. In its last instant, the meteor fell on the Moon. It was impeded by Evans' tractor. It drilled a small, neat hole through the casing of the steam turbine, and volitized upon striking the blades. Portions of the turbine also volitized; idling at eight thousand RPM, it became unstable. The shaft tried to tie itself into a knot, and the blades, damaged and undamaged were spit through the casing. The turbine again reached a stable state, that is, stopped. Permanently stopped. It was two days to sunrise, where Evans stood. It was just before sunset on a spring evening in September in Sydney. The shadow line between day and night could be seen from the Moon to be drifting across Australia. Evans, who had no watch, thought of the time as a quarter after Australia. Evans was a prospector, and like all prospectors, a sort of jackknife geologist, selenologist, rather. His tractor and equipment cost two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Fifty thousand was paid for. The rest was promissory notes and grubstake shares. When he was broke, which was usually, he used his tractor to haul uranium ore and metallic sodium from the mines at Potter's dike to Williamson Town, where the rockets landed. When he was flush, he would prospect for a couple of weeks. Once he followed a stampede to Yellow Crater, where he thought for a while that he had a fortune in chromium. The chromite petered out in a month and a half, and he was lucky to break even. Evans was about three hundred miles east of Williamson Town, the site of the first landing on the Moon. Evans was due back at Williamson Town at about sunset, that is, in about sixteen days. When he saw the wrecked turbine, he knew that he wouldn't make it. By careful rationing, he could probably stretch his food out to more than a month. His drinking water—kept separate from the water in the reactor—might conceivably last just as long. But his oxygen was too carefully measured; there was a four-day reserve. By diligent conservation, he might make it last an extra day. Four days reserve—plus one is five—plus sixteen days normal supply equals twenty-one days to live. In seventeen days he might be missed, but in seventeen days it would be dark again, and the search for him, if it ever began, could not begin for thirteen more days. At the earliest it would be eight days too late. "Well, man, 'tis a fine spot you're in now," he told himself. "Let's find out how bad it is indeed," he answered. He reached for the light switch and tried to turn it on. The switch was already in the "on" position. "Batteries must be dead," he told himself. "What batteries?" he asked. "There're no batteries in here, the power comes from the generator." "Why isn't the generator working, man?" he asked. He thought this one out carefully. The generator was not turned by the main turbine, but by a small reciprocating engine. The steam, however, came from the same boiler. And the boiler, of course, had emptied itself through the hole in the turbine. And the condenser, of course— "The condenser!" he shouted. He fumbled for a while, until he found a small flashlight. By the light of this, he reinspected the steam system, and found about three gallons of water frozen in the condenser. The condenser, like all condensers, was a device to convert steam into water, so that it could be reused in the boiler. This one had a tank and coils of tubing in the center of a curved reflector that was positioned to radiate the heat of the steam into the cold darkness of space. When the meteor pierced the turbine, the water in the condenser began to boil. This boiling lowered the temperature, and the condenser demonstrated its efficiency by quickly freezing the water in the tank. Evans sealed the turbine from the rest of the steam system by closing the shut-off valves. If there was any water in the boiler, it would operate the engine that drove the generator. The water would condense in the condenser, and with a little luck, melt the ice in there. Then, if the pump wasn't blocked by ice, it would return the water to the boiler. But there was no water in the boiler. Carefully he poured a cup of his drinking water into a pipe that led to the boiler, and resealed the pipe. He pulled on a knob marked "Nuclear Start/Safety Bypass." The water that he had poured into the boiler quickly turned into steam, and the steam turned the generator briefly. Evans watched the lights flicker and go out, and he guessed what the trouble was. "The water, man," he said, "there is not enough to melt the ice in the condenser." He opened the pipe again and poured nearly a half-gallon of water into the boiler. It was three days' supply of water, if it had been carefully used. It was one day's supply if used wastefully. It was ostentatious luxury for a man with a month's supply of water and twenty-one days to live. The generator started again, and the lights came on. They flickered as the boiler pressure began to fail, but the steam had melted some of the ice in the condenser, and the water pump began to function. "Well, man," he breathed, "there's a light to die by." The sun rose on Williamson Town at about the same time it rose on Evans. It was an incredibly brilliant disk in a black sky. The stars next to the sun shone as brightly as though there were no sun. They might have appeared to waver slightly, if they were behind outflung corona flares. If they did, no one noticed. No one looked toward the sun without dark filters. When Director McIlroy came into his office, he found it lighted by the rising sun. The light was a hot, brilliant white that seemed to pierce the darkest shadows of the room. He moved to the round window, screening his eyes from the light, and adjusted the polaroid shade to maximum density. The sun became an angry red brown, and the room was dark again. McIlroy decreased the density again until the room was comfortably lighted. The room felt stuffy, so he decided to leave the door to the inner office open. He felt a little guilty about this, because he had ordered that all doors in the survey building should remain closed except when someone was passing through them. This was to allow the air-conditioning system to function properly, and to prevent air loss in case of the highly improbable meteor damage. McIlroy thought that on the whole, he was disobeying his own orders no more flagrantly than anyone else in the survey. McIlroy had no illusions about his ability to lead men. Or rather, he did have one illusion; he thought that he was completely unfit as a leader. It was true that his strictest orders were disobeyed with cheerful contempt, but it was also true his mildest requests were complied with eagerly and smoothly. Everyone in the survey except McIlroy realized this, and even he accepted this without thinking about it. He had fallen into the habit of suggesting mildly anything that he wanted done, and writing orders he didn't particularly care to have obeyed. For example, because of an order of his stating that there would be no alcoholic beverages within the survey building, the entire survey was assured of a constant supply of home-made, but passably good liquor. Even McIlroy enjoyed the surreptitious drinking. "Good morning, Mr. McIlroy," said Mrs. Garth, his secretary. Morning to Mrs. Garth was simply the first four hours after waking. "Good morning indeed," answered McIlroy. Morning to him had no meaning at all, but he thought in the strictest sense that it would be morning on the Moon for another week. "Has the power crew set up the solar furnace?" he asked. The solar furnace was a rough parabola of mirrors used to focus the sun's heat on anything that it was desirable to heat. It was used mostly, from sun-up to sun-down, to supplement the nuclear power plant. "They went out about an hour ago," she answered, "I suppose that's what they were going to do." "Very good, what's first on the schedule?" "A Mr. Phelps to see you," she said. "How do you do, Mr. Phelps," McIlroy greeted him. "Good afternoon," Mr. Phelps replied. "I'm here representing the Merchants' Bank Association." "Fine," McIlroy said, "I suppose you're here to set up a bank." "That's right, I just got in from Muroc last night, and I've been going over the assets of the Survey Credit Association all morning." "I'll certainly be glad to get them off my hands," McIlroy said. "I hope they're in good order." "There doesn't seem to be any profit," Mr. Phelps said. "That's par for a nonprofit organization," said McIlroy. "But we're amateurs, and we're turning this operation over to professionals. I'm sure it will be to everyone's satisfaction." "I know this seems like a silly question. What day is this?" "Well," said McIlroy, "that's not so silly. I don't know either." "Mrs. Garth," he called, "what day is this?" "Why, September, I think," she answered. "I mean what day ." "I don't know, I'll call the observatory." There was a pause. "They say what day where?" she asked. "Greenwich, I guess, our official time is supposed to be Greenwich Mean Time." There was another pause. "They say it's September fourth, one thirty a.m. " "Well, there you are," laughed McIlroy, "it isn't that time doesn't mean anything here, it just doesn't mean the same thing." Mr. Phelps joined the laughter. "Bankers' hours don't mean much, at any rate," he said. The power crew was having trouble with the solar furnace. Three of the nine banks of mirrors would not respond to the electric controls, and one bank moved so jerkily that it could not be focused, and it threatened to tear several of the mirrors loose. "What happened here?" Spotty Cade, one of the electrical technicians asked his foreman, Cowalczk, over the intercommunications radio. "I've got about a hundred pinholes in the cables out here. It's no wonder they don't work." "Meteor shower," Cowalczk answered, "and that's not half of it. Walker says he's got a half dozen mirrors cracked or pitted, and Hoffman on bank three wants you to replace a servo motor. He says the bearing was hit." "When did it happen?" Cade wanted to know. "Must have been last night, at least two or three days ago. All of 'em too small for Radar to pick up, and not enough for Seismo to get a rumble." "Sounds pretty bad." "Could have been worse," said Cowalczk. "How's that?" "Wasn't anybody out in it." "Hey, Chuck," another technician, Lehman, broke in, "you could maybe get hurt that way." "I doubt it," Cowalczk answered, "most of these were pinhead size, and they wouldn't go through a suit." "It would take a pretty big one to damage a servo bearing," Cade commented. "That could hurt," Cowalczk admitted, "but there was only one of them." "You mean only one hit our gear," Lehman said. "How many missed?" Nobody answered. They could all see the Moon under their feet. Small craters overlapped and touched each other. There was—except in the places that men had obscured them with footprints—not a square foot that didn't contain a crater at least ten inches across, there was not a square inch without its half-inch crater. Nearly all of these had been made millions of years ago, but here and there, the rim of a crater covered part of a footprint, clear evidence that it was a recent one. After the sun rose, Evans returned to the lava cave that he had been exploring when the meteor hit. Inside, he lifted his filter visor, and found that the light reflected from the small ray that peered into the cave door lighted the cave adequately. He tapped loose some white crystals on the cave wall with his geologist's hammer, and put them into a collector's bag. "A few mineral specimens would give us something to think about, man. These crystals," he said, "look a little like zeolites, but that can't be, zeolites need water to form, and there's no water on the Moon." He chipped a number of other crystals loose and put them in bags. One of them he found in a dark crevice had a hexagonal shape that puzzled him. One at a time, back in the tractor, he took the crystals out of the bags and analyzed them as well as he could without using a flame which would waste oxygen. The ones that looked like zeolites were zeolites, all right, or something very much like it. One of the crystals that he thought was quartz turned out to be calcite, and one of the ones that he was sure could be nothing but calcite was actually potassium nitrate. "Well, now," he said, "it's probably the largest natural crystal of potassium nitrate that anyone has ever seen. Man, it's a full inch across." All of these needed water to form, and their existence on the Moon puzzled him for a while. Then he opened the bag that had contained the unusual hexagonal crystals, and the puzzle resolved itself. There was nothing in the bag but a few drops of water. What he had taken to be a type of rock was ice, frozen in a niche that had never been warmed by the sun. The sun rose to the meridian slowly. It was a week after sunrise. The stars shone coldly, and wheeled in their slow course with the sun. Only Earth remained in the same spot in the black sky. The shadow line crept around until Earth was nearly dark, and then the rim of light appeared on the opposite side. For a while Earth was a dark disk in a thin halo, and then the light came to be a crescent, and the line of dawn began to move around Earth. The continents drifted across the dark disk and into the crescent. The people on Earth saw the full moon set about the same time that the sun rose. Nickel Jones was the captain of a supply rocket. He made trips from and to the Moon about once a month, carrying supplies in and metal and ores out. At this time he was visiting with his old friend McIlroy. "I swear, Mac," said Jones, "another season like this, and I'm going back to mining." "I thought you were doing pretty well," said McIlroy, as he poured two drinks from a bottle of Scotch that Jones had brought him. "Oh, the money I like, but I will say that I'd have more if I didn't have to fight the union and the Lunar Trade Commission." McIlroy had heard all of this before. "How's that?" he asked politely. "You may think it's myself running the ship," Jones started on his tirade, "but it's not. The union it is that says who I can hire. The union it is that says how much I must pay, and how large a crew I need. And then the Commission ..." The word seemed to give Jones an unpleasant taste in his mouth, which he hurriedly rinsed with a sip of Scotch. "The Commission," he continued, making the word sound like an obscenity, "it is that tells me how much I can charge for freight." McIlroy noticed that his friend's glass was empty, and he quietly filled it again. "And then," continued Jones, "if I buy a cargo up here, the Commission it is that says what I'll sell it for. If I had my way, I'd charge only fifty cents a pound for freight instead of the dollar forty that the Commission insists on. That's from here to Earth, of course. There's no profit I could make by cutting rates the other way." "Why not?" asked McIlroy. He knew the answer, but he liked to listen to the slightly Welsh voice of Jones. "Near cost it is now at a dollar forty. But what sense is there in charging the same rate to go either way when it takes about a seventh of the fuel to get from here to Earth as it does to get from there to here?" "What good would it do to charge fifty cents a pound?" asked McIlroy. "The nickel, man, the tons of nickel worth a dollar and a half on Earth, and not worth mining here; the low-grade ores of uranium and vanadium, they need these things on Earth, but they can't get them as long as it isn't worth the carrying of them. And then, of course, there's the water we haven't got. We could afford to bring more water for more people, and set up more distilling plants if we had the money from the nickel. "Even though I say it who shouldn't, two-eighty a quart is too much to pay for water." Both men fell silent for a while. Then Jones spoke again: "Have you seen our friend Evans lately? The price of chromium has gone up, and I think he could ship some of his ore from Yellow Crater at a profit." "He's out prospecting again. I don't expect to see him until sun-down." "I'll likely see him then. I won't be loaded for another week and a half. Can't you get in touch with him by radio?" "He isn't carrying one. Most of the prospectors don't. They claim that a radio that won't carry beyond the horizon isn't any good, and one that will bounce messages from Earth takes up too much room." "Well, if I don't see him, you let him know about the chromium." "Anything to help another Welshman, is that the idea?" "Well, protection it is that a poor Welshman needs from all the English and Scots. Speaking of which—" "Oh, of course," McIlroy grinned as he refilled the glasses. " Slainte, McIlroy, bach. " [Health, McIlroy, man.] " Slainte mhor, bach. " [Great Health, man.] The sun was halfway to the horizon, and Earth was a crescent in the sky when Evans had quarried all the ice that was available in the cave. The thought grew on him as he worked that this couldn't be the only such cave in the area. There must be several more bubbles in the lava flow. Part of his reasoning proved correct. That is, he found that by chipping, he could locate small bubbles up to an inch in diameter, each one with its droplet of water. The average was about one per cent of the volume of each bubble filled with ice. A quarter of a mile from the tractor, Evans found a promising looking mound of lava. It was rounded on top, and it could easily be the dome of a bubble. Suddenly, Evans noticed that the gauge on the oxygen tank of his suit was reading dangerously near empty. He turned back to his tractor, moving as slowly as he felt safe in doing. Running would use up oxygen too fast. He was halfway there when the pressure warning light went on, and the signal sounded inside his helmet. He turned on his ten-minute reserve supply, and made it to the tractor with about five minutes left. The air purifying apparatus in the suit was not as efficient as the one in the tractor; it wasted oxygen. By using the suit so much, Evans had already shortened his life by several days. He resolved not to leave the tractor again, and reluctantly abandoned his plan to search for a large bubble. The sun stood at half its diameter above the horizon. The shadows of the mountains stretched out to touch the shadows of the other mountains. The dawning line of light covered half of Earth, and Earth turned beneath it. Cowalczk itched under his suit, and the sweat on his face prickled maddeningly because he couldn't reach it through his helmet. He pushed his forehead against the faceplate of his helmet and rubbed off some of the sweat. It didn't help much, and it left a blurred spot in his vision. That annoyed him. "Is everyone clear of the outlet?" he asked. "All clear," he heard Cade report through the intercom. "How come we have to blow the boilers now?" asked Lehman. "Because I say so," Cowalczk shouted, surprised at his outburst and ashamed of it. "Boiler scale," he continued, much calmer. "We've got to clean out the boilers once a year to make sure the tubes in the reactor don't clog up." He squinted through his dark visor at the reactor building, a gray concrete structure a quarter of a mile distant. "It would be pretty bad if they clogged up some night." "Pressure's ten and a half pounds," said Cade. "Right, let her go," said Cowalczk. Cade threw a switch. In the reactor building, a relay closed. A motor started turning, and the worm gear on the motor opened a valve on the boiler. A stream of muddy water gushed into a closed vat. When the vat was about half full, the water began to run nearly clear. An electric eye noted that fact and a light in front of Cade turned on. Cade threw the switch back the other way, and the relay in the reactor building opened. The motor turned and the gears started to close the valve. But a fragment of boiler scale held the valve open. "Valve's stuck," said Cade. "Open it and close it again," said Cowalczk. The sweat on his forehead started to run into his eyes. He banged his hand on his faceplate in an unconscious attempt to wipe it off. He cursed silently, and wiped it off on the inside of his helmet again. This time, two drops ran down the inside of his faceplate. "Still don't work," said Cade. "Keep trying," Cowalczk ordered. "Lehman, get a Geiger counter and come with me, we've got to fix this thing." Lehman and Cowalczk, who were already suited up started across to the reactor building. Cade, who was in the pressurized control room without a suit on, kept working the switch back and forth. There was light that indicated when the valve was open. It was on, and it stayed on, no matter what Cade did. "The vat pressure's too high," Cade said. "Let me know when it reaches six pounds," Cowalczk requested. "Because it'll probably blow at seven." The vat was a light plastic container used only to decant sludge out of the water. It neither needed nor had much strength. "Six now," said Cade. Cowalczk and Lehman stopped halfway to the reactor. The vat bulged and ruptured. A stream of mud gushed out and boiled dry on the face of the Moon. Cowalczk and Lehman rushed forward again. They could see the trickle of water from the discharge pipe. The motor turned the valve back and forth in response to Cade's signals. "What's going on out there?" demanded McIlroy on the intercom. "Scale stuck in the valve," Cowalczk answered. "Are the reactors off?" "Yes. Vat blew. Shut up! Let me work, Mac!" "Sorry," McIlroy said, realizing that this was no time for officials. "Let me know when it's fixed." "Geiger's off scale," Lehman said. "We're probably O.K. in these suits for an hour," Cowalczk answered. "Is there a manual shut-off?" "Not that I know of," Lehman answered. "What about it, Cade?" "I don't think so," Cade said. "I'll get on the blower and rouse out an engineer." "O.K., but keep working that switch." "I checked the line as far as it's safe," said Lehman. "No valve." "O.K.," Cowalczk said. "Listen, Cade, are the injectors still on?" "Yeah. There's still enough heat in these reactors to do some damage. I'll cut 'em in about fifteen minutes." "I've found the trouble," Lehman said. "The worm gear's loose on its shaft. It's slipping every time the valve closes. There's not enough power in it to crush the scale." "Right," Cowalczk said. "Cade, open the valve wide. Lehman, hand me that pipe wrench!" Cowalczk hit the shaft with the back of the pipe wrench, and it broke at the motor bearing. Cowalczk and Lehman fitted the pipe wrench to the gear on the valve, and turned it. "Is the light off?" Cowalczk asked. "No," Cade answered. "Water's stopped. Give us some pressure, we'll see if it holds." "Twenty pounds," Cade answered after a couple of minutes. "Take her up to ... no, wait, it's still leaking," Cowalczk said. "Hold it there, we'll open the valve again." "O.K.," said Cade. "An engineer here says there's no manual cutoff." "Like Hell," said Lehman. Cowalczk and Lehman opened the valve again. Water spurted out, and dwindled as they closed the valve. "What did you do?" asked Cade. "The light went out and came on again." "Check that circuit and see if it works," Cowalczk instructed. There was a pause. "It's O.K.," Cade said. Cowalczk and Lehman opened and closed the valve again. "Light is off now," Cade said. "Good," said Cowalczk, "take the pressure up all the way, and we'll see what happens." "Eight hundred pounds," Cade said, after a short wait. "Good enough," Cowalczk said. "Tell that engineer to hold up a while, he can fix this thing as soon as he gets parts. Come on, Lehman, let's get out of here." "Well, I'm glad that's over," said Cade. "You guys had me worried for a while." "Think we weren't worried?" Lehman asked. "And it's not over." "What?" Cade asked. "Oh, you mean the valve servo you two bashed up?" "No," said Lehman, "I mean the two thousand gallons of water that we lost." "Two thousand?" Cade asked. "We only had seven hundred gallons reserve. How come we can operate now?" "We picked up twelve hundred from the town sewage plant. What with using the solar furnace as a radiator, we can make do." "Oh, God, I suppose this means water rationing again." "You're probably right, at least until the next rocket lands in a couple of weeks." PROSPECTOR FEARED LOST ON MOON IPP Williamson Town, Moon, Sept. 21st. Scientific survey director McIlroy released a statement today that Howard Evans, a prospector is missing and presumed lost. Evans, who was apparently exploring the Moon in search of minerals was due two days ago, but it was presumed that he was merely temporarily delayed. Evans began his exploration on August 25th, and was known to be carrying several days reserve of oxygen and supplies. Director McIlroy has expressed a hope that Evans will be found before his oxygen runs out. Search parties have started from Williamson Town, but telescopic search from Palomar and the new satellite observatory are hindered by the fact that Evans is lost on the part of the Moon which is now dark. Little hope is held for radio contact with the missing man as it is believed he was carrying only short-range, intercommunications equipment. Nevertheless, receivers are ... Captain Nickel Jones was also expressing a hope: "Anyway, Mac," he was saying to McIlroy, "a Welshman knows when his luck's run out. And never a word did he say." "Like as not, you're right," McIlroy replied, "but if I know Evans, he'd never say a word about any forebodings." "Well, happen I might have a bit of Welsh second sight about me, and it tells me that Evans will be found." McIlroy chuckled for the first time in several days. "So that's the reason you didn't take off when you were scheduled," he said. "Well, yes," Jones answered. "I thought that it might happen that a rocket would be needed in the search." The light from Earth lighted the Moon as the Moon had never lighted Earth. The great blue globe of Earth, the only thing larger than the stars, wheeled silently in the sky. As it turned, the shadow of sunset crept across the face that could be seen from the Moon. From full Earth, as you might say, it moved toward last quarter. The rising sun shone into Director McIlroy's office. The hot light formed a circle on the wall opposite the window, and the light became more intense as the sun slowly pulled over the horizon. Mrs. Garth walked into the director's office, and saw the director sleeping with his head cradled in his arms on the desk. She walked softly to the window and adjusted the shade to darken the office. She stood looking at McIlroy for a moment, and when he moved slightly in his sleep, she walked softly out of the office. A few minutes later she was back with a cup of coffee. She placed it in front of the director, and shook his shoulder gently. "Wake up, Mr. McIlroy," she said, "you told me to wake you at sunrise, and there it is, and here's Mr. Phelps." McIlroy woke up slowly. He leaned back in his chair and stretched. His neck was stiff from sleeping in such an awkward position. "'Morning, Mr. Phelps," he said. "Good morning," Phelps answered, dropping tiredly into a chair. "Have some coffee, Mr. Phelps," said Mrs. Garth, handing him a cup. "Any news?" asked McIlroy. "About Evans?" Phelps shook his head slowly. "Palomar called in a few minutes back. Nothing to report and the sun was rising there. Australia will be in position pretty soon. Several observatories there. Then Capetown. There are lots of observatories in Europe, but most of them are clouded over. Anyway the satellite observatory will be in position by the time Europe is." McIlroy was fully awake. He glanced at Phelps and wondered how long it had been since he had slept last. More than that, McIlroy wondered why this banker, who had never met Evans, was losing so much sleep about finding him. It began to dawn on McIlroy that nearly the whole population of Williamson Town was involved, one way or another, in the search. The director turned to ask Phelps about this fact, but the banker was slumped in his chair, fast asleep with his coffee untouched. It was three hours later that McIlroy woke Phelps. "They've found the tractor," McIlroy said. "Good," Phelps mumbled, and then as comprehension came; "That's fine! That's just line! Is Evans—?" "Can't tell yet. They spotted the tractor from the satellite observatory. Captain Jones took off a few minutes ago, and he'll report back as soon as he lands. Hadn't you better get some sleep?" Evans was carrying a block of ice into the tractor when he saw the rocket coming in for a landing. He dropped the block and stood waiting. When the dust settled from around the tail of the rocket, he started to run forward. The air lock opened, and Evans recognized the vacuum suited figure of Nickel Jones. "Evans, man!" said Jones' voice in the intercom. "Alive you are!" "A Welshman takes a lot of killing," Evans answered. Later, in Evans' tractor, he was telling his story: "... And I don't know how long I sat there after I found the water." He looked at the Goldburgian device he had made out of wire and tubing. "Finally I built this thing. These caves were made of lava. They must have been formed by steam some time, because there's a floor of ice in all of 'em. "The idea didn't come all at once, it took a long time for me to remember that water is made out of oxygen and hydrogen. When I remembered that, of course, I remembered that it can be separated with electricity. So I built this thing. "It runs an electric current through water, lets the oxygen loose in the room, and pipes the hydrogen outside. It doesn't work automatically, of course, so I run it about an hour a day. My oxygen level gauge shows how long." "You're a genius, man!" Jones exclaimed. "No," Evans answered, "a Welshman, nothing more." "Well, then," said Jones, "are you ready to start back?" "Back?" "Well, it was to rescue you that I came." "I don't need rescuing, man," Evans said. Jones stared at him blankly. "You might let me have some food," Evans continued. "I'm getting short of that. And you might have someone send out a mechanic with parts to fix my tractor. Then maybe you'll let me use your radio to file my claim." "Claim?" "Sure, man, I've thousands of tons of water here. It's the richest mine on the Moon!" THE END

He has a limited amount of time until the next meteor shower hits and permanently destroys his equipment

In submitting a claim to the lava mine, he will attract violence from those desperate for water

By entering into an unknown cave, he is possibly exposing himself to lava, which has the capacity to melt his space suit

If he is to discover a new water source, he must utilize his low, existing source to find it

24161_INDOEF2N_7

What is the worst consequence of the Geiger being off scale?

ALL DAY SEPTEMBER By ROGER KUYKENDALL Illustrated by van Dongen Some men just haven't got good sense. They just can't seem to learn the most fundamental things. Like when there's no use trying—when it's time to give up because it's hopeless.... The meteor, a pebble, a little larger than a match head, traveled through space and time since it came into being. The light from the star that died when the meteor was created fell on Earth before the first lungfish ventured from the sea. In its last instant, the meteor fell on the Moon. It was impeded by Evans' tractor. It drilled a small, neat hole through the casing of the steam turbine, and volitized upon striking the blades. Portions of the turbine also volitized; idling at eight thousand RPM, it became unstable. The shaft tried to tie itself into a knot, and the blades, damaged and undamaged were spit through the casing. The turbine again reached a stable state, that is, stopped. Permanently stopped. It was two days to sunrise, where Evans stood. It was just before sunset on a spring evening in September in Sydney. The shadow line between day and night could be seen from the Moon to be drifting across Australia. Evans, who had no watch, thought of the time as a quarter after Australia. Evans was a prospector, and like all prospectors, a sort of jackknife geologist, selenologist, rather. His tractor and equipment cost two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Fifty thousand was paid for. The rest was promissory notes and grubstake shares. When he was broke, which was usually, he used his tractor to haul uranium ore and metallic sodium from the mines at Potter's dike to Williamson Town, where the rockets landed. When he was flush, he would prospect for a couple of weeks. Once he followed a stampede to Yellow Crater, where he thought for a while that he had a fortune in chromium. The chromite petered out in a month and a half, and he was lucky to break even. Evans was about three hundred miles east of Williamson Town, the site of the first landing on the Moon. Evans was due back at Williamson Town at about sunset, that is, in about sixteen days. When he saw the wrecked turbine, he knew that he wouldn't make it. By careful rationing, he could probably stretch his food out to more than a month. His drinking water—kept separate from the water in the reactor—might conceivably last just as long. But his oxygen was too carefully measured; there was a four-day reserve. By diligent conservation, he might make it last an extra day. Four days reserve—plus one is five—plus sixteen days normal supply equals twenty-one days to live. In seventeen days he might be missed, but in seventeen days it would be dark again, and the search for him, if it ever began, could not begin for thirteen more days. At the earliest it would be eight days too late. "Well, man, 'tis a fine spot you're in now," he told himself. "Let's find out how bad it is indeed," he answered. He reached for the light switch and tried to turn it on. The switch was already in the "on" position. "Batteries must be dead," he told himself. "What batteries?" he asked. "There're no batteries in here, the power comes from the generator." "Why isn't the generator working, man?" he asked. He thought this one out carefully. The generator was not turned by the main turbine, but by a small reciprocating engine. The steam, however, came from the same boiler. And the boiler, of course, had emptied itself through the hole in the turbine. And the condenser, of course— "The condenser!" he shouted. He fumbled for a while, until he found a small flashlight. By the light of this, he reinspected the steam system, and found about three gallons of water frozen in the condenser. The condenser, like all condensers, was a device to convert steam into water, so that it could be reused in the boiler. This one had a tank and coils of tubing in the center of a curved reflector that was positioned to radiate the heat of the steam into the cold darkness of space. When the meteor pierced the turbine, the water in the condenser began to boil. This boiling lowered the temperature, and the condenser demonstrated its efficiency by quickly freezing the water in the tank. Evans sealed the turbine from the rest of the steam system by closing the shut-off valves. If there was any water in the boiler, it would operate the engine that drove the generator. The water would condense in the condenser, and with a little luck, melt the ice in there. Then, if the pump wasn't blocked by ice, it would return the water to the boiler. But there was no water in the boiler. Carefully he poured a cup of his drinking water into a pipe that led to the boiler, and resealed the pipe. He pulled on a knob marked "Nuclear Start/Safety Bypass." The water that he had poured into the boiler quickly turned into steam, and the steam turned the generator briefly. Evans watched the lights flicker and go out, and he guessed what the trouble was. "The water, man," he said, "there is not enough to melt the ice in the condenser." He opened the pipe again and poured nearly a half-gallon of water into the boiler. It was three days' supply of water, if it had been carefully used. It was one day's supply if used wastefully. It was ostentatious luxury for a man with a month's supply of water and twenty-one days to live. The generator started again, and the lights came on. They flickered as the boiler pressure began to fail, but the steam had melted some of the ice in the condenser, and the water pump began to function. "Well, man," he breathed, "there's a light to die by." The sun rose on Williamson Town at about the same time it rose on Evans. It was an incredibly brilliant disk in a black sky. The stars next to the sun shone as brightly as though there were no sun. They might have appeared to waver slightly, if they were behind outflung corona flares. If they did, no one noticed. No one looked toward the sun without dark filters. When Director McIlroy came into his office, he found it lighted by the rising sun. The light was a hot, brilliant white that seemed to pierce the darkest shadows of the room. He moved to the round window, screening his eyes from the light, and adjusted the polaroid shade to maximum density. The sun became an angry red brown, and the room was dark again. McIlroy decreased the density again until the room was comfortably lighted. The room felt stuffy, so he decided to leave the door to the inner office open. He felt a little guilty about this, because he had ordered that all doors in the survey building should remain closed except when someone was passing through them. This was to allow the air-conditioning system to function properly, and to prevent air loss in case of the highly improbable meteor damage. McIlroy thought that on the whole, he was disobeying his own orders no more flagrantly than anyone else in the survey. McIlroy had no illusions about his ability to lead men. Or rather, he did have one illusion; he thought that he was completely unfit as a leader. It was true that his strictest orders were disobeyed with cheerful contempt, but it was also true his mildest requests were complied with eagerly and smoothly. Everyone in the survey except McIlroy realized this, and even he accepted this without thinking about it. He had fallen into the habit of suggesting mildly anything that he wanted done, and writing orders he didn't particularly care to have obeyed. For example, because of an order of his stating that there would be no alcoholic beverages within the survey building, the entire survey was assured of a constant supply of home-made, but passably good liquor. Even McIlroy enjoyed the surreptitious drinking. "Good morning, Mr. McIlroy," said Mrs. Garth, his secretary. Morning to Mrs. Garth was simply the first four hours after waking. "Good morning indeed," answered McIlroy. Morning to him had no meaning at all, but he thought in the strictest sense that it would be morning on the Moon for another week. "Has the power crew set up the solar furnace?" he asked. The solar furnace was a rough parabola of mirrors used to focus the sun's heat on anything that it was desirable to heat. It was used mostly, from sun-up to sun-down, to supplement the nuclear power plant. "They went out about an hour ago," she answered, "I suppose that's what they were going to do." "Very good, what's first on the schedule?" "A Mr. Phelps to see you," she said. "How do you do, Mr. Phelps," McIlroy greeted him. "Good afternoon," Mr. Phelps replied. "I'm here representing the Merchants' Bank Association." "Fine," McIlroy said, "I suppose you're here to set up a bank." "That's right, I just got in from Muroc last night, and I've been going over the assets of the Survey Credit Association all morning." "I'll certainly be glad to get them off my hands," McIlroy said. "I hope they're in good order." "There doesn't seem to be any profit," Mr. Phelps said. "That's par for a nonprofit organization," said McIlroy. "But we're amateurs, and we're turning this operation over to professionals. I'm sure it will be to everyone's satisfaction." "I know this seems like a silly question. What day is this?" "Well," said McIlroy, "that's not so silly. I don't know either." "Mrs. Garth," he called, "what day is this?" "Why, September, I think," she answered. "I mean what day ." "I don't know, I'll call the observatory." There was a pause. "They say what day where?" she asked. "Greenwich, I guess, our official time is supposed to be Greenwich Mean Time." There was another pause. "They say it's September fourth, one thirty a.m. " "Well, there you are," laughed McIlroy, "it isn't that time doesn't mean anything here, it just doesn't mean the same thing." Mr. Phelps joined the laughter. "Bankers' hours don't mean much, at any rate," he said. The power crew was having trouble with the solar furnace. Three of the nine banks of mirrors would not respond to the electric controls, and one bank moved so jerkily that it could not be focused, and it threatened to tear several of the mirrors loose. "What happened here?" Spotty Cade, one of the electrical technicians asked his foreman, Cowalczk, over the intercommunications radio. "I've got about a hundred pinholes in the cables out here. It's no wonder they don't work." "Meteor shower," Cowalczk answered, "and that's not half of it. Walker says he's got a half dozen mirrors cracked or pitted, and Hoffman on bank three wants you to replace a servo motor. He says the bearing was hit." "When did it happen?" Cade wanted to know. "Must have been last night, at least two or three days ago. All of 'em too small for Radar to pick up, and not enough for Seismo to get a rumble." "Sounds pretty bad." "Could have been worse," said Cowalczk. "How's that?" "Wasn't anybody out in it." "Hey, Chuck," another technician, Lehman, broke in, "you could maybe get hurt that way." "I doubt it," Cowalczk answered, "most of these were pinhead size, and they wouldn't go through a suit." "It would take a pretty big one to damage a servo bearing," Cade commented. "That could hurt," Cowalczk admitted, "but there was only one of them." "You mean only one hit our gear," Lehman said. "How many missed?" Nobody answered. They could all see the Moon under their feet. Small craters overlapped and touched each other. There was—except in the places that men had obscured them with footprints—not a square foot that didn't contain a crater at least ten inches across, there was not a square inch without its half-inch crater. Nearly all of these had been made millions of years ago, but here and there, the rim of a crater covered part of a footprint, clear evidence that it was a recent one. After the sun rose, Evans returned to the lava cave that he had been exploring when the meteor hit. Inside, he lifted his filter visor, and found that the light reflected from the small ray that peered into the cave door lighted the cave adequately. He tapped loose some white crystals on the cave wall with his geologist's hammer, and put them into a collector's bag. "A few mineral specimens would give us something to think about, man. These crystals," he said, "look a little like zeolites, but that can't be, zeolites need water to form, and there's no water on the Moon." He chipped a number of other crystals loose and put them in bags. One of them he found in a dark crevice had a hexagonal shape that puzzled him. One at a time, back in the tractor, he took the crystals out of the bags and analyzed them as well as he could without using a flame which would waste oxygen. The ones that looked like zeolites were zeolites, all right, or something very much like it. One of the crystals that he thought was quartz turned out to be calcite, and one of the ones that he was sure could be nothing but calcite was actually potassium nitrate. "Well, now," he said, "it's probably the largest natural crystal of potassium nitrate that anyone has ever seen. Man, it's a full inch across." All of these needed water to form, and their existence on the Moon puzzled him for a while. Then he opened the bag that had contained the unusual hexagonal crystals, and the puzzle resolved itself. There was nothing in the bag but a few drops of water. What he had taken to be a type of rock was ice, frozen in a niche that had never been warmed by the sun. The sun rose to the meridian slowly. It was a week after sunrise. The stars shone coldly, and wheeled in their slow course with the sun. Only Earth remained in the same spot in the black sky. The shadow line crept around until Earth was nearly dark, and then the rim of light appeared on the opposite side. For a while Earth was a dark disk in a thin halo, and then the light came to be a crescent, and the line of dawn began to move around Earth. The continents drifted across the dark disk and into the crescent. The people on Earth saw the full moon set about the same time that the sun rose. Nickel Jones was the captain of a supply rocket. He made trips from and to the Moon about once a month, carrying supplies in and metal and ores out. At this time he was visiting with his old friend McIlroy. "I swear, Mac," said Jones, "another season like this, and I'm going back to mining." "I thought you were doing pretty well," said McIlroy, as he poured two drinks from a bottle of Scotch that Jones had brought him. "Oh, the money I like, but I will say that I'd have more if I didn't have to fight the union and the Lunar Trade Commission." McIlroy had heard all of this before. "How's that?" he asked politely. "You may think it's myself running the ship," Jones started on his tirade, "but it's not. The union it is that says who I can hire. The union it is that says how much I must pay, and how large a crew I need. And then the Commission ..." The word seemed to give Jones an unpleasant taste in his mouth, which he hurriedly rinsed with a sip of Scotch. "The Commission," he continued, making the word sound like an obscenity, "it is that tells me how much I can charge for freight." McIlroy noticed that his friend's glass was empty, and he quietly filled it again. "And then," continued Jones, "if I buy a cargo up here, the Commission it is that says what I'll sell it for. If I had my way, I'd charge only fifty cents a pound for freight instead of the dollar forty that the Commission insists on. That's from here to Earth, of course. There's no profit I could make by cutting rates the other way." "Why not?" asked McIlroy. He knew the answer, but he liked to listen to the slightly Welsh voice of Jones. "Near cost it is now at a dollar forty. But what sense is there in charging the same rate to go either way when it takes about a seventh of the fuel to get from here to Earth as it does to get from there to here?" "What good would it do to charge fifty cents a pound?" asked McIlroy. "The nickel, man, the tons of nickel worth a dollar and a half on Earth, and not worth mining here; the low-grade ores of uranium and vanadium, they need these things on Earth, but they can't get them as long as it isn't worth the carrying of them. And then, of course, there's the water we haven't got. We could afford to bring more water for more people, and set up more distilling plants if we had the money from the nickel. "Even though I say it who shouldn't, two-eighty a quart is too much to pay for water." Both men fell silent for a while. Then Jones spoke again: "Have you seen our friend Evans lately? The price of chromium has gone up, and I think he could ship some of his ore from Yellow Crater at a profit." "He's out prospecting again. I don't expect to see him until sun-down." "I'll likely see him then. I won't be loaded for another week and a half. Can't you get in touch with him by radio?" "He isn't carrying one. Most of the prospectors don't. They claim that a radio that won't carry beyond the horizon isn't any good, and one that will bounce messages from Earth takes up too much room." "Well, if I don't see him, you let him know about the chromium." "Anything to help another Welshman, is that the idea?" "Well, protection it is that a poor Welshman needs from all the English and Scots. Speaking of which—" "Oh, of course," McIlroy grinned as he refilled the glasses. " Slainte, McIlroy, bach. " [Health, McIlroy, man.] " Slainte mhor, bach. " [Great Health, man.] The sun was halfway to the horizon, and Earth was a crescent in the sky when Evans had quarried all the ice that was available in the cave. The thought grew on him as he worked that this couldn't be the only such cave in the area. There must be several more bubbles in the lava flow. Part of his reasoning proved correct. That is, he found that by chipping, he could locate small bubbles up to an inch in diameter, each one with its droplet of water. The average was about one per cent of the volume of each bubble filled with ice. A quarter of a mile from the tractor, Evans found a promising looking mound of lava. It was rounded on top, and it could easily be the dome of a bubble. Suddenly, Evans noticed that the gauge on the oxygen tank of his suit was reading dangerously near empty. He turned back to his tractor, moving as slowly as he felt safe in doing. Running would use up oxygen too fast. He was halfway there when the pressure warning light went on, and the signal sounded inside his helmet. He turned on his ten-minute reserve supply, and made it to the tractor with about five minutes left. The air purifying apparatus in the suit was not as efficient as the one in the tractor; it wasted oxygen. By using the suit so much, Evans had already shortened his life by several days. He resolved not to leave the tractor again, and reluctantly abandoned his plan to search for a large bubble. The sun stood at half its diameter above the horizon. The shadows of the mountains stretched out to touch the shadows of the other mountains. The dawning line of light covered half of Earth, and Earth turned beneath it. Cowalczk itched under his suit, and the sweat on his face prickled maddeningly because he couldn't reach it through his helmet. He pushed his forehead against the faceplate of his helmet and rubbed off some of the sweat. It didn't help much, and it left a blurred spot in his vision. That annoyed him. "Is everyone clear of the outlet?" he asked. "All clear," he heard Cade report through the intercom. "How come we have to blow the boilers now?" asked Lehman. "Because I say so," Cowalczk shouted, surprised at his outburst and ashamed of it. "Boiler scale," he continued, much calmer. "We've got to clean out the boilers once a year to make sure the tubes in the reactor don't clog up." He squinted through his dark visor at the reactor building, a gray concrete structure a quarter of a mile distant. "It would be pretty bad if they clogged up some night." "Pressure's ten and a half pounds," said Cade. "Right, let her go," said Cowalczk. Cade threw a switch. In the reactor building, a relay closed. A motor started turning, and the worm gear on the motor opened a valve on the boiler. A stream of muddy water gushed into a closed vat. When the vat was about half full, the water began to run nearly clear. An electric eye noted that fact and a light in front of Cade turned on. Cade threw the switch back the other way, and the relay in the reactor building opened. The motor turned and the gears started to close the valve. But a fragment of boiler scale held the valve open. "Valve's stuck," said Cade. "Open it and close it again," said Cowalczk. The sweat on his forehead started to run into his eyes. He banged his hand on his faceplate in an unconscious attempt to wipe it off. He cursed silently, and wiped it off on the inside of his helmet again. This time, two drops ran down the inside of his faceplate. "Still don't work," said Cade. "Keep trying," Cowalczk ordered. "Lehman, get a Geiger counter and come with me, we've got to fix this thing." Lehman and Cowalczk, who were already suited up started across to the reactor building. Cade, who was in the pressurized control room without a suit on, kept working the switch back and forth. There was light that indicated when the valve was open. It was on, and it stayed on, no matter what Cade did. "The vat pressure's too high," Cade said. "Let me know when it reaches six pounds," Cowalczk requested. "Because it'll probably blow at seven." The vat was a light plastic container used only to decant sludge out of the water. It neither needed nor had much strength. "Six now," said Cade. Cowalczk and Lehman stopped halfway to the reactor. The vat bulged and ruptured. A stream of mud gushed out and boiled dry on the face of the Moon. Cowalczk and Lehman rushed forward again. They could see the trickle of water from the discharge pipe. The motor turned the valve back and forth in response to Cade's signals. "What's going on out there?" demanded McIlroy on the intercom. "Scale stuck in the valve," Cowalczk answered. "Are the reactors off?" "Yes. Vat blew. Shut up! Let me work, Mac!" "Sorry," McIlroy said, realizing that this was no time for officials. "Let me know when it's fixed." "Geiger's off scale," Lehman said. "We're probably O.K. in these suits for an hour," Cowalczk answered. "Is there a manual shut-off?" "Not that I know of," Lehman answered. "What about it, Cade?" "I don't think so," Cade said. "I'll get on the blower and rouse out an engineer." "O.K., but keep working that switch." "I checked the line as far as it's safe," said Lehman. "No valve." "O.K.," Cowalczk said. "Listen, Cade, are the injectors still on?" "Yeah. There's still enough heat in these reactors to do some damage. I'll cut 'em in about fifteen minutes." "I've found the trouble," Lehman said. "The worm gear's loose on its shaft. It's slipping every time the valve closes. There's not enough power in it to crush the scale." "Right," Cowalczk said. "Cade, open the valve wide. Lehman, hand me that pipe wrench!" Cowalczk hit the shaft with the back of the pipe wrench, and it broke at the motor bearing. Cowalczk and Lehman fitted the pipe wrench to the gear on the valve, and turned it. "Is the light off?" Cowalczk asked. "No," Cade answered. "Water's stopped. Give us some pressure, we'll see if it holds." "Twenty pounds," Cade answered after a couple of minutes. "Take her up to ... no, wait, it's still leaking," Cowalczk said. "Hold it there, we'll open the valve again." "O.K.," said Cade. "An engineer here says there's no manual cutoff." "Like Hell," said Lehman. Cowalczk and Lehman opened the valve again. Water spurted out, and dwindled as they closed the valve. "What did you do?" asked Cade. "The light went out and came on again." "Check that circuit and see if it works," Cowalczk instructed. There was a pause. "It's O.K.," Cade said. Cowalczk and Lehman opened and closed the valve again. "Light is off now," Cade said. "Good," said Cowalczk, "take the pressure up all the way, and we'll see what happens." "Eight hundred pounds," Cade said, after a short wait. "Good enough," Cowalczk said. "Tell that engineer to hold up a while, he can fix this thing as soon as he gets parts. Come on, Lehman, let's get out of here." "Well, I'm glad that's over," said Cade. "You guys had me worried for a while." "Think we weren't worried?" Lehman asked. "And it's not over." "What?" Cade asked. "Oh, you mean the valve servo you two bashed up?" "No," said Lehman, "I mean the two thousand gallons of water that we lost." "Two thousand?" Cade asked. "We only had seven hundred gallons reserve. How come we can operate now?" "We picked up twelve hundred from the town sewage plant. What with using the solar furnace as a radiator, we can make do." "Oh, God, I suppose this means water rationing again." "You're probably right, at least until the next rocket lands in a couple of weeks." PROSPECTOR FEARED LOST ON MOON IPP Williamson Town, Moon, Sept. 21st. Scientific survey director McIlroy released a statement today that Howard Evans, a prospector is missing and presumed lost. Evans, who was apparently exploring the Moon in search of minerals was due two days ago, but it was presumed that he was merely temporarily delayed. Evans began his exploration on August 25th, and was known to be carrying several days reserve of oxygen and supplies. Director McIlroy has expressed a hope that Evans will be found before his oxygen runs out. Search parties have started from Williamson Town, but telescopic search from Palomar and the new satellite observatory are hindered by the fact that Evans is lost on the part of the Moon which is now dark. Little hope is held for radio contact with the missing man as it is believed he was carrying only short-range, intercommunications equipment. Nevertheless, receivers are ... Captain Nickel Jones was also expressing a hope: "Anyway, Mac," he was saying to McIlroy, "a Welshman knows when his luck's run out. And never a word did he say." "Like as not, you're right," McIlroy replied, "but if I know Evans, he'd never say a word about any forebodings." "Well, happen I might have a bit of Welsh second sight about me, and it tells me that Evans will be found." McIlroy chuckled for the first time in several days. "So that's the reason you didn't take off when you were scheduled," he said. "Well, yes," Jones answered. "I thought that it might happen that a rocket would be needed in the search." The light from Earth lighted the Moon as the Moon had never lighted Earth. The great blue globe of Earth, the only thing larger than the stars, wheeled silently in the sky. As it turned, the shadow of sunset crept across the face that could be seen from the Moon. From full Earth, as you might say, it moved toward last quarter. The rising sun shone into Director McIlroy's office. The hot light formed a circle on the wall opposite the window, and the light became more intense as the sun slowly pulled over the horizon. Mrs. Garth walked into the director's office, and saw the director sleeping with his head cradled in his arms on the desk. She walked softly to the window and adjusted the shade to darken the office. She stood looking at McIlroy for a moment, and when he moved slightly in his sleep, she walked softly out of the office. A few minutes later she was back with a cup of coffee. She placed it in front of the director, and shook his shoulder gently. "Wake up, Mr. McIlroy," she said, "you told me to wake you at sunrise, and there it is, and here's Mr. Phelps." McIlroy woke up slowly. He leaned back in his chair and stretched. His neck was stiff from sleeping in such an awkward position. "'Morning, Mr. Phelps," he said. "Good morning," Phelps answered, dropping tiredly into a chair. "Have some coffee, Mr. Phelps," said Mrs. Garth, handing him a cup. "Any news?" asked McIlroy. "About Evans?" Phelps shook his head slowly. "Palomar called in a few minutes back. Nothing to report and the sun was rising there. Australia will be in position pretty soon. Several observatories there. Then Capetown. There are lots of observatories in Europe, but most of them are clouded over. Anyway the satellite observatory will be in position by the time Europe is." McIlroy was fully awake. He glanced at Phelps and wondered how long it had been since he had slept last. More than that, McIlroy wondered why this banker, who had never met Evans, was losing so much sleep about finding him. It began to dawn on McIlroy that nearly the whole population of Williamson Town was involved, one way or another, in the search. The director turned to ask Phelps about this fact, but the banker was slumped in his chair, fast asleep with his coffee untouched. It was three hours later that McIlroy woke Phelps. "They've found the tractor," McIlroy said. "Good," Phelps mumbled, and then as comprehension came; "That's fine! That's just line! Is Evans—?" "Can't tell yet. They spotted the tractor from the satellite observatory. Captain Jones took off a few minutes ago, and he'll report back as soon as he lands. Hadn't you better get some sleep?" Evans was carrying a block of ice into the tractor when he saw the rocket coming in for a landing. He dropped the block and stood waiting. When the dust settled from around the tail of the rocket, he started to run forward. The air lock opened, and Evans recognized the vacuum suited figure of Nickel Jones. "Evans, man!" said Jones' voice in the intercom. "Alive you are!" "A Welshman takes a lot of killing," Evans answered. Later, in Evans' tractor, he was telling his story: "... And I don't know how long I sat there after I found the water." He looked at the Goldburgian device he had made out of wire and tubing. "Finally I built this thing. These caves were made of lava. They must have been formed by steam some time, because there's a floor of ice in all of 'em. "The idea didn't come all at once, it took a long time for me to remember that water is made out of oxygen and hydrogen. When I remembered that, of course, I remembered that it can be separated with electricity. So I built this thing. "It runs an electric current through water, lets the oxygen loose in the room, and pipes the hydrogen outside. It doesn't work automatically, of course, so I run it about an hour a day. My oxygen level gauge shows how long." "You're a genius, man!" Jones exclaimed. "No," Evans answered, "a Welshman, nothing more." "Well, then," said Jones, "are you ready to start back?" "Back?" "Well, it was to rescue you that I came." "I don't need rescuing, man," Evans said. Jones stared at him blankly. "You might let me have some food," Evans continued. "I'm getting short of that. And you might have someone send out a mechanic with parts to fix my tractor. Then maybe you'll let me use your radio to file my claim." "Claim?" "Sure, man, I've thousands of tons of water here. It's the richest mine on the Moon!" THE END

The moon and Earth will enter a war fought over natural elements

Evans will die before he is discovered by a rescue team

Authorities will be forced to make more strict limitations when it comes to water

The entire Survey will be fired and forced to compete over prospecting jobs

25086_TN2QYF3S_1

Which two terms best describe Jerry's tone toward Greta?

The saucer was interesting, but where was the delegate? The DELEGATE FROM VENUS By HENRY SLESAR ILLUSTRATOR NOVICK Everybody was waiting to see what the delegate from Venus looked like. And all they got for their patience was the biggest surprise since David clobbered Goliath. " Let me put it this way," Conners said paternally. "We expect a certain amount of decorum from our Washington news correspondents, and that's all I'm asking for." Jerry Bridges, sitting in the chair opposite his employer's desk, chewed on his knuckles and said nothing. One part of his mind wanted him to play it cagey, to behave the way the newspaper wanted him to behave, to protect the cozy Washington assignment he had waited four years to get. But another part of him, a rebel part, wanted him to stay on the trail of the story he felt sure was about to break. "I didn't mean to make trouble, Mr. Conners," he said casually. "It just seemed strange, all these exchanges of couriers in the past two days. I couldn't help thinking something was up." "Even if that's true, we'll hear about it through the usual channels," Conners frowned. "But getting a senator's secretary drunk to obtain information—well, that's not only indiscreet, Bridges. It's downright dirty." Jerry grinned. "I didn't take that kind of advantage, Mr. Conners. Not that she wasn't a toothsome little dish ..." "Just thank your lucky stars that it didn't go any further. And from now on—" He waggled a finger at him. "Watch your step." Jerry got up and ambled to the door. But he turned before leaving and said: "By the way. What do you think is going on?" "I haven't the faintest idea." "Don't kid me, Mr. Conners. Think it's war?" "That'll be all, Bridges." The reporter closed the door behind him, and then strolled out of the building into the sunlight. He met Ruskin, the fat little AP correspondent, in front of the Pan-American Building on Constitution Avenue. Ruskin was holding the newspaper that contained the gossip-column item which had started the whole affair, and he seemed more interested in the romantic rather than political implications. As he walked beside him, he said: "So what really happened, pal? That Greta babe really let down her hair?" "Where's your decorum?" Jerry growled. Ruskin giggled. "Boy, she's quite a dame, all right. I think they ought to get the Secret Service to guard her. She really fills out a size 10, don't she?" "Ruskin," Jerry said, "you have a low mind. For a week, this town has been acting like the 39 Steps , and all you can think about is dames. What's the matter with you? Where will you be when the big mushroom cloud comes?" "With Greta, I hope," Ruskin sighed. "What a way to get radioactive." They split off a few blocks later, and Jerry walked until he came to the Red Tape Bar & Grill, a favorite hangout of the local journalists. There were three other newsmen at the bar, and they gave him snickering greetings. He took a small table in the rear and ate his meal in sullen silence. It wasn't the newsmen's jibes that bothered him; it was the certainty that something of major importance was happening in the capitol. There had been hourly conferences at the White House, flying visits by State Department officials, mysterious conferences involving members of the Science Commission. So far, the byword had been secrecy. They knew that Senator Spocker, chairman of the Congressional Science Committee, had been involved in every meeting, but Senator Spocker was unavailable. His secretary, however, was a little more obliging ... Jerry looked up from his coffee and blinked when he saw who was coming through the door of the Bar & Grill. So did every other patron, but for different reasons. Greta Johnson had that effect upon men. Even the confining effect of a mannishly-tailored suit didn't hide her outrageously feminine qualities. She walked straight to his table, and he stood up. "They told me you might be here," she said, breathing hard. "I just wanted to thank you for last night." "Look, Greta—" Wham! Her hand, small and delicate, felt like a slab of lead when it slammed into his cheek. She left a bruise five fingers wide, and then turned and stalked out. He ran after her, the restaurant proprietor shouting about the unpaid bill. It took a rapid dog-trot to reach her side. "Greta, listen!" he panted. "You don't understand about last night. It wasn't the way that lousy columnist said—" She stopped in her tracks. "I wouldn't have minded so much if you'd gotten me drunk. But to use me, just to get a story—" "But I'm a reporter , damn it. It's my job. I'd do it again if I thought you knew anything." She was pouting now. "Well, how do you suppose I feel, knowing you're only interested in me because of the Senator? Anyway, I'll probably lose my job, and then you won't have any use for me." "Good-bye, Greta," Jerry said sadly. "What?" "Good-bye. I suppose you won't want to see me any more." "Did I say that?" "It just won't be any use. We'll always have this thing between us." She looked at him for a moment, and then touched his bruised cheek with a tender, motherly gesture. "Your poor face," she murmured, and then sighed. "Oh, well. I guess there's no use fighting it. Maybe if I did tell you what I know, we could act human again." "Greta!" "But if you print one word of it, Jerry Bridges, I'll never speak to you again!" "Honey," Jerry said, taking her arm, "you can trust me like a brother." "That's not the idea," Greta said stiffly. In a secluded booth at the rear of a restaurant unfrequented by newsmen, Greta leaned forward and said: "At first, they thought it was another sputnik." " Who did?" "The State Department, silly. They got reports from the observatories about another sputnik being launched by the Russians. Only the Russians denied it. Then there were joint meetings, and nobody could figure out what the damn thing was." "Wait a minute," Jerry said dizzily. "You mean to tell me there's another of those metal moons up there?" "But it's not a moon. That's the big point. It's a spaceship." "A what ?" "A spaceship," Greta said coolly, sipping lemonade. "They have been in contact with it now for about three days, and they're thinking of calling a plenary session of the UN just to figure out what to do about it. The only hitch is, Russia doesn't want to wait that long, and is asking for a hurry-up summit meeting to make a decision." "A decision about what?" "About the Venusians, of course." "Greta," Jerry said mildly, "I think you're still a little woozy from last night." "Don't be silly. The spaceship's from Venus; they've already established that. And the people on it—I guess they're people—want to know if they can land their delegate." "Their what?" "Their delegate. They came here for some kind of conference, I guess. They know about the UN and everything, and they want to take part. They say that with all the satellites being launched, that our affairs are their affairs, too. It's kind of confusing, but that's what they say." "You mean these Venusians speak English?" "And Russian. And French. And German. And everything I guess. They've been having radio talks with practically every country for the past three days. Like I say, they want to establish diplomatic relations or something. The Senator thinks that if we don't agree, they might do something drastic, like blow us all up. It's kind of scary." She shivered delicately. "You're taking it mighty calm," he said ironically. "Well, how else can I take it? I'm not even supposed to know about it, except that the Senator is so careless about—" She put her fingers to her lips. "Oh, dear, now you'll really think I'm terrible." "Terrible? I think you're wonderful!" "And you promise not to print it?" "Didn't I say I wouldn't?" "Y-e-s. But you know, you're a liar sometimes, Jerry. I've noticed that about you." The press secretary's secretary, a massive woman with gray hair and impervious to charm, guarded the portals of his office with all the indomitable will of the U. S. Marines. But Jerry Bridges tried. "You don't understand, Lana," he said. "I don't want to see Mr. Howells. I just want you to give him something." "My name's not Lana, and I can't deliver any messages." "But this is something he wants to see." He handed her an envelope, stamped URGENT. "Do it for me, Hedy. And I'll buy you the flashiest pair of diamond earrings in Washington." "Well," the woman said, thawing slightly. "I could deliver it with his next batch of mail." "When will that be?" "In an hour. He's in a terribly important meeting right now." "You've got some mail right there. Earrings and a bracelet to match." She looked at him with exasperation, and then gathered up a stack of memorandums and letters, his own envelope atop it. She came out of the press secretary's office two minutes later with Howells himself, and Howells said: "You there, Bridges. Come in here." "Yes, sir !" Jerry said, breezing by the waiting reporters with a grin of triumph. There were six men in the room, three in military uniform. Howells poked the envelope towards Jerry, and snapped: "This note of yours. Just what do you think it means?" "You know better than I do, Mr. Howells. I'm just doing my job; I think the public has a right to know about this spaceship that's flying around—" His words brought an exclamation from the others. Howells sighed, and said: "Mr. Bridges, you don't make it easy for us. It's our opinion that secrecy is essential, that leakage of the story might cause panic. Since you're the only unauthorized person who knows of it, we have two choices. One of them is to lock you up." Jerry swallowed hard. "The other is perhaps more practical," Howells said. "You'll be taken into our confidence, and allowed to accompany those officials who will be admitted to the landing site. But you will not be allowed to relay the story to the press until such a time as all correspondents are informed. That won't give you a 'scoop' if that's what you call it, but you'll be an eyewitness. That should be worth something." "It's worth a lot," Jerry said eagerly. "Thanks, Mr. Howells." "Don't thank me, I'm not doing you any personal favor. Now about the landing tonight—" "You mean the spaceship's coming down?" "Yes. A special foreign ministers conference was held this morning, and a decision was reached to accept the delegate. Landing instructions are being given at Los Alamos, and the ship will presumably land around midnight tonight. There will be a jet leaving Washington Airport at nine, and you'll be on it. Meanwhile, consider yourself in custody." The USAF jet transport wasn't the only secrecy-shrouded aircraft that took off that evening from Washington Airport. But Jerry Bridges, sitting in the rear seat flanked by two Sphinx-like Secret Service men, knew that he was the only passenger with non-official status aboard. It was only a few minutes past ten when they arrived at the air base at Los Alamos. The desert sky was cloudy and starless, and powerful searchlights probed the thick cumulus. There were sleek, purring black autos waiting to rush the air passengers to some unnamed destination. They drove for twenty minutes across a flat ribbon of desert road, until Jerry sighted what appeared to be a circle of newly-erected lights in the middle of nowhere. On the perimeter, official vehicles were parked in orderly rows, and four USAF trailer trucks were in evidence, their radarscopes turning slowly. There was activity everywhere, but it was well-ordered and unhurried. They had done a good job of keeping the excitement contained. He was allowed to leave the car and stroll unescorted. He tried to talk to some of the scurrying officials, but to no avail. Finally, he contented himself by sitting on the sand, his back against the grill of a staff car, smoking one cigarette after another. As the minutes ticked off, the activity became more frenetic around him. Then the pace slowed, and he knew the appointed moment was approaching. Stillness returned to the desert, and tension was a tangible substance in the night air. The radarscopes spun slowly. The searchlights converged in an intricate pattern. Then the clouds seemed to part! "Here she comes!" a voice shouted. And in a moment, the calm was shattered. At first, he saw nothing. A faint roar was started in the heavens, and it became a growl that increased in volume until even the shouting voices could no longer be heard. Then the crisscrossing lights struck metal, glancing off the gleaming body of a descending object. Larger and larger the object grew, until it assumed the definable shape of a squat silver funnel, falling in a perfect straight line towards the center of the light-ringed area. When it hit, a dust cloud obscured it from sight. A loudspeaker blared out an unintelligible order, but its message was clear. No one moved from their position. Finally, a three-man team, asbestos-clad, lead-shielded, stepped out from the ring of spectators. They carried geiger counters on long poles before them. Jerry held his breath as they approached the object; only when they were yards away did he appreciate its size. It wasn't large; not more than fifteen feet in total circumference. One of the three men waved a gloved hand. "It's okay," a voice breathed behind him. "No radiation ..." Slowly, the ring of spectators closed tighter. They were twenty yards from the ship when the voice spoke to them. "Greetings from Venus," it said, and then repeated the phrase in six languages. "The ship you see is a Venusian Class 7 interplanetary rocket, built for one-passenger. It is clear of all radiation, and is perfectly safe to approach. There is a hatch which may be opened by an automatic lever in the side. Please open this hatch and remove the passenger." An Air Force General whom Jerry couldn't identify stepped forward. He circled the ship warily, and then said something to the others. They came closer, and he touched a small lever on the silvery surface of the funnel. A door slid open. "It's a box!" someone said. "A crate—" "Colligan! Moore! Schaffer! Lend a hand here—" A trio came forward and hoisted the crate out of the ship. Then the voice spoke again; Jerry deduced that it must have been activated by the decreased load of the ship. "Please open the crate. You will find our delegate within. We trust you will treat him with the courtesy of an official emissary." They set to work on the crate, its gray plastic material giving in readily to the application of their tools. But when it was opened, they stood aside in amazement and consternation. There were a variety of metal pieces packed within, protected by a filmy packing material. "Wait a minute," the general said. "Here's a book—" He picked up a gray-bound volume, and opened its cover. "'Instructions for assembling Delegate,'" he read aloud. "'First, remove all parts and arrange them in the following order. A-1, central nervous system housing. A-2 ...'" He looked up. "It's an instruction book," he whispered. "We're supposed to build the damn thing." The Delegate, a handsomely constructed robot almost eight feet tall, was pieced together some three hours later, by a team of scientists and engineers who seemed to find the Venusian instructions as elementary as a blueprint in an Erector set. But simple as the job was, they were obviously impressed by the mechanism they had assembled. It stood impassive until they obeyed the final instruction. "Press Button K ..." They found button K, and pressed it. The robot bowed. "Thank you, gentlemen," it said, in sweet, unmetallic accents. "Now if you will please escort me to the meeting place ..." It wasn't until three days after the landing that Jerry Bridges saw the Delegate again. Along with a dozen assorted government officials, Army officers, and scientists, he was quartered in a quonset hut in Fort Dix, New Jersey. Then, after seventy-two frustrating hours, he was escorted by Marine guard into New York City. No one told him his destination, and it wasn't until he saw the bright strips of light across the face of the United Nations building that he knew where the meeting was to be held. But his greatest surprise was yet to come. The vast auditorium which housed the general assembly was filled to its capacity, but there were new faces behind the plaques which designated the member nations. He couldn't believe his eyes at first, but as the meeting got under way, he knew that it was true. The highest echelons of the world's governments were represented, even—Jerry gulped at the realization—Nikita Khrushchev himself. It was a summit meeting such as he had never dreamed possible, a summit meeting without benefit of long foreign minister's debate. And the cause of it all, a placid, highly-polished metal robot, was seated blithely at a desk which bore the designation: VENUS. The robot delegate stood up. "Gentlemen," it said into the microphone, and the great men at the council tables strained to hear the translator's version through their headphones, "Gentlemen, I thank you for your prompt attention. I come as a Delegate from a great neighbor planet, in the interests of peace and progress for all the solar system. I come in the belief that peace is the responsibility of individuals, of nations, and now of worlds, and that each is dependent upon the other. I speak to you now through the electronic instrumentation which has been created for me, and I come to offer your planet not merely a threat, a promise, or an easy solution—but a challenge." The council room stirred. "Your earth satellites have been viewed with interest by the astronomers of our world, and we foresee the day when contact between our planets will be commonplace. As for ourselves, we have hitherto had little desire to explore beyond our realm, being far too occupied with internal matters. But our isolation cannot last in the face of your progress, so we believe that we must take part in your affairs. "Here, then, is our challenge. Continue your struggle of ideas, compete with each other for the minds of men, fight your bloodless battles, if you know no other means to attain progress. But do all this without unleashing the terrible forces of power now at your command. Once unleashed, these forces may or may not destroy all that you have gained. But we, the scientists of Venus, promise you this—that on the very day your conflict deteriorates into heedless violence, we will not stand by and let the ugly contagion spread. On that day, we of Venus will act swiftly, mercilessly, and relentlessly—to destroy your world completely." Again, the meeting room exploded in a babble of languages. "The vessel which brought me here came as a messenger of peace. But envision it, men of Earth, as a messenger of war. Unstoppable, inexorable, it may return, bearing a different Delegate from Venus—a Delegate of Death, who speaks not in words, but in the explosion of atoms. Think of thousands of such Delegates, fired from a vantage point far beyond the reach of your retaliation. This is the promise and the challenge that will hang in your night sky from this moment forward. Look at the planet Venus, men of Earth, and see a Goddess of Vengeance, poised to wreak its wrath upon those who betray the peace." The Delegate sat down. Four days later, a mysterious explosion rocked the quiet sands of Los Alamos, and the Venus spacecraft was no more. Two hours after that, the robot delegate, its message delivered, its mission fulfilled, requested to be locked inside a bombproof chamber. When the door was opened, the Delegate was an exploded ruin. The news flashed with lightning speed over the world, and Jerry Bridges' eyewitness accounts of the incredible event was syndicated throughout the nation. But his sudden celebrity left him vaguely unsatisfied. He tried to explain his feeling to Greta on his first night back in Washington. They were in his apartment, and it was the first time Greta had consented to pay him the visit. "Well, what's bothering you?" Greta pouted. "You've had the biggest story of the year under your byline. I should think you'd be tickled pink." "It's not that," Jerry said moodily. "But ever since I heard the Delegate speak, something's been nagging me." "But don't you think he's done good? Don't you think they'll be impressed by what he said?" "I'm not worried about that. I think that damn robot did more for peace than anything that's ever come along in this cockeyed world. But still ..." Greta snuggled up to him on the sofa. "You worry too much. Don't you ever think of anything else? You should learn to relax. It can be fun." She started to prove it to him, and Jerry responded the way a normal, healthy male usually does. But in the middle of an embrace, he cried out: "Wait a minute!" "What's the matter?" "I just thought of something! Now where the hell did I put my old notebooks?" He got up from the sofa and went scurrying to a closet. From a debris of cardboard boxes, he found a worn old leather brief case, and cackled with delight when he found the yellowed notebooks inside. "What are they?" Greta said. "My old school notebooks. Greta, you'll have to excuse me. But there's something I've got to do, right away!" "That's all right with me," Greta said haughtily. "I know when I'm not wanted." She took her hat and coat from the hall closet, gave him one last chance to change his mind, and then left. Five minutes later, Jerry Bridges was calling the airlines. It had been eleven years since Jerry had walked across the campus of Clifton University, heading for the ivy-choked main building. It was remarkable how little had changed, but the students seemed incredibly young. He was winded by the time he asked the pretty girl at the desk where Professor Martin Coltz could be located. "Professor Coltz?" She stuck a pencil to her mouth. "Well, I guess he'd be in the Holland Laboratory about now." "Holland Laboratory? What's that?" "Oh, I guess that was after your time, wasn't it?" Jerry felt decrepit, but managed to say: "It must be something new since I was here. Where is this place?" He followed her directions, and located a fresh-painted building three hundred yards from the men's dorm. He met a student at the door, who told him that Professor Coltz would be found in the physics department. The room was empty when Jerry entered, except for the single stooped figure vigorously erasing a blackboard. He turned when the door opened. If the students looked younger, Professor Coltz was far older than Jerry remembered. He was a tall man, with an unruly confusion of straight gray hair. He blinked when Jerry said: "Hello, Professor. Do you remember me? Jerry Bridges?" "Of course! I thought of you only yesterday, when I saw your name in the papers—" They sat at facing student desks, and chatted about old times. But Jerry was impatient to get to the point of his visit, and he blurted out: "Professor Coltz, something's been bothering me. It bothered me from the moment I heard the Delegate speak. I didn't know what it was until last night, when I dug out my old college notebooks. Thank God I kept them." Coltz's eyes were suddenly hooded. "What do you mean, Jerry?" "There was something about the Robot's speech that sounded familiar—I could have sworn I'd heard some of the words before. I couldn't prove anything until I checked my old notes, and here's what I found." He dug into his coat pocket and produced a sheet of paper. He unfolded it and read aloud. "'It's my belief that peace is the responsibility of individuals, of nations, and someday, even of worlds ...' Sound familiar, Professor?" Coltz shifted uncomfortably. "I don't recall every silly thing I said, Jerry." "But it's an interesting coincidence, isn't it, Professor? These very words were spoken by the Delegate from Venus." "A coincidence—" "Is it? But I also remember your interest in robotics. I'll never forget that mechanical homing pigeon you constructed. And you've probably learned much more these past eleven years." "What are you driving at, Jerry?" "Just this, Professor. I had a little daydream, recently, and I want you to hear it. I dreamed about a group of teachers, scientists, and engineers, a group who were suddenly struck by an exciting, incredible idea. A group that worked in the quiet and secrecy of a University on a fantastic scheme to force the idea of peace into the minds of the world's big shots. Does my dream interest you, Professor?" "Go on." "Well, I dreamt that this group would secretly launch an earth satellite of their own, and arrange for the nose cone to come down safely at a certain time and place. They would install a marvelous electronic robot within the cone, ready to be assembled. They would beam a radio message to earth from the cone, seemingly as if it originated from their 'spaceship.' Then, when the Robot was assembled, they would speak through it to demand peace for all mankind ..." "Jerry, if you do this—" "You don't have to say it, Professor, I know what you're thinking. I'm a reporter, and my business is to tell the world everything I know. But if I did it, there might not be a world for me to write about, would there? No, thanks, Professor. As far as I'm concerned, what I told you was nothing more than a daydream." Jerry braked the convertible to a halt, and put his arm around Greta's shoulder. She looked up at the star-filled night, and sighed romantically. Jerry pointed. "That one." Greta shivered closer to him. "And to think what that terrible planet can do to us!" "Oh, I dunno. Venus is also the Goddess of Love." He swung his other arm around her, and Venus winked approvingly. THE END Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Amazing Science Fiction Stories October 1958. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note.

misogynistic and dismissive

lustful and manipulative

rueful and vexed

condescending and harsh

25086_TN2QYF3S_2

For what reason is Greta most angry at Jerry?

The saucer was interesting, but where was the delegate? The DELEGATE FROM VENUS By HENRY SLESAR ILLUSTRATOR NOVICK Everybody was waiting to see what the delegate from Venus looked like. And all they got for their patience was the biggest surprise since David clobbered Goliath. " Let me put it this way," Conners said paternally. "We expect a certain amount of decorum from our Washington news correspondents, and that's all I'm asking for." Jerry Bridges, sitting in the chair opposite his employer's desk, chewed on his knuckles and said nothing. One part of his mind wanted him to play it cagey, to behave the way the newspaper wanted him to behave, to protect the cozy Washington assignment he had waited four years to get. But another part of him, a rebel part, wanted him to stay on the trail of the story he felt sure was about to break. "I didn't mean to make trouble, Mr. Conners," he said casually. "It just seemed strange, all these exchanges of couriers in the past two days. I couldn't help thinking something was up." "Even if that's true, we'll hear about it through the usual channels," Conners frowned. "But getting a senator's secretary drunk to obtain information—well, that's not only indiscreet, Bridges. It's downright dirty." Jerry grinned. "I didn't take that kind of advantage, Mr. Conners. Not that she wasn't a toothsome little dish ..." "Just thank your lucky stars that it didn't go any further. And from now on—" He waggled a finger at him. "Watch your step." Jerry got up and ambled to the door. But he turned before leaving and said: "By the way. What do you think is going on?" "I haven't the faintest idea." "Don't kid me, Mr. Conners. Think it's war?" "That'll be all, Bridges." The reporter closed the door behind him, and then strolled out of the building into the sunlight. He met Ruskin, the fat little AP correspondent, in front of the Pan-American Building on Constitution Avenue. Ruskin was holding the newspaper that contained the gossip-column item which had started the whole affair, and he seemed more interested in the romantic rather than political implications. As he walked beside him, he said: "So what really happened, pal? That Greta babe really let down her hair?" "Where's your decorum?" Jerry growled. Ruskin giggled. "Boy, she's quite a dame, all right. I think they ought to get the Secret Service to guard her. She really fills out a size 10, don't she?" "Ruskin," Jerry said, "you have a low mind. For a week, this town has been acting like the 39 Steps , and all you can think about is dames. What's the matter with you? Where will you be when the big mushroom cloud comes?" "With Greta, I hope," Ruskin sighed. "What a way to get radioactive." They split off a few blocks later, and Jerry walked until he came to the Red Tape Bar & Grill, a favorite hangout of the local journalists. There were three other newsmen at the bar, and they gave him snickering greetings. He took a small table in the rear and ate his meal in sullen silence. It wasn't the newsmen's jibes that bothered him; it was the certainty that something of major importance was happening in the capitol. There had been hourly conferences at the White House, flying visits by State Department officials, mysterious conferences involving members of the Science Commission. So far, the byword had been secrecy. They knew that Senator Spocker, chairman of the Congressional Science Committee, had been involved in every meeting, but Senator Spocker was unavailable. His secretary, however, was a little more obliging ... Jerry looked up from his coffee and blinked when he saw who was coming through the door of the Bar & Grill. So did every other patron, but for different reasons. Greta Johnson had that effect upon men. Even the confining effect of a mannishly-tailored suit didn't hide her outrageously feminine qualities. She walked straight to his table, and he stood up. "They told me you might be here," she said, breathing hard. "I just wanted to thank you for last night." "Look, Greta—" Wham! Her hand, small and delicate, felt like a slab of lead when it slammed into his cheek. She left a bruise five fingers wide, and then turned and stalked out. He ran after her, the restaurant proprietor shouting about the unpaid bill. It took a rapid dog-trot to reach her side. "Greta, listen!" he panted. "You don't understand about last night. It wasn't the way that lousy columnist said—" She stopped in her tracks. "I wouldn't have minded so much if you'd gotten me drunk. But to use me, just to get a story—" "But I'm a reporter , damn it. It's my job. I'd do it again if I thought you knew anything." She was pouting now. "Well, how do you suppose I feel, knowing you're only interested in me because of the Senator? Anyway, I'll probably lose my job, and then you won't have any use for me." "Good-bye, Greta," Jerry said sadly. "What?" "Good-bye. I suppose you won't want to see me any more." "Did I say that?" "It just won't be any use. We'll always have this thing between us." She looked at him for a moment, and then touched his bruised cheek with a tender, motherly gesture. "Your poor face," she murmured, and then sighed. "Oh, well. I guess there's no use fighting it. Maybe if I did tell you what I know, we could act human again." "Greta!" "But if you print one word of it, Jerry Bridges, I'll never speak to you again!" "Honey," Jerry said, taking her arm, "you can trust me like a brother." "That's not the idea," Greta said stiffly. In a secluded booth at the rear of a restaurant unfrequented by newsmen, Greta leaned forward and said: "At first, they thought it was another sputnik." " Who did?" "The State Department, silly. They got reports from the observatories about another sputnik being launched by the Russians. Only the Russians denied it. Then there were joint meetings, and nobody could figure out what the damn thing was." "Wait a minute," Jerry said dizzily. "You mean to tell me there's another of those metal moons up there?" "But it's not a moon. That's the big point. It's a spaceship." "A what ?" "A spaceship," Greta said coolly, sipping lemonade. "They have been in contact with it now for about three days, and they're thinking of calling a plenary session of the UN just to figure out what to do about it. The only hitch is, Russia doesn't want to wait that long, and is asking for a hurry-up summit meeting to make a decision." "A decision about what?" "About the Venusians, of course." "Greta," Jerry said mildly, "I think you're still a little woozy from last night." "Don't be silly. The spaceship's from Venus; they've already established that. And the people on it—I guess they're people—want to know if they can land their delegate." "Their what?" "Their delegate. They came here for some kind of conference, I guess. They know about the UN and everything, and they want to take part. They say that with all the satellites being launched, that our affairs are their affairs, too. It's kind of confusing, but that's what they say." "You mean these Venusians speak English?" "And Russian. And French. And German. And everything I guess. They've been having radio talks with practically every country for the past three days. Like I say, they want to establish diplomatic relations or something. The Senator thinks that if we don't agree, they might do something drastic, like blow us all up. It's kind of scary." She shivered delicately. "You're taking it mighty calm," he said ironically. "Well, how else can I take it? I'm not even supposed to know about it, except that the Senator is so careless about—" She put her fingers to her lips. "Oh, dear, now you'll really think I'm terrible." "Terrible? I think you're wonderful!" "And you promise not to print it?" "Didn't I say I wouldn't?" "Y-e-s. But you know, you're a liar sometimes, Jerry. I've noticed that about you." The press secretary's secretary, a massive woman with gray hair and impervious to charm, guarded the portals of his office with all the indomitable will of the U. S. Marines. But Jerry Bridges tried. "You don't understand, Lana," he said. "I don't want to see Mr. Howells. I just want you to give him something." "My name's not Lana, and I can't deliver any messages." "But this is something he wants to see." He handed her an envelope, stamped URGENT. "Do it for me, Hedy. And I'll buy you the flashiest pair of diamond earrings in Washington." "Well," the woman said, thawing slightly. "I could deliver it with his next batch of mail." "When will that be?" "In an hour. He's in a terribly important meeting right now." "You've got some mail right there. Earrings and a bracelet to match." She looked at him with exasperation, and then gathered up a stack of memorandums and letters, his own envelope atop it. She came out of the press secretary's office two minutes later with Howells himself, and Howells said: "You there, Bridges. Come in here." "Yes, sir !" Jerry said, breezing by the waiting reporters with a grin of triumph. There were six men in the room, three in military uniform. Howells poked the envelope towards Jerry, and snapped: "This note of yours. Just what do you think it means?" "You know better than I do, Mr. Howells. I'm just doing my job; I think the public has a right to know about this spaceship that's flying around—" His words brought an exclamation from the others. Howells sighed, and said: "Mr. Bridges, you don't make it easy for us. It's our opinion that secrecy is essential, that leakage of the story might cause panic. Since you're the only unauthorized person who knows of it, we have two choices. One of them is to lock you up." Jerry swallowed hard. "The other is perhaps more practical," Howells said. "You'll be taken into our confidence, and allowed to accompany those officials who will be admitted to the landing site. But you will not be allowed to relay the story to the press until such a time as all correspondents are informed. That won't give you a 'scoop' if that's what you call it, but you'll be an eyewitness. That should be worth something." "It's worth a lot," Jerry said eagerly. "Thanks, Mr. Howells." "Don't thank me, I'm not doing you any personal favor. Now about the landing tonight—" "You mean the spaceship's coming down?" "Yes. A special foreign ministers conference was held this morning, and a decision was reached to accept the delegate. Landing instructions are being given at Los Alamos, and the ship will presumably land around midnight tonight. There will be a jet leaving Washington Airport at nine, and you'll be on it. Meanwhile, consider yourself in custody." The USAF jet transport wasn't the only secrecy-shrouded aircraft that took off that evening from Washington Airport. But Jerry Bridges, sitting in the rear seat flanked by two Sphinx-like Secret Service men, knew that he was the only passenger with non-official status aboard. It was only a few minutes past ten when they arrived at the air base at Los Alamos. The desert sky was cloudy and starless, and powerful searchlights probed the thick cumulus. There were sleek, purring black autos waiting to rush the air passengers to some unnamed destination. They drove for twenty minutes across a flat ribbon of desert road, until Jerry sighted what appeared to be a circle of newly-erected lights in the middle of nowhere. On the perimeter, official vehicles were parked in orderly rows, and four USAF trailer trucks were in evidence, their radarscopes turning slowly. There was activity everywhere, but it was well-ordered and unhurried. They had done a good job of keeping the excitement contained. He was allowed to leave the car and stroll unescorted. He tried to talk to some of the scurrying officials, but to no avail. Finally, he contented himself by sitting on the sand, his back against the grill of a staff car, smoking one cigarette after another. As the minutes ticked off, the activity became more frenetic around him. Then the pace slowed, and he knew the appointed moment was approaching. Stillness returned to the desert, and tension was a tangible substance in the night air. The radarscopes spun slowly. The searchlights converged in an intricate pattern. Then the clouds seemed to part! "Here she comes!" a voice shouted. And in a moment, the calm was shattered. At first, he saw nothing. A faint roar was started in the heavens, and it became a growl that increased in volume until even the shouting voices could no longer be heard. Then the crisscrossing lights struck metal, glancing off the gleaming body of a descending object. Larger and larger the object grew, until it assumed the definable shape of a squat silver funnel, falling in a perfect straight line towards the center of the light-ringed area. When it hit, a dust cloud obscured it from sight. A loudspeaker blared out an unintelligible order, but its message was clear. No one moved from their position. Finally, a three-man team, asbestos-clad, lead-shielded, stepped out from the ring of spectators. They carried geiger counters on long poles before them. Jerry held his breath as they approached the object; only when they were yards away did he appreciate its size. It wasn't large; not more than fifteen feet in total circumference. One of the three men waved a gloved hand. "It's okay," a voice breathed behind him. "No radiation ..." Slowly, the ring of spectators closed tighter. They were twenty yards from the ship when the voice spoke to them. "Greetings from Venus," it said, and then repeated the phrase in six languages. "The ship you see is a Venusian Class 7 interplanetary rocket, built for one-passenger. It is clear of all radiation, and is perfectly safe to approach. There is a hatch which may be opened by an automatic lever in the side. Please open this hatch and remove the passenger." An Air Force General whom Jerry couldn't identify stepped forward. He circled the ship warily, and then said something to the others. They came closer, and he touched a small lever on the silvery surface of the funnel. A door slid open. "It's a box!" someone said. "A crate—" "Colligan! Moore! Schaffer! Lend a hand here—" A trio came forward and hoisted the crate out of the ship. Then the voice spoke again; Jerry deduced that it must have been activated by the decreased load of the ship. "Please open the crate. You will find our delegate within. We trust you will treat him with the courtesy of an official emissary." They set to work on the crate, its gray plastic material giving in readily to the application of their tools. But when it was opened, they stood aside in amazement and consternation. There were a variety of metal pieces packed within, protected by a filmy packing material. "Wait a minute," the general said. "Here's a book—" He picked up a gray-bound volume, and opened its cover. "'Instructions for assembling Delegate,'" he read aloud. "'First, remove all parts and arrange them in the following order. A-1, central nervous system housing. A-2 ...'" He looked up. "It's an instruction book," he whispered. "We're supposed to build the damn thing." The Delegate, a handsomely constructed robot almost eight feet tall, was pieced together some three hours later, by a team of scientists and engineers who seemed to find the Venusian instructions as elementary as a blueprint in an Erector set. But simple as the job was, they were obviously impressed by the mechanism they had assembled. It stood impassive until they obeyed the final instruction. "Press Button K ..." They found button K, and pressed it. The robot bowed. "Thank you, gentlemen," it said, in sweet, unmetallic accents. "Now if you will please escort me to the meeting place ..." It wasn't until three days after the landing that Jerry Bridges saw the Delegate again. Along with a dozen assorted government officials, Army officers, and scientists, he was quartered in a quonset hut in Fort Dix, New Jersey. Then, after seventy-two frustrating hours, he was escorted by Marine guard into New York City. No one told him his destination, and it wasn't until he saw the bright strips of light across the face of the United Nations building that he knew where the meeting was to be held. But his greatest surprise was yet to come. The vast auditorium which housed the general assembly was filled to its capacity, but there were new faces behind the plaques which designated the member nations. He couldn't believe his eyes at first, but as the meeting got under way, he knew that it was true. The highest echelons of the world's governments were represented, even—Jerry gulped at the realization—Nikita Khrushchev himself. It was a summit meeting such as he had never dreamed possible, a summit meeting without benefit of long foreign minister's debate. And the cause of it all, a placid, highly-polished metal robot, was seated blithely at a desk which bore the designation: VENUS. The robot delegate stood up. "Gentlemen," it said into the microphone, and the great men at the council tables strained to hear the translator's version through their headphones, "Gentlemen, I thank you for your prompt attention. I come as a Delegate from a great neighbor planet, in the interests of peace and progress for all the solar system. I come in the belief that peace is the responsibility of individuals, of nations, and now of worlds, and that each is dependent upon the other. I speak to you now through the electronic instrumentation which has been created for me, and I come to offer your planet not merely a threat, a promise, or an easy solution—but a challenge." The council room stirred. "Your earth satellites have been viewed with interest by the astronomers of our world, and we foresee the day when contact between our planets will be commonplace. As for ourselves, we have hitherto had little desire to explore beyond our realm, being far too occupied with internal matters. But our isolation cannot last in the face of your progress, so we believe that we must take part in your affairs. "Here, then, is our challenge. Continue your struggle of ideas, compete with each other for the minds of men, fight your bloodless battles, if you know no other means to attain progress. But do all this without unleashing the terrible forces of power now at your command. Once unleashed, these forces may or may not destroy all that you have gained. But we, the scientists of Venus, promise you this—that on the very day your conflict deteriorates into heedless violence, we will not stand by and let the ugly contagion spread. On that day, we of Venus will act swiftly, mercilessly, and relentlessly—to destroy your world completely." Again, the meeting room exploded in a babble of languages. "The vessel which brought me here came as a messenger of peace. But envision it, men of Earth, as a messenger of war. Unstoppable, inexorable, it may return, bearing a different Delegate from Venus—a Delegate of Death, who speaks not in words, but in the explosion of atoms. Think of thousands of such Delegates, fired from a vantage point far beyond the reach of your retaliation. This is the promise and the challenge that will hang in your night sky from this moment forward. Look at the planet Venus, men of Earth, and see a Goddess of Vengeance, poised to wreak its wrath upon those who betray the peace." The Delegate sat down. Four days later, a mysterious explosion rocked the quiet sands of Los Alamos, and the Venus spacecraft was no more. Two hours after that, the robot delegate, its message delivered, its mission fulfilled, requested to be locked inside a bombproof chamber. When the door was opened, the Delegate was an exploded ruin. The news flashed with lightning speed over the world, and Jerry Bridges' eyewitness accounts of the incredible event was syndicated throughout the nation. But his sudden celebrity left him vaguely unsatisfied. He tried to explain his feeling to Greta on his first night back in Washington. They were in his apartment, and it was the first time Greta had consented to pay him the visit. "Well, what's bothering you?" Greta pouted. "You've had the biggest story of the year under your byline. I should think you'd be tickled pink." "It's not that," Jerry said moodily. "But ever since I heard the Delegate speak, something's been nagging me." "But don't you think he's done good? Don't you think they'll be impressed by what he said?" "I'm not worried about that. I think that damn robot did more for peace than anything that's ever come along in this cockeyed world. But still ..." Greta snuggled up to him on the sofa. "You worry too much. Don't you ever think of anything else? You should learn to relax. It can be fun." She started to prove it to him, and Jerry responded the way a normal, healthy male usually does. But in the middle of an embrace, he cried out: "Wait a minute!" "What's the matter?" "I just thought of something! Now where the hell did I put my old notebooks?" He got up from the sofa and went scurrying to a closet. From a debris of cardboard boxes, he found a worn old leather brief case, and cackled with delight when he found the yellowed notebooks inside. "What are they?" Greta said. "My old school notebooks. Greta, you'll have to excuse me. But there's something I've got to do, right away!" "That's all right with me," Greta said haughtily. "I know when I'm not wanted." She took her hat and coat from the hall closet, gave him one last chance to change his mind, and then left. Five minutes later, Jerry Bridges was calling the airlines. It had been eleven years since Jerry had walked across the campus of Clifton University, heading for the ivy-choked main building. It was remarkable how little had changed, but the students seemed incredibly young. He was winded by the time he asked the pretty girl at the desk where Professor Martin Coltz could be located. "Professor Coltz?" She stuck a pencil to her mouth. "Well, I guess he'd be in the Holland Laboratory about now." "Holland Laboratory? What's that?" "Oh, I guess that was after your time, wasn't it?" Jerry felt decrepit, but managed to say: "It must be something new since I was here. Where is this place?" He followed her directions, and located a fresh-painted building three hundred yards from the men's dorm. He met a student at the door, who told him that Professor Coltz would be found in the physics department. The room was empty when Jerry entered, except for the single stooped figure vigorously erasing a blackboard. He turned when the door opened. If the students looked younger, Professor Coltz was far older than Jerry remembered. He was a tall man, with an unruly confusion of straight gray hair. He blinked when Jerry said: "Hello, Professor. Do you remember me? Jerry Bridges?" "Of course! I thought of you only yesterday, when I saw your name in the papers—" They sat at facing student desks, and chatted about old times. But Jerry was impatient to get to the point of his visit, and he blurted out: "Professor Coltz, something's been bothering me. It bothered me from the moment I heard the Delegate speak. I didn't know what it was until last night, when I dug out my old college notebooks. Thank God I kept them." Coltz's eyes were suddenly hooded. "What do you mean, Jerry?" "There was something about the Robot's speech that sounded familiar—I could have sworn I'd heard some of the words before. I couldn't prove anything until I checked my old notes, and here's what I found." He dug into his coat pocket and produced a sheet of paper. He unfolded it and read aloud. "'It's my belief that peace is the responsibility of individuals, of nations, and someday, even of worlds ...' Sound familiar, Professor?" Coltz shifted uncomfortably. "I don't recall every silly thing I said, Jerry." "But it's an interesting coincidence, isn't it, Professor? These very words were spoken by the Delegate from Venus." "A coincidence—" "Is it? But I also remember your interest in robotics. I'll never forget that mechanical homing pigeon you constructed. And you've probably learned much more these past eleven years." "What are you driving at, Jerry?" "Just this, Professor. I had a little daydream, recently, and I want you to hear it. I dreamed about a group of teachers, scientists, and engineers, a group who were suddenly struck by an exciting, incredible idea. A group that worked in the quiet and secrecy of a University on a fantastic scheme to force the idea of peace into the minds of the world's big shots. Does my dream interest you, Professor?" "Go on." "Well, I dreamt that this group would secretly launch an earth satellite of their own, and arrange for the nose cone to come down safely at a certain time and place. They would install a marvelous electronic robot within the cone, ready to be assembled. They would beam a radio message to earth from the cone, seemingly as if it originated from their 'spaceship.' Then, when the Robot was assembled, they would speak through it to demand peace for all mankind ..." "Jerry, if you do this—" "You don't have to say it, Professor, I know what you're thinking. I'm a reporter, and my business is to tell the world everything I know. But if I did it, there might not be a world for me to write about, would there? No, thanks, Professor. As far as I'm concerned, what I told you was nothing more than a daydream." Jerry braked the convertible to a halt, and put his arm around Greta's shoulder. She looked up at the star-filled night, and sighed romantically. Jerry pointed. "That one." Greta shivered closer to him. "And to think what that terrible planet can do to us!" "Oh, I dunno. Venus is also the Goddess of Love." He swung his other arm around her, and Venus winked approvingly. THE END Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Amazing Science Fiction Stories October 1958. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note.

He stole her source and took credit for her 'scoop'

He feigned attraction to get valuable information

He talked negatively about her to her colleagues

He convinced her to get too intoxicated

25086_TN2QYF3S_3

What is the most surprising detail about the Venusian delegate?

The saucer was interesting, but where was the delegate? The DELEGATE FROM VENUS By HENRY SLESAR ILLUSTRATOR NOVICK Everybody was waiting to see what the delegate from Venus looked like. And all they got for their patience was the biggest surprise since David clobbered Goliath. " Let me put it this way," Conners said paternally. "We expect a certain amount of decorum from our Washington news correspondents, and that's all I'm asking for." Jerry Bridges, sitting in the chair opposite his employer's desk, chewed on his knuckles and said nothing. One part of his mind wanted him to play it cagey, to behave the way the newspaper wanted him to behave, to protect the cozy Washington assignment he had waited four years to get. But another part of him, a rebel part, wanted him to stay on the trail of the story he felt sure was about to break. "I didn't mean to make trouble, Mr. Conners," he said casually. "It just seemed strange, all these exchanges of couriers in the past two days. I couldn't help thinking something was up." "Even if that's true, we'll hear about it through the usual channels," Conners frowned. "But getting a senator's secretary drunk to obtain information—well, that's not only indiscreet, Bridges. It's downright dirty." Jerry grinned. "I didn't take that kind of advantage, Mr. Conners. Not that she wasn't a toothsome little dish ..." "Just thank your lucky stars that it didn't go any further. And from now on—" He waggled a finger at him. "Watch your step." Jerry got up and ambled to the door. But he turned before leaving and said: "By the way. What do you think is going on?" "I haven't the faintest idea." "Don't kid me, Mr. Conners. Think it's war?" "That'll be all, Bridges." The reporter closed the door behind him, and then strolled out of the building into the sunlight. He met Ruskin, the fat little AP correspondent, in front of the Pan-American Building on Constitution Avenue. Ruskin was holding the newspaper that contained the gossip-column item which had started the whole affair, and he seemed more interested in the romantic rather than political implications. As he walked beside him, he said: "So what really happened, pal? That Greta babe really let down her hair?" "Where's your decorum?" Jerry growled. Ruskin giggled. "Boy, she's quite a dame, all right. I think they ought to get the Secret Service to guard her. She really fills out a size 10, don't she?" "Ruskin," Jerry said, "you have a low mind. For a week, this town has been acting like the 39 Steps , and all you can think about is dames. What's the matter with you? Where will you be when the big mushroom cloud comes?" "With Greta, I hope," Ruskin sighed. "What a way to get radioactive." They split off a few blocks later, and Jerry walked until he came to the Red Tape Bar & Grill, a favorite hangout of the local journalists. There were three other newsmen at the bar, and they gave him snickering greetings. He took a small table in the rear and ate his meal in sullen silence. It wasn't the newsmen's jibes that bothered him; it was the certainty that something of major importance was happening in the capitol. There had been hourly conferences at the White House, flying visits by State Department officials, mysterious conferences involving members of the Science Commission. So far, the byword had been secrecy. They knew that Senator Spocker, chairman of the Congressional Science Committee, had been involved in every meeting, but Senator Spocker was unavailable. His secretary, however, was a little more obliging ... Jerry looked up from his coffee and blinked when he saw who was coming through the door of the Bar & Grill. So did every other patron, but for different reasons. Greta Johnson had that effect upon men. Even the confining effect of a mannishly-tailored suit didn't hide her outrageously feminine qualities. She walked straight to his table, and he stood up. "They told me you might be here," she said, breathing hard. "I just wanted to thank you for last night." "Look, Greta—" Wham! Her hand, small and delicate, felt like a slab of lead when it slammed into his cheek. She left a bruise five fingers wide, and then turned and stalked out. He ran after her, the restaurant proprietor shouting about the unpaid bill. It took a rapid dog-trot to reach her side. "Greta, listen!" he panted. "You don't understand about last night. It wasn't the way that lousy columnist said—" She stopped in her tracks. "I wouldn't have minded so much if you'd gotten me drunk. But to use me, just to get a story—" "But I'm a reporter , damn it. It's my job. I'd do it again if I thought you knew anything." She was pouting now. "Well, how do you suppose I feel, knowing you're only interested in me because of the Senator? Anyway, I'll probably lose my job, and then you won't have any use for me." "Good-bye, Greta," Jerry said sadly. "What?" "Good-bye. I suppose you won't want to see me any more." "Did I say that?" "It just won't be any use. We'll always have this thing between us." She looked at him for a moment, and then touched his bruised cheek with a tender, motherly gesture. "Your poor face," she murmured, and then sighed. "Oh, well. I guess there's no use fighting it. Maybe if I did tell you what I know, we could act human again." "Greta!" "But if you print one word of it, Jerry Bridges, I'll never speak to you again!" "Honey," Jerry said, taking her arm, "you can trust me like a brother." "That's not the idea," Greta said stiffly. In a secluded booth at the rear of a restaurant unfrequented by newsmen, Greta leaned forward and said: "At first, they thought it was another sputnik." " Who did?" "The State Department, silly. They got reports from the observatories about another sputnik being launched by the Russians. Only the Russians denied it. Then there were joint meetings, and nobody could figure out what the damn thing was." "Wait a minute," Jerry said dizzily. "You mean to tell me there's another of those metal moons up there?" "But it's not a moon. That's the big point. It's a spaceship." "A what ?" "A spaceship," Greta said coolly, sipping lemonade. "They have been in contact with it now for about three days, and they're thinking of calling a plenary session of the UN just to figure out what to do about it. The only hitch is, Russia doesn't want to wait that long, and is asking for a hurry-up summit meeting to make a decision." "A decision about what?" "About the Venusians, of course." "Greta," Jerry said mildly, "I think you're still a little woozy from last night." "Don't be silly. The spaceship's from Venus; they've already established that. And the people on it—I guess they're people—want to know if they can land their delegate." "Their what?" "Their delegate. They came here for some kind of conference, I guess. They know about the UN and everything, and they want to take part. They say that with all the satellites being launched, that our affairs are their affairs, too. It's kind of confusing, but that's what they say." "You mean these Venusians speak English?" "And Russian. And French. And German. And everything I guess. They've been having radio talks with practically every country for the past three days. Like I say, they want to establish diplomatic relations or something. The Senator thinks that if we don't agree, they might do something drastic, like blow us all up. It's kind of scary." She shivered delicately. "You're taking it mighty calm," he said ironically. "Well, how else can I take it? I'm not even supposed to know about it, except that the Senator is so careless about—" She put her fingers to her lips. "Oh, dear, now you'll really think I'm terrible." "Terrible? I think you're wonderful!" "And you promise not to print it?" "Didn't I say I wouldn't?" "Y-e-s. But you know, you're a liar sometimes, Jerry. I've noticed that about you." The press secretary's secretary, a massive woman with gray hair and impervious to charm, guarded the portals of his office with all the indomitable will of the U. S. Marines. But Jerry Bridges tried. "You don't understand, Lana," he said. "I don't want to see Mr. Howells. I just want you to give him something." "My name's not Lana, and I can't deliver any messages." "But this is something he wants to see." He handed her an envelope, stamped URGENT. "Do it for me, Hedy. And I'll buy you the flashiest pair of diamond earrings in Washington." "Well," the woman said, thawing slightly. "I could deliver it with his next batch of mail." "When will that be?" "In an hour. He's in a terribly important meeting right now." "You've got some mail right there. Earrings and a bracelet to match." She looked at him with exasperation, and then gathered up a stack of memorandums and letters, his own envelope atop it. She came out of the press secretary's office two minutes later with Howells himself, and Howells said: "You there, Bridges. Come in here." "Yes, sir !" Jerry said, breezing by the waiting reporters with a grin of triumph. There were six men in the room, three in military uniform. Howells poked the envelope towards Jerry, and snapped: "This note of yours. Just what do you think it means?" "You know better than I do, Mr. Howells. I'm just doing my job; I think the public has a right to know about this spaceship that's flying around—" His words brought an exclamation from the others. Howells sighed, and said: "Mr. Bridges, you don't make it easy for us. It's our opinion that secrecy is essential, that leakage of the story might cause panic. Since you're the only unauthorized person who knows of it, we have two choices. One of them is to lock you up." Jerry swallowed hard. "The other is perhaps more practical," Howells said. "You'll be taken into our confidence, and allowed to accompany those officials who will be admitted to the landing site. But you will not be allowed to relay the story to the press until such a time as all correspondents are informed. That won't give you a 'scoop' if that's what you call it, but you'll be an eyewitness. That should be worth something." "It's worth a lot," Jerry said eagerly. "Thanks, Mr. Howells." "Don't thank me, I'm not doing you any personal favor. Now about the landing tonight—" "You mean the spaceship's coming down?" "Yes. A special foreign ministers conference was held this morning, and a decision was reached to accept the delegate. Landing instructions are being given at Los Alamos, and the ship will presumably land around midnight tonight. There will be a jet leaving Washington Airport at nine, and you'll be on it. Meanwhile, consider yourself in custody." The USAF jet transport wasn't the only secrecy-shrouded aircraft that took off that evening from Washington Airport. But Jerry Bridges, sitting in the rear seat flanked by two Sphinx-like Secret Service men, knew that he was the only passenger with non-official status aboard. It was only a few minutes past ten when they arrived at the air base at Los Alamos. The desert sky was cloudy and starless, and powerful searchlights probed the thick cumulus. There were sleek, purring black autos waiting to rush the air passengers to some unnamed destination. They drove for twenty minutes across a flat ribbon of desert road, until Jerry sighted what appeared to be a circle of newly-erected lights in the middle of nowhere. On the perimeter, official vehicles were parked in orderly rows, and four USAF trailer trucks were in evidence, their radarscopes turning slowly. There was activity everywhere, but it was well-ordered and unhurried. They had done a good job of keeping the excitement contained. He was allowed to leave the car and stroll unescorted. He tried to talk to some of the scurrying officials, but to no avail. Finally, he contented himself by sitting on the sand, his back against the grill of a staff car, smoking one cigarette after another. As the minutes ticked off, the activity became more frenetic around him. Then the pace slowed, and he knew the appointed moment was approaching. Stillness returned to the desert, and tension was a tangible substance in the night air. The radarscopes spun slowly. The searchlights converged in an intricate pattern. Then the clouds seemed to part! "Here she comes!" a voice shouted. And in a moment, the calm was shattered. At first, he saw nothing. A faint roar was started in the heavens, and it became a growl that increased in volume until even the shouting voices could no longer be heard. Then the crisscrossing lights struck metal, glancing off the gleaming body of a descending object. Larger and larger the object grew, until it assumed the definable shape of a squat silver funnel, falling in a perfect straight line towards the center of the light-ringed area. When it hit, a dust cloud obscured it from sight. A loudspeaker blared out an unintelligible order, but its message was clear. No one moved from their position. Finally, a three-man team, asbestos-clad, lead-shielded, stepped out from the ring of spectators. They carried geiger counters on long poles before them. Jerry held his breath as they approached the object; only when they were yards away did he appreciate its size. It wasn't large; not more than fifteen feet in total circumference. One of the three men waved a gloved hand. "It's okay," a voice breathed behind him. "No radiation ..." Slowly, the ring of spectators closed tighter. They were twenty yards from the ship when the voice spoke to them. "Greetings from Venus," it said, and then repeated the phrase in six languages. "The ship you see is a Venusian Class 7 interplanetary rocket, built for one-passenger. It is clear of all radiation, and is perfectly safe to approach. There is a hatch which may be opened by an automatic lever in the side. Please open this hatch and remove the passenger." An Air Force General whom Jerry couldn't identify stepped forward. He circled the ship warily, and then said something to the others. They came closer, and he touched a small lever on the silvery surface of the funnel. A door slid open. "It's a box!" someone said. "A crate—" "Colligan! Moore! Schaffer! Lend a hand here—" A trio came forward and hoisted the crate out of the ship. Then the voice spoke again; Jerry deduced that it must have been activated by the decreased load of the ship. "Please open the crate. You will find our delegate within. We trust you will treat him with the courtesy of an official emissary." They set to work on the crate, its gray plastic material giving in readily to the application of their tools. But when it was opened, they stood aside in amazement and consternation. There were a variety of metal pieces packed within, protected by a filmy packing material. "Wait a minute," the general said. "Here's a book—" He picked up a gray-bound volume, and opened its cover. "'Instructions for assembling Delegate,'" he read aloud. "'First, remove all parts and arrange them in the following order. A-1, central nervous system housing. A-2 ...'" He looked up. "It's an instruction book," he whispered. "We're supposed to build the damn thing." The Delegate, a handsomely constructed robot almost eight feet tall, was pieced together some three hours later, by a team of scientists and engineers who seemed to find the Venusian instructions as elementary as a blueprint in an Erector set. But simple as the job was, they were obviously impressed by the mechanism they had assembled. It stood impassive until they obeyed the final instruction. "Press Button K ..." They found button K, and pressed it. The robot bowed. "Thank you, gentlemen," it said, in sweet, unmetallic accents. "Now if you will please escort me to the meeting place ..." It wasn't until three days after the landing that Jerry Bridges saw the Delegate again. Along with a dozen assorted government officials, Army officers, and scientists, he was quartered in a quonset hut in Fort Dix, New Jersey. Then, after seventy-two frustrating hours, he was escorted by Marine guard into New York City. No one told him his destination, and it wasn't until he saw the bright strips of light across the face of the United Nations building that he knew where the meeting was to be held. But his greatest surprise was yet to come. The vast auditorium which housed the general assembly was filled to its capacity, but there were new faces behind the plaques which designated the member nations. He couldn't believe his eyes at first, but as the meeting got under way, he knew that it was true. The highest echelons of the world's governments were represented, even—Jerry gulped at the realization—Nikita Khrushchev himself. It was a summit meeting such as he had never dreamed possible, a summit meeting without benefit of long foreign minister's debate. And the cause of it all, a placid, highly-polished metal robot, was seated blithely at a desk which bore the designation: VENUS. The robot delegate stood up. "Gentlemen," it said into the microphone, and the great men at the council tables strained to hear the translator's version through their headphones, "Gentlemen, I thank you for your prompt attention. I come as a Delegate from a great neighbor planet, in the interests of peace and progress for all the solar system. I come in the belief that peace is the responsibility of individuals, of nations, and now of worlds, and that each is dependent upon the other. I speak to you now through the electronic instrumentation which has been created for me, and I come to offer your planet not merely a threat, a promise, or an easy solution—but a challenge." The council room stirred. "Your earth satellites have been viewed with interest by the astronomers of our world, and we foresee the day when contact between our planets will be commonplace. As for ourselves, we have hitherto had little desire to explore beyond our realm, being far too occupied with internal matters. But our isolation cannot last in the face of your progress, so we believe that we must take part in your affairs. "Here, then, is our challenge. Continue your struggle of ideas, compete with each other for the minds of men, fight your bloodless battles, if you know no other means to attain progress. But do all this without unleashing the terrible forces of power now at your command. Once unleashed, these forces may or may not destroy all that you have gained. But we, the scientists of Venus, promise you this—that on the very day your conflict deteriorates into heedless violence, we will not stand by and let the ugly contagion spread. On that day, we of Venus will act swiftly, mercilessly, and relentlessly—to destroy your world completely." Again, the meeting room exploded in a babble of languages. "The vessel which brought me here came as a messenger of peace. But envision it, men of Earth, as a messenger of war. Unstoppable, inexorable, it may return, bearing a different Delegate from Venus—a Delegate of Death, who speaks not in words, but in the explosion of atoms. Think of thousands of such Delegates, fired from a vantage point far beyond the reach of your retaliation. This is the promise and the challenge that will hang in your night sky from this moment forward. Look at the planet Venus, men of Earth, and see a Goddess of Vengeance, poised to wreak its wrath upon those who betray the peace." The Delegate sat down. Four days later, a mysterious explosion rocked the quiet sands of Los Alamos, and the Venus spacecraft was no more. Two hours after that, the robot delegate, its message delivered, its mission fulfilled, requested to be locked inside a bombproof chamber. When the door was opened, the Delegate was an exploded ruin. The news flashed with lightning speed over the world, and Jerry Bridges' eyewitness accounts of the incredible event was syndicated throughout the nation. But his sudden celebrity left him vaguely unsatisfied. He tried to explain his feeling to Greta on his first night back in Washington. They were in his apartment, and it was the first time Greta had consented to pay him the visit. "Well, what's bothering you?" Greta pouted. "You've had the biggest story of the year under your byline. I should think you'd be tickled pink." "It's not that," Jerry said moodily. "But ever since I heard the Delegate speak, something's been nagging me." "But don't you think he's done good? Don't you think they'll be impressed by what he said?" "I'm not worried about that. I think that damn robot did more for peace than anything that's ever come along in this cockeyed world. But still ..." Greta snuggled up to him on the sofa. "You worry too much. Don't you ever think of anything else? You should learn to relax. It can be fun." She started to prove it to him, and Jerry responded the way a normal, healthy male usually does. But in the middle of an embrace, he cried out: "Wait a minute!" "What's the matter?" "I just thought of something! Now where the hell did I put my old notebooks?" He got up from the sofa and went scurrying to a closet. From a debris of cardboard boxes, he found a worn old leather brief case, and cackled with delight when he found the yellowed notebooks inside. "What are they?" Greta said. "My old school notebooks. Greta, you'll have to excuse me. But there's something I've got to do, right away!" "That's all right with me," Greta said haughtily. "I know when I'm not wanted." She took her hat and coat from the hall closet, gave him one last chance to change his mind, and then left. Five minutes later, Jerry Bridges was calling the airlines. It had been eleven years since Jerry had walked across the campus of Clifton University, heading for the ivy-choked main building. It was remarkable how little had changed, but the students seemed incredibly young. He was winded by the time he asked the pretty girl at the desk where Professor Martin Coltz could be located. "Professor Coltz?" She stuck a pencil to her mouth. "Well, I guess he'd be in the Holland Laboratory about now." "Holland Laboratory? What's that?" "Oh, I guess that was after your time, wasn't it?" Jerry felt decrepit, but managed to say: "It must be something new since I was here. Where is this place?" He followed her directions, and located a fresh-painted building three hundred yards from the men's dorm. He met a student at the door, who told him that Professor Coltz would be found in the physics department. The room was empty when Jerry entered, except for the single stooped figure vigorously erasing a blackboard. He turned when the door opened. If the students looked younger, Professor Coltz was far older than Jerry remembered. He was a tall man, with an unruly confusion of straight gray hair. He blinked when Jerry said: "Hello, Professor. Do you remember me? Jerry Bridges?" "Of course! I thought of you only yesterday, when I saw your name in the papers—" They sat at facing student desks, and chatted about old times. But Jerry was impatient to get to the point of his visit, and he blurted out: "Professor Coltz, something's been bothering me. It bothered me from the moment I heard the Delegate speak. I didn't know what it was until last night, when I dug out my old college notebooks. Thank God I kept them." Coltz's eyes were suddenly hooded. "What do you mean, Jerry?" "There was something about the Robot's speech that sounded familiar—I could have sworn I'd heard some of the words before. I couldn't prove anything until I checked my old notes, and here's what I found." He dug into his coat pocket and produced a sheet of paper. He unfolded it and read aloud. "'It's my belief that peace is the responsibility of individuals, of nations, and someday, even of worlds ...' Sound familiar, Professor?" Coltz shifted uncomfortably. "I don't recall every silly thing I said, Jerry." "But it's an interesting coincidence, isn't it, Professor? These very words were spoken by the Delegate from Venus." "A coincidence—" "Is it? But I also remember your interest in robotics. I'll never forget that mechanical homing pigeon you constructed. And you've probably learned much more these past eleven years." "What are you driving at, Jerry?" "Just this, Professor. I had a little daydream, recently, and I want you to hear it. I dreamed about a group of teachers, scientists, and engineers, a group who were suddenly struck by an exciting, incredible idea. A group that worked in the quiet and secrecy of a University on a fantastic scheme to force the idea of peace into the minds of the world's big shots. Does my dream interest you, Professor?" "Go on." "Well, I dreamt that this group would secretly launch an earth satellite of their own, and arrange for the nose cone to come down safely at a certain time and place. They would install a marvelous electronic robot within the cone, ready to be assembled. They would beam a radio message to earth from the cone, seemingly as if it originated from their 'spaceship.' Then, when the Robot was assembled, they would speak through it to demand peace for all mankind ..." "Jerry, if you do this—" "You don't have to say it, Professor, I know what you're thinking. I'm a reporter, and my business is to tell the world everything I know. But if I did it, there might not be a world for me to write about, would there? No, thanks, Professor. As far as I'm concerned, what I told you was nothing more than a daydream." Jerry braked the convertible to a halt, and put his arm around Greta's shoulder. She looked up at the star-filled night, and sighed romantically. Jerry pointed. "That one." Greta shivered closer to him. "And to think what that terrible planet can do to us!" "Oh, I dunno. Venus is also the Goddess of Love." He swung his other arm around her, and Venus winked approvingly. THE END Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Amazing Science Fiction Stories October 1958. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note.

She is very tall for a female

It must be assembled according to instructions

He was once an inhabitant of Earth

It self-destructs after a certain time period has passed

25086_TN2QYF3S_4

The Venusian delegate's message to humans on Earth is best characterized as a:

The saucer was interesting, but where was the delegate? The DELEGATE FROM VENUS By HENRY SLESAR ILLUSTRATOR NOVICK Everybody was waiting to see what the delegate from Venus looked like. And all they got for their patience was the biggest surprise since David clobbered Goliath. " Let me put it this way," Conners said paternally. "We expect a certain amount of decorum from our Washington news correspondents, and that's all I'm asking for." Jerry Bridges, sitting in the chair opposite his employer's desk, chewed on his knuckles and said nothing. One part of his mind wanted him to play it cagey, to behave the way the newspaper wanted him to behave, to protect the cozy Washington assignment he had waited four years to get. But another part of him, a rebel part, wanted him to stay on the trail of the story he felt sure was about to break. "I didn't mean to make trouble, Mr. Conners," he said casually. "It just seemed strange, all these exchanges of couriers in the past two days. I couldn't help thinking something was up." "Even if that's true, we'll hear about it through the usual channels," Conners frowned. "But getting a senator's secretary drunk to obtain information—well, that's not only indiscreet, Bridges. It's downright dirty." Jerry grinned. "I didn't take that kind of advantage, Mr. Conners. Not that she wasn't a toothsome little dish ..." "Just thank your lucky stars that it didn't go any further. And from now on—" He waggled a finger at him. "Watch your step." Jerry got up and ambled to the door. But he turned before leaving and said: "By the way. What do you think is going on?" "I haven't the faintest idea." "Don't kid me, Mr. Conners. Think it's war?" "That'll be all, Bridges." The reporter closed the door behind him, and then strolled out of the building into the sunlight. He met Ruskin, the fat little AP correspondent, in front of the Pan-American Building on Constitution Avenue. Ruskin was holding the newspaper that contained the gossip-column item which had started the whole affair, and he seemed more interested in the romantic rather than political implications. As he walked beside him, he said: "So what really happened, pal? That Greta babe really let down her hair?" "Where's your decorum?" Jerry growled. Ruskin giggled. "Boy, she's quite a dame, all right. I think they ought to get the Secret Service to guard her. She really fills out a size 10, don't she?" "Ruskin," Jerry said, "you have a low mind. For a week, this town has been acting like the 39 Steps , and all you can think about is dames. What's the matter with you? Where will you be when the big mushroom cloud comes?" "With Greta, I hope," Ruskin sighed. "What a way to get radioactive." They split off a few blocks later, and Jerry walked until he came to the Red Tape Bar & Grill, a favorite hangout of the local journalists. There were three other newsmen at the bar, and they gave him snickering greetings. He took a small table in the rear and ate his meal in sullen silence. It wasn't the newsmen's jibes that bothered him; it was the certainty that something of major importance was happening in the capitol. There had been hourly conferences at the White House, flying visits by State Department officials, mysterious conferences involving members of the Science Commission. So far, the byword had been secrecy. They knew that Senator Spocker, chairman of the Congressional Science Committee, had been involved in every meeting, but Senator Spocker was unavailable. His secretary, however, was a little more obliging ... Jerry looked up from his coffee and blinked when he saw who was coming through the door of the Bar & Grill. So did every other patron, but for different reasons. Greta Johnson had that effect upon men. Even the confining effect of a mannishly-tailored suit didn't hide her outrageously feminine qualities. She walked straight to his table, and he stood up. "They told me you might be here," she said, breathing hard. "I just wanted to thank you for last night." "Look, Greta—" Wham! Her hand, small and delicate, felt like a slab of lead when it slammed into his cheek. She left a bruise five fingers wide, and then turned and stalked out. He ran after her, the restaurant proprietor shouting about the unpaid bill. It took a rapid dog-trot to reach her side. "Greta, listen!" he panted. "You don't understand about last night. It wasn't the way that lousy columnist said—" She stopped in her tracks. "I wouldn't have minded so much if you'd gotten me drunk. But to use me, just to get a story—" "But I'm a reporter , damn it. It's my job. I'd do it again if I thought you knew anything." She was pouting now. "Well, how do you suppose I feel, knowing you're only interested in me because of the Senator? Anyway, I'll probably lose my job, and then you won't have any use for me." "Good-bye, Greta," Jerry said sadly. "What?" "Good-bye. I suppose you won't want to see me any more." "Did I say that?" "It just won't be any use. We'll always have this thing between us." She looked at him for a moment, and then touched his bruised cheek with a tender, motherly gesture. "Your poor face," she murmured, and then sighed. "Oh, well. I guess there's no use fighting it. Maybe if I did tell you what I know, we could act human again." "Greta!" "But if you print one word of it, Jerry Bridges, I'll never speak to you again!" "Honey," Jerry said, taking her arm, "you can trust me like a brother." "That's not the idea," Greta said stiffly. In a secluded booth at the rear of a restaurant unfrequented by newsmen, Greta leaned forward and said: "At first, they thought it was another sputnik." " Who did?" "The State Department, silly. They got reports from the observatories about another sputnik being launched by the Russians. Only the Russians denied it. Then there were joint meetings, and nobody could figure out what the damn thing was." "Wait a minute," Jerry said dizzily. "You mean to tell me there's another of those metal moons up there?" "But it's not a moon. That's the big point. It's a spaceship." "A what ?" "A spaceship," Greta said coolly, sipping lemonade. "They have been in contact with it now for about three days, and they're thinking of calling a plenary session of the UN just to figure out what to do about it. The only hitch is, Russia doesn't want to wait that long, and is asking for a hurry-up summit meeting to make a decision." "A decision about what?" "About the Venusians, of course." "Greta," Jerry said mildly, "I think you're still a little woozy from last night." "Don't be silly. The spaceship's from Venus; they've already established that. And the people on it—I guess they're people—want to know if they can land their delegate." "Their what?" "Their delegate. They came here for some kind of conference, I guess. They know about the UN and everything, and they want to take part. They say that with all the satellites being launched, that our affairs are their affairs, too. It's kind of confusing, but that's what they say." "You mean these Venusians speak English?" "And Russian. And French. And German. And everything I guess. They've been having radio talks with practically every country for the past three days. Like I say, they want to establish diplomatic relations or something. The Senator thinks that if we don't agree, they might do something drastic, like blow us all up. It's kind of scary." She shivered delicately. "You're taking it mighty calm," he said ironically. "Well, how else can I take it? I'm not even supposed to know about it, except that the Senator is so careless about—" She put her fingers to her lips. "Oh, dear, now you'll really think I'm terrible." "Terrible? I think you're wonderful!" "And you promise not to print it?" "Didn't I say I wouldn't?" "Y-e-s. But you know, you're a liar sometimes, Jerry. I've noticed that about you." The press secretary's secretary, a massive woman with gray hair and impervious to charm, guarded the portals of his office with all the indomitable will of the U. S. Marines. But Jerry Bridges tried. "You don't understand, Lana," he said. "I don't want to see Mr. Howells. I just want you to give him something." "My name's not Lana, and I can't deliver any messages." "But this is something he wants to see." He handed her an envelope, stamped URGENT. "Do it for me, Hedy. And I'll buy you the flashiest pair of diamond earrings in Washington." "Well," the woman said, thawing slightly. "I could deliver it with his next batch of mail." "When will that be?" "In an hour. He's in a terribly important meeting right now." "You've got some mail right there. Earrings and a bracelet to match." She looked at him with exasperation, and then gathered up a stack of memorandums and letters, his own envelope atop it. She came out of the press secretary's office two minutes later with Howells himself, and Howells said: "You there, Bridges. Come in here." "Yes, sir !" Jerry said, breezing by the waiting reporters with a grin of triumph. There were six men in the room, three in military uniform. Howells poked the envelope towards Jerry, and snapped: "This note of yours. Just what do you think it means?" "You know better than I do, Mr. Howells. I'm just doing my job; I think the public has a right to know about this spaceship that's flying around—" His words brought an exclamation from the others. Howells sighed, and said: "Mr. Bridges, you don't make it easy for us. It's our opinion that secrecy is essential, that leakage of the story might cause panic. Since you're the only unauthorized person who knows of it, we have two choices. One of them is to lock you up." Jerry swallowed hard. "The other is perhaps more practical," Howells said. "You'll be taken into our confidence, and allowed to accompany those officials who will be admitted to the landing site. But you will not be allowed to relay the story to the press until such a time as all correspondents are informed. That won't give you a 'scoop' if that's what you call it, but you'll be an eyewitness. That should be worth something." "It's worth a lot," Jerry said eagerly. "Thanks, Mr. Howells." "Don't thank me, I'm not doing you any personal favor. Now about the landing tonight—" "You mean the spaceship's coming down?" "Yes. A special foreign ministers conference was held this morning, and a decision was reached to accept the delegate. Landing instructions are being given at Los Alamos, and the ship will presumably land around midnight tonight. There will be a jet leaving Washington Airport at nine, and you'll be on it. Meanwhile, consider yourself in custody." The USAF jet transport wasn't the only secrecy-shrouded aircraft that took off that evening from Washington Airport. But Jerry Bridges, sitting in the rear seat flanked by two Sphinx-like Secret Service men, knew that he was the only passenger with non-official status aboard. It was only a few minutes past ten when they arrived at the air base at Los Alamos. The desert sky was cloudy and starless, and powerful searchlights probed the thick cumulus. There were sleek, purring black autos waiting to rush the air passengers to some unnamed destination. They drove for twenty minutes across a flat ribbon of desert road, until Jerry sighted what appeared to be a circle of newly-erected lights in the middle of nowhere. On the perimeter, official vehicles were parked in orderly rows, and four USAF trailer trucks were in evidence, their radarscopes turning slowly. There was activity everywhere, but it was well-ordered and unhurried. They had done a good job of keeping the excitement contained. He was allowed to leave the car and stroll unescorted. He tried to talk to some of the scurrying officials, but to no avail. Finally, he contented himself by sitting on the sand, his back against the grill of a staff car, smoking one cigarette after another. As the minutes ticked off, the activity became more frenetic around him. Then the pace slowed, and he knew the appointed moment was approaching. Stillness returned to the desert, and tension was a tangible substance in the night air. The radarscopes spun slowly. The searchlights converged in an intricate pattern. Then the clouds seemed to part! "Here she comes!" a voice shouted. And in a moment, the calm was shattered. At first, he saw nothing. A faint roar was started in the heavens, and it became a growl that increased in volume until even the shouting voices could no longer be heard. Then the crisscrossing lights struck metal, glancing off the gleaming body of a descending object. Larger and larger the object grew, until it assumed the definable shape of a squat silver funnel, falling in a perfect straight line towards the center of the light-ringed area. When it hit, a dust cloud obscured it from sight. A loudspeaker blared out an unintelligible order, but its message was clear. No one moved from their position. Finally, a three-man team, asbestos-clad, lead-shielded, stepped out from the ring of spectators. They carried geiger counters on long poles before them. Jerry held his breath as they approached the object; only when they were yards away did he appreciate its size. It wasn't large; not more than fifteen feet in total circumference. One of the three men waved a gloved hand. "It's okay," a voice breathed behind him. "No radiation ..." Slowly, the ring of spectators closed tighter. They were twenty yards from the ship when the voice spoke to them. "Greetings from Venus," it said, and then repeated the phrase in six languages. "The ship you see is a Venusian Class 7 interplanetary rocket, built for one-passenger. It is clear of all radiation, and is perfectly safe to approach. There is a hatch which may be opened by an automatic lever in the side. Please open this hatch and remove the passenger." An Air Force General whom Jerry couldn't identify stepped forward. He circled the ship warily, and then said something to the others. They came closer, and he touched a small lever on the silvery surface of the funnel. A door slid open. "It's a box!" someone said. "A crate—" "Colligan! Moore! Schaffer! Lend a hand here—" A trio came forward and hoisted the crate out of the ship. Then the voice spoke again; Jerry deduced that it must have been activated by the decreased load of the ship. "Please open the crate. You will find our delegate within. We trust you will treat him with the courtesy of an official emissary." They set to work on the crate, its gray plastic material giving in readily to the application of their tools. But when it was opened, they stood aside in amazement and consternation. There were a variety of metal pieces packed within, protected by a filmy packing material. "Wait a minute," the general said. "Here's a book—" He picked up a gray-bound volume, and opened its cover. "'Instructions for assembling Delegate,'" he read aloud. "'First, remove all parts and arrange them in the following order. A-1, central nervous system housing. A-2 ...'" He looked up. "It's an instruction book," he whispered. "We're supposed to build the damn thing." The Delegate, a handsomely constructed robot almost eight feet tall, was pieced together some three hours later, by a team of scientists and engineers who seemed to find the Venusian instructions as elementary as a blueprint in an Erector set. But simple as the job was, they were obviously impressed by the mechanism they had assembled. It stood impassive until they obeyed the final instruction. "Press Button K ..." They found button K, and pressed it. The robot bowed. "Thank you, gentlemen," it said, in sweet, unmetallic accents. "Now if you will please escort me to the meeting place ..." It wasn't until three days after the landing that Jerry Bridges saw the Delegate again. Along with a dozen assorted government officials, Army officers, and scientists, he was quartered in a quonset hut in Fort Dix, New Jersey. Then, after seventy-two frustrating hours, he was escorted by Marine guard into New York City. No one told him his destination, and it wasn't until he saw the bright strips of light across the face of the United Nations building that he knew where the meeting was to be held. But his greatest surprise was yet to come. The vast auditorium which housed the general assembly was filled to its capacity, but there were new faces behind the plaques which designated the member nations. He couldn't believe his eyes at first, but as the meeting got under way, he knew that it was true. The highest echelons of the world's governments were represented, even—Jerry gulped at the realization—Nikita Khrushchev himself. It was a summit meeting such as he had never dreamed possible, a summit meeting without benefit of long foreign minister's debate. And the cause of it all, a placid, highly-polished metal robot, was seated blithely at a desk which bore the designation: VENUS. The robot delegate stood up. "Gentlemen," it said into the microphone, and the great men at the council tables strained to hear the translator's version through their headphones, "Gentlemen, I thank you for your prompt attention. I come as a Delegate from a great neighbor planet, in the interests of peace and progress for all the solar system. I come in the belief that peace is the responsibility of individuals, of nations, and now of worlds, and that each is dependent upon the other. I speak to you now through the electronic instrumentation which has been created for me, and I come to offer your planet not merely a threat, a promise, or an easy solution—but a challenge." The council room stirred. "Your earth satellites have been viewed with interest by the astronomers of our world, and we foresee the day when contact between our planets will be commonplace. As for ourselves, we have hitherto had little desire to explore beyond our realm, being far too occupied with internal matters. But our isolation cannot last in the face of your progress, so we believe that we must take part in your affairs. "Here, then, is our challenge. Continue your struggle of ideas, compete with each other for the minds of men, fight your bloodless battles, if you know no other means to attain progress. But do all this without unleashing the terrible forces of power now at your command. Once unleashed, these forces may or may not destroy all that you have gained. But we, the scientists of Venus, promise you this—that on the very day your conflict deteriorates into heedless violence, we will not stand by and let the ugly contagion spread. On that day, we of Venus will act swiftly, mercilessly, and relentlessly—to destroy your world completely." Again, the meeting room exploded in a babble of languages. "The vessel which brought me here came as a messenger of peace. But envision it, men of Earth, as a messenger of war. Unstoppable, inexorable, it may return, bearing a different Delegate from Venus—a Delegate of Death, who speaks not in words, but in the explosion of atoms. Think of thousands of such Delegates, fired from a vantage point far beyond the reach of your retaliation. This is the promise and the challenge that will hang in your night sky from this moment forward. Look at the planet Venus, men of Earth, and see a Goddess of Vengeance, poised to wreak its wrath upon those who betray the peace." The Delegate sat down. Four days later, a mysterious explosion rocked the quiet sands of Los Alamos, and the Venus spacecraft was no more. Two hours after that, the robot delegate, its message delivered, its mission fulfilled, requested to be locked inside a bombproof chamber. When the door was opened, the Delegate was an exploded ruin. The news flashed with lightning speed over the world, and Jerry Bridges' eyewitness accounts of the incredible event was syndicated throughout the nation. But his sudden celebrity left him vaguely unsatisfied. He tried to explain his feeling to Greta on his first night back in Washington. They were in his apartment, and it was the first time Greta had consented to pay him the visit. "Well, what's bothering you?" Greta pouted. "You've had the biggest story of the year under your byline. I should think you'd be tickled pink." "It's not that," Jerry said moodily. "But ever since I heard the Delegate speak, something's been nagging me." "But don't you think he's done good? Don't you think they'll be impressed by what he said?" "I'm not worried about that. I think that damn robot did more for peace than anything that's ever come along in this cockeyed world. But still ..." Greta snuggled up to him on the sofa. "You worry too much. Don't you ever think of anything else? You should learn to relax. It can be fun." She started to prove it to him, and Jerry responded the way a normal, healthy male usually does. But in the middle of an embrace, he cried out: "Wait a minute!" "What's the matter?" "I just thought of something! Now where the hell did I put my old notebooks?" He got up from the sofa and went scurrying to a closet. From a debris of cardboard boxes, he found a worn old leather brief case, and cackled with delight when he found the yellowed notebooks inside. "What are they?" Greta said. "My old school notebooks. Greta, you'll have to excuse me. But there's something I've got to do, right away!" "That's all right with me," Greta said haughtily. "I know when I'm not wanted." She took her hat and coat from the hall closet, gave him one last chance to change his mind, and then left. Five minutes later, Jerry Bridges was calling the airlines. It had been eleven years since Jerry had walked across the campus of Clifton University, heading for the ivy-choked main building. It was remarkable how little had changed, but the students seemed incredibly young. He was winded by the time he asked the pretty girl at the desk where Professor Martin Coltz could be located. "Professor Coltz?" She stuck a pencil to her mouth. "Well, I guess he'd be in the Holland Laboratory about now." "Holland Laboratory? What's that?" "Oh, I guess that was after your time, wasn't it?" Jerry felt decrepit, but managed to say: "It must be something new since I was here. Where is this place?" He followed her directions, and located a fresh-painted building three hundred yards from the men's dorm. He met a student at the door, who told him that Professor Coltz would be found in the physics department. The room was empty when Jerry entered, except for the single stooped figure vigorously erasing a blackboard. He turned when the door opened. If the students looked younger, Professor Coltz was far older than Jerry remembered. He was a tall man, with an unruly confusion of straight gray hair. He blinked when Jerry said: "Hello, Professor. Do you remember me? Jerry Bridges?" "Of course! I thought of you only yesterday, when I saw your name in the papers—" They sat at facing student desks, and chatted about old times. But Jerry was impatient to get to the point of his visit, and he blurted out: "Professor Coltz, something's been bothering me. It bothered me from the moment I heard the Delegate speak. I didn't know what it was until last night, when I dug out my old college notebooks. Thank God I kept them." Coltz's eyes were suddenly hooded. "What do you mean, Jerry?" "There was something about the Robot's speech that sounded familiar—I could have sworn I'd heard some of the words before. I couldn't prove anything until I checked my old notes, and here's what I found." He dug into his coat pocket and produced a sheet of paper. He unfolded it and read aloud. "'It's my belief that peace is the responsibility of individuals, of nations, and someday, even of worlds ...' Sound familiar, Professor?" Coltz shifted uncomfortably. "I don't recall every silly thing I said, Jerry." "But it's an interesting coincidence, isn't it, Professor? These very words were spoken by the Delegate from Venus." "A coincidence—" "Is it? But I also remember your interest in robotics. I'll never forget that mechanical homing pigeon you constructed. And you've probably learned much more these past eleven years." "What are you driving at, Jerry?" "Just this, Professor. I had a little daydream, recently, and I want you to hear it. I dreamed about a group of teachers, scientists, and engineers, a group who were suddenly struck by an exciting, incredible idea. A group that worked in the quiet and secrecy of a University on a fantastic scheme to force the idea of peace into the minds of the world's big shots. Does my dream interest you, Professor?" "Go on." "Well, I dreamt that this group would secretly launch an earth satellite of their own, and arrange for the nose cone to come down safely at a certain time and place. They would install a marvelous electronic robot within the cone, ready to be assembled. They would beam a radio message to earth from the cone, seemingly as if it originated from their 'spaceship.' Then, when the Robot was assembled, they would speak through it to demand peace for all mankind ..." "Jerry, if you do this—" "You don't have to say it, Professor, I know what you're thinking. I'm a reporter, and my business is to tell the world everything I know. But if I did it, there might not be a world for me to write about, would there? No, thanks, Professor. As far as I'm concerned, what I told you was nothing more than a daydream." Jerry braked the convertible to a halt, and put his arm around Greta's shoulder. She looked up at the star-filled night, and sighed romantically. Jerry pointed. "That one." Greta shivered closer to him. "And to think what that terrible planet can do to us!" "Oh, I dunno. Venus is also the Goddess of Love." He swung his other arm around her, and Venus winked approvingly. THE END Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Amazing Science Fiction Stories October 1958. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note.

ultimatum

attack

task

enigma

25086_TN2QYF3S_5

What ultimately revealed the true identity of the Venusian delegate to Jerry?

The saucer was interesting, but where was the delegate? The DELEGATE FROM VENUS By HENRY SLESAR ILLUSTRATOR NOVICK Everybody was waiting to see what the delegate from Venus looked like. And all they got for their patience was the biggest surprise since David clobbered Goliath. " Let me put it this way," Conners said paternally. "We expect a certain amount of decorum from our Washington news correspondents, and that's all I'm asking for." Jerry Bridges, sitting in the chair opposite his employer's desk, chewed on his knuckles and said nothing. One part of his mind wanted him to play it cagey, to behave the way the newspaper wanted him to behave, to protect the cozy Washington assignment he had waited four years to get. But another part of him, a rebel part, wanted him to stay on the trail of the story he felt sure was about to break. "I didn't mean to make trouble, Mr. Conners," he said casually. "It just seemed strange, all these exchanges of couriers in the past two days. I couldn't help thinking something was up." "Even if that's true, we'll hear about it through the usual channels," Conners frowned. "But getting a senator's secretary drunk to obtain information—well, that's not only indiscreet, Bridges. It's downright dirty." Jerry grinned. "I didn't take that kind of advantage, Mr. Conners. Not that she wasn't a toothsome little dish ..." "Just thank your lucky stars that it didn't go any further. And from now on—" He waggled a finger at him. "Watch your step." Jerry got up and ambled to the door. But he turned before leaving and said: "By the way. What do you think is going on?" "I haven't the faintest idea." "Don't kid me, Mr. Conners. Think it's war?" "That'll be all, Bridges." The reporter closed the door behind him, and then strolled out of the building into the sunlight. He met Ruskin, the fat little AP correspondent, in front of the Pan-American Building on Constitution Avenue. Ruskin was holding the newspaper that contained the gossip-column item which had started the whole affair, and he seemed more interested in the romantic rather than political implications. As he walked beside him, he said: "So what really happened, pal? That Greta babe really let down her hair?" "Where's your decorum?" Jerry growled. Ruskin giggled. "Boy, she's quite a dame, all right. I think they ought to get the Secret Service to guard her. She really fills out a size 10, don't she?" "Ruskin," Jerry said, "you have a low mind. For a week, this town has been acting like the 39 Steps , and all you can think about is dames. What's the matter with you? Where will you be when the big mushroom cloud comes?" "With Greta, I hope," Ruskin sighed. "What a way to get radioactive." They split off a few blocks later, and Jerry walked until he came to the Red Tape Bar & Grill, a favorite hangout of the local journalists. There were three other newsmen at the bar, and they gave him snickering greetings. He took a small table in the rear and ate his meal in sullen silence. It wasn't the newsmen's jibes that bothered him; it was the certainty that something of major importance was happening in the capitol. There had been hourly conferences at the White House, flying visits by State Department officials, mysterious conferences involving members of the Science Commission. So far, the byword had been secrecy. They knew that Senator Spocker, chairman of the Congressional Science Committee, had been involved in every meeting, but Senator Spocker was unavailable. His secretary, however, was a little more obliging ... Jerry looked up from his coffee and blinked when he saw who was coming through the door of the Bar & Grill. So did every other patron, but for different reasons. Greta Johnson had that effect upon men. Even the confining effect of a mannishly-tailored suit didn't hide her outrageously feminine qualities. She walked straight to his table, and he stood up. "They told me you might be here," she said, breathing hard. "I just wanted to thank you for last night." "Look, Greta—" Wham! Her hand, small and delicate, felt like a slab of lead when it slammed into his cheek. She left a bruise five fingers wide, and then turned and stalked out. He ran after her, the restaurant proprietor shouting about the unpaid bill. It took a rapid dog-trot to reach her side. "Greta, listen!" he panted. "You don't understand about last night. It wasn't the way that lousy columnist said—" She stopped in her tracks. "I wouldn't have minded so much if you'd gotten me drunk. But to use me, just to get a story—" "But I'm a reporter , damn it. It's my job. I'd do it again if I thought you knew anything." She was pouting now. "Well, how do you suppose I feel, knowing you're only interested in me because of the Senator? Anyway, I'll probably lose my job, and then you won't have any use for me." "Good-bye, Greta," Jerry said sadly. "What?" "Good-bye. I suppose you won't want to see me any more." "Did I say that?" "It just won't be any use. We'll always have this thing between us." She looked at him for a moment, and then touched his bruised cheek with a tender, motherly gesture. "Your poor face," she murmured, and then sighed. "Oh, well. I guess there's no use fighting it. Maybe if I did tell you what I know, we could act human again." "Greta!" "But if you print one word of it, Jerry Bridges, I'll never speak to you again!" "Honey," Jerry said, taking her arm, "you can trust me like a brother." "That's not the idea," Greta said stiffly. In a secluded booth at the rear of a restaurant unfrequented by newsmen, Greta leaned forward and said: "At first, they thought it was another sputnik." " Who did?" "The State Department, silly. They got reports from the observatories about another sputnik being launched by the Russians. Only the Russians denied it. Then there were joint meetings, and nobody could figure out what the damn thing was." "Wait a minute," Jerry said dizzily. "You mean to tell me there's another of those metal moons up there?" "But it's not a moon. That's the big point. It's a spaceship." "A what ?" "A spaceship," Greta said coolly, sipping lemonade. "They have been in contact with it now for about three days, and they're thinking of calling a plenary session of the UN just to figure out what to do about it. The only hitch is, Russia doesn't want to wait that long, and is asking for a hurry-up summit meeting to make a decision." "A decision about what?" "About the Venusians, of course." "Greta," Jerry said mildly, "I think you're still a little woozy from last night." "Don't be silly. The spaceship's from Venus; they've already established that. And the people on it—I guess they're people—want to know if they can land their delegate." "Their what?" "Their delegate. They came here for some kind of conference, I guess. They know about the UN and everything, and they want to take part. They say that with all the satellites being launched, that our affairs are their affairs, too. It's kind of confusing, but that's what they say." "You mean these Venusians speak English?" "And Russian. And French. And German. And everything I guess. They've been having radio talks with practically every country for the past three days. Like I say, they want to establish diplomatic relations or something. The Senator thinks that if we don't agree, they might do something drastic, like blow us all up. It's kind of scary." She shivered delicately. "You're taking it mighty calm," he said ironically. "Well, how else can I take it? I'm not even supposed to know about it, except that the Senator is so careless about—" She put her fingers to her lips. "Oh, dear, now you'll really think I'm terrible." "Terrible? I think you're wonderful!" "And you promise not to print it?" "Didn't I say I wouldn't?" "Y-e-s. But you know, you're a liar sometimes, Jerry. I've noticed that about you." The press secretary's secretary, a massive woman with gray hair and impervious to charm, guarded the portals of his office with all the indomitable will of the U. S. Marines. But Jerry Bridges tried. "You don't understand, Lana," he said. "I don't want to see Mr. Howells. I just want you to give him something." "My name's not Lana, and I can't deliver any messages." "But this is something he wants to see." He handed her an envelope, stamped URGENT. "Do it for me, Hedy. And I'll buy you the flashiest pair of diamond earrings in Washington." "Well," the woman said, thawing slightly. "I could deliver it with his next batch of mail." "When will that be?" "In an hour. He's in a terribly important meeting right now." "You've got some mail right there. Earrings and a bracelet to match." She looked at him with exasperation, and then gathered up a stack of memorandums and letters, his own envelope atop it. She came out of the press secretary's office two minutes later with Howells himself, and Howells said: "You there, Bridges. Come in here." "Yes, sir !" Jerry said, breezing by the waiting reporters with a grin of triumph. There were six men in the room, three in military uniform. Howells poked the envelope towards Jerry, and snapped: "This note of yours. Just what do you think it means?" "You know better than I do, Mr. Howells. I'm just doing my job; I think the public has a right to know about this spaceship that's flying around—" His words brought an exclamation from the others. Howells sighed, and said: "Mr. Bridges, you don't make it easy for us. It's our opinion that secrecy is essential, that leakage of the story might cause panic. Since you're the only unauthorized person who knows of it, we have two choices. One of them is to lock you up." Jerry swallowed hard. "The other is perhaps more practical," Howells said. "You'll be taken into our confidence, and allowed to accompany those officials who will be admitted to the landing site. But you will not be allowed to relay the story to the press until such a time as all correspondents are informed. That won't give you a 'scoop' if that's what you call it, but you'll be an eyewitness. That should be worth something." "It's worth a lot," Jerry said eagerly. "Thanks, Mr. Howells." "Don't thank me, I'm not doing you any personal favor. Now about the landing tonight—" "You mean the spaceship's coming down?" "Yes. A special foreign ministers conference was held this morning, and a decision was reached to accept the delegate. Landing instructions are being given at Los Alamos, and the ship will presumably land around midnight tonight. There will be a jet leaving Washington Airport at nine, and you'll be on it. Meanwhile, consider yourself in custody." The USAF jet transport wasn't the only secrecy-shrouded aircraft that took off that evening from Washington Airport. But Jerry Bridges, sitting in the rear seat flanked by two Sphinx-like Secret Service men, knew that he was the only passenger with non-official status aboard. It was only a few minutes past ten when they arrived at the air base at Los Alamos. The desert sky was cloudy and starless, and powerful searchlights probed the thick cumulus. There were sleek, purring black autos waiting to rush the air passengers to some unnamed destination. They drove for twenty minutes across a flat ribbon of desert road, until Jerry sighted what appeared to be a circle of newly-erected lights in the middle of nowhere. On the perimeter, official vehicles were parked in orderly rows, and four USAF trailer trucks were in evidence, their radarscopes turning slowly. There was activity everywhere, but it was well-ordered and unhurried. They had done a good job of keeping the excitement contained. He was allowed to leave the car and stroll unescorted. He tried to talk to some of the scurrying officials, but to no avail. Finally, he contented himself by sitting on the sand, his back against the grill of a staff car, smoking one cigarette after another. As the minutes ticked off, the activity became more frenetic around him. Then the pace slowed, and he knew the appointed moment was approaching. Stillness returned to the desert, and tension was a tangible substance in the night air. The radarscopes spun slowly. The searchlights converged in an intricate pattern. Then the clouds seemed to part! "Here she comes!" a voice shouted. And in a moment, the calm was shattered. At first, he saw nothing. A faint roar was started in the heavens, and it became a growl that increased in volume until even the shouting voices could no longer be heard. Then the crisscrossing lights struck metal, glancing off the gleaming body of a descending object. Larger and larger the object grew, until it assumed the definable shape of a squat silver funnel, falling in a perfect straight line towards the center of the light-ringed area. When it hit, a dust cloud obscured it from sight. A loudspeaker blared out an unintelligible order, but its message was clear. No one moved from their position. Finally, a three-man team, asbestos-clad, lead-shielded, stepped out from the ring of spectators. They carried geiger counters on long poles before them. Jerry held his breath as they approached the object; only when they were yards away did he appreciate its size. It wasn't large; not more than fifteen feet in total circumference. One of the three men waved a gloved hand. "It's okay," a voice breathed behind him. "No radiation ..." Slowly, the ring of spectators closed tighter. They were twenty yards from the ship when the voice spoke to them. "Greetings from Venus," it said, and then repeated the phrase in six languages. "The ship you see is a Venusian Class 7 interplanetary rocket, built for one-passenger. It is clear of all radiation, and is perfectly safe to approach. There is a hatch which may be opened by an automatic lever in the side. Please open this hatch and remove the passenger." An Air Force General whom Jerry couldn't identify stepped forward. He circled the ship warily, and then said something to the others. They came closer, and he touched a small lever on the silvery surface of the funnel. A door slid open. "It's a box!" someone said. "A crate—" "Colligan! Moore! Schaffer! Lend a hand here—" A trio came forward and hoisted the crate out of the ship. Then the voice spoke again; Jerry deduced that it must have been activated by the decreased load of the ship. "Please open the crate. You will find our delegate within. We trust you will treat him with the courtesy of an official emissary." They set to work on the crate, its gray plastic material giving in readily to the application of their tools. But when it was opened, they stood aside in amazement and consternation. There were a variety of metal pieces packed within, protected by a filmy packing material. "Wait a minute," the general said. "Here's a book—" He picked up a gray-bound volume, and opened its cover. "'Instructions for assembling Delegate,'" he read aloud. "'First, remove all parts and arrange them in the following order. A-1, central nervous system housing. A-2 ...'" He looked up. "It's an instruction book," he whispered. "We're supposed to build the damn thing." The Delegate, a handsomely constructed robot almost eight feet tall, was pieced together some three hours later, by a team of scientists and engineers who seemed to find the Venusian instructions as elementary as a blueprint in an Erector set. But simple as the job was, they were obviously impressed by the mechanism they had assembled. It stood impassive until they obeyed the final instruction. "Press Button K ..." They found button K, and pressed it. The robot bowed. "Thank you, gentlemen," it said, in sweet, unmetallic accents. "Now if you will please escort me to the meeting place ..." It wasn't until three days after the landing that Jerry Bridges saw the Delegate again. Along with a dozen assorted government officials, Army officers, and scientists, he was quartered in a quonset hut in Fort Dix, New Jersey. Then, after seventy-two frustrating hours, he was escorted by Marine guard into New York City. No one told him his destination, and it wasn't until he saw the bright strips of light across the face of the United Nations building that he knew where the meeting was to be held. But his greatest surprise was yet to come. The vast auditorium which housed the general assembly was filled to its capacity, but there were new faces behind the plaques which designated the member nations. He couldn't believe his eyes at first, but as the meeting got under way, he knew that it was true. The highest echelons of the world's governments were represented, even—Jerry gulped at the realization—Nikita Khrushchev himself. It was a summit meeting such as he had never dreamed possible, a summit meeting without benefit of long foreign minister's debate. And the cause of it all, a placid, highly-polished metal robot, was seated blithely at a desk which bore the designation: VENUS. The robot delegate stood up. "Gentlemen," it said into the microphone, and the great men at the council tables strained to hear the translator's version through their headphones, "Gentlemen, I thank you for your prompt attention. I come as a Delegate from a great neighbor planet, in the interests of peace and progress for all the solar system. I come in the belief that peace is the responsibility of individuals, of nations, and now of worlds, and that each is dependent upon the other. I speak to you now through the electronic instrumentation which has been created for me, and I come to offer your planet not merely a threat, a promise, or an easy solution—but a challenge." The council room stirred. "Your earth satellites have been viewed with interest by the astronomers of our world, and we foresee the day when contact between our planets will be commonplace. As for ourselves, we have hitherto had little desire to explore beyond our realm, being far too occupied with internal matters. But our isolation cannot last in the face of your progress, so we believe that we must take part in your affairs. "Here, then, is our challenge. Continue your struggle of ideas, compete with each other for the minds of men, fight your bloodless battles, if you know no other means to attain progress. But do all this without unleashing the terrible forces of power now at your command. Once unleashed, these forces may or may not destroy all that you have gained. But we, the scientists of Venus, promise you this—that on the very day your conflict deteriorates into heedless violence, we will not stand by and let the ugly contagion spread. On that day, we of Venus will act swiftly, mercilessly, and relentlessly—to destroy your world completely." Again, the meeting room exploded in a babble of languages. "The vessel which brought me here came as a messenger of peace. But envision it, men of Earth, as a messenger of war. Unstoppable, inexorable, it may return, bearing a different Delegate from Venus—a Delegate of Death, who speaks not in words, but in the explosion of atoms. Think of thousands of such Delegates, fired from a vantage point far beyond the reach of your retaliation. This is the promise and the challenge that will hang in your night sky from this moment forward. Look at the planet Venus, men of Earth, and see a Goddess of Vengeance, poised to wreak its wrath upon those who betray the peace." The Delegate sat down. Four days later, a mysterious explosion rocked the quiet sands of Los Alamos, and the Venus spacecraft was no more. Two hours after that, the robot delegate, its message delivered, its mission fulfilled, requested to be locked inside a bombproof chamber. When the door was opened, the Delegate was an exploded ruin. The news flashed with lightning speed over the world, and Jerry Bridges' eyewitness accounts of the incredible event was syndicated throughout the nation. But his sudden celebrity left him vaguely unsatisfied. He tried to explain his feeling to Greta on his first night back in Washington. They were in his apartment, and it was the first time Greta had consented to pay him the visit. "Well, what's bothering you?" Greta pouted. "You've had the biggest story of the year under your byline. I should think you'd be tickled pink." "It's not that," Jerry said moodily. "But ever since I heard the Delegate speak, something's been nagging me." "But don't you think he's done good? Don't you think they'll be impressed by what he said?" "I'm not worried about that. I think that damn robot did more for peace than anything that's ever come along in this cockeyed world. But still ..." Greta snuggled up to him on the sofa. "You worry too much. Don't you ever think of anything else? You should learn to relax. It can be fun." She started to prove it to him, and Jerry responded the way a normal, healthy male usually does. But in the middle of an embrace, he cried out: "Wait a minute!" "What's the matter?" "I just thought of something! Now where the hell did I put my old notebooks?" He got up from the sofa and went scurrying to a closet. From a debris of cardboard boxes, he found a worn old leather brief case, and cackled with delight when he found the yellowed notebooks inside. "What are they?" Greta said. "My old school notebooks. Greta, you'll have to excuse me. But there's something I've got to do, right away!" "That's all right with me," Greta said haughtily. "I know when I'm not wanted." She took her hat and coat from the hall closet, gave him one last chance to change his mind, and then left. Five minutes later, Jerry Bridges was calling the airlines. It had been eleven years since Jerry had walked across the campus of Clifton University, heading for the ivy-choked main building. It was remarkable how little had changed, but the students seemed incredibly young. He was winded by the time he asked the pretty girl at the desk where Professor Martin Coltz could be located. "Professor Coltz?" She stuck a pencil to her mouth. "Well, I guess he'd be in the Holland Laboratory about now." "Holland Laboratory? What's that?" "Oh, I guess that was after your time, wasn't it?" Jerry felt decrepit, but managed to say: "It must be something new since I was here. Where is this place?" He followed her directions, and located a fresh-painted building three hundred yards from the men's dorm. He met a student at the door, who told him that Professor Coltz would be found in the physics department. The room was empty when Jerry entered, except for the single stooped figure vigorously erasing a blackboard. He turned when the door opened. If the students looked younger, Professor Coltz was far older than Jerry remembered. He was a tall man, with an unruly confusion of straight gray hair. He blinked when Jerry said: "Hello, Professor. Do you remember me? Jerry Bridges?" "Of course! I thought of you only yesterday, when I saw your name in the papers—" They sat at facing student desks, and chatted about old times. But Jerry was impatient to get to the point of his visit, and he blurted out: "Professor Coltz, something's been bothering me. It bothered me from the moment I heard the Delegate speak. I didn't know what it was until last night, when I dug out my old college notebooks. Thank God I kept them." Coltz's eyes were suddenly hooded. "What do you mean, Jerry?" "There was something about the Robot's speech that sounded familiar—I could have sworn I'd heard some of the words before. I couldn't prove anything until I checked my old notes, and here's what I found." He dug into his coat pocket and produced a sheet of paper. He unfolded it and read aloud. "'It's my belief that peace is the responsibility of individuals, of nations, and someday, even of worlds ...' Sound familiar, Professor?" Coltz shifted uncomfortably. "I don't recall every silly thing I said, Jerry." "But it's an interesting coincidence, isn't it, Professor? These very words were spoken by the Delegate from Venus." "A coincidence—" "Is it? But I also remember your interest in robotics. I'll never forget that mechanical homing pigeon you constructed. And you've probably learned much more these past eleven years." "What are you driving at, Jerry?" "Just this, Professor. I had a little daydream, recently, and I want you to hear it. I dreamed about a group of teachers, scientists, and engineers, a group who were suddenly struck by an exciting, incredible idea. A group that worked in the quiet and secrecy of a University on a fantastic scheme to force the idea of peace into the minds of the world's big shots. Does my dream interest you, Professor?" "Go on." "Well, I dreamt that this group would secretly launch an earth satellite of their own, and arrange for the nose cone to come down safely at a certain time and place. They would install a marvelous electronic robot within the cone, ready to be assembled. They would beam a radio message to earth from the cone, seemingly as if it originated from their 'spaceship.' Then, when the Robot was assembled, they would speak through it to demand peace for all mankind ..." "Jerry, if you do this—" "You don't have to say it, Professor, I know what you're thinking. I'm a reporter, and my business is to tell the world everything I know. But if I did it, there might not be a world for me to write about, would there? No, thanks, Professor. As far as I'm concerned, what I told you was nothing more than a daydream." Jerry braked the convertible to a halt, and put his arm around Greta's shoulder. She looked up at the star-filled night, and sighed romantically. Jerry pointed. "That one." Greta shivered closer to him. "And to think what that terrible planet can do to us!" "Oh, I dunno. Venus is also the Goddess of Love." He swung his other arm around her, and Venus winked approvingly. THE END Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Amazing Science Fiction Stories October 1958. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note.

It's opening monologue

The origin of its materials

Notes that Greta stole from a source

Its style of self-destruction

25086_TN2QYF3S_6

What is the central irony of the Venusian delegate's message?

The saucer was interesting, but where was the delegate? The DELEGATE FROM VENUS By HENRY SLESAR ILLUSTRATOR NOVICK Everybody was waiting to see what the delegate from Venus looked like. And all they got for their patience was the biggest surprise since David clobbered Goliath. " Let me put it this way," Conners said paternally. "We expect a certain amount of decorum from our Washington news correspondents, and that's all I'm asking for." Jerry Bridges, sitting in the chair opposite his employer's desk, chewed on his knuckles and said nothing. One part of his mind wanted him to play it cagey, to behave the way the newspaper wanted him to behave, to protect the cozy Washington assignment he had waited four years to get. But another part of him, a rebel part, wanted him to stay on the trail of the story he felt sure was about to break. "I didn't mean to make trouble, Mr. Conners," he said casually. "It just seemed strange, all these exchanges of couriers in the past two days. I couldn't help thinking something was up." "Even if that's true, we'll hear about it through the usual channels," Conners frowned. "But getting a senator's secretary drunk to obtain information—well, that's not only indiscreet, Bridges. It's downright dirty." Jerry grinned. "I didn't take that kind of advantage, Mr. Conners. Not that she wasn't a toothsome little dish ..." "Just thank your lucky stars that it didn't go any further. And from now on—" He waggled a finger at him. "Watch your step." Jerry got up and ambled to the door. But he turned before leaving and said: "By the way. What do you think is going on?" "I haven't the faintest idea." "Don't kid me, Mr. Conners. Think it's war?" "That'll be all, Bridges." The reporter closed the door behind him, and then strolled out of the building into the sunlight. He met Ruskin, the fat little AP correspondent, in front of the Pan-American Building on Constitution Avenue. Ruskin was holding the newspaper that contained the gossip-column item which had started the whole affair, and he seemed more interested in the romantic rather than political implications. As he walked beside him, he said: "So what really happened, pal? That Greta babe really let down her hair?" "Where's your decorum?" Jerry growled. Ruskin giggled. "Boy, she's quite a dame, all right. I think they ought to get the Secret Service to guard her. She really fills out a size 10, don't she?" "Ruskin," Jerry said, "you have a low mind. For a week, this town has been acting like the 39 Steps , and all you can think about is dames. What's the matter with you? Where will you be when the big mushroom cloud comes?" "With Greta, I hope," Ruskin sighed. "What a way to get radioactive." They split off a few blocks later, and Jerry walked until he came to the Red Tape Bar & Grill, a favorite hangout of the local journalists. There were three other newsmen at the bar, and they gave him snickering greetings. He took a small table in the rear and ate his meal in sullen silence. It wasn't the newsmen's jibes that bothered him; it was the certainty that something of major importance was happening in the capitol. There had been hourly conferences at the White House, flying visits by State Department officials, mysterious conferences involving members of the Science Commission. So far, the byword had been secrecy. They knew that Senator Spocker, chairman of the Congressional Science Committee, had been involved in every meeting, but Senator Spocker was unavailable. His secretary, however, was a little more obliging ... Jerry looked up from his coffee and blinked when he saw who was coming through the door of the Bar & Grill. So did every other patron, but for different reasons. Greta Johnson had that effect upon men. Even the confining effect of a mannishly-tailored suit didn't hide her outrageously feminine qualities. She walked straight to his table, and he stood up. "They told me you might be here," she said, breathing hard. "I just wanted to thank you for last night." "Look, Greta—" Wham! Her hand, small and delicate, felt like a slab of lead when it slammed into his cheek. She left a bruise five fingers wide, and then turned and stalked out. He ran after her, the restaurant proprietor shouting about the unpaid bill. It took a rapid dog-trot to reach her side. "Greta, listen!" he panted. "You don't understand about last night. It wasn't the way that lousy columnist said—" She stopped in her tracks. "I wouldn't have minded so much if you'd gotten me drunk. But to use me, just to get a story—" "But I'm a reporter , damn it. It's my job. I'd do it again if I thought you knew anything." She was pouting now. "Well, how do you suppose I feel, knowing you're only interested in me because of the Senator? Anyway, I'll probably lose my job, and then you won't have any use for me." "Good-bye, Greta," Jerry said sadly. "What?" "Good-bye. I suppose you won't want to see me any more." "Did I say that?" "It just won't be any use. We'll always have this thing between us." She looked at him for a moment, and then touched his bruised cheek with a tender, motherly gesture. "Your poor face," she murmured, and then sighed. "Oh, well. I guess there's no use fighting it. Maybe if I did tell you what I know, we could act human again." "Greta!" "But if you print one word of it, Jerry Bridges, I'll never speak to you again!" "Honey," Jerry said, taking her arm, "you can trust me like a brother." "That's not the idea," Greta said stiffly. In a secluded booth at the rear of a restaurant unfrequented by newsmen, Greta leaned forward and said: "At first, they thought it was another sputnik." " Who did?" "The State Department, silly. They got reports from the observatories about another sputnik being launched by the Russians. Only the Russians denied it. Then there were joint meetings, and nobody could figure out what the damn thing was." "Wait a minute," Jerry said dizzily. "You mean to tell me there's another of those metal moons up there?" "But it's not a moon. That's the big point. It's a spaceship." "A what ?" "A spaceship," Greta said coolly, sipping lemonade. "They have been in contact with it now for about three days, and they're thinking of calling a plenary session of the UN just to figure out what to do about it. The only hitch is, Russia doesn't want to wait that long, and is asking for a hurry-up summit meeting to make a decision." "A decision about what?" "About the Venusians, of course." "Greta," Jerry said mildly, "I think you're still a little woozy from last night." "Don't be silly. The spaceship's from Venus; they've already established that. And the people on it—I guess they're people—want to know if they can land their delegate." "Their what?" "Their delegate. They came here for some kind of conference, I guess. They know about the UN and everything, and they want to take part. They say that with all the satellites being launched, that our affairs are their affairs, too. It's kind of confusing, but that's what they say." "You mean these Venusians speak English?" "And Russian. And French. And German. And everything I guess. They've been having radio talks with practically every country for the past three days. Like I say, they want to establish diplomatic relations or something. The Senator thinks that if we don't agree, they might do something drastic, like blow us all up. It's kind of scary." She shivered delicately. "You're taking it mighty calm," he said ironically. "Well, how else can I take it? I'm not even supposed to know about it, except that the Senator is so careless about—" She put her fingers to her lips. "Oh, dear, now you'll really think I'm terrible." "Terrible? I think you're wonderful!" "And you promise not to print it?" "Didn't I say I wouldn't?" "Y-e-s. But you know, you're a liar sometimes, Jerry. I've noticed that about you." The press secretary's secretary, a massive woman with gray hair and impervious to charm, guarded the portals of his office with all the indomitable will of the U. S. Marines. But Jerry Bridges tried. "You don't understand, Lana," he said. "I don't want to see Mr. Howells. I just want you to give him something." "My name's not Lana, and I can't deliver any messages." "But this is something he wants to see." He handed her an envelope, stamped URGENT. "Do it for me, Hedy. And I'll buy you the flashiest pair of diamond earrings in Washington." "Well," the woman said, thawing slightly. "I could deliver it with his next batch of mail." "When will that be?" "In an hour. He's in a terribly important meeting right now." "You've got some mail right there. Earrings and a bracelet to match." She looked at him with exasperation, and then gathered up a stack of memorandums and letters, his own envelope atop it. She came out of the press secretary's office two minutes later with Howells himself, and Howells said: "You there, Bridges. Come in here." "Yes, sir !" Jerry said, breezing by the waiting reporters with a grin of triumph. There were six men in the room, three in military uniform. Howells poked the envelope towards Jerry, and snapped: "This note of yours. Just what do you think it means?" "You know better than I do, Mr. Howells. I'm just doing my job; I think the public has a right to know about this spaceship that's flying around—" His words brought an exclamation from the others. Howells sighed, and said: "Mr. Bridges, you don't make it easy for us. It's our opinion that secrecy is essential, that leakage of the story might cause panic. Since you're the only unauthorized person who knows of it, we have two choices. One of them is to lock you up." Jerry swallowed hard. "The other is perhaps more practical," Howells said. "You'll be taken into our confidence, and allowed to accompany those officials who will be admitted to the landing site. But you will not be allowed to relay the story to the press until such a time as all correspondents are informed. That won't give you a 'scoop' if that's what you call it, but you'll be an eyewitness. That should be worth something." "It's worth a lot," Jerry said eagerly. "Thanks, Mr. Howells." "Don't thank me, I'm not doing you any personal favor. Now about the landing tonight—" "You mean the spaceship's coming down?" "Yes. A special foreign ministers conference was held this morning, and a decision was reached to accept the delegate. Landing instructions are being given at Los Alamos, and the ship will presumably land around midnight tonight. There will be a jet leaving Washington Airport at nine, and you'll be on it. Meanwhile, consider yourself in custody." The USAF jet transport wasn't the only secrecy-shrouded aircraft that took off that evening from Washington Airport. But Jerry Bridges, sitting in the rear seat flanked by two Sphinx-like Secret Service men, knew that he was the only passenger with non-official status aboard. It was only a few minutes past ten when they arrived at the air base at Los Alamos. The desert sky was cloudy and starless, and powerful searchlights probed the thick cumulus. There were sleek, purring black autos waiting to rush the air passengers to some unnamed destination. They drove for twenty minutes across a flat ribbon of desert road, until Jerry sighted what appeared to be a circle of newly-erected lights in the middle of nowhere. On the perimeter, official vehicles were parked in orderly rows, and four USAF trailer trucks were in evidence, their radarscopes turning slowly. There was activity everywhere, but it was well-ordered and unhurried. They had done a good job of keeping the excitement contained. He was allowed to leave the car and stroll unescorted. He tried to talk to some of the scurrying officials, but to no avail. Finally, he contented himself by sitting on the sand, his back against the grill of a staff car, smoking one cigarette after another. As the minutes ticked off, the activity became more frenetic around him. Then the pace slowed, and he knew the appointed moment was approaching. Stillness returned to the desert, and tension was a tangible substance in the night air. The radarscopes spun slowly. The searchlights converged in an intricate pattern. Then the clouds seemed to part! "Here she comes!" a voice shouted. And in a moment, the calm was shattered. At first, he saw nothing. A faint roar was started in the heavens, and it became a growl that increased in volume until even the shouting voices could no longer be heard. Then the crisscrossing lights struck metal, glancing off the gleaming body of a descending object. Larger and larger the object grew, until it assumed the definable shape of a squat silver funnel, falling in a perfect straight line towards the center of the light-ringed area. When it hit, a dust cloud obscured it from sight. A loudspeaker blared out an unintelligible order, but its message was clear. No one moved from their position. Finally, a three-man team, asbestos-clad, lead-shielded, stepped out from the ring of spectators. They carried geiger counters on long poles before them. Jerry held his breath as they approached the object; only when they were yards away did he appreciate its size. It wasn't large; not more than fifteen feet in total circumference. One of the three men waved a gloved hand. "It's okay," a voice breathed behind him. "No radiation ..." Slowly, the ring of spectators closed tighter. They were twenty yards from the ship when the voice spoke to them. "Greetings from Venus," it said, and then repeated the phrase in six languages. "The ship you see is a Venusian Class 7 interplanetary rocket, built for one-passenger. It is clear of all radiation, and is perfectly safe to approach. There is a hatch which may be opened by an automatic lever in the side. Please open this hatch and remove the passenger." An Air Force General whom Jerry couldn't identify stepped forward. He circled the ship warily, and then said something to the others. They came closer, and he touched a small lever on the silvery surface of the funnel. A door slid open. "It's a box!" someone said. "A crate—" "Colligan! Moore! Schaffer! Lend a hand here—" A trio came forward and hoisted the crate out of the ship. Then the voice spoke again; Jerry deduced that it must have been activated by the decreased load of the ship. "Please open the crate. You will find our delegate within. We trust you will treat him with the courtesy of an official emissary." They set to work on the crate, its gray plastic material giving in readily to the application of their tools. But when it was opened, they stood aside in amazement and consternation. There were a variety of metal pieces packed within, protected by a filmy packing material. "Wait a minute," the general said. "Here's a book—" He picked up a gray-bound volume, and opened its cover. "'Instructions for assembling Delegate,'" he read aloud. "'First, remove all parts and arrange them in the following order. A-1, central nervous system housing. A-2 ...'" He looked up. "It's an instruction book," he whispered. "We're supposed to build the damn thing." The Delegate, a handsomely constructed robot almost eight feet tall, was pieced together some three hours later, by a team of scientists and engineers who seemed to find the Venusian instructions as elementary as a blueprint in an Erector set. But simple as the job was, they were obviously impressed by the mechanism they had assembled. It stood impassive until they obeyed the final instruction. "Press Button K ..." They found button K, and pressed it. The robot bowed. "Thank you, gentlemen," it said, in sweet, unmetallic accents. "Now if you will please escort me to the meeting place ..." It wasn't until three days after the landing that Jerry Bridges saw the Delegate again. Along with a dozen assorted government officials, Army officers, and scientists, he was quartered in a quonset hut in Fort Dix, New Jersey. Then, after seventy-two frustrating hours, he was escorted by Marine guard into New York City. No one told him his destination, and it wasn't until he saw the bright strips of light across the face of the United Nations building that he knew where the meeting was to be held. But his greatest surprise was yet to come. The vast auditorium which housed the general assembly was filled to its capacity, but there were new faces behind the plaques which designated the member nations. He couldn't believe his eyes at first, but as the meeting got under way, he knew that it was true. The highest echelons of the world's governments were represented, even—Jerry gulped at the realization—Nikita Khrushchev himself. It was a summit meeting such as he had never dreamed possible, a summit meeting without benefit of long foreign minister's debate. And the cause of it all, a placid, highly-polished metal robot, was seated blithely at a desk which bore the designation: VENUS. The robot delegate stood up. "Gentlemen," it said into the microphone, and the great men at the council tables strained to hear the translator's version through their headphones, "Gentlemen, I thank you for your prompt attention. I come as a Delegate from a great neighbor planet, in the interests of peace and progress for all the solar system. I come in the belief that peace is the responsibility of individuals, of nations, and now of worlds, and that each is dependent upon the other. I speak to you now through the electronic instrumentation which has been created for me, and I come to offer your planet not merely a threat, a promise, or an easy solution—but a challenge." The council room stirred. "Your earth satellites have been viewed with interest by the astronomers of our world, and we foresee the day when contact between our planets will be commonplace. As for ourselves, we have hitherto had little desire to explore beyond our realm, being far too occupied with internal matters. But our isolation cannot last in the face of your progress, so we believe that we must take part in your affairs. "Here, then, is our challenge. Continue your struggle of ideas, compete with each other for the minds of men, fight your bloodless battles, if you know no other means to attain progress. But do all this without unleashing the terrible forces of power now at your command. Once unleashed, these forces may or may not destroy all that you have gained. But we, the scientists of Venus, promise you this—that on the very day your conflict deteriorates into heedless violence, we will not stand by and let the ugly contagion spread. On that day, we of Venus will act swiftly, mercilessly, and relentlessly—to destroy your world completely." Again, the meeting room exploded in a babble of languages. "The vessel which brought me here came as a messenger of peace. But envision it, men of Earth, as a messenger of war. Unstoppable, inexorable, it may return, bearing a different Delegate from Venus—a Delegate of Death, who speaks not in words, but in the explosion of atoms. Think of thousands of such Delegates, fired from a vantage point far beyond the reach of your retaliation. This is the promise and the challenge that will hang in your night sky from this moment forward. Look at the planet Venus, men of Earth, and see a Goddess of Vengeance, poised to wreak its wrath upon those who betray the peace." The Delegate sat down. Four days later, a mysterious explosion rocked the quiet sands of Los Alamos, and the Venus spacecraft was no more. Two hours after that, the robot delegate, its message delivered, its mission fulfilled, requested to be locked inside a bombproof chamber. When the door was opened, the Delegate was an exploded ruin. The news flashed with lightning speed over the world, and Jerry Bridges' eyewitness accounts of the incredible event was syndicated throughout the nation. But his sudden celebrity left him vaguely unsatisfied. He tried to explain his feeling to Greta on his first night back in Washington. They were in his apartment, and it was the first time Greta had consented to pay him the visit. "Well, what's bothering you?" Greta pouted. "You've had the biggest story of the year under your byline. I should think you'd be tickled pink." "It's not that," Jerry said moodily. "But ever since I heard the Delegate speak, something's been nagging me." "But don't you think he's done good? Don't you think they'll be impressed by what he said?" "I'm not worried about that. I think that damn robot did more for peace than anything that's ever come along in this cockeyed world. But still ..." Greta snuggled up to him on the sofa. "You worry too much. Don't you ever think of anything else? You should learn to relax. It can be fun." She started to prove it to him, and Jerry responded the way a normal, healthy male usually does. But in the middle of an embrace, he cried out: "Wait a minute!" "What's the matter?" "I just thought of something! Now where the hell did I put my old notebooks?" He got up from the sofa and went scurrying to a closet. From a debris of cardboard boxes, he found a worn old leather brief case, and cackled with delight when he found the yellowed notebooks inside. "What are they?" Greta said. "My old school notebooks. Greta, you'll have to excuse me. But there's something I've got to do, right away!" "That's all right with me," Greta said haughtily. "I know when I'm not wanted." She took her hat and coat from the hall closet, gave him one last chance to change his mind, and then left. Five minutes later, Jerry Bridges was calling the airlines. It had been eleven years since Jerry had walked across the campus of Clifton University, heading for the ivy-choked main building. It was remarkable how little had changed, but the students seemed incredibly young. He was winded by the time he asked the pretty girl at the desk where Professor Martin Coltz could be located. "Professor Coltz?" She stuck a pencil to her mouth. "Well, I guess he'd be in the Holland Laboratory about now." "Holland Laboratory? What's that?" "Oh, I guess that was after your time, wasn't it?" Jerry felt decrepit, but managed to say: "It must be something new since I was here. Where is this place?" He followed her directions, and located a fresh-painted building three hundred yards from the men's dorm. He met a student at the door, who told him that Professor Coltz would be found in the physics department. The room was empty when Jerry entered, except for the single stooped figure vigorously erasing a blackboard. He turned when the door opened. If the students looked younger, Professor Coltz was far older than Jerry remembered. He was a tall man, with an unruly confusion of straight gray hair. He blinked when Jerry said: "Hello, Professor. Do you remember me? Jerry Bridges?" "Of course! I thought of you only yesterday, when I saw your name in the papers—" They sat at facing student desks, and chatted about old times. But Jerry was impatient to get to the point of his visit, and he blurted out: "Professor Coltz, something's been bothering me. It bothered me from the moment I heard the Delegate speak. I didn't know what it was until last night, when I dug out my old college notebooks. Thank God I kept them." Coltz's eyes were suddenly hooded. "What do you mean, Jerry?" "There was something about the Robot's speech that sounded familiar—I could have sworn I'd heard some of the words before. I couldn't prove anything until I checked my old notes, and here's what I found." He dug into his coat pocket and produced a sheet of paper. He unfolded it and read aloud. "'It's my belief that peace is the responsibility of individuals, of nations, and someday, even of worlds ...' Sound familiar, Professor?" Coltz shifted uncomfortably. "I don't recall every silly thing I said, Jerry." "But it's an interesting coincidence, isn't it, Professor? These very words were spoken by the Delegate from Venus." "A coincidence—" "Is it? But I also remember your interest in robotics. I'll never forget that mechanical homing pigeon you constructed. And you've probably learned much more these past eleven years." "What are you driving at, Jerry?" "Just this, Professor. I had a little daydream, recently, and I want you to hear it. I dreamed about a group of teachers, scientists, and engineers, a group who were suddenly struck by an exciting, incredible idea. A group that worked in the quiet and secrecy of a University on a fantastic scheme to force the idea of peace into the minds of the world's big shots. Does my dream interest you, Professor?" "Go on." "Well, I dreamt that this group would secretly launch an earth satellite of their own, and arrange for the nose cone to come down safely at a certain time and place. They would install a marvelous electronic robot within the cone, ready to be assembled. They would beam a radio message to earth from the cone, seemingly as if it originated from their 'spaceship.' Then, when the Robot was assembled, they would speak through it to demand peace for all mankind ..." "Jerry, if you do this—" "You don't have to say it, Professor, I know what you're thinking. I'm a reporter, and my business is to tell the world everything I know. But if I did it, there might not be a world for me to write about, would there? No, thanks, Professor. As far as I'm concerned, what I told you was nothing more than a daydream." Jerry braked the convertible to a halt, and put his arm around Greta's shoulder. She looked up at the star-filled night, and sighed romantically. Jerry pointed. "That one." Greta shivered closer to him. "And to think what that terrible planet can do to us!" "Oh, I dunno. Venus is also the Goddess of Love." He swung his other arm around her, and Venus winked approvingly. THE END Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Amazing Science Fiction Stories October 1958. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note.

It self destructs in the same way that it promises to devastate Earth's population, if Earth does not fulfill its terms

It glorifies war and violence despite the fact that Venus is the goddess of love

It's artificial intelligence is undecipherable by the most intelligent scientists from each major country on Earth

It uses threatening means in order to achieve a peaceful desired outcome

25086_TN2QYF3S_7

Which emotion does the Venusian delegate intentionally tap into in order to more effectively achieve its mission?

The saucer was interesting, but where was the delegate? The DELEGATE FROM VENUS By HENRY SLESAR ILLUSTRATOR NOVICK Everybody was waiting to see what the delegate from Venus looked like. And all they got for their patience was the biggest surprise since David clobbered Goliath. " Let me put it this way," Conners said paternally. "We expect a certain amount of decorum from our Washington news correspondents, and that's all I'm asking for." Jerry Bridges, sitting in the chair opposite his employer's desk, chewed on his knuckles and said nothing. One part of his mind wanted him to play it cagey, to behave the way the newspaper wanted him to behave, to protect the cozy Washington assignment he had waited four years to get. But another part of him, a rebel part, wanted him to stay on the trail of the story he felt sure was about to break. "I didn't mean to make trouble, Mr. Conners," he said casually. "It just seemed strange, all these exchanges of couriers in the past two days. I couldn't help thinking something was up." "Even if that's true, we'll hear about it through the usual channels," Conners frowned. "But getting a senator's secretary drunk to obtain information—well, that's not only indiscreet, Bridges. It's downright dirty." Jerry grinned. "I didn't take that kind of advantage, Mr. Conners. Not that she wasn't a toothsome little dish ..." "Just thank your lucky stars that it didn't go any further. And from now on—" He waggled a finger at him. "Watch your step." Jerry got up and ambled to the door. But he turned before leaving and said: "By the way. What do you think is going on?" "I haven't the faintest idea." "Don't kid me, Mr. Conners. Think it's war?" "That'll be all, Bridges." The reporter closed the door behind him, and then strolled out of the building into the sunlight. He met Ruskin, the fat little AP correspondent, in front of the Pan-American Building on Constitution Avenue. Ruskin was holding the newspaper that contained the gossip-column item which had started the whole affair, and he seemed more interested in the romantic rather than political implications. As he walked beside him, he said: "So what really happened, pal? That Greta babe really let down her hair?" "Where's your decorum?" Jerry growled. Ruskin giggled. "Boy, she's quite a dame, all right. I think they ought to get the Secret Service to guard her. She really fills out a size 10, don't she?" "Ruskin," Jerry said, "you have a low mind. For a week, this town has been acting like the 39 Steps , and all you can think about is dames. What's the matter with you? Where will you be when the big mushroom cloud comes?" "With Greta, I hope," Ruskin sighed. "What a way to get radioactive." They split off a few blocks later, and Jerry walked until he came to the Red Tape Bar & Grill, a favorite hangout of the local journalists. There were three other newsmen at the bar, and they gave him snickering greetings. He took a small table in the rear and ate his meal in sullen silence. It wasn't the newsmen's jibes that bothered him; it was the certainty that something of major importance was happening in the capitol. There had been hourly conferences at the White House, flying visits by State Department officials, mysterious conferences involving members of the Science Commission. So far, the byword had been secrecy. They knew that Senator Spocker, chairman of the Congressional Science Committee, had been involved in every meeting, but Senator Spocker was unavailable. His secretary, however, was a little more obliging ... Jerry looked up from his coffee and blinked when he saw who was coming through the door of the Bar & Grill. So did every other patron, but for different reasons. Greta Johnson had that effect upon men. Even the confining effect of a mannishly-tailored suit didn't hide her outrageously feminine qualities. She walked straight to his table, and he stood up. "They told me you might be here," she said, breathing hard. "I just wanted to thank you for last night." "Look, Greta—" Wham! Her hand, small and delicate, felt like a slab of lead when it slammed into his cheek. She left a bruise five fingers wide, and then turned and stalked out. He ran after her, the restaurant proprietor shouting about the unpaid bill. It took a rapid dog-trot to reach her side. "Greta, listen!" he panted. "You don't understand about last night. It wasn't the way that lousy columnist said—" She stopped in her tracks. "I wouldn't have minded so much if you'd gotten me drunk. But to use me, just to get a story—" "But I'm a reporter , damn it. It's my job. I'd do it again if I thought you knew anything." She was pouting now. "Well, how do you suppose I feel, knowing you're only interested in me because of the Senator? Anyway, I'll probably lose my job, and then you won't have any use for me." "Good-bye, Greta," Jerry said sadly. "What?" "Good-bye. I suppose you won't want to see me any more." "Did I say that?" "It just won't be any use. We'll always have this thing between us." She looked at him for a moment, and then touched his bruised cheek with a tender, motherly gesture. "Your poor face," she murmured, and then sighed. "Oh, well. I guess there's no use fighting it. Maybe if I did tell you what I know, we could act human again." "Greta!" "But if you print one word of it, Jerry Bridges, I'll never speak to you again!" "Honey," Jerry said, taking her arm, "you can trust me like a brother." "That's not the idea," Greta said stiffly. In a secluded booth at the rear of a restaurant unfrequented by newsmen, Greta leaned forward and said: "At first, they thought it was another sputnik." " Who did?" "The State Department, silly. They got reports from the observatories about another sputnik being launched by the Russians. Only the Russians denied it. Then there were joint meetings, and nobody could figure out what the damn thing was." "Wait a minute," Jerry said dizzily. "You mean to tell me there's another of those metal moons up there?" "But it's not a moon. That's the big point. It's a spaceship." "A what ?" "A spaceship," Greta said coolly, sipping lemonade. "They have been in contact with it now for about three days, and they're thinking of calling a plenary session of the UN just to figure out what to do about it. The only hitch is, Russia doesn't want to wait that long, and is asking for a hurry-up summit meeting to make a decision." "A decision about what?" "About the Venusians, of course." "Greta," Jerry said mildly, "I think you're still a little woozy from last night." "Don't be silly. The spaceship's from Venus; they've already established that. And the people on it—I guess they're people—want to know if they can land their delegate." "Their what?" "Their delegate. They came here for some kind of conference, I guess. They know about the UN and everything, and they want to take part. They say that with all the satellites being launched, that our affairs are their affairs, too. It's kind of confusing, but that's what they say." "You mean these Venusians speak English?" "And Russian. And French. And German. And everything I guess. They've been having radio talks with practically every country for the past three days. Like I say, they want to establish diplomatic relations or something. The Senator thinks that if we don't agree, they might do something drastic, like blow us all up. It's kind of scary." She shivered delicately. "You're taking it mighty calm," he said ironically. "Well, how else can I take it? I'm not even supposed to know about it, except that the Senator is so careless about—" She put her fingers to her lips. "Oh, dear, now you'll really think I'm terrible." "Terrible? I think you're wonderful!" "And you promise not to print it?" "Didn't I say I wouldn't?" "Y-e-s. But you know, you're a liar sometimes, Jerry. I've noticed that about you." The press secretary's secretary, a massive woman with gray hair and impervious to charm, guarded the portals of his office with all the indomitable will of the U. S. Marines. But Jerry Bridges tried. "You don't understand, Lana," he said. "I don't want to see Mr. Howells. I just want you to give him something." "My name's not Lana, and I can't deliver any messages." "But this is something he wants to see." He handed her an envelope, stamped URGENT. "Do it for me, Hedy. And I'll buy you the flashiest pair of diamond earrings in Washington." "Well," the woman said, thawing slightly. "I could deliver it with his next batch of mail." "When will that be?" "In an hour. He's in a terribly important meeting right now." "You've got some mail right there. Earrings and a bracelet to match." She looked at him with exasperation, and then gathered up a stack of memorandums and letters, his own envelope atop it. She came out of the press secretary's office two minutes later with Howells himself, and Howells said: "You there, Bridges. Come in here." "Yes, sir !" Jerry said, breezing by the waiting reporters with a grin of triumph. There were six men in the room, three in military uniform. Howells poked the envelope towards Jerry, and snapped: "This note of yours. Just what do you think it means?" "You know better than I do, Mr. Howells. I'm just doing my job; I think the public has a right to know about this spaceship that's flying around—" His words brought an exclamation from the others. Howells sighed, and said: "Mr. Bridges, you don't make it easy for us. It's our opinion that secrecy is essential, that leakage of the story might cause panic. Since you're the only unauthorized person who knows of it, we have two choices. One of them is to lock you up." Jerry swallowed hard. "The other is perhaps more practical," Howells said. "You'll be taken into our confidence, and allowed to accompany those officials who will be admitted to the landing site. But you will not be allowed to relay the story to the press until such a time as all correspondents are informed. That won't give you a 'scoop' if that's what you call it, but you'll be an eyewitness. That should be worth something." "It's worth a lot," Jerry said eagerly. "Thanks, Mr. Howells." "Don't thank me, I'm not doing you any personal favor. Now about the landing tonight—" "You mean the spaceship's coming down?" "Yes. A special foreign ministers conference was held this morning, and a decision was reached to accept the delegate. Landing instructions are being given at Los Alamos, and the ship will presumably land around midnight tonight. There will be a jet leaving Washington Airport at nine, and you'll be on it. Meanwhile, consider yourself in custody." The USAF jet transport wasn't the only secrecy-shrouded aircraft that took off that evening from Washington Airport. But Jerry Bridges, sitting in the rear seat flanked by two Sphinx-like Secret Service men, knew that he was the only passenger with non-official status aboard. It was only a few minutes past ten when they arrived at the air base at Los Alamos. The desert sky was cloudy and starless, and powerful searchlights probed the thick cumulus. There were sleek, purring black autos waiting to rush the air passengers to some unnamed destination. They drove for twenty minutes across a flat ribbon of desert road, until Jerry sighted what appeared to be a circle of newly-erected lights in the middle of nowhere. On the perimeter, official vehicles were parked in orderly rows, and four USAF trailer trucks were in evidence, their radarscopes turning slowly. There was activity everywhere, but it was well-ordered and unhurried. They had done a good job of keeping the excitement contained. He was allowed to leave the car and stroll unescorted. He tried to talk to some of the scurrying officials, but to no avail. Finally, he contented himself by sitting on the sand, his back against the grill of a staff car, smoking one cigarette after another. As the minutes ticked off, the activity became more frenetic around him. Then the pace slowed, and he knew the appointed moment was approaching. Stillness returned to the desert, and tension was a tangible substance in the night air. The radarscopes spun slowly. The searchlights converged in an intricate pattern. Then the clouds seemed to part! "Here she comes!" a voice shouted. And in a moment, the calm was shattered. At first, he saw nothing. A faint roar was started in the heavens, and it became a growl that increased in volume until even the shouting voices could no longer be heard. Then the crisscrossing lights struck metal, glancing off the gleaming body of a descending object. Larger and larger the object grew, until it assumed the definable shape of a squat silver funnel, falling in a perfect straight line towards the center of the light-ringed area. When it hit, a dust cloud obscured it from sight. A loudspeaker blared out an unintelligible order, but its message was clear. No one moved from their position. Finally, a three-man team, asbestos-clad, lead-shielded, stepped out from the ring of spectators. They carried geiger counters on long poles before them. Jerry held his breath as they approached the object; only when they were yards away did he appreciate its size. It wasn't large; not more than fifteen feet in total circumference. One of the three men waved a gloved hand. "It's okay," a voice breathed behind him. "No radiation ..." Slowly, the ring of spectators closed tighter. They were twenty yards from the ship when the voice spoke to them. "Greetings from Venus," it said, and then repeated the phrase in six languages. "The ship you see is a Venusian Class 7 interplanetary rocket, built for one-passenger. It is clear of all radiation, and is perfectly safe to approach. There is a hatch which may be opened by an automatic lever in the side. Please open this hatch and remove the passenger." An Air Force General whom Jerry couldn't identify stepped forward. He circled the ship warily, and then said something to the others. They came closer, and he touched a small lever on the silvery surface of the funnel. A door slid open. "It's a box!" someone said. "A crate—" "Colligan! Moore! Schaffer! Lend a hand here—" A trio came forward and hoisted the crate out of the ship. Then the voice spoke again; Jerry deduced that it must have been activated by the decreased load of the ship. "Please open the crate. You will find our delegate within. We trust you will treat him with the courtesy of an official emissary." They set to work on the crate, its gray plastic material giving in readily to the application of their tools. But when it was opened, they stood aside in amazement and consternation. There were a variety of metal pieces packed within, protected by a filmy packing material. "Wait a minute," the general said. "Here's a book—" He picked up a gray-bound volume, and opened its cover. "'Instructions for assembling Delegate,'" he read aloud. "'First, remove all parts and arrange them in the following order. A-1, central nervous system housing. A-2 ...'" He looked up. "It's an instruction book," he whispered. "We're supposed to build the damn thing." The Delegate, a handsomely constructed robot almost eight feet tall, was pieced together some three hours later, by a team of scientists and engineers who seemed to find the Venusian instructions as elementary as a blueprint in an Erector set. But simple as the job was, they were obviously impressed by the mechanism they had assembled. It stood impassive until they obeyed the final instruction. "Press Button K ..." They found button K, and pressed it. The robot bowed. "Thank you, gentlemen," it said, in sweet, unmetallic accents. "Now if you will please escort me to the meeting place ..." It wasn't until three days after the landing that Jerry Bridges saw the Delegate again. Along with a dozen assorted government officials, Army officers, and scientists, he was quartered in a quonset hut in Fort Dix, New Jersey. Then, after seventy-two frustrating hours, he was escorted by Marine guard into New York City. No one told him his destination, and it wasn't until he saw the bright strips of light across the face of the United Nations building that he knew where the meeting was to be held. But his greatest surprise was yet to come. The vast auditorium which housed the general assembly was filled to its capacity, but there were new faces behind the plaques which designated the member nations. He couldn't believe his eyes at first, but as the meeting got under way, he knew that it was true. The highest echelons of the world's governments were represented, even—Jerry gulped at the realization—Nikita Khrushchev himself. It was a summit meeting such as he had never dreamed possible, a summit meeting without benefit of long foreign minister's debate. And the cause of it all, a placid, highly-polished metal robot, was seated blithely at a desk which bore the designation: VENUS. The robot delegate stood up. "Gentlemen," it said into the microphone, and the great men at the council tables strained to hear the translator's version through their headphones, "Gentlemen, I thank you for your prompt attention. I come as a Delegate from a great neighbor planet, in the interests of peace and progress for all the solar system. I come in the belief that peace is the responsibility of individuals, of nations, and now of worlds, and that each is dependent upon the other. I speak to you now through the electronic instrumentation which has been created for me, and I come to offer your planet not merely a threat, a promise, or an easy solution—but a challenge." The council room stirred. "Your earth satellites have been viewed with interest by the astronomers of our world, and we foresee the day when contact between our planets will be commonplace. As for ourselves, we have hitherto had little desire to explore beyond our realm, being far too occupied with internal matters. But our isolation cannot last in the face of your progress, so we believe that we must take part in your affairs. "Here, then, is our challenge. Continue your struggle of ideas, compete with each other for the minds of men, fight your bloodless battles, if you know no other means to attain progress. But do all this without unleashing the terrible forces of power now at your command. Once unleashed, these forces may or may not destroy all that you have gained. But we, the scientists of Venus, promise you this—that on the very day your conflict deteriorates into heedless violence, we will not stand by and let the ugly contagion spread. On that day, we of Venus will act swiftly, mercilessly, and relentlessly—to destroy your world completely." Again, the meeting room exploded in a babble of languages. "The vessel which brought me here came as a messenger of peace. But envision it, men of Earth, as a messenger of war. Unstoppable, inexorable, it may return, bearing a different Delegate from Venus—a Delegate of Death, who speaks not in words, but in the explosion of atoms. Think of thousands of such Delegates, fired from a vantage point far beyond the reach of your retaliation. This is the promise and the challenge that will hang in your night sky from this moment forward. Look at the planet Venus, men of Earth, and see a Goddess of Vengeance, poised to wreak its wrath upon those who betray the peace." The Delegate sat down. Four days later, a mysterious explosion rocked the quiet sands of Los Alamos, and the Venus spacecraft was no more. Two hours after that, the robot delegate, its message delivered, its mission fulfilled, requested to be locked inside a bombproof chamber. When the door was opened, the Delegate was an exploded ruin. The news flashed with lightning speed over the world, and Jerry Bridges' eyewitness accounts of the incredible event was syndicated throughout the nation. But his sudden celebrity left him vaguely unsatisfied. He tried to explain his feeling to Greta on his first night back in Washington. They were in his apartment, and it was the first time Greta had consented to pay him the visit. "Well, what's bothering you?" Greta pouted. "You've had the biggest story of the year under your byline. I should think you'd be tickled pink." "It's not that," Jerry said moodily. "But ever since I heard the Delegate speak, something's been nagging me." "But don't you think he's done good? Don't you think they'll be impressed by what he said?" "I'm not worried about that. I think that damn robot did more for peace than anything that's ever come along in this cockeyed world. But still ..." Greta snuggled up to him on the sofa. "You worry too much. Don't you ever think of anything else? You should learn to relax. It can be fun." She started to prove it to him, and Jerry responded the way a normal, healthy male usually does. But in the middle of an embrace, he cried out: "Wait a minute!" "What's the matter?" "I just thought of something! Now where the hell did I put my old notebooks?" He got up from the sofa and went scurrying to a closet. From a debris of cardboard boxes, he found a worn old leather brief case, and cackled with delight when he found the yellowed notebooks inside. "What are they?" Greta said. "My old school notebooks. Greta, you'll have to excuse me. But there's something I've got to do, right away!" "That's all right with me," Greta said haughtily. "I know when I'm not wanted." She took her hat and coat from the hall closet, gave him one last chance to change his mind, and then left. Five minutes later, Jerry Bridges was calling the airlines. It had been eleven years since Jerry had walked across the campus of Clifton University, heading for the ivy-choked main building. It was remarkable how little had changed, but the students seemed incredibly young. He was winded by the time he asked the pretty girl at the desk where Professor Martin Coltz could be located. "Professor Coltz?" She stuck a pencil to her mouth. "Well, I guess he'd be in the Holland Laboratory about now." "Holland Laboratory? What's that?" "Oh, I guess that was after your time, wasn't it?" Jerry felt decrepit, but managed to say: "It must be something new since I was here. Where is this place?" He followed her directions, and located a fresh-painted building three hundred yards from the men's dorm. He met a student at the door, who told him that Professor Coltz would be found in the physics department. The room was empty when Jerry entered, except for the single stooped figure vigorously erasing a blackboard. He turned when the door opened. If the students looked younger, Professor Coltz was far older than Jerry remembered. He was a tall man, with an unruly confusion of straight gray hair. He blinked when Jerry said: "Hello, Professor. Do you remember me? Jerry Bridges?" "Of course! I thought of you only yesterday, when I saw your name in the papers—" They sat at facing student desks, and chatted about old times. But Jerry was impatient to get to the point of his visit, and he blurted out: "Professor Coltz, something's been bothering me. It bothered me from the moment I heard the Delegate speak. I didn't know what it was until last night, when I dug out my old college notebooks. Thank God I kept them." Coltz's eyes were suddenly hooded. "What do you mean, Jerry?" "There was something about the Robot's speech that sounded familiar—I could have sworn I'd heard some of the words before. I couldn't prove anything until I checked my old notes, and here's what I found." He dug into his coat pocket and produced a sheet of paper. He unfolded it and read aloud. "'It's my belief that peace is the responsibility of individuals, of nations, and someday, even of worlds ...' Sound familiar, Professor?" Coltz shifted uncomfortably. "I don't recall every silly thing I said, Jerry." "But it's an interesting coincidence, isn't it, Professor? These very words were spoken by the Delegate from Venus." "A coincidence—" "Is it? But I also remember your interest in robotics. I'll never forget that mechanical homing pigeon you constructed. And you've probably learned much more these past eleven years." "What are you driving at, Jerry?" "Just this, Professor. I had a little daydream, recently, and I want you to hear it. I dreamed about a group of teachers, scientists, and engineers, a group who were suddenly struck by an exciting, incredible idea. A group that worked in the quiet and secrecy of a University on a fantastic scheme to force the idea of peace into the minds of the world's big shots. Does my dream interest you, Professor?" "Go on." "Well, I dreamt that this group would secretly launch an earth satellite of their own, and arrange for the nose cone to come down safely at a certain time and place. They would install a marvelous electronic robot within the cone, ready to be assembled. They would beam a radio message to earth from the cone, seemingly as if it originated from their 'spaceship.' Then, when the Robot was assembled, they would speak through it to demand peace for all mankind ..." "Jerry, if you do this—" "You don't have to say it, Professor, I know what you're thinking. I'm a reporter, and my business is to tell the world everything I know. But if I did it, there might not be a world for me to write about, would there? No, thanks, Professor. As far as I'm concerned, what I told you was nothing more than a daydream." Jerry braked the convertible to a halt, and put his arm around Greta's shoulder. She looked up at the star-filled night, and sighed romantically. Jerry pointed. "That one." Greta shivered closer to him. "And to think what that terrible planet can do to us!" "Oh, I dunno. Venus is also the Goddess of Love." He swung his other arm around her, and Venus winked approvingly. THE END Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Amazing Science Fiction Stories October 1958. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note.

greed

shame

fear

doubt

25086_TN2QYF3S_8

If the following event had not occurred, the Venusian delegate's identify would likely not have been discovered:

The saucer was interesting, but where was the delegate? The DELEGATE FROM VENUS By HENRY SLESAR ILLUSTRATOR NOVICK Everybody was waiting to see what the delegate from Venus looked like. And all they got for their patience was the biggest surprise since David clobbered Goliath. " Let me put it this way," Conners said paternally. "We expect a certain amount of decorum from our Washington news correspondents, and that's all I'm asking for." Jerry Bridges, sitting in the chair opposite his employer's desk, chewed on his knuckles and said nothing. One part of his mind wanted him to play it cagey, to behave the way the newspaper wanted him to behave, to protect the cozy Washington assignment he had waited four years to get. But another part of him, a rebel part, wanted him to stay on the trail of the story he felt sure was about to break. "I didn't mean to make trouble, Mr. Conners," he said casually. "It just seemed strange, all these exchanges of couriers in the past two days. I couldn't help thinking something was up." "Even if that's true, we'll hear about it through the usual channels," Conners frowned. "But getting a senator's secretary drunk to obtain information—well, that's not only indiscreet, Bridges. It's downright dirty." Jerry grinned. "I didn't take that kind of advantage, Mr. Conners. Not that she wasn't a toothsome little dish ..." "Just thank your lucky stars that it didn't go any further. And from now on—" He waggled a finger at him. "Watch your step." Jerry got up and ambled to the door. But he turned before leaving and said: "By the way. What do you think is going on?" "I haven't the faintest idea." "Don't kid me, Mr. Conners. Think it's war?" "That'll be all, Bridges." The reporter closed the door behind him, and then strolled out of the building into the sunlight. He met Ruskin, the fat little AP correspondent, in front of the Pan-American Building on Constitution Avenue. Ruskin was holding the newspaper that contained the gossip-column item which had started the whole affair, and he seemed more interested in the romantic rather than political implications. As he walked beside him, he said: "So what really happened, pal? That Greta babe really let down her hair?" "Where's your decorum?" Jerry growled. Ruskin giggled. "Boy, she's quite a dame, all right. I think they ought to get the Secret Service to guard her. She really fills out a size 10, don't she?" "Ruskin," Jerry said, "you have a low mind. For a week, this town has been acting like the 39 Steps , and all you can think about is dames. What's the matter with you? Where will you be when the big mushroom cloud comes?" "With Greta, I hope," Ruskin sighed. "What a way to get radioactive." They split off a few blocks later, and Jerry walked until he came to the Red Tape Bar & Grill, a favorite hangout of the local journalists. There were three other newsmen at the bar, and they gave him snickering greetings. He took a small table in the rear and ate his meal in sullen silence. It wasn't the newsmen's jibes that bothered him; it was the certainty that something of major importance was happening in the capitol. There had been hourly conferences at the White House, flying visits by State Department officials, mysterious conferences involving members of the Science Commission. So far, the byword had been secrecy. They knew that Senator Spocker, chairman of the Congressional Science Committee, had been involved in every meeting, but Senator Spocker was unavailable. His secretary, however, was a little more obliging ... Jerry looked up from his coffee and blinked when he saw who was coming through the door of the Bar & Grill. So did every other patron, but for different reasons. Greta Johnson had that effect upon men. Even the confining effect of a mannishly-tailored suit didn't hide her outrageously feminine qualities. She walked straight to his table, and he stood up. "They told me you might be here," she said, breathing hard. "I just wanted to thank you for last night." "Look, Greta—" Wham! Her hand, small and delicate, felt like a slab of lead when it slammed into his cheek. She left a bruise five fingers wide, and then turned and stalked out. He ran after her, the restaurant proprietor shouting about the unpaid bill. It took a rapid dog-trot to reach her side. "Greta, listen!" he panted. "You don't understand about last night. It wasn't the way that lousy columnist said—" She stopped in her tracks. "I wouldn't have minded so much if you'd gotten me drunk. But to use me, just to get a story—" "But I'm a reporter , damn it. It's my job. I'd do it again if I thought you knew anything." She was pouting now. "Well, how do you suppose I feel, knowing you're only interested in me because of the Senator? Anyway, I'll probably lose my job, and then you won't have any use for me." "Good-bye, Greta," Jerry said sadly. "What?" "Good-bye. I suppose you won't want to see me any more." "Did I say that?" "It just won't be any use. We'll always have this thing between us." She looked at him for a moment, and then touched his bruised cheek with a tender, motherly gesture. "Your poor face," she murmured, and then sighed. "Oh, well. I guess there's no use fighting it. Maybe if I did tell you what I know, we could act human again." "Greta!" "But if you print one word of it, Jerry Bridges, I'll never speak to you again!" "Honey," Jerry said, taking her arm, "you can trust me like a brother." "That's not the idea," Greta said stiffly. In a secluded booth at the rear of a restaurant unfrequented by newsmen, Greta leaned forward and said: "At first, they thought it was another sputnik." " Who did?" "The State Department, silly. They got reports from the observatories about another sputnik being launched by the Russians. Only the Russians denied it. Then there were joint meetings, and nobody could figure out what the damn thing was." "Wait a minute," Jerry said dizzily. "You mean to tell me there's another of those metal moons up there?" "But it's not a moon. That's the big point. It's a spaceship." "A what ?" "A spaceship," Greta said coolly, sipping lemonade. "They have been in contact with it now for about three days, and they're thinking of calling a plenary session of the UN just to figure out what to do about it. The only hitch is, Russia doesn't want to wait that long, and is asking for a hurry-up summit meeting to make a decision." "A decision about what?" "About the Venusians, of course." "Greta," Jerry said mildly, "I think you're still a little woozy from last night." "Don't be silly. The spaceship's from Venus; they've already established that. And the people on it—I guess they're people—want to know if they can land their delegate." "Their what?" "Their delegate. They came here for some kind of conference, I guess. They know about the UN and everything, and they want to take part. They say that with all the satellites being launched, that our affairs are their affairs, too. It's kind of confusing, but that's what they say." "You mean these Venusians speak English?" "And Russian. And French. And German. And everything I guess. They've been having radio talks with practically every country for the past three days. Like I say, they want to establish diplomatic relations or something. The Senator thinks that if we don't agree, they might do something drastic, like blow us all up. It's kind of scary." She shivered delicately. "You're taking it mighty calm," he said ironically. "Well, how else can I take it? I'm not even supposed to know about it, except that the Senator is so careless about—" She put her fingers to her lips. "Oh, dear, now you'll really think I'm terrible." "Terrible? I think you're wonderful!" "And you promise not to print it?" "Didn't I say I wouldn't?" "Y-e-s. But you know, you're a liar sometimes, Jerry. I've noticed that about you." The press secretary's secretary, a massive woman with gray hair and impervious to charm, guarded the portals of his office with all the indomitable will of the U. S. Marines. But Jerry Bridges tried. "You don't understand, Lana," he said. "I don't want to see Mr. Howells. I just want you to give him something." "My name's not Lana, and I can't deliver any messages." "But this is something he wants to see." He handed her an envelope, stamped URGENT. "Do it for me, Hedy. And I'll buy you the flashiest pair of diamond earrings in Washington." "Well," the woman said, thawing slightly. "I could deliver it with his next batch of mail." "When will that be?" "In an hour. He's in a terribly important meeting right now." "You've got some mail right there. Earrings and a bracelet to match." She looked at him with exasperation, and then gathered up a stack of memorandums and letters, his own envelope atop it. She came out of the press secretary's office two minutes later with Howells himself, and Howells said: "You there, Bridges. Come in here." "Yes, sir !" Jerry said, breezing by the waiting reporters with a grin of triumph. There were six men in the room, three in military uniform. Howells poked the envelope towards Jerry, and snapped: "This note of yours. Just what do you think it means?" "You know better than I do, Mr. Howells. I'm just doing my job; I think the public has a right to know about this spaceship that's flying around—" His words brought an exclamation from the others. Howells sighed, and said: "Mr. Bridges, you don't make it easy for us. It's our opinion that secrecy is essential, that leakage of the story might cause panic. Since you're the only unauthorized person who knows of it, we have two choices. One of them is to lock you up." Jerry swallowed hard. "The other is perhaps more practical," Howells said. "You'll be taken into our confidence, and allowed to accompany those officials who will be admitted to the landing site. But you will not be allowed to relay the story to the press until such a time as all correspondents are informed. That won't give you a 'scoop' if that's what you call it, but you'll be an eyewitness. That should be worth something." "It's worth a lot," Jerry said eagerly. "Thanks, Mr. Howells." "Don't thank me, I'm not doing you any personal favor. Now about the landing tonight—" "You mean the spaceship's coming down?" "Yes. A special foreign ministers conference was held this morning, and a decision was reached to accept the delegate. Landing instructions are being given at Los Alamos, and the ship will presumably land around midnight tonight. There will be a jet leaving Washington Airport at nine, and you'll be on it. Meanwhile, consider yourself in custody." The USAF jet transport wasn't the only secrecy-shrouded aircraft that took off that evening from Washington Airport. But Jerry Bridges, sitting in the rear seat flanked by two Sphinx-like Secret Service men, knew that he was the only passenger with non-official status aboard. It was only a few minutes past ten when they arrived at the air base at Los Alamos. The desert sky was cloudy and starless, and powerful searchlights probed the thick cumulus. There were sleek, purring black autos waiting to rush the air passengers to some unnamed destination. They drove for twenty minutes across a flat ribbon of desert road, until Jerry sighted what appeared to be a circle of newly-erected lights in the middle of nowhere. On the perimeter, official vehicles were parked in orderly rows, and four USAF trailer trucks were in evidence, their radarscopes turning slowly. There was activity everywhere, but it was well-ordered and unhurried. They had done a good job of keeping the excitement contained. He was allowed to leave the car and stroll unescorted. He tried to talk to some of the scurrying officials, but to no avail. Finally, he contented himself by sitting on the sand, his back against the grill of a staff car, smoking one cigarette after another. As the minutes ticked off, the activity became more frenetic around him. Then the pace slowed, and he knew the appointed moment was approaching. Stillness returned to the desert, and tension was a tangible substance in the night air. The radarscopes spun slowly. The searchlights converged in an intricate pattern. Then the clouds seemed to part! "Here she comes!" a voice shouted. And in a moment, the calm was shattered. At first, he saw nothing. A faint roar was started in the heavens, and it became a growl that increased in volume until even the shouting voices could no longer be heard. Then the crisscrossing lights struck metal, glancing off the gleaming body of a descending object. Larger and larger the object grew, until it assumed the definable shape of a squat silver funnel, falling in a perfect straight line towards the center of the light-ringed area. When it hit, a dust cloud obscured it from sight. A loudspeaker blared out an unintelligible order, but its message was clear. No one moved from their position. Finally, a three-man team, asbestos-clad, lead-shielded, stepped out from the ring of spectators. They carried geiger counters on long poles before them. Jerry held his breath as they approached the object; only when they were yards away did he appreciate its size. It wasn't large; not more than fifteen feet in total circumference. One of the three men waved a gloved hand. "It's okay," a voice breathed behind him. "No radiation ..." Slowly, the ring of spectators closed tighter. They were twenty yards from the ship when the voice spoke to them. "Greetings from Venus," it said, and then repeated the phrase in six languages. "The ship you see is a Venusian Class 7 interplanetary rocket, built for one-passenger. It is clear of all radiation, and is perfectly safe to approach. There is a hatch which may be opened by an automatic lever in the side. Please open this hatch and remove the passenger." An Air Force General whom Jerry couldn't identify stepped forward. He circled the ship warily, and then said something to the others. They came closer, and he touched a small lever on the silvery surface of the funnel. A door slid open. "It's a box!" someone said. "A crate—" "Colligan! Moore! Schaffer! Lend a hand here—" A trio came forward and hoisted the crate out of the ship. Then the voice spoke again; Jerry deduced that it must have been activated by the decreased load of the ship. "Please open the crate. You will find our delegate within. We trust you will treat him with the courtesy of an official emissary." They set to work on the crate, its gray plastic material giving in readily to the application of their tools. But when it was opened, they stood aside in amazement and consternation. There were a variety of metal pieces packed within, protected by a filmy packing material. "Wait a minute," the general said. "Here's a book—" He picked up a gray-bound volume, and opened its cover. "'Instructions for assembling Delegate,'" he read aloud. "'First, remove all parts and arrange them in the following order. A-1, central nervous system housing. A-2 ...'" He looked up. "It's an instruction book," he whispered. "We're supposed to build the damn thing." The Delegate, a handsomely constructed robot almost eight feet tall, was pieced together some three hours later, by a team of scientists and engineers who seemed to find the Venusian instructions as elementary as a blueprint in an Erector set. But simple as the job was, they were obviously impressed by the mechanism they had assembled. It stood impassive until they obeyed the final instruction. "Press Button K ..." They found button K, and pressed it. The robot bowed. "Thank you, gentlemen," it said, in sweet, unmetallic accents. "Now if you will please escort me to the meeting place ..." It wasn't until three days after the landing that Jerry Bridges saw the Delegate again. Along with a dozen assorted government officials, Army officers, and scientists, he was quartered in a quonset hut in Fort Dix, New Jersey. Then, after seventy-two frustrating hours, he was escorted by Marine guard into New York City. No one told him his destination, and it wasn't until he saw the bright strips of light across the face of the United Nations building that he knew where the meeting was to be held. But his greatest surprise was yet to come. The vast auditorium which housed the general assembly was filled to its capacity, but there were new faces behind the plaques which designated the member nations. He couldn't believe his eyes at first, but as the meeting got under way, he knew that it was true. The highest echelons of the world's governments were represented, even—Jerry gulped at the realization—Nikita Khrushchev himself. It was a summit meeting such as he had never dreamed possible, a summit meeting without benefit of long foreign minister's debate. And the cause of it all, a placid, highly-polished metal robot, was seated blithely at a desk which bore the designation: VENUS. The robot delegate stood up. "Gentlemen," it said into the microphone, and the great men at the council tables strained to hear the translator's version through their headphones, "Gentlemen, I thank you for your prompt attention. I come as a Delegate from a great neighbor planet, in the interests of peace and progress for all the solar system. I come in the belief that peace is the responsibility of individuals, of nations, and now of worlds, and that each is dependent upon the other. I speak to you now through the electronic instrumentation which has been created for me, and I come to offer your planet not merely a threat, a promise, or an easy solution—but a challenge." The council room stirred. "Your earth satellites have been viewed with interest by the astronomers of our world, and we foresee the day when contact between our planets will be commonplace. As for ourselves, we have hitherto had little desire to explore beyond our realm, being far too occupied with internal matters. But our isolation cannot last in the face of your progress, so we believe that we must take part in your affairs. "Here, then, is our challenge. Continue your struggle of ideas, compete with each other for the minds of men, fight your bloodless battles, if you know no other means to attain progress. But do all this without unleashing the terrible forces of power now at your command. Once unleashed, these forces may or may not destroy all that you have gained. But we, the scientists of Venus, promise you this—that on the very day your conflict deteriorates into heedless violence, we will not stand by and let the ugly contagion spread. On that day, we of Venus will act swiftly, mercilessly, and relentlessly—to destroy your world completely." Again, the meeting room exploded in a babble of languages. "The vessel which brought me here came as a messenger of peace. But envision it, men of Earth, as a messenger of war. Unstoppable, inexorable, it may return, bearing a different Delegate from Venus—a Delegate of Death, who speaks not in words, but in the explosion of atoms. Think of thousands of such Delegates, fired from a vantage point far beyond the reach of your retaliation. This is the promise and the challenge that will hang in your night sky from this moment forward. Look at the planet Venus, men of Earth, and see a Goddess of Vengeance, poised to wreak its wrath upon those who betray the peace." The Delegate sat down. Four days later, a mysterious explosion rocked the quiet sands of Los Alamos, and the Venus spacecraft was no more. Two hours after that, the robot delegate, its message delivered, its mission fulfilled, requested to be locked inside a bombproof chamber. When the door was opened, the Delegate was an exploded ruin. The news flashed with lightning speed over the world, and Jerry Bridges' eyewitness accounts of the incredible event was syndicated throughout the nation. But his sudden celebrity left him vaguely unsatisfied. He tried to explain his feeling to Greta on his first night back in Washington. They were in his apartment, and it was the first time Greta had consented to pay him the visit. "Well, what's bothering you?" Greta pouted. "You've had the biggest story of the year under your byline. I should think you'd be tickled pink." "It's not that," Jerry said moodily. "But ever since I heard the Delegate speak, something's been nagging me." "But don't you think he's done good? Don't you think they'll be impressed by what he said?" "I'm not worried about that. I think that damn robot did more for peace than anything that's ever come along in this cockeyed world. But still ..." Greta snuggled up to him on the sofa. "You worry too much. Don't you ever think of anything else? You should learn to relax. It can be fun." She started to prove it to him, and Jerry responded the way a normal, healthy male usually does. But in the middle of an embrace, he cried out: "Wait a minute!" "What's the matter?" "I just thought of something! Now where the hell did I put my old notebooks?" He got up from the sofa and went scurrying to a closet. From a debris of cardboard boxes, he found a worn old leather brief case, and cackled with delight when he found the yellowed notebooks inside. "What are they?" Greta said. "My old school notebooks. Greta, you'll have to excuse me. But there's something I've got to do, right away!" "That's all right with me," Greta said haughtily. "I know when I'm not wanted." She took her hat and coat from the hall closet, gave him one last chance to change his mind, and then left. Five minutes later, Jerry Bridges was calling the airlines. It had been eleven years since Jerry had walked across the campus of Clifton University, heading for the ivy-choked main building. It was remarkable how little had changed, but the students seemed incredibly young. He was winded by the time he asked the pretty girl at the desk where Professor Martin Coltz could be located. "Professor Coltz?" She stuck a pencil to her mouth. "Well, I guess he'd be in the Holland Laboratory about now." "Holland Laboratory? What's that?" "Oh, I guess that was after your time, wasn't it?" Jerry felt decrepit, but managed to say: "It must be something new since I was here. Where is this place?" He followed her directions, and located a fresh-painted building three hundred yards from the men's dorm. He met a student at the door, who told him that Professor Coltz would be found in the physics department. The room was empty when Jerry entered, except for the single stooped figure vigorously erasing a blackboard. He turned when the door opened. If the students looked younger, Professor Coltz was far older than Jerry remembered. He was a tall man, with an unruly confusion of straight gray hair. He blinked when Jerry said: "Hello, Professor. Do you remember me? Jerry Bridges?" "Of course! I thought of you only yesterday, when I saw your name in the papers—" They sat at facing student desks, and chatted about old times. But Jerry was impatient to get to the point of his visit, and he blurted out: "Professor Coltz, something's been bothering me. It bothered me from the moment I heard the Delegate speak. I didn't know what it was until last night, when I dug out my old college notebooks. Thank God I kept them." Coltz's eyes were suddenly hooded. "What do you mean, Jerry?" "There was something about the Robot's speech that sounded familiar—I could have sworn I'd heard some of the words before. I couldn't prove anything until I checked my old notes, and here's what I found." He dug into his coat pocket and produced a sheet of paper. He unfolded it and read aloud. "'It's my belief that peace is the responsibility of individuals, of nations, and someday, even of worlds ...' Sound familiar, Professor?" Coltz shifted uncomfortably. "I don't recall every silly thing I said, Jerry." "But it's an interesting coincidence, isn't it, Professor? These very words were spoken by the Delegate from Venus." "A coincidence—" "Is it? But I also remember your interest in robotics. I'll never forget that mechanical homing pigeon you constructed. And you've probably learned much more these past eleven years." "What are you driving at, Jerry?" "Just this, Professor. I had a little daydream, recently, and I want you to hear it. I dreamed about a group of teachers, scientists, and engineers, a group who were suddenly struck by an exciting, incredible idea. A group that worked in the quiet and secrecy of a University on a fantastic scheme to force the idea of peace into the minds of the world's big shots. Does my dream interest you, Professor?" "Go on." "Well, I dreamt that this group would secretly launch an earth satellite of their own, and arrange for the nose cone to come down safely at a certain time and place. They would install a marvelous electronic robot within the cone, ready to be assembled. They would beam a radio message to earth from the cone, seemingly as if it originated from their 'spaceship.' Then, when the Robot was assembled, they would speak through it to demand peace for all mankind ..." "Jerry, if you do this—" "You don't have to say it, Professor, I know what you're thinking. I'm a reporter, and my business is to tell the world everything I know. But if I did it, there might not be a world for me to write about, would there? No, thanks, Professor. As far as I'm concerned, what I told you was nothing more than a daydream." Jerry braked the convertible to a halt, and put his arm around Greta's shoulder. She looked up at the star-filled night, and sighed romantically. Jerry pointed. "That one." Greta shivered closer to him. "And to think what that terrible planet can do to us!" "Oh, I dunno. Venus is also the Goddess of Love." He swung his other arm around her, and Venus winked approvingly. THE END Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Amazing Science Fiction Stories October 1958. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note.

If Jerry had not kept his old notes from college physics

If the UN had not called a plenary session

If Greta had gotten fired for leaking her source

If the authorities had destroyed the delegate after its opening message

25086_TN2QYF3S_9

What does Jerry promise to Professor Coltz without saying explicitly?

The saucer was interesting, but where was the delegate? The DELEGATE FROM VENUS By HENRY SLESAR ILLUSTRATOR NOVICK Everybody was waiting to see what the delegate from Venus looked like. And all they got for their patience was the biggest surprise since David clobbered Goliath. " Let me put it this way," Conners said paternally. "We expect a certain amount of decorum from our Washington news correspondents, and that's all I'm asking for." Jerry Bridges, sitting in the chair opposite his employer's desk, chewed on his knuckles and said nothing. One part of his mind wanted him to play it cagey, to behave the way the newspaper wanted him to behave, to protect the cozy Washington assignment he had waited four years to get. But another part of him, a rebel part, wanted him to stay on the trail of the story he felt sure was about to break. "I didn't mean to make trouble, Mr. Conners," he said casually. "It just seemed strange, all these exchanges of couriers in the past two days. I couldn't help thinking something was up." "Even if that's true, we'll hear about it through the usual channels," Conners frowned. "But getting a senator's secretary drunk to obtain information—well, that's not only indiscreet, Bridges. It's downright dirty." Jerry grinned. "I didn't take that kind of advantage, Mr. Conners. Not that she wasn't a toothsome little dish ..." "Just thank your lucky stars that it didn't go any further. And from now on—" He waggled a finger at him. "Watch your step." Jerry got up and ambled to the door. But he turned before leaving and said: "By the way. What do you think is going on?" "I haven't the faintest idea." "Don't kid me, Mr. Conners. Think it's war?" "That'll be all, Bridges." The reporter closed the door behind him, and then strolled out of the building into the sunlight. He met Ruskin, the fat little AP correspondent, in front of the Pan-American Building on Constitution Avenue. Ruskin was holding the newspaper that contained the gossip-column item which had started the whole affair, and he seemed more interested in the romantic rather than political implications. As he walked beside him, he said: "So what really happened, pal? That Greta babe really let down her hair?" "Where's your decorum?" Jerry growled. Ruskin giggled. "Boy, she's quite a dame, all right. I think they ought to get the Secret Service to guard her. She really fills out a size 10, don't she?" "Ruskin," Jerry said, "you have a low mind. For a week, this town has been acting like the 39 Steps , and all you can think about is dames. What's the matter with you? Where will you be when the big mushroom cloud comes?" "With Greta, I hope," Ruskin sighed. "What a way to get radioactive." They split off a few blocks later, and Jerry walked until he came to the Red Tape Bar & Grill, a favorite hangout of the local journalists. There were three other newsmen at the bar, and they gave him snickering greetings. He took a small table in the rear and ate his meal in sullen silence. It wasn't the newsmen's jibes that bothered him; it was the certainty that something of major importance was happening in the capitol. There had been hourly conferences at the White House, flying visits by State Department officials, mysterious conferences involving members of the Science Commission. So far, the byword had been secrecy. They knew that Senator Spocker, chairman of the Congressional Science Committee, had been involved in every meeting, but Senator Spocker was unavailable. His secretary, however, was a little more obliging ... Jerry looked up from his coffee and blinked when he saw who was coming through the door of the Bar & Grill. So did every other patron, but for different reasons. Greta Johnson had that effect upon men. Even the confining effect of a mannishly-tailored suit didn't hide her outrageously feminine qualities. She walked straight to his table, and he stood up. "They told me you might be here," she said, breathing hard. "I just wanted to thank you for last night." "Look, Greta—" Wham! Her hand, small and delicate, felt like a slab of lead when it slammed into his cheek. She left a bruise five fingers wide, and then turned and stalked out. He ran after her, the restaurant proprietor shouting about the unpaid bill. It took a rapid dog-trot to reach her side. "Greta, listen!" he panted. "You don't understand about last night. It wasn't the way that lousy columnist said—" She stopped in her tracks. "I wouldn't have minded so much if you'd gotten me drunk. But to use me, just to get a story—" "But I'm a reporter , damn it. It's my job. I'd do it again if I thought you knew anything." She was pouting now. "Well, how do you suppose I feel, knowing you're only interested in me because of the Senator? Anyway, I'll probably lose my job, and then you won't have any use for me." "Good-bye, Greta," Jerry said sadly. "What?" "Good-bye. I suppose you won't want to see me any more." "Did I say that?" "It just won't be any use. We'll always have this thing between us." She looked at him for a moment, and then touched his bruised cheek with a tender, motherly gesture. "Your poor face," she murmured, and then sighed. "Oh, well. I guess there's no use fighting it. Maybe if I did tell you what I know, we could act human again." "Greta!" "But if you print one word of it, Jerry Bridges, I'll never speak to you again!" "Honey," Jerry said, taking her arm, "you can trust me like a brother." "That's not the idea," Greta said stiffly. In a secluded booth at the rear of a restaurant unfrequented by newsmen, Greta leaned forward and said: "At first, they thought it was another sputnik." " Who did?" "The State Department, silly. They got reports from the observatories about another sputnik being launched by the Russians. Only the Russians denied it. Then there were joint meetings, and nobody could figure out what the damn thing was." "Wait a minute," Jerry said dizzily. "You mean to tell me there's another of those metal moons up there?" "But it's not a moon. That's the big point. It's a spaceship." "A what ?" "A spaceship," Greta said coolly, sipping lemonade. "They have been in contact with it now for about three days, and they're thinking of calling a plenary session of the UN just to figure out what to do about it. The only hitch is, Russia doesn't want to wait that long, and is asking for a hurry-up summit meeting to make a decision." "A decision about what?" "About the Venusians, of course." "Greta," Jerry said mildly, "I think you're still a little woozy from last night." "Don't be silly. The spaceship's from Venus; they've already established that. And the people on it—I guess they're people—want to know if they can land their delegate." "Their what?" "Their delegate. They came here for some kind of conference, I guess. They know about the UN and everything, and they want to take part. They say that with all the satellites being launched, that our affairs are their affairs, too. It's kind of confusing, but that's what they say." "You mean these Venusians speak English?" "And Russian. And French. And German. And everything I guess. They've been having radio talks with practically every country for the past three days. Like I say, they want to establish diplomatic relations or something. The Senator thinks that if we don't agree, they might do something drastic, like blow us all up. It's kind of scary." She shivered delicately. "You're taking it mighty calm," he said ironically. "Well, how else can I take it? I'm not even supposed to know about it, except that the Senator is so careless about—" She put her fingers to her lips. "Oh, dear, now you'll really think I'm terrible." "Terrible? I think you're wonderful!" "And you promise not to print it?" "Didn't I say I wouldn't?" "Y-e-s. But you know, you're a liar sometimes, Jerry. I've noticed that about you." The press secretary's secretary, a massive woman with gray hair and impervious to charm, guarded the portals of his office with all the indomitable will of the U. S. Marines. But Jerry Bridges tried. "You don't understand, Lana," he said. "I don't want to see Mr. Howells. I just want you to give him something." "My name's not Lana, and I can't deliver any messages." "But this is something he wants to see." He handed her an envelope, stamped URGENT. "Do it for me, Hedy. And I'll buy you the flashiest pair of diamond earrings in Washington." "Well," the woman said, thawing slightly. "I could deliver it with his next batch of mail." "When will that be?" "In an hour. He's in a terribly important meeting right now." "You've got some mail right there. Earrings and a bracelet to match." She looked at him with exasperation, and then gathered up a stack of memorandums and letters, his own envelope atop it. She came out of the press secretary's office two minutes later with Howells himself, and Howells said: "You there, Bridges. Come in here." "Yes, sir !" Jerry said, breezing by the waiting reporters with a grin of triumph. There were six men in the room, three in military uniform. Howells poked the envelope towards Jerry, and snapped: "This note of yours. Just what do you think it means?" "You know better than I do, Mr. Howells. I'm just doing my job; I think the public has a right to know about this spaceship that's flying around—" His words brought an exclamation from the others. Howells sighed, and said: "Mr. Bridges, you don't make it easy for us. It's our opinion that secrecy is essential, that leakage of the story might cause panic. Since you're the only unauthorized person who knows of it, we have two choices. One of them is to lock you up." Jerry swallowed hard. "The other is perhaps more practical," Howells said. "You'll be taken into our confidence, and allowed to accompany those officials who will be admitted to the landing site. But you will not be allowed to relay the story to the press until such a time as all correspondents are informed. That won't give you a 'scoop' if that's what you call it, but you'll be an eyewitness. That should be worth something." "It's worth a lot," Jerry said eagerly. "Thanks, Mr. Howells." "Don't thank me, I'm not doing you any personal favor. Now about the landing tonight—" "You mean the spaceship's coming down?" "Yes. A special foreign ministers conference was held this morning, and a decision was reached to accept the delegate. Landing instructions are being given at Los Alamos, and the ship will presumably land around midnight tonight. There will be a jet leaving Washington Airport at nine, and you'll be on it. Meanwhile, consider yourself in custody." The USAF jet transport wasn't the only secrecy-shrouded aircraft that took off that evening from Washington Airport. But Jerry Bridges, sitting in the rear seat flanked by two Sphinx-like Secret Service men, knew that he was the only passenger with non-official status aboard. It was only a few minutes past ten when they arrived at the air base at Los Alamos. The desert sky was cloudy and starless, and powerful searchlights probed the thick cumulus. There were sleek, purring black autos waiting to rush the air passengers to some unnamed destination. They drove for twenty minutes across a flat ribbon of desert road, until Jerry sighted what appeared to be a circle of newly-erected lights in the middle of nowhere. On the perimeter, official vehicles were parked in orderly rows, and four USAF trailer trucks were in evidence, their radarscopes turning slowly. There was activity everywhere, but it was well-ordered and unhurried. They had done a good job of keeping the excitement contained. He was allowed to leave the car and stroll unescorted. He tried to talk to some of the scurrying officials, but to no avail. Finally, he contented himself by sitting on the sand, his back against the grill of a staff car, smoking one cigarette after another. As the minutes ticked off, the activity became more frenetic around him. Then the pace slowed, and he knew the appointed moment was approaching. Stillness returned to the desert, and tension was a tangible substance in the night air. The radarscopes spun slowly. The searchlights converged in an intricate pattern. Then the clouds seemed to part! "Here she comes!" a voice shouted. And in a moment, the calm was shattered. At first, he saw nothing. A faint roar was started in the heavens, and it became a growl that increased in volume until even the shouting voices could no longer be heard. Then the crisscrossing lights struck metal, glancing off the gleaming body of a descending object. Larger and larger the object grew, until it assumed the definable shape of a squat silver funnel, falling in a perfect straight line towards the center of the light-ringed area. When it hit, a dust cloud obscured it from sight. A loudspeaker blared out an unintelligible order, but its message was clear. No one moved from their position. Finally, a three-man team, asbestos-clad, lead-shielded, stepped out from the ring of spectators. They carried geiger counters on long poles before them. Jerry held his breath as they approached the object; only when they were yards away did he appreciate its size. It wasn't large; not more than fifteen feet in total circumference. One of the three men waved a gloved hand. "It's okay," a voice breathed behind him. "No radiation ..." Slowly, the ring of spectators closed tighter. They were twenty yards from the ship when the voice spoke to them. "Greetings from Venus," it said, and then repeated the phrase in six languages. "The ship you see is a Venusian Class 7 interplanetary rocket, built for one-passenger. It is clear of all radiation, and is perfectly safe to approach. There is a hatch which may be opened by an automatic lever in the side. Please open this hatch and remove the passenger." An Air Force General whom Jerry couldn't identify stepped forward. He circled the ship warily, and then said something to the others. They came closer, and he touched a small lever on the silvery surface of the funnel. A door slid open. "It's a box!" someone said. "A crate—" "Colligan! Moore! Schaffer! Lend a hand here—" A trio came forward and hoisted the crate out of the ship. Then the voice spoke again; Jerry deduced that it must have been activated by the decreased load of the ship. "Please open the crate. You will find our delegate within. We trust you will treat him with the courtesy of an official emissary." They set to work on the crate, its gray plastic material giving in readily to the application of their tools. But when it was opened, they stood aside in amazement and consternation. There were a variety of metal pieces packed within, protected by a filmy packing material. "Wait a minute," the general said. "Here's a book—" He picked up a gray-bound volume, and opened its cover. "'Instructions for assembling Delegate,'" he read aloud. "'First, remove all parts and arrange them in the following order. A-1, central nervous system housing. A-2 ...'" He looked up. "It's an instruction book," he whispered. "We're supposed to build the damn thing." The Delegate, a handsomely constructed robot almost eight feet tall, was pieced together some three hours later, by a team of scientists and engineers who seemed to find the Venusian instructions as elementary as a blueprint in an Erector set. But simple as the job was, they were obviously impressed by the mechanism they had assembled. It stood impassive until they obeyed the final instruction. "Press Button K ..." They found button K, and pressed it. The robot bowed. "Thank you, gentlemen," it said, in sweet, unmetallic accents. "Now if you will please escort me to the meeting place ..." It wasn't until three days after the landing that Jerry Bridges saw the Delegate again. Along with a dozen assorted government officials, Army officers, and scientists, he was quartered in a quonset hut in Fort Dix, New Jersey. Then, after seventy-two frustrating hours, he was escorted by Marine guard into New York City. No one told him his destination, and it wasn't until he saw the bright strips of light across the face of the United Nations building that he knew where the meeting was to be held. But his greatest surprise was yet to come. The vast auditorium which housed the general assembly was filled to its capacity, but there were new faces behind the plaques which designated the member nations. He couldn't believe his eyes at first, but as the meeting got under way, he knew that it was true. The highest echelons of the world's governments were represented, even—Jerry gulped at the realization—Nikita Khrushchev himself. It was a summit meeting such as he had never dreamed possible, a summit meeting without benefit of long foreign minister's debate. And the cause of it all, a placid, highly-polished metal robot, was seated blithely at a desk which bore the designation: VENUS. The robot delegate stood up. "Gentlemen," it said into the microphone, and the great men at the council tables strained to hear the translator's version through their headphones, "Gentlemen, I thank you for your prompt attention. I come as a Delegate from a great neighbor planet, in the interests of peace and progress for all the solar system. I come in the belief that peace is the responsibility of individuals, of nations, and now of worlds, and that each is dependent upon the other. I speak to you now through the electronic instrumentation which has been created for me, and I come to offer your planet not merely a threat, a promise, or an easy solution—but a challenge." The council room stirred. "Your earth satellites have been viewed with interest by the astronomers of our world, and we foresee the day when contact between our planets will be commonplace. As for ourselves, we have hitherto had little desire to explore beyond our realm, being far too occupied with internal matters. But our isolation cannot last in the face of your progress, so we believe that we must take part in your affairs. "Here, then, is our challenge. Continue your struggle of ideas, compete with each other for the minds of men, fight your bloodless battles, if you know no other means to attain progress. But do all this without unleashing the terrible forces of power now at your command. Once unleashed, these forces may or may not destroy all that you have gained. But we, the scientists of Venus, promise you this—that on the very day your conflict deteriorates into heedless violence, we will not stand by and let the ugly contagion spread. On that day, we of Venus will act swiftly, mercilessly, and relentlessly—to destroy your world completely." Again, the meeting room exploded in a babble of languages. "The vessel which brought me here came as a messenger of peace. But envision it, men of Earth, as a messenger of war. Unstoppable, inexorable, it may return, bearing a different Delegate from Venus—a Delegate of Death, who speaks not in words, but in the explosion of atoms. Think of thousands of such Delegates, fired from a vantage point far beyond the reach of your retaliation. This is the promise and the challenge that will hang in your night sky from this moment forward. Look at the planet Venus, men of Earth, and see a Goddess of Vengeance, poised to wreak its wrath upon those who betray the peace." The Delegate sat down. Four days later, a mysterious explosion rocked the quiet sands of Los Alamos, and the Venus spacecraft was no more. Two hours after that, the robot delegate, its message delivered, its mission fulfilled, requested to be locked inside a bombproof chamber. When the door was opened, the Delegate was an exploded ruin. The news flashed with lightning speed over the world, and Jerry Bridges' eyewitness accounts of the incredible event was syndicated throughout the nation. But his sudden celebrity left him vaguely unsatisfied. He tried to explain his feeling to Greta on his first night back in Washington. They were in his apartment, and it was the first time Greta had consented to pay him the visit. "Well, what's bothering you?" Greta pouted. "You've had the biggest story of the year under your byline. I should think you'd be tickled pink." "It's not that," Jerry said moodily. "But ever since I heard the Delegate speak, something's been nagging me." "But don't you think he's done good? Don't you think they'll be impressed by what he said?" "I'm not worried about that. I think that damn robot did more for peace than anything that's ever come along in this cockeyed world. But still ..." Greta snuggled up to him on the sofa. "You worry too much. Don't you ever think of anything else? You should learn to relax. It can be fun." She started to prove it to him, and Jerry responded the way a normal, healthy male usually does. But in the middle of an embrace, he cried out: "Wait a minute!" "What's the matter?" "I just thought of something! Now where the hell did I put my old notebooks?" He got up from the sofa and went scurrying to a closet. From a debris of cardboard boxes, he found a worn old leather brief case, and cackled with delight when he found the yellowed notebooks inside. "What are they?" Greta said. "My old school notebooks. Greta, you'll have to excuse me. But there's something I've got to do, right away!" "That's all right with me," Greta said haughtily. "I know when I'm not wanted." She took her hat and coat from the hall closet, gave him one last chance to change his mind, and then left. Five minutes later, Jerry Bridges was calling the airlines. It had been eleven years since Jerry had walked across the campus of Clifton University, heading for the ivy-choked main building. It was remarkable how little had changed, but the students seemed incredibly young. He was winded by the time he asked the pretty girl at the desk where Professor Martin Coltz could be located. "Professor Coltz?" She stuck a pencil to her mouth. "Well, I guess he'd be in the Holland Laboratory about now." "Holland Laboratory? What's that?" "Oh, I guess that was after your time, wasn't it?" Jerry felt decrepit, but managed to say: "It must be something new since I was here. Where is this place?" He followed her directions, and located a fresh-painted building three hundred yards from the men's dorm. He met a student at the door, who told him that Professor Coltz would be found in the physics department. The room was empty when Jerry entered, except for the single stooped figure vigorously erasing a blackboard. He turned when the door opened. If the students looked younger, Professor Coltz was far older than Jerry remembered. He was a tall man, with an unruly confusion of straight gray hair. He blinked when Jerry said: "Hello, Professor. Do you remember me? Jerry Bridges?" "Of course! I thought of you only yesterday, when I saw your name in the papers—" They sat at facing student desks, and chatted about old times. But Jerry was impatient to get to the point of his visit, and he blurted out: "Professor Coltz, something's been bothering me. It bothered me from the moment I heard the Delegate speak. I didn't know what it was until last night, when I dug out my old college notebooks. Thank God I kept them." Coltz's eyes were suddenly hooded. "What do you mean, Jerry?" "There was something about the Robot's speech that sounded familiar—I could have sworn I'd heard some of the words before. I couldn't prove anything until I checked my old notes, and here's what I found." He dug into his coat pocket and produced a sheet of paper. He unfolded it and read aloud. "'It's my belief that peace is the responsibility of individuals, of nations, and someday, even of worlds ...' Sound familiar, Professor?" Coltz shifted uncomfortably. "I don't recall every silly thing I said, Jerry." "But it's an interesting coincidence, isn't it, Professor? These very words were spoken by the Delegate from Venus." "A coincidence—" "Is it? But I also remember your interest in robotics. I'll never forget that mechanical homing pigeon you constructed. And you've probably learned much more these past eleven years." "What are you driving at, Jerry?" "Just this, Professor. I had a little daydream, recently, and I want you to hear it. I dreamed about a group of teachers, scientists, and engineers, a group who were suddenly struck by an exciting, incredible idea. A group that worked in the quiet and secrecy of a University on a fantastic scheme to force the idea of peace into the minds of the world's big shots. Does my dream interest you, Professor?" "Go on." "Well, I dreamt that this group would secretly launch an earth satellite of their own, and arrange for the nose cone to come down safely at a certain time and place. They would install a marvelous electronic robot within the cone, ready to be assembled. They would beam a radio message to earth from the cone, seemingly as if it originated from their 'spaceship.' Then, when the Robot was assembled, they would speak through it to demand peace for all mankind ..." "Jerry, if you do this—" "You don't have to say it, Professor, I know what you're thinking. I'm a reporter, and my business is to tell the world everything I know. But if I did it, there might not be a world for me to write about, would there? No, thanks, Professor. As far as I'm concerned, what I told you was nothing more than a daydream." Jerry braked the convertible to a halt, and put his arm around Greta's shoulder. She looked up at the star-filled night, and sighed romantically. Jerry pointed. "That one." Greta shivered closer to him. "And to think what that terrible planet can do to us!" "Oh, I dunno. Venus is also the Goddess of Love." He swung his other arm around her, and Venus winked approvingly. THE END Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Amazing Science Fiction Stories October 1958. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note.

He plans to reveal the true creators of the Venusian delegate

He plans not to share his physics notes with the media

He plans not to reveal the true creators of the Venusian delegate

He plans to share his physics notes with the media

25086_TN2QYF3S_10

How does Jerry change from the beginning of the story to the end?

The saucer was interesting, but where was the delegate? The DELEGATE FROM VENUS By HENRY SLESAR ILLUSTRATOR NOVICK Everybody was waiting to see what the delegate from Venus looked like. And all they got for their patience was the biggest surprise since David clobbered Goliath. " Let me put it this way," Conners said paternally. "We expect a certain amount of decorum from our Washington news correspondents, and that's all I'm asking for." Jerry Bridges, sitting in the chair opposite his employer's desk, chewed on his knuckles and said nothing. One part of his mind wanted him to play it cagey, to behave the way the newspaper wanted him to behave, to protect the cozy Washington assignment he had waited four years to get. But another part of him, a rebel part, wanted him to stay on the trail of the story he felt sure was about to break. "I didn't mean to make trouble, Mr. Conners," he said casually. "It just seemed strange, all these exchanges of couriers in the past two days. I couldn't help thinking something was up." "Even if that's true, we'll hear about it through the usual channels," Conners frowned. "But getting a senator's secretary drunk to obtain information—well, that's not only indiscreet, Bridges. It's downright dirty." Jerry grinned. "I didn't take that kind of advantage, Mr. Conners. Not that she wasn't a toothsome little dish ..." "Just thank your lucky stars that it didn't go any further. And from now on—" He waggled a finger at him. "Watch your step." Jerry got up and ambled to the door. But he turned before leaving and said: "By the way. What do you think is going on?" "I haven't the faintest idea." "Don't kid me, Mr. Conners. Think it's war?" "That'll be all, Bridges." The reporter closed the door behind him, and then strolled out of the building into the sunlight. He met Ruskin, the fat little AP correspondent, in front of the Pan-American Building on Constitution Avenue. Ruskin was holding the newspaper that contained the gossip-column item which had started the whole affair, and he seemed more interested in the romantic rather than political implications. As he walked beside him, he said: "So what really happened, pal? That Greta babe really let down her hair?" "Where's your decorum?" Jerry growled. Ruskin giggled. "Boy, she's quite a dame, all right. I think they ought to get the Secret Service to guard her. She really fills out a size 10, don't she?" "Ruskin," Jerry said, "you have a low mind. For a week, this town has been acting like the 39 Steps , and all you can think about is dames. What's the matter with you? Where will you be when the big mushroom cloud comes?" "With Greta, I hope," Ruskin sighed. "What a way to get radioactive." They split off a few blocks later, and Jerry walked until he came to the Red Tape Bar & Grill, a favorite hangout of the local journalists. There were three other newsmen at the bar, and they gave him snickering greetings. He took a small table in the rear and ate his meal in sullen silence. It wasn't the newsmen's jibes that bothered him; it was the certainty that something of major importance was happening in the capitol. There had been hourly conferences at the White House, flying visits by State Department officials, mysterious conferences involving members of the Science Commission. So far, the byword had been secrecy. They knew that Senator Spocker, chairman of the Congressional Science Committee, had been involved in every meeting, but Senator Spocker was unavailable. His secretary, however, was a little more obliging ... Jerry looked up from his coffee and blinked when he saw who was coming through the door of the Bar & Grill. So did every other patron, but for different reasons. Greta Johnson had that effect upon men. Even the confining effect of a mannishly-tailored suit didn't hide her outrageously feminine qualities. She walked straight to his table, and he stood up. "They told me you might be here," she said, breathing hard. "I just wanted to thank you for last night." "Look, Greta—" Wham! Her hand, small and delicate, felt like a slab of lead when it slammed into his cheek. She left a bruise five fingers wide, and then turned and stalked out. He ran after her, the restaurant proprietor shouting about the unpaid bill. It took a rapid dog-trot to reach her side. "Greta, listen!" he panted. "You don't understand about last night. It wasn't the way that lousy columnist said—" She stopped in her tracks. "I wouldn't have minded so much if you'd gotten me drunk. But to use me, just to get a story—" "But I'm a reporter , damn it. It's my job. I'd do it again if I thought you knew anything." She was pouting now. "Well, how do you suppose I feel, knowing you're only interested in me because of the Senator? Anyway, I'll probably lose my job, and then you won't have any use for me." "Good-bye, Greta," Jerry said sadly. "What?" "Good-bye. I suppose you won't want to see me any more." "Did I say that?" "It just won't be any use. We'll always have this thing between us." She looked at him for a moment, and then touched his bruised cheek with a tender, motherly gesture. "Your poor face," she murmured, and then sighed. "Oh, well. I guess there's no use fighting it. Maybe if I did tell you what I know, we could act human again." "Greta!" "But if you print one word of it, Jerry Bridges, I'll never speak to you again!" "Honey," Jerry said, taking her arm, "you can trust me like a brother." "That's not the idea," Greta said stiffly. In a secluded booth at the rear of a restaurant unfrequented by newsmen, Greta leaned forward and said: "At first, they thought it was another sputnik." " Who did?" "The State Department, silly. They got reports from the observatories about another sputnik being launched by the Russians. Only the Russians denied it. Then there were joint meetings, and nobody could figure out what the damn thing was." "Wait a minute," Jerry said dizzily. "You mean to tell me there's another of those metal moons up there?" "But it's not a moon. That's the big point. It's a spaceship." "A what ?" "A spaceship," Greta said coolly, sipping lemonade. "They have been in contact with it now for about three days, and they're thinking of calling a plenary session of the UN just to figure out what to do about it. The only hitch is, Russia doesn't want to wait that long, and is asking for a hurry-up summit meeting to make a decision." "A decision about what?" "About the Venusians, of course." "Greta," Jerry said mildly, "I think you're still a little woozy from last night." "Don't be silly. The spaceship's from Venus; they've already established that. And the people on it—I guess they're people—want to know if they can land their delegate." "Their what?" "Their delegate. They came here for some kind of conference, I guess. They know about the UN and everything, and they want to take part. They say that with all the satellites being launched, that our affairs are their affairs, too. It's kind of confusing, but that's what they say." "You mean these Venusians speak English?" "And Russian. And French. And German. And everything I guess. They've been having radio talks with practically every country for the past three days. Like I say, they want to establish diplomatic relations or something. The Senator thinks that if we don't agree, they might do something drastic, like blow us all up. It's kind of scary." She shivered delicately. "You're taking it mighty calm," he said ironically. "Well, how else can I take it? I'm not even supposed to know about it, except that the Senator is so careless about—" She put her fingers to her lips. "Oh, dear, now you'll really think I'm terrible." "Terrible? I think you're wonderful!" "And you promise not to print it?" "Didn't I say I wouldn't?" "Y-e-s. But you know, you're a liar sometimes, Jerry. I've noticed that about you." The press secretary's secretary, a massive woman with gray hair and impervious to charm, guarded the portals of his office with all the indomitable will of the U. S. Marines. But Jerry Bridges tried. "You don't understand, Lana," he said. "I don't want to see Mr. Howells. I just want you to give him something." "My name's not Lana, and I can't deliver any messages." "But this is something he wants to see." He handed her an envelope, stamped URGENT. "Do it for me, Hedy. And I'll buy you the flashiest pair of diamond earrings in Washington." "Well," the woman said, thawing slightly. "I could deliver it with his next batch of mail." "When will that be?" "In an hour. He's in a terribly important meeting right now." "You've got some mail right there. Earrings and a bracelet to match." She looked at him with exasperation, and then gathered up a stack of memorandums and letters, his own envelope atop it. She came out of the press secretary's office two minutes later with Howells himself, and Howells said: "You there, Bridges. Come in here." "Yes, sir !" Jerry said, breezing by the waiting reporters with a grin of triumph. There were six men in the room, three in military uniform. Howells poked the envelope towards Jerry, and snapped: "This note of yours. Just what do you think it means?" "You know better than I do, Mr. Howells. I'm just doing my job; I think the public has a right to know about this spaceship that's flying around—" His words brought an exclamation from the others. Howells sighed, and said: "Mr. Bridges, you don't make it easy for us. It's our opinion that secrecy is essential, that leakage of the story might cause panic. Since you're the only unauthorized person who knows of it, we have two choices. One of them is to lock you up." Jerry swallowed hard. "The other is perhaps more practical," Howells said. "You'll be taken into our confidence, and allowed to accompany those officials who will be admitted to the landing site. But you will not be allowed to relay the story to the press until such a time as all correspondents are informed. That won't give you a 'scoop' if that's what you call it, but you'll be an eyewitness. That should be worth something." "It's worth a lot," Jerry said eagerly. "Thanks, Mr. Howells." "Don't thank me, I'm not doing you any personal favor. Now about the landing tonight—" "You mean the spaceship's coming down?" "Yes. A special foreign ministers conference was held this morning, and a decision was reached to accept the delegate. Landing instructions are being given at Los Alamos, and the ship will presumably land around midnight tonight. There will be a jet leaving Washington Airport at nine, and you'll be on it. Meanwhile, consider yourself in custody." The USAF jet transport wasn't the only secrecy-shrouded aircraft that took off that evening from Washington Airport. But Jerry Bridges, sitting in the rear seat flanked by two Sphinx-like Secret Service men, knew that he was the only passenger with non-official status aboard. It was only a few minutes past ten when they arrived at the air base at Los Alamos. The desert sky was cloudy and starless, and powerful searchlights probed the thick cumulus. There were sleek, purring black autos waiting to rush the air passengers to some unnamed destination. They drove for twenty minutes across a flat ribbon of desert road, until Jerry sighted what appeared to be a circle of newly-erected lights in the middle of nowhere. On the perimeter, official vehicles were parked in orderly rows, and four USAF trailer trucks were in evidence, their radarscopes turning slowly. There was activity everywhere, but it was well-ordered and unhurried. They had done a good job of keeping the excitement contained. He was allowed to leave the car and stroll unescorted. He tried to talk to some of the scurrying officials, but to no avail. Finally, he contented himself by sitting on the sand, his back against the grill of a staff car, smoking one cigarette after another. As the minutes ticked off, the activity became more frenetic around him. Then the pace slowed, and he knew the appointed moment was approaching. Stillness returned to the desert, and tension was a tangible substance in the night air. The radarscopes spun slowly. The searchlights converged in an intricate pattern. Then the clouds seemed to part! "Here she comes!" a voice shouted. And in a moment, the calm was shattered. At first, he saw nothing. A faint roar was started in the heavens, and it became a growl that increased in volume until even the shouting voices could no longer be heard. Then the crisscrossing lights struck metal, glancing off the gleaming body of a descending object. Larger and larger the object grew, until it assumed the definable shape of a squat silver funnel, falling in a perfect straight line towards the center of the light-ringed area. When it hit, a dust cloud obscured it from sight. A loudspeaker blared out an unintelligible order, but its message was clear. No one moved from their position. Finally, a three-man team, asbestos-clad, lead-shielded, stepped out from the ring of spectators. They carried geiger counters on long poles before them. Jerry held his breath as they approached the object; only when they were yards away did he appreciate its size. It wasn't large; not more than fifteen feet in total circumference. One of the three men waved a gloved hand. "It's okay," a voice breathed behind him. "No radiation ..." Slowly, the ring of spectators closed tighter. They were twenty yards from the ship when the voice spoke to them. "Greetings from Venus," it said, and then repeated the phrase in six languages. "The ship you see is a Venusian Class 7 interplanetary rocket, built for one-passenger. It is clear of all radiation, and is perfectly safe to approach. There is a hatch which may be opened by an automatic lever in the side. Please open this hatch and remove the passenger." An Air Force General whom Jerry couldn't identify stepped forward. He circled the ship warily, and then said something to the others. They came closer, and he touched a small lever on the silvery surface of the funnel. A door slid open. "It's a box!" someone said. "A crate—" "Colligan! Moore! Schaffer! Lend a hand here—" A trio came forward and hoisted the crate out of the ship. Then the voice spoke again; Jerry deduced that it must have been activated by the decreased load of the ship. "Please open the crate. You will find our delegate within. We trust you will treat him with the courtesy of an official emissary." They set to work on the crate, its gray plastic material giving in readily to the application of their tools. But when it was opened, they stood aside in amazement and consternation. There were a variety of metal pieces packed within, protected by a filmy packing material. "Wait a minute," the general said. "Here's a book—" He picked up a gray-bound volume, and opened its cover. "'Instructions for assembling Delegate,'" he read aloud. "'First, remove all parts and arrange them in the following order. A-1, central nervous system housing. A-2 ...'" He looked up. "It's an instruction book," he whispered. "We're supposed to build the damn thing." The Delegate, a handsomely constructed robot almost eight feet tall, was pieced together some three hours later, by a team of scientists and engineers who seemed to find the Venusian instructions as elementary as a blueprint in an Erector set. But simple as the job was, they were obviously impressed by the mechanism they had assembled. It stood impassive until they obeyed the final instruction. "Press Button K ..." They found button K, and pressed it. The robot bowed. "Thank you, gentlemen," it said, in sweet, unmetallic accents. "Now if you will please escort me to the meeting place ..." It wasn't until three days after the landing that Jerry Bridges saw the Delegate again. Along with a dozen assorted government officials, Army officers, and scientists, he was quartered in a quonset hut in Fort Dix, New Jersey. Then, after seventy-two frustrating hours, he was escorted by Marine guard into New York City. No one told him his destination, and it wasn't until he saw the bright strips of light across the face of the United Nations building that he knew where the meeting was to be held. But his greatest surprise was yet to come. The vast auditorium which housed the general assembly was filled to its capacity, but there were new faces behind the plaques which designated the member nations. He couldn't believe his eyes at first, but as the meeting got under way, he knew that it was true. The highest echelons of the world's governments were represented, even—Jerry gulped at the realization—Nikita Khrushchev himself. It was a summit meeting such as he had never dreamed possible, a summit meeting without benefit of long foreign minister's debate. And the cause of it all, a placid, highly-polished metal robot, was seated blithely at a desk which bore the designation: VENUS. The robot delegate stood up. "Gentlemen," it said into the microphone, and the great men at the council tables strained to hear the translator's version through their headphones, "Gentlemen, I thank you for your prompt attention. I come as a Delegate from a great neighbor planet, in the interests of peace and progress for all the solar system. I come in the belief that peace is the responsibility of individuals, of nations, and now of worlds, and that each is dependent upon the other. I speak to you now through the electronic instrumentation which has been created for me, and I come to offer your planet not merely a threat, a promise, or an easy solution—but a challenge." The council room stirred. "Your earth satellites have been viewed with interest by the astronomers of our world, and we foresee the day when contact between our planets will be commonplace. As for ourselves, we have hitherto had little desire to explore beyond our realm, being far too occupied with internal matters. But our isolation cannot last in the face of your progress, so we believe that we must take part in your affairs. "Here, then, is our challenge. Continue your struggle of ideas, compete with each other for the minds of men, fight your bloodless battles, if you know no other means to attain progress. But do all this without unleashing the terrible forces of power now at your command. Once unleashed, these forces may or may not destroy all that you have gained. But we, the scientists of Venus, promise you this—that on the very day your conflict deteriorates into heedless violence, we will not stand by and let the ugly contagion spread. On that day, we of Venus will act swiftly, mercilessly, and relentlessly—to destroy your world completely." Again, the meeting room exploded in a babble of languages. "The vessel which brought me here came as a messenger of peace. But envision it, men of Earth, as a messenger of war. Unstoppable, inexorable, it may return, bearing a different Delegate from Venus—a Delegate of Death, who speaks not in words, but in the explosion of atoms. Think of thousands of such Delegates, fired from a vantage point far beyond the reach of your retaliation. This is the promise and the challenge that will hang in your night sky from this moment forward. Look at the planet Venus, men of Earth, and see a Goddess of Vengeance, poised to wreak its wrath upon those who betray the peace." The Delegate sat down. Four days later, a mysterious explosion rocked the quiet sands of Los Alamos, and the Venus spacecraft was no more. Two hours after that, the robot delegate, its message delivered, its mission fulfilled, requested to be locked inside a bombproof chamber. When the door was opened, the Delegate was an exploded ruin. The news flashed with lightning speed over the world, and Jerry Bridges' eyewitness accounts of the incredible event was syndicated throughout the nation. But his sudden celebrity left him vaguely unsatisfied. He tried to explain his feeling to Greta on his first night back in Washington. They were in his apartment, and it was the first time Greta had consented to pay him the visit. "Well, what's bothering you?" Greta pouted. "You've had the biggest story of the year under your byline. I should think you'd be tickled pink." "It's not that," Jerry said moodily. "But ever since I heard the Delegate speak, something's been nagging me." "But don't you think he's done good? Don't you think they'll be impressed by what he said?" "I'm not worried about that. I think that damn robot did more for peace than anything that's ever come along in this cockeyed world. But still ..." Greta snuggled up to him on the sofa. "You worry too much. Don't you ever think of anything else? You should learn to relax. It can be fun." She started to prove it to him, and Jerry responded the way a normal, healthy male usually does. But in the middle of an embrace, he cried out: "Wait a minute!" "What's the matter?" "I just thought of something! Now where the hell did I put my old notebooks?" He got up from the sofa and went scurrying to a closet. From a debris of cardboard boxes, he found a worn old leather brief case, and cackled with delight when he found the yellowed notebooks inside. "What are they?" Greta said. "My old school notebooks. Greta, you'll have to excuse me. But there's something I've got to do, right away!" "That's all right with me," Greta said haughtily. "I know when I'm not wanted." She took her hat and coat from the hall closet, gave him one last chance to change his mind, and then left. Five minutes later, Jerry Bridges was calling the airlines. It had been eleven years since Jerry had walked across the campus of Clifton University, heading for the ivy-choked main building. It was remarkable how little had changed, but the students seemed incredibly young. He was winded by the time he asked the pretty girl at the desk where Professor Martin Coltz could be located. "Professor Coltz?" She stuck a pencil to her mouth. "Well, I guess he'd be in the Holland Laboratory about now." "Holland Laboratory? What's that?" "Oh, I guess that was after your time, wasn't it?" Jerry felt decrepit, but managed to say: "It must be something new since I was here. Where is this place?" He followed her directions, and located a fresh-painted building three hundred yards from the men's dorm. He met a student at the door, who told him that Professor Coltz would be found in the physics department. The room was empty when Jerry entered, except for the single stooped figure vigorously erasing a blackboard. He turned when the door opened. If the students looked younger, Professor Coltz was far older than Jerry remembered. He was a tall man, with an unruly confusion of straight gray hair. He blinked when Jerry said: "Hello, Professor. Do you remember me? Jerry Bridges?" "Of course! I thought of you only yesterday, when I saw your name in the papers—" They sat at facing student desks, and chatted about old times. But Jerry was impatient to get to the point of his visit, and he blurted out: "Professor Coltz, something's been bothering me. It bothered me from the moment I heard the Delegate speak. I didn't know what it was until last night, when I dug out my old college notebooks. Thank God I kept them." Coltz's eyes were suddenly hooded. "What do you mean, Jerry?" "There was something about the Robot's speech that sounded familiar—I could have sworn I'd heard some of the words before. I couldn't prove anything until I checked my old notes, and here's what I found." He dug into his coat pocket and produced a sheet of paper. He unfolded it and read aloud. "'It's my belief that peace is the responsibility of individuals, of nations, and someday, even of worlds ...' Sound familiar, Professor?" Coltz shifted uncomfortably. "I don't recall every silly thing I said, Jerry." "But it's an interesting coincidence, isn't it, Professor? These very words were spoken by the Delegate from Venus." "A coincidence—" "Is it? But I also remember your interest in robotics. I'll never forget that mechanical homing pigeon you constructed. And you've probably learned much more these past eleven years." "What are you driving at, Jerry?" "Just this, Professor. I had a little daydream, recently, and I want you to hear it. I dreamed about a group of teachers, scientists, and engineers, a group who were suddenly struck by an exciting, incredible idea. A group that worked in the quiet and secrecy of a University on a fantastic scheme to force the idea of peace into the minds of the world's big shots. Does my dream interest you, Professor?" "Go on." "Well, I dreamt that this group would secretly launch an earth satellite of their own, and arrange for the nose cone to come down safely at a certain time and place. They would install a marvelous electronic robot within the cone, ready to be assembled. They would beam a radio message to earth from the cone, seemingly as if it originated from their 'spaceship.' Then, when the Robot was assembled, they would speak through it to demand peace for all mankind ..." "Jerry, if you do this—" "You don't have to say it, Professor, I know what you're thinking. I'm a reporter, and my business is to tell the world everything I know. But if I did it, there might not be a world for me to write about, would there? No, thanks, Professor. As far as I'm concerned, what I told you was nothing more than a daydream." Jerry braked the convertible to a halt, and put his arm around Greta's shoulder. She looked up at the star-filled night, and sighed romantically. Jerry pointed. "That one." Greta shivered closer to him. "And to think what that terrible planet can do to us!" "Oh, I dunno. Venus is also the Goddess of Love." He swung his other arm around her, and Venus winked approvingly. THE END Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Amazing Science Fiction Stories October 1958. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note.

He is consumed by the difficulty of keeping the secret of the Venusian delegate's origin

He comes to value the Venusian delegate's outcome over the recognition of breaking unprecedented news

He becomes less caught up in the fast-paced world of media and more interested in settling down as a family man

He stops living his life according to what the media values and decides to leave Earth forever

26066_T3J3I3D3_1

The plot of Eric's newest book most likely reflects:

Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Amazing Stories December 1961 and was first published in Amazing Stories November 1930. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note. A Classic Reprint from AMAZING STORIES, November, 1930 Copyright 1931, by Experimenter Publications Inc. The Cosmic Express By JACK WILLIAMSON Introduction by Sam Moskowitz The year 1928 was a great year of discovery for AMAZING STORIES . They were uncovering new talent at such a great rate, (Harl Vincent, David H. Keller, E. E. Smith, Philip Francis Nowlan, Fletcher Pratt and Miles J. Breuer), that Jack Williamson barely managed to become one of a distinguished group of discoveries by stealing the cover of the December issue for his first story The Metal Man. A disciple of A. Merritt, he attempted to imitate in style, mood and subject the magic of that late lamented master of fantasy. The imitation found great favor from the readership and almost instantly Jack Williamson became an important name on the contents page of AMAZING STORIES . He followed his initial success with two short novels , The Green Girl in AMAZING STORIES and The Alien Intelligence in SCIENCE WONDER STORIES , another Gernsback publication. Both of these stories were close copies of A. Merritt, whose style and method Jack Williamson parlayed into popularity for eight years. Yet the strange thing about it was that Jack Williamson was one of the most versatile science fiction authors ever to sit down at the typewriter. When the vogue for science-fantasy altered to super science, he created the memorable super lock-picker Giles Habilula as the major attraction in a rousing trio of space operas , The Legion of Space, The Cometeers and One Against the Legion. When grim realism was the order of the day, he produced Crucible of Power and when they wanted extrapolated theory in present tense, he assumed the disguise of Will Stewart and popularized the concept of contra terrene matter in science fiction with Seetee Ship and Seetee Shock. Finally, when only psychological studies of the future would do, he produced "With Folded Hands ..." "... And Searching Mind." The Cosmic Express is of special interest because it was written during Williamson's A. Merritt "kick," when he was writing little else but, and it gave the earliest indication of a more general capability. The lightness of the handling is especially modern, barely avoiding the farcical by the validity of the notion that wireless transmission of matter is the next big transportation frontier to be conquered. It is especially important because it stylistically forecast a later trend to accept the background for granted, regardless of the quantity of wonders, and proceed with the story. With only a few thousand scanning-disk television sets in existence at the time of the writing, the surmise that this media would be a natural for westerns was particularly astute. Jack Williamson was born in 1908 in the Arizona territory when covered wagons were the primary form of transportation and apaches still raided the settlers. His father was a cattle man, but for young Jack, the ranch was anything but glamorous. "My days were filled," he remembers, "with monotonous rounds of what seemed an endless, heart-breaking war with drought and frost and dust-storms, poison-weeds and hail, for the sake of survival on the Llano Estacado." The discovery of AMAZING STORIES was the escape he sought and his goal was to be a science fiction writer. He labored to this end and the first he knew that a story of his had been accepted was when he bought the December, 1929 issue of AMAZING STORIES . Since then, he has written millions of words of science fiction and has gone on record as follows: "I feel that science-fiction is the folklore of the new world of science, and the expression of man's reaction to a technological environment. By which I mean that it is the most interesting and stimulating form of literature today." Mr. Eric Stokes-Harding tumbled out of the rumpled bed-clothing, a striking slender figure in purple-striped pajamas. He smiled fondly across to the other of the twin beds, where Nada, his pretty bride, lay quiet beneath light silk covers. With a groan, he stood up and began a series of fantastic bending exercises. But after a few half-hearted movements, he gave it up, and walked through an open door into a small bright room, its walls covered with bookcases and also with scientific appliances that would have been strange to the man of four or five centuries before, when the Age of Aviation was beginning. Suddenly there was a sharp tingling sensation where they touched the polished surface. Yawning, Mr. Eric Stokes-Harding stood before the great open window, staring out. Below him was a wide, park-like space, green with emerald lawns, and bright with flowering plants. Two hundred yards across it rose an immense pyramidal building—an artistic structure, gleaming with white marble and bright metal, striped with the verdure of terraced roof-gardens, its slender peak rising to help support the gray, steel-ribbed glass roof above. Beyond, the park stretched away in illimitable vistas, broken with the graceful columned buildings that held up the great glass roof. Above the glass, over this New York of 2432 A. D., a freezing blizzard was sweeping. But small concern was that to the lightly clad man at the window, who was inhaling deeply the fragrant air from the plants below—air kept, winter and summer, exactly at 20° C. With another yawn, Mr. Eric Stokes-Harding turned back to the room, which was bright with the rich golden light that poured in from the suspended globes of the cold ato-light that illuminated the snow-covered city. With a distasteful grimace, he seated himself before a broad, paper-littered desk, sat a few minutes leaning back, with his hands clasped behind his head. At last he straightened reluctantly, slid a small typewriter out of its drawer, and began pecking at it impatiently. For Mr. Eric Stokes-Harding was an author. There was a whole shelf of his books on the wall, in bright jackets, red and blue and green, that brought a thrill of pleasure to the young novelist's heart when he looked up from his clattering machine. He wrote "thrilling action romances," as his enthusiastic publishers and television directors said, "of ages past, when men were men. Red-blooded heroes responding vigorously to the stirring passions of primordial life!" He was impartial as to the source of his thrills—provided they were distant enough from modern civilization. His hero was likely to be an ape-man roaring through the jungle, with a bloody rock in one hand and a beautiful girl in the other. Or a cowboy, "hard-riding, hard-shooting," the vanishing hero of the ancient ranches. Or a man marooned with a lovely woman on a desert South Sea island. His heroes were invariably strong, fearless, resourceful fellows, who could handle a club on equal terms with a cave-man, or call science to aid them in defending a beautiful mate from the terrors of a desolate wilderness. And a hundred million read Eric's novels, and watched the dramatization of them on the television screens. They thrilled at the simple, romantic lives his heroes led, paid him handsome royalties, and subconsciously shared his opinion that civilization had taken all the best from the life of man. Eric had settled down to the artistic satisfaction of describing the sensuous delight of his hero in the roasted marrow-bones of a dead mammoth, when the pretty woman in the other room stirred, and presently came tripping into the study, gay and vivacious, and—as her husband of a few months most justly thought—altogether beautiful in a bright silk dressing gown. Recklessly, he slammed the machine back into its place, and resolved to forget that his next "red-blooded action thriller" was due in the publisher's office at the end of the month. He sprang up to kiss his wife, held her embraced for a long happy moment. And then they went hand in hand, to the side of the room and punched a series of buttons on a panel—a simple way of ordering breakfast sent up the automatic shaft from the kitchens below. Nada Stokes-Harding was also an author. She wrote poems—"back to nature stuff"—simple lyrics of the sea, of sunsets, of bird songs, of bright flowers and warm winds, of thrilling communion with Nature, and growing things. Men read her poems and called her a genius. Even though the whole world had grown up into a city, the birds were extinct, there were no wild flowers, and no one had time to bother about sunsets. "Eric, darling," she said, "isn't it terrible to be cooped up here in this little flat, away from the things we both love?" "Yes, dear. Civilization has ruined the world. If we could only have lived a thousand years ago, when life was simple and natural, when men hunted and killed their meat, instead of drinking synthetic stuff, when men still had the joys of conflict, instead of living under glass, like hot-house flowers." "If we could only go somewhere—" "There isn't anywhere to go. I write about the West, Africa, South Sea Islands. But they were all filled up two hundred years ago. Pleasure resorts, sanatoriums, cities, factories." "If only we lived on Venus! I was listening to a lecture on the television, last night. The speaker said that the Planet Venus is younger than the Earth, that it has not cooled so much. It has a thick, cloudy atmosphere, and low, rainy forests. There's simple, elemental life there—like Earth had before civilization ruined it." "Yes, Kinsley, with his new infra-red ray telescope, that penetrates the cloud layers of the planet, proved that Venus rotates in about the same period as Earth; and it must be much like Earth was a million years ago." "Eric, I wonder if we could go there! It would be so thrilling to begin life like the characters in your stories, to get away from this hateful civilization, and live natural lives. Maybe a rocket—" The young author's eyes were glowing. He skipped across the floor, seized Nada, kissed her ecstatically. "Splendid! Think of hunting in the virgin forest, and bringing the game home to you! But I'm afraid there is no way.—Wait! The Cosmic Express." "The Cosmic Express?" "A new invention. Just perfected a few weeks ago, I understand. By Ludwig Von der Valls, the German physicist." "I've quit bothering about science. It has ruined nature, filled the world with silly, artificial people, doing silly, artificial things." "But this is quite remarkable, dear. A new way to travel—by ether!" "By ether!" "Yes. You know of course that energy and matter are interchangeable terms; both are simply etheric vibration, of different sorts." "Of course. That's elementary." She smiled proudly. "I can give you examples, even of the change. The disintegration of the radium atom, making helium and lead and energy . And Millikan's old proof that his Cosmic Ray is generated when particles of electricity are united to form an atom." "Fine! I thought you said you weren't a scientist." He glowed with pride. "But the method, in the new Cosmic Express, is simply to convert the matter to be carried into power, send it out as a radiant beam and focus the beam to convert it back into atoms at the destination." "But the amount of energy must be terrific—" "It is. You know short waves carry more energy than long ones. The Express Ray is an electromagnetic vibration of frequency far higher than that of even the Cosmic Ray, and correspondingly more powerful and more penetrating." The girl frowned, running slim fingers through golden-brown hair. "But I don't see how they get any recognizable object, not even how they get the radiation turned back into matter." "The beam is focused, just like the light that passes through a camera lens. The photographic lens, using light rays, picks up a picture and reproduces it again on the plate—just the same as the Express Ray picks up an object and sets it down on the other side of the world. "An analogy from television might help. You know that by means of the scanning disc, the picture is transformed into mere rapid fluctuations in the brightness of a beam of light. In a parallel manner, the focal plane of the Express Ray moves slowly through the object, progressively, dissolving layers of the thickness of a single atom, which are accurately reproduced at the other focus of the instrument—which might be in Venus! "But the analogy of the lens is the better of the two. For no receiving instrument is required, as in television. The object is built up of an infinite series of plane layers, at the focus of the ray, no matter where that may be. Such a thing would be impossible with radio apparatus because even with the best beam transmission, all but a tiny fraction of the power is lost, and power is required to rebuild the atoms. Do you understand, dear?" "Not altogether. But I should worry! Here comes breakfast. Let me butter your toast." A bell had rung at the shaft. She ran to it, and returned with a great silver tray, laden with dainty dishes, which she set on a little side table. They sat down opposite each other, and ate, getting as much satisfaction from contemplation of each other's faces as from the excellent food. When they had finished, she carried the tray to the shaft, slid it in a slot, and touched a button—thus disposing of the culinary cares of the morning. She ran back to Eric, who was once more staring distastefully at his typewriter. "Oh, darling! I'm thrilled to death about the Cosmic Express! If we could go to Venus, to a new life on a new world, and get away from all this hateful conventional society—" "We can go to their office—it's only five minutes. The chap that operates the machine for the company is a pal of mine. He's not supposed to take passengers except between the offices they have scattered about the world. But I know his weak point—" Eric laughed, fumbled with a hidden spring under his desk. A small polished object, gleaming silvery, slid down into his hand. "Old friendship, plus this, would make him—like spinach." Five minutes later Mr. Eric Stokes-Harding and his pretty wife were in street clothes, light silk tunics of loose, flowing lines—little clothing being required in the artificially warmed city. They entered an elevator and dropped thirty stories to the ground floor of the great building. There they entered a cylindrical car, with rows of seats down the sides. Not greatly different from an ancient subway car, except that it was air-tight, and was hurled by magnetic attraction and repulsion through a tube exhausted of air, at a speed that would have made an old subway rider gasp with amazement. In five more minutes their car had whipped up to the base of another building, in the business section, where there was no room for parks between the mighty structures that held the unbroken glass roofs two hundred stories above the concrete pavement. An elevator brought them up a hundred and fifty stories. Eric led Nada down a long, carpeted corridor to a wide glass door, which bore the words: COSMIC EXPRESS stenciled in gold capitals across it. As they approached, a lean man, carrying a black bag, darted out of an elevator shaft opposite the door, ran across the corridor, and entered. They pushed in after him. They were in a little room, cut in two by a high brass grill. In front of it was a long bench against the wall, that reminded one of the waiting room in an old railroad depot. In the grill was a little window, with a lazy, brown-eyed youth leaning on the shelf behind it. Beyond him was a great, glittering piece of mechanism, half hidden by the brass. A little door gave access to the machine from the space before the grill. The thin man in black, whom Eric now recognized as a prominent French heart-specialist, was dancing before the window, waving his bag frantically, raving at the sleepy boy. "Queek! I have tell you zee truth! I have zee most urgent necessity to go queekly. A patient I have in Paree, zat ees in zee most creetical condition!" "Hold your horses just a minute, Mister. We got a client in the machine now. Russian diplomat from Moscow to Rio de Janeiro.... Two hundred seventy dollars and eighty cents, please.... Your turn next. Remember this is just an experimental service. Regular installations all over the world in a year.... Ready now. Come on in." The youth took the money, pressed a button. The door sprang open in the grill, and the frantic physician leaped through it. "Lie down on the crystal, face up," the young man ordered. "Hands at your sides, don't breathe. Ready!" He manipulated his dials and switches, and pressed another button. "Why, hello, Eric, old man!" he cried. "That's the lady you were telling me about? Congratulations!" A bell jangled before him on the panel. "Just a minute. I've got a call." He punched the board again. Little bulbs lit and glowed for a second. The youth turned toward the half-hidden machine, spoke courteously. "All right, madam. Walk out. Hope you found the transit pleasant." "But my Violet! My precious Violet!" a shrill female voice came from the machine. "Sir, what have you done with my darling Violet?" "I'm sure I don't know, madam. You lost it off your hat?" "None of your impertinence, sir! I want my dog." "Ah, a dog. Must have jumped off the crystal. You can have him sent on for three hundred and—" "Young man, if any harm comes to my Violet—I'll—I'll—I'll appeal to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals!" "Very good, madam. We appreciate your patronage." The door flew open again. A very fat woman, puffing angrily, face highly colored, clothing shimmering with artificial gems, waddled pompously out of the door through which the frantic French doctor had so recently vanished. She rolled heavily across the room, and out into the corridor. Shrill words floated back: "I'm going to see my lawyer! My precious Violet—" The sallow youth winked. "And now what can I do for you, Eric?" "We want to go to Venus, if that ray of yours can put us there." "To Venus? Impossible. My orders are to use the Express merely between the sixteen designated stations, at New York, San Francisco, Tokyo, London, Paris—" "See here, Charley," with a cautious glance toward the door, Eric held up the silver flask. "For old time's sake, and for this—" The boy seemed dazed at sight of the bright flask. Then, with a single swift motion, he snatched it out of Eric's hand, and bent to conceal it below his instrument panel. "Sure, old boy. I'd send you to heaven for that, if you'd give me the micrometer readings to set the ray with. But I tell you, this is dangerous. I've got a sort of television attachment, for focusing the ray. I can turn that on Venus—I've been amusing myself, watching the life there, already. Terrible place. Savage. I can pick a place on high land to set you down. But I can't be responsible for what happens afterward." "Simple, primitive life is what we're looking for. And now what do I owe you—" "Oh, that's all right. Between friends. Provided that stuff's genuine! Walk in and lie down on the crystal block. Hands at your sides. Don't move." The little door had swung open again, and Eric led Nada through. They stepped into a little cell, completely surrounded with mirrors and vast prisms and lenses and electron tubes. In the center was a slab of transparent crystal, eight feet square and two inches thick, with an intricate mass of machinery below it. Eric helped Nada to a place on the crystal, lay down at her side. "I think the Express Ray is focused just at the surface of the crystal, from below," he said. "It dissolves our substance, to be transmitted by the beam. It would look as if we were melting into the crystal." "Ready," called the youth. "Think I've got it for you. Sort of a high island in the jungle. Nothing bad in sight now. But, I say—how're you coming back? I haven't got time to watch you." "Go ahead. We aren't coming back." "Gee! What is it? Elopement? I thought you were married already. Or is it business difficulties? The Bears did make an awful raid last night. But you better let me set you down in Hong Kong." A bell jangled. "So long," the youth called. Nada and Eric felt themselves enveloped in fire. Sheets of white flame seemed to lap up about them from the crystal block. Suddenly there was a sharp tingling sensation where they touched the polished surface. Then blackness, blankness. The next thing they knew, the fires were gone from about them. They were lying in something extremely soft and fluid; and warm rain was beating in their faces. Eric sat up, found himself in a mud-puddle. Beside him was Nada, opening her eyes and struggling up, her bright garments stained with black mud. All about rose a thick jungle, dark and gloomy—and very wet. Palm-like, the gigantic trees were, or fern-like, flinging clouds of feathery green foliage high against a somber sky of unbroken gloom. They stood up, triumphant. "At last!" Nada cried. "We're free! Free of that hateful old civilization! We're back to Nature!" "Yes, we're on our feet now, not parasites on the machines." "It's wonderful to have a fine, strong man like you to trust in, Eric. You're just like one of the heroes in your books!" "You're the perfect companion, Nada.... But now we must be practical. We must build a fire, find weapons, set up a shelter of some kind. I guess it will be night, pretty soon. And Charley said something about savage animals he had seen in the television. "We'll find a nice dry cave, and have a fire in front of the door. And skins of animals to sleep on. And pottery vessels to cook in. And you will find seeds and grown grain." "But first we must find a flint-bed. We need flint for tools, and to strike sparks to make a fire with. We will probably come across a chunk of virgin copper, too—it's found native." Presently they set off through the jungle. The mud seemed to be very abundant, and of a most sticky consistence. They sank into it ankle deep at every step, and vast masses of it clung to their feet. A mile they struggled on, without finding where a provident nature had left them even a single fragment of quartz, to say nothing of a mass of pure copper. "A darned shame," Eric grumbled, "to come forty million miles, and meet such a reception as this!" Nada stopped. "Eric," she said, "I'm tired. And I don't believe there's any rock here, anyway. You'll have to use wooden tools, sharpened in the fire." "Probably you're right. This soil seemed to be of alluvial origin. Shouldn't be surprised if the native rock is some hundreds of feet underground. Your idea is better." "You can make a fire by rubbing sticks together, can't you?" "It can be done, I'm sure. I've never tried it, myself. We need some dry sticks, first." They resumed the weary march, with a good fraction of the new planet adhering to their feet. Rain was still falling from the dark heavens in a steady, warm downpour. Dry wood seemed scarce as the proverbial hen's teeth. "You didn't bring any matches, dear?" "Matches! Of course not! We're going back to Nature." "I hope we get a fire pretty soon." "If dry wood were gold dust, we couldn't buy a hot dog." "Eric, that reminds me that I'm hungry." He confessed to a few pangs of his own. They turned their attention to looking for banana trees, and coconut palms, but they did not seem to abound in the Venerian jungle. Even small animals that might have been slain with a broken branch had contrary ideas about the matter. At last, from sheer weariness, they stopped, and gathered branches to make a sloping shelter by a vast fallen tree-trunk. "This will keep out the rain—maybe—" Eric said hopefully. "And tomorrow, when it has quit raining—I'm sure we'll do better." They crept in, as gloomy night fell without. They lay in each other's arms, the body warmth oddly comforting. Nada cried a little. "Buck up," Eric advised her. "We're back to nature—where we've always wanted to be." With the darkness, the temperature fell somewhat, and a high wind rose, whipping cold rain into the little shelter, and threatening to demolish it. Swarms of mosquito-like insects, seemingly not inconvenienced in the least by the inclement elements, swarmed about them in clouds. Then came a sound from the dismal stormy night, a hoarse, bellowing roar, raucous, terrifying. Nada clung against Eric. "What is it, dear?" she chattered. "Must be a reptile. Dinosaur, or something of the sort. This world seems to be in about the same state as the Earth when they flourished there.... But maybe it won't find us." The roar was repeated, nearer. The earth trembled beneath a mighty tread. "Eric," a thin voice trembled. "Don't you think—it might have been better— You know the old life was not so bad, after all." "I was just thinking of our rooms, nice and warm and bright, with hot foods coming up the shaft whenever we pushed the button, and the gay crowds in the park, and my old typewriter." "Eric?" she called softly. "Yes, dear." "Don't you wish—we had known better?" "I do." If he winced at the "we" the girl did not notice. The roaring outside was closer. And suddenly it was answered by another raucous bellow, at considerable distance, that echoed strangely through the forest. The fearful sounds were repeated, alternately. And always the more distant seemed nearer, until the two sounds were together. And then an infernal din broke out in the darkness. Bellows. Screams. Deafening shrieks. Mighty splashes, as if struggling Titans had upset oceans. Thunderous crashes, as if they were demolishing forests. Eric and Nada clung to each other, in doubt whether to stay or to fly through the storm. Gradually the sound of the conflict came nearer, until the earth shook beneath them, and they were afraid to move. Suddenly the great fallen tree against which they had erected the flimsy shelter was rolled back, evidently by a chance blow from the invisible monsters. The pitiful roof collapsed on the bedraggled humans. Nada burst into tears. "Oh, if only—if only—" Suddenly flame lapped up about them, the same white fire they had seen as they lay on the crystal block. Dizziness, insensibility overcame them. A few moments later, they were lying on the transparent table in the Cosmic Express office, with all those great mirrors and prisms and lenses about them. A bustling, red-faced official appeared through the door in the grill, fairly bubbling apologies. "So sorry—an accident—inconceivable. I can't see how he got it! We got you back as soon as we could find a focus. I sincerely hope you haven't been injured." "Why—what—what—" "Why I happened in, found our operator drunk. I've no idea where he got the stuff. He muttered something about Venus. I consulted the auto-register, and found two more passengers registered here than had been recorded at our other stations. I looked up the duplicate beam coordinates, and found that it had been set on Venus. I got men on the television at once, and we happened to find you. "I can't imagine how it happened. I've had the fellow locked up, and the 'dry-laws' are on the job. I hope you won't hold us for excessive damages." "No, I ask nothing except that you don't press charges against the boy. I don't want him to suffer for it in any way. My wife and I will be perfectly satisfied to get back to our apartment." "I don't wonder. You look like you've been through—I don't know what. But I'll have you there in five minutes. My private car—" Mr. Eric Stokes-Harding, noted author of primitive life and love, ate a hearty meal with his pretty spouse, after they had washed off the grime of another planet. He spent the next twelve hours in bed. At the end of the month he delivered his promised story to his publishers, a thrilling tale of a man marooned on Venus, with a beautiful girl. The hero made stone tools, erected a dwelling for himself and his mate, hunted food for her, defended her from the mammoth saurian monsters of the Venerian jungles. The book was a huge success. THE END

How Eric wishes he could have provided for Nada on their visit to Venus

How Nada resents Eric for not providing for her on their visit to Venus

How Eric has contorted his experience on Venus to seem more like his protagonist

How Nada would have envisioned her and Eric's visit to Venus

26066_T3J3I3D3_2

Which statement best describes Williamson's writing style?

Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Amazing Stories December 1961 and was first published in Amazing Stories November 1930. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note. A Classic Reprint from AMAZING STORIES, November, 1930 Copyright 1931, by Experimenter Publications Inc. The Cosmic Express By JACK WILLIAMSON Introduction by Sam Moskowitz The year 1928 was a great year of discovery for AMAZING STORIES . They were uncovering new talent at such a great rate, (Harl Vincent, David H. Keller, E. E. Smith, Philip Francis Nowlan, Fletcher Pratt and Miles J. Breuer), that Jack Williamson barely managed to become one of a distinguished group of discoveries by stealing the cover of the December issue for his first story The Metal Man. A disciple of A. Merritt, he attempted to imitate in style, mood and subject the magic of that late lamented master of fantasy. The imitation found great favor from the readership and almost instantly Jack Williamson became an important name on the contents page of AMAZING STORIES . He followed his initial success with two short novels , The Green Girl in AMAZING STORIES and The Alien Intelligence in SCIENCE WONDER STORIES , another Gernsback publication. Both of these stories were close copies of A. Merritt, whose style and method Jack Williamson parlayed into popularity for eight years. Yet the strange thing about it was that Jack Williamson was one of the most versatile science fiction authors ever to sit down at the typewriter. When the vogue for science-fantasy altered to super science, he created the memorable super lock-picker Giles Habilula as the major attraction in a rousing trio of space operas , The Legion of Space, The Cometeers and One Against the Legion. When grim realism was the order of the day, he produced Crucible of Power and when they wanted extrapolated theory in present tense, he assumed the disguise of Will Stewart and popularized the concept of contra terrene matter in science fiction with Seetee Ship and Seetee Shock. Finally, when only psychological studies of the future would do, he produced "With Folded Hands ..." "... And Searching Mind." The Cosmic Express is of special interest because it was written during Williamson's A. Merritt "kick," when he was writing little else but, and it gave the earliest indication of a more general capability. The lightness of the handling is especially modern, barely avoiding the farcical by the validity of the notion that wireless transmission of matter is the next big transportation frontier to be conquered. It is especially important because it stylistically forecast a later trend to accept the background for granted, regardless of the quantity of wonders, and proceed with the story. With only a few thousand scanning-disk television sets in existence at the time of the writing, the surmise that this media would be a natural for westerns was particularly astute. Jack Williamson was born in 1908 in the Arizona territory when covered wagons were the primary form of transportation and apaches still raided the settlers. His father was a cattle man, but for young Jack, the ranch was anything but glamorous. "My days were filled," he remembers, "with monotonous rounds of what seemed an endless, heart-breaking war with drought and frost and dust-storms, poison-weeds and hail, for the sake of survival on the Llano Estacado." The discovery of AMAZING STORIES was the escape he sought and his goal was to be a science fiction writer. He labored to this end and the first he knew that a story of his had been accepted was when he bought the December, 1929 issue of AMAZING STORIES . Since then, he has written millions of words of science fiction and has gone on record as follows: "I feel that science-fiction is the folklore of the new world of science, and the expression of man's reaction to a technological environment. By which I mean that it is the most interesting and stimulating form of literature today." Mr. Eric Stokes-Harding tumbled out of the rumpled bed-clothing, a striking slender figure in purple-striped pajamas. He smiled fondly across to the other of the twin beds, where Nada, his pretty bride, lay quiet beneath light silk covers. With a groan, he stood up and began a series of fantastic bending exercises. But after a few half-hearted movements, he gave it up, and walked through an open door into a small bright room, its walls covered with bookcases and also with scientific appliances that would have been strange to the man of four or five centuries before, when the Age of Aviation was beginning. Suddenly there was a sharp tingling sensation where they touched the polished surface. Yawning, Mr. Eric Stokes-Harding stood before the great open window, staring out. Below him was a wide, park-like space, green with emerald lawns, and bright with flowering plants. Two hundred yards across it rose an immense pyramidal building—an artistic structure, gleaming with white marble and bright metal, striped with the verdure of terraced roof-gardens, its slender peak rising to help support the gray, steel-ribbed glass roof above. Beyond, the park stretched away in illimitable vistas, broken with the graceful columned buildings that held up the great glass roof. Above the glass, over this New York of 2432 A. D., a freezing blizzard was sweeping. But small concern was that to the lightly clad man at the window, who was inhaling deeply the fragrant air from the plants below—air kept, winter and summer, exactly at 20° C. With another yawn, Mr. Eric Stokes-Harding turned back to the room, which was bright with the rich golden light that poured in from the suspended globes of the cold ato-light that illuminated the snow-covered city. With a distasteful grimace, he seated himself before a broad, paper-littered desk, sat a few minutes leaning back, with his hands clasped behind his head. At last he straightened reluctantly, slid a small typewriter out of its drawer, and began pecking at it impatiently. For Mr. Eric Stokes-Harding was an author. There was a whole shelf of his books on the wall, in bright jackets, red and blue and green, that brought a thrill of pleasure to the young novelist's heart when he looked up from his clattering machine. He wrote "thrilling action romances," as his enthusiastic publishers and television directors said, "of ages past, when men were men. Red-blooded heroes responding vigorously to the stirring passions of primordial life!" He was impartial as to the source of his thrills—provided they were distant enough from modern civilization. His hero was likely to be an ape-man roaring through the jungle, with a bloody rock in one hand and a beautiful girl in the other. Or a cowboy, "hard-riding, hard-shooting," the vanishing hero of the ancient ranches. Or a man marooned with a lovely woman on a desert South Sea island. His heroes were invariably strong, fearless, resourceful fellows, who could handle a club on equal terms with a cave-man, or call science to aid them in defending a beautiful mate from the terrors of a desolate wilderness. And a hundred million read Eric's novels, and watched the dramatization of them on the television screens. They thrilled at the simple, romantic lives his heroes led, paid him handsome royalties, and subconsciously shared his opinion that civilization had taken all the best from the life of man. Eric had settled down to the artistic satisfaction of describing the sensuous delight of his hero in the roasted marrow-bones of a dead mammoth, when the pretty woman in the other room stirred, and presently came tripping into the study, gay and vivacious, and—as her husband of a few months most justly thought—altogether beautiful in a bright silk dressing gown. Recklessly, he slammed the machine back into its place, and resolved to forget that his next "red-blooded action thriller" was due in the publisher's office at the end of the month. He sprang up to kiss his wife, held her embraced for a long happy moment. And then they went hand in hand, to the side of the room and punched a series of buttons on a panel—a simple way of ordering breakfast sent up the automatic shaft from the kitchens below. Nada Stokes-Harding was also an author. She wrote poems—"back to nature stuff"—simple lyrics of the sea, of sunsets, of bird songs, of bright flowers and warm winds, of thrilling communion with Nature, and growing things. Men read her poems and called her a genius. Even though the whole world had grown up into a city, the birds were extinct, there were no wild flowers, and no one had time to bother about sunsets. "Eric, darling," she said, "isn't it terrible to be cooped up here in this little flat, away from the things we both love?" "Yes, dear. Civilization has ruined the world. If we could only have lived a thousand years ago, when life was simple and natural, when men hunted and killed their meat, instead of drinking synthetic stuff, when men still had the joys of conflict, instead of living under glass, like hot-house flowers." "If we could only go somewhere—" "There isn't anywhere to go. I write about the West, Africa, South Sea Islands. But they were all filled up two hundred years ago. Pleasure resorts, sanatoriums, cities, factories." "If only we lived on Venus! I was listening to a lecture on the television, last night. The speaker said that the Planet Venus is younger than the Earth, that it has not cooled so much. It has a thick, cloudy atmosphere, and low, rainy forests. There's simple, elemental life there—like Earth had before civilization ruined it." "Yes, Kinsley, with his new infra-red ray telescope, that penetrates the cloud layers of the planet, proved that Venus rotates in about the same period as Earth; and it must be much like Earth was a million years ago." "Eric, I wonder if we could go there! It would be so thrilling to begin life like the characters in your stories, to get away from this hateful civilization, and live natural lives. Maybe a rocket—" The young author's eyes were glowing. He skipped across the floor, seized Nada, kissed her ecstatically. "Splendid! Think of hunting in the virgin forest, and bringing the game home to you! But I'm afraid there is no way.—Wait! The Cosmic Express." "The Cosmic Express?" "A new invention. Just perfected a few weeks ago, I understand. By Ludwig Von der Valls, the German physicist." "I've quit bothering about science. It has ruined nature, filled the world with silly, artificial people, doing silly, artificial things." "But this is quite remarkable, dear. A new way to travel—by ether!" "By ether!" "Yes. You know of course that energy and matter are interchangeable terms; both are simply etheric vibration, of different sorts." "Of course. That's elementary." She smiled proudly. "I can give you examples, even of the change. The disintegration of the radium atom, making helium and lead and energy . And Millikan's old proof that his Cosmic Ray is generated when particles of electricity are united to form an atom." "Fine! I thought you said you weren't a scientist." He glowed with pride. "But the method, in the new Cosmic Express, is simply to convert the matter to be carried into power, send it out as a radiant beam and focus the beam to convert it back into atoms at the destination." "But the amount of energy must be terrific—" "It is. You know short waves carry more energy than long ones. The Express Ray is an electromagnetic vibration of frequency far higher than that of even the Cosmic Ray, and correspondingly more powerful and more penetrating." The girl frowned, running slim fingers through golden-brown hair. "But I don't see how they get any recognizable object, not even how they get the radiation turned back into matter." "The beam is focused, just like the light that passes through a camera lens. The photographic lens, using light rays, picks up a picture and reproduces it again on the plate—just the same as the Express Ray picks up an object and sets it down on the other side of the world. "An analogy from television might help. You know that by means of the scanning disc, the picture is transformed into mere rapid fluctuations in the brightness of a beam of light. In a parallel manner, the focal plane of the Express Ray moves slowly through the object, progressively, dissolving layers of the thickness of a single atom, which are accurately reproduced at the other focus of the instrument—which might be in Venus! "But the analogy of the lens is the better of the two. For no receiving instrument is required, as in television. The object is built up of an infinite series of plane layers, at the focus of the ray, no matter where that may be. Such a thing would be impossible with radio apparatus because even with the best beam transmission, all but a tiny fraction of the power is lost, and power is required to rebuild the atoms. Do you understand, dear?" "Not altogether. But I should worry! Here comes breakfast. Let me butter your toast." A bell had rung at the shaft. She ran to it, and returned with a great silver tray, laden with dainty dishes, which she set on a little side table. They sat down opposite each other, and ate, getting as much satisfaction from contemplation of each other's faces as from the excellent food. When they had finished, she carried the tray to the shaft, slid it in a slot, and touched a button—thus disposing of the culinary cares of the morning. She ran back to Eric, who was once more staring distastefully at his typewriter. "Oh, darling! I'm thrilled to death about the Cosmic Express! If we could go to Venus, to a new life on a new world, and get away from all this hateful conventional society—" "We can go to their office—it's only five minutes. The chap that operates the machine for the company is a pal of mine. He's not supposed to take passengers except between the offices they have scattered about the world. But I know his weak point—" Eric laughed, fumbled with a hidden spring under his desk. A small polished object, gleaming silvery, slid down into his hand. "Old friendship, plus this, would make him—like spinach." Five minutes later Mr. Eric Stokes-Harding and his pretty wife were in street clothes, light silk tunics of loose, flowing lines—little clothing being required in the artificially warmed city. They entered an elevator and dropped thirty stories to the ground floor of the great building. There they entered a cylindrical car, with rows of seats down the sides. Not greatly different from an ancient subway car, except that it was air-tight, and was hurled by magnetic attraction and repulsion through a tube exhausted of air, at a speed that would have made an old subway rider gasp with amazement. In five more minutes their car had whipped up to the base of another building, in the business section, where there was no room for parks between the mighty structures that held the unbroken glass roofs two hundred stories above the concrete pavement. An elevator brought them up a hundred and fifty stories. Eric led Nada down a long, carpeted corridor to a wide glass door, which bore the words: COSMIC EXPRESS stenciled in gold capitals across it. As they approached, a lean man, carrying a black bag, darted out of an elevator shaft opposite the door, ran across the corridor, and entered. They pushed in after him. They were in a little room, cut in two by a high brass grill. In front of it was a long bench against the wall, that reminded one of the waiting room in an old railroad depot. In the grill was a little window, with a lazy, brown-eyed youth leaning on the shelf behind it. Beyond him was a great, glittering piece of mechanism, half hidden by the brass. A little door gave access to the machine from the space before the grill. The thin man in black, whom Eric now recognized as a prominent French heart-specialist, was dancing before the window, waving his bag frantically, raving at the sleepy boy. "Queek! I have tell you zee truth! I have zee most urgent necessity to go queekly. A patient I have in Paree, zat ees in zee most creetical condition!" "Hold your horses just a minute, Mister. We got a client in the machine now. Russian diplomat from Moscow to Rio de Janeiro.... Two hundred seventy dollars and eighty cents, please.... Your turn next. Remember this is just an experimental service. Regular installations all over the world in a year.... Ready now. Come on in." The youth took the money, pressed a button. The door sprang open in the grill, and the frantic physician leaped through it. "Lie down on the crystal, face up," the young man ordered. "Hands at your sides, don't breathe. Ready!" He manipulated his dials and switches, and pressed another button. "Why, hello, Eric, old man!" he cried. "That's the lady you were telling me about? Congratulations!" A bell jangled before him on the panel. "Just a minute. I've got a call." He punched the board again. Little bulbs lit and glowed for a second. The youth turned toward the half-hidden machine, spoke courteously. "All right, madam. Walk out. Hope you found the transit pleasant." "But my Violet! My precious Violet!" a shrill female voice came from the machine. "Sir, what have you done with my darling Violet?" "I'm sure I don't know, madam. You lost it off your hat?" "None of your impertinence, sir! I want my dog." "Ah, a dog. Must have jumped off the crystal. You can have him sent on for three hundred and—" "Young man, if any harm comes to my Violet—I'll—I'll—I'll appeal to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals!" "Very good, madam. We appreciate your patronage." The door flew open again. A very fat woman, puffing angrily, face highly colored, clothing shimmering with artificial gems, waddled pompously out of the door through which the frantic French doctor had so recently vanished. She rolled heavily across the room, and out into the corridor. Shrill words floated back: "I'm going to see my lawyer! My precious Violet—" The sallow youth winked. "And now what can I do for you, Eric?" "We want to go to Venus, if that ray of yours can put us there." "To Venus? Impossible. My orders are to use the Express merely between the sixteen designated stations, at New York, San Francisco, Tokyo, London, Paris—" "See here, Charley," with a cautious glance toward the door, Eric held up the silver flask. "For old time's sake, and for this—" The boy seemed dazed at sight of the bright flask. Then, with a single swift motion, he snatched it out of Eric's hand, and bent to conceal it below his instrument panel. "Sure, old boy. I'd send you to heaven for that, if you'd give me the micrometer readings to set the ray with. But I tell you, this is dangerous. I've got a sort of television attachment, for focusing the ray. I can turn that on Venus—I've been amusing myself, watching the life there, already. Terrible place. Savage. I can pick a place on high land to set you down. But I can't be responsible for what happens afterward." "Simple, primitive life is what we're looking for. And now what do I owe you—" "Oh, that's all right. Between friends. Provided that stuff's genuine! Walk in and lie down on the crystal block. Hands at your sides. Don't move." The little door had swung open again, and Eric led Nada through. They stepped into a little cell, completely surrounded with mirrors and vast prisms and lenses and electron tubes. In the center was a slab of transparent crystal, eight feet square and two inches thick, with an intricate mass of machinery below it. Eric helped Nada to a place on the crystal, lay down at her side. "I think the Express Ray is focused just at the surface of the crystal, from below," he said. "It dissolves our substance, to be transmitted by the beam. It would look as if we were melting into the crystal." "Ready," called the youth. "Think I've got it for you. Sort of a high island in the jungle. Nothing bad in sight now. But, I say—how're you coming back? I haven't got time to watch you." "Go ahead. We aren't coming back." "Gee! What is it? Elopement? I thought you were married already. Or is it business difficulties? The Bears did make an awful raid last night. But you better let me set you down in Hong Kong." A bell jangled. "So long," the youth called. Nada and Eric felt themselves enveloped in fire. Sheets of white flame seemed to lap up about them from the crystal block. Suddenly there was a sharp tingling sensation where they touched the polished surface. Then blackness, blankness. The next thing they knew, the fires were gone from about them. They were lying in something extremely soft and fluid; and warm rain was beating in their faces. Eric sat up, found himself in a mud-puddle. Beside him was Nada, opening her eyes and struggling up, her bright garments stained with black mud. All about rose a thick jungle, dark and gloomy—and very wet. Palm-like, the gigantic trees were, or fern-like, flinging clouds of feathery green foliage high against a somber sky of unbroken gloom. They stood up, triumphant. "At last!" Nada cried. "We're free! Free of that hateful old civilization! We're back to Nature!" "Yes, we're on our feet now, not parasites on the machines." "It's wonderful to have a fine, strong man like you to trust in, Eric. You're just like one of the heroes in your books!" "You're the perfect companion, Nada.... But now we must be practical. We must build a fire, find weapons, set up a shelter of some kind. I guess it will be night, pretty soon. And Charley said something about savage animals he had seen in the television. "We'll find a nice dry cave, and have a fire in front of the door. And skins of animals to sleep on. And pottery vessels to cook in. And you will find seeds and grown grain." "But first we must find a flint-bed. We need flint for tools, and to strike sparks to make a fire with. We will probably come across a chunk of virgin copper, too—it's found native." Presently they set off through the jungle. The mud seemed to be very abundant, and of a most sticky consistence. They sank into it ankle deep at every step, and vast masses of it clung to their feet. A mile they struggled on, without finding where a provident nature had left them even a single fragment of quartz, to say nothing of a mass of pure copper. "A darned shame," Eric grumbled, "to come forty million miles, and meet such a reception as this!" Nada stopped. "Eric," she said, "I'm tired. And I don't believe there's any rock here, anyway. You'll have to use wooden tools, sharpened in the fire." "Probably you're right. This soil seemed to be of alluvial origin. Shouldn't be surprised if the native rock is some hundreds of feet underground. Your idea is better." "You can make a fire by rubbing sticks together, can't you?" "It can be done, I'm sure. I've never tried it, myself. We need some dry sticks, first." They resumed the weary march, with a good fraction of the new planet adhering to their feet. Rain was still falling from the dark heavens in a steady, warm downpour. Dry wood seemed scarce as the proverbial hen's teeth. "You didn't bring any matches, dear?" "Matches! Of course not! We're going back to Nature." "I hope we get a fire pretty soon." "If dry wood were gold dust, we couldn't buy a hot dog." "Eric, that reminds me that I'm hungry." He confessed to a few pangs of his own. They turned their attention to looking for banana trees, and coconut palms, but they did not seem to abound in the Venerian jungle. Even small animals that might have been slain with a broken branch had contrary ideas about the matter. At last, from sheer weariness, they stopped, and gathered branches to make a sloping shelter by a vast fallen tree-trunk. "This will keep out the rain—maybe—" Eric said hopefully. "And tomorrow, when it has quit raining—I'm sure we'll do better." They crept in, as gloomy night fell without. They lay in each other's arms, the body warmth oddly comforting. Nada cried a little. "Buck up," Eric advised her. "We're back to nature—where we've always wanted to be." With the darkness, the temperature fell somewhat, and a high wind rose, whipping cold rain into the little shelter, and threatening to demolish it. Swarms of mosquito-like insects, seemingly not inconvenienced in the least by the inclement elements, swarmed about them in clouds. Then came a sound from the dismal stormy night, a hoarse, bellowing roar, raucous, terrifying. Nada clung against Eric. "What is it, dear?" she chattered. "Must be a reptile. Dinosaur, or something of the sort. This world seems to be in about the same state as the Earth when they flourished there.... But maybe it won't find us." The roar was repeated, nearer. The earth trembled beneath a mighty tread. "Eric," a thin voice trembled. "Don't you think—it might have been better— You know the old life was not so bad, after all." "I was just thinking of our rooms, nice and warm and bright, with hot foods coming up the shaft whenever we pushed the button, and the gay crowds in the park, and my old typewriter." "Eric?" she called softly. "Yes, dear." "Don't you wish—we had known better?" "I do." If he winced at the "we" the girl did not notice. The roaring outside was closer. And suddenly it was answered by another raucous bellow, at considerable distance, that echoed strangely through the forest. The fearful sounds were repeated, alternately. And always the more distant seemed nearer, until the two sounds were together. And then an infernal din broke out in the darkness. Bellows. Screams. Deafening shrieks. Mighty splashes, as if struggling Titans had upset oceans. Thunderous crashes, as if they were demolishing forests. Eric and Nada clung to each other, in doubt whether to stay or to fly through the storm. Gradually the sound of the conflict came nearer, until the earth shook beneath them, and they were afraid to move. Suddenly the great fallen tree against which they had erected the flimsy shelter was rolled back, evidently by a chance blow from the invisible monsters. The pitiful roof collapsed on the bedraggled humans. Nada burst into tears. "Oh, if only—if only—" Suddenly flame lapped up about them, the same white fire they had seen as they lay on the crystal block. Dizziness, insensibility overcame them. A few moments later, they were lying on the transparent table in the Cosmic Express office, with all those great mirrors and prisms and lenses about them. A bustling, red-faced official appeared through the door in the grill, fairly bubbling apologies. "So sorry—an accident—inconceivable. I can't see how he got it! We got you back as soon as we could find a focus. I sincerely hope you haven't been injured." "Why—what—what—" "Why I happened in, found our operator drunk. I've no idea where he got the stuff. He muttered something about Venus. I consulted the auto-register, and found two more passengers registered here than had been recorded at our other stations. I looked up the duplicate beam coordinates, and found that it had been set on Venus. I got men on the television at once, and we happened to find you. "I can't imagine how it happened. I've had the fellow locked up, and the 'dry-laws' are on the job. I hope you won't hold us for excessive damages." "No, I ask nothing except that you don't press charges against the boy. I don't want him to suffer for it in any way. My wife and I will be perfectly satisfied to get back to our apartment." "I don't wonder. You look like you've been through—I don't know what. But I'll have you there in five minutes. My private car—" Mr. Eric Stokes-Harding, noted author of primitive life and love, ate a hearty meal with his pretty spouse, after they had washed off the grime of another planet. He spent the next twelve hours in bed. At the end of the month he delivered his promised story to his publishers, a thrilling tale of a man marooned on Venus, with a beautiful girl. The hero made stone tools, erected a dwelling for himself and his mate, hunted food for her, defended her from the mammoth saurian monsters of the Venerian jungles. The book was a huge success. THE END

It reflects his disdain for humankind's obsession with technological advancement

More authors have parlayed his method and style than any other science fiction author

It evolved to be flexible despite how it initially imitated the style of a singular author

It contains myriad farcical and parodic literary elements, which was uncommon during his time

26066_T3J3I3D3_3

What event or experience had the strongest impact on Williamson's literary style?

Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Amazing Stories December 1961 and was first published in Amazing Stories November 1930. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note. A Classic Reprint from AMAZING STORIES, November, 1930 Copyright 1931, by Experimenter Publications Inc. The Cosmic Express By JACK WILLIAMSON Introduction by Sam Moskowitz The year 1928 was a great year of discovery for AMAZING STORIES . They were uncovering new talent at such a great rate, (Harl Vincent, David H. Keller, E. E. Smith, Philip Francis Nowlan, Fletcher Pratt and Miles J. Breuer), that Jack Williamson barely managed to become one of a distinguished group of discoveries by stealing the cover of the December issue for his first story The Metal Man. A disciple of A. Merritt, he attempted to imitate in style, mood and subject the magic of that late lamented master of fantasy. The imitation found great favor from the readership and almost instantly Jack Williamson became an important name on the contents page of AMAZING STORIES . He followed his initial success with two short novels , The Green Girl in AMAZING STORIES and The Alien Intelligence in SCIENCE WONDER STORIES , another Gernsback publication. Both of these stories were close copies of A. Merritt, whose style and method Jack Williamson parlayed into popularity for eight years. Yet the strange thing about it was that Jack Williamson was one of the most versatile science fiction authors ever to sit down at the typewriter. When the vogue for science-fantasy altered to super science, he created the memorable super lock-picker Giles Habilula as the major attraction in a rousing trio of space operas , The Legion of Space, The Cometeers and One Against the Legion. When grim realism was the order of the day, he produced Crucible of Power and when they wanted extrapolated theory in present tense, he assumed the disguise of Will Stewart and popularized the concept of contra terrene matter in science fiction with Seetee Ship and Seetee Shock. Finally, when only psychological studies of the future would do, he produced "With Folded Hands ..." "... And Searching Mind." The Cosmic Express is of special interest because it was written during Williamson's A. Merritt "kick," when he was writing little else but, and it gave the earliest indication of a more general capability. The lightness of the handling is especially modern, barely avoiding the farcical by the validity of the notion that wireless transmission of matter is the next big transportation frontier to be conquered. It is especially important because it stylistically forecast a later trend to accept the background for granted, regardless of the quantity of wonders, and proceed with the story. With only a few thousand scanning-disk television sets in existence at the time of the writing, the surmise that this media would be a natural for westerns was particularly astute. Jack Williamson was born in 1908 in the Arizona territory when covered wagons were the primary form of transportation and apaches still raided the settlers. His father was a cattle man, but for young Jack, the ranch was anything but glamorous. "My days were filled," he remembers, "with monotonous rounds of what seemed an endless, heart-breaking war with drought and frost and dust-storms, poison-weeds and hail, for the sake of survival on the Llano Estacado." The discovery of AMAZING STORIES was the escape he sought and his goal was to be a science fiction writer. He labored to this end and the first he knew that a story of his had been accepted was when he bought the December, 1929 issue of AMAZING STORIES . Since then, he has written millions of words of science fiction and has gone on record as follows: "I feel that science-fiction is the folklore of the new world of science, and the expression of man's reaction to a technological environment. By which I mean that it is the most interesting and stimulating form of literature today." Mr. Eric Stokes-Harding tumbled out of the rumpled bed-clothing, a striking slender figure in purple-striped pajamas. He smiled fondly across to the other of the twin beds, where Nada, his pretty bride, lay quiet beneath light silk covers. With a groan, he stood up and began a series of fantastic bending exercises. But after a few half-hearted movements, he gave it up, and walked through an open door into a small bright room, its walls covered with bookcases and also with scientific appliances that would have been strange to the man of four or five centuries before, when the Age of Aviation was beginning. Suddenly there was a sharp tingling sensation where they touched the polished surface. Yawning, Mr. Eric Stokes-Harding stood before the great open window, staring out. Below him was a wide, park-like space, green with emerald lawns, and bright with flowering plants. Two hundred yards across it rose an immense pyramidal building—an artistic structure, gleaming with white marble and bright metal, striped with the verdure of terraced roof-gardens, its slender peak rising to help support the gray, steel-ribbed glass roof above. Beyond, the park stretched away in illimitable vistas, broken with the graceful columned buildings that held up the great glass roof. Above the glass, over this New York of 2432 A. D., a freezing blizzard was sweeping. But small concern was that to the lightly clad man at the window, who was inhaling deeply the fragrant air from the plants below—air kept, winter and summer, exactly at 20° C. With another yawn, Mr. Eric Stokes-Harding turned back to the room, which was bright with the rich golden light that poured in from the suspended globes of the cold ato-light that illuminated the snow-covered city. With a distasteful grimace, he seated himself before a broad, paper-littered desk, sat a few minutes leaning back, with his hands clasped behind his head. At last he straightened reluctantly, slid a small typewriter out of its drawer, and began pecking at it impatiently. For Mr. Eric Stokes-Harding was an author. There was a whole shelf of his books on the wall, in bright jackets, red and blue and green, that brought a thrill of pleasure to the young novelist's heart when he looked up from his clattering machine. He wrote "thrilling action romances," as his enthusiastic publishers and television directors said, "of ages past, when men were men. Red-blooded heroes responding vigorously to the stirring passions of primordial life!" He was impartial as to the source of his thrills—provided they were distant enough from modern civilization. His hero was likely to be an ape-man roaring through the jungle, with a bloody rock in one hand and a beautiful girl in the other. Or a cowboy, "hard-riding, hard-shooting," the vanishing hero of the ancient ranches. Or a man marooned with a lovely woman on a desert South Sea island. His heroes were invariably strong, fearless, resourceful fellows, who could handle a club on equal terms with a cave-man, or call science to aid them in defending a beautiful mate from the terrors of a desolate wilderness. And a hundred million read Eric's novels, and watched the dramatization of them on the television screens. They thrilled at the simple, romantic lives his heroes led, paid him handsome royalties, and subconsciously shared his opinion that civilization had taken all the best from the life of man. Eric had settled down to the artistic satisfaction of describing the sensuous delight of his hero in the roasted marrow-bones of a dead mammoth, when the pretty woman in the other room stirred, and presently came tripping into the study, gay and vivacious, and—as her husband of a few months most justly thought—altogether beautiful in a bright silk dressing gown. Recklessly, he slammed the machine back into its place, and resolved to forget that his next "red-blooded action thriller" was due in the publisher's office at the end of the month. He sprang up to kiss his wife, held her embraced for a long happy moment. And then they went hand in hand, to the side of the room and punched a series of buttons on a panel—a simple way of ordering breakfast sent up the automatic shaft from the kitchens below. Nada Stokes-Harding was also an author. She wrote poems—"back to nature stuff"—simple lyrics of the sea, of sunsets, of bird songs, of bright flowers and warm winds, of thrilling communion with Nature, and growing things. Men read her poems and called her a genius. Even though the whole world had grown up into a city, the birds were extinct, there were no wild flowers, and no one had time to bother about sunsets. "Eric, darling," she said, "isn't it terrible to be cooped up here in this little flat, away from the things we both love?" "Yes, dear. Civilization has ruined the world. If we could only have lived a thousand years ago, when life was simple and natural, when men hunted and killed their meat, instead of drinking synthetic stuff, when men still had the joys of conflict, instead of living under glass, like hot-house flowers." "If we could only go somewhere—" "There isn't anywhere to go. I write about the West, Africa, South Sea Islands. But they were all filled up two hundred years ago. Pleasure resorts, sanatoriums, cities, factories." "If only we lived on Venus! I was listening to a lecture on the television, last night. The speaker said that the Planet Venus is younger than the Earth, that it has not cooled so much. It has a thick, cloudy atmosphere, and low, rainy forests. There's simple, elemental life there—like Earth had before civilization ruined it." "Yes, Kinsley, with his new infra-red ray telescope, that penetrates the cloud layers of the planet, proved that Venus rotates in about the same period as Earth; and it must be much like Earth was a million years ago." "Eric, I wonder if we could go there! It would be so thrilling to begin life like the characters in your stories, to get away from this hateful civilization, and live natural lives. Maybe a rocket—" The young author's eyes were glowing. He skipped across the floor, seized Nada, kissed her ecstatically. "Splendid! Think of hunting in the virgin forest, and bringing the game home to you! But I'm afraid there is no way.—Wait! The Cosmic Express." "The Cosmic Express?" "A new invention. Just perfected a few weeks ago, I understand. By Ludwig Von der Valls, the German physicist." "I've quit bothering about science. It has ruined nature, filled the world with silly, artificial people, doing silly, artificial things." "But this is quite remarkable, dear. A new way to travel—by ether!" "By ether!" "Yes. You know of course that energy and matter are interchangeable terms; both are simply etheric vibration, of different sorts." "Of course. That's elementary." She smiled proudly. "I can give you examples, even of the change. The disintegration of the radium atom, making helium and lead and energy . And Millikan's old proof that his Cosmic Ray is generated when particles of electricity are united to form an atom." "Fine! I thought you said you weren't a scientist." He glowed with pride. "But the method, in the new Cosmic Express, is simply to convert the matter to be carried into power, send it out as a radiant beam and focus the beam to convert it back into atoms at the destination." "But the amount of energy must be terrific—" "It is. You know short waves carry more energy than long ones. The Express Ray is an electromagnetic vibration of frequency far higher than that of even the Cosmic Ray, and correspondingly more powerful and more penetrating." The girl frowned, running slim fingers through golden-brown hair. "But I don't see how they get any recognizable object, not even how they get the radiation turned back into matter." "The beam is focused, just like the light that passes through a camera lens. The photographic lens, using light rays, picks up a picture and reproduces it again on the plate—just the same as the Express Ray picks up an object and sets it down on the other side of the world. "An analogy from television might help. You know that by means of the scanning disc, the picture is transformed into mere rapid fluctuations in the brightness of a beam of light. In a parallel manner, the focal plane of the Express Ray moves slowly through the object, progressively, dissolving layers of the thickness of a single atom, which are accurately reproduced at the other focus of the instrument—which might be in Venus! "But the analogy of the lens is the better of the two. For no receiving instrument is required, as in television. The object is built up of an infinite series of plane layers, at the focus of the ray, no matter where that may be. Such a thing would be impossible with radio apparatus because even with the best beam transmission, all but a tiny fraction of the power is lost, and power is required to rebuild the atoms. Do you understand, dear?" "Not altogether. But I should worry! Here comes breakfast. Let me butter your toast." A bell had rung at the shaft. She ran to it, and returned with a great silver tray, laden with dainty dishes, which she set on a little side table. They sat down opposite each other, and ate, getting as much satisfaction from contemplation of each other's faces as from the excellent food. When they had finished, she carried the tray to the shaft, slid it in a slot, and touched a button—thus disposing of the culinary cares of the morning. She ran back to Eric, who was once more staring distastefully at his typewriter. "Oh, darling! I'm thrilled to death about the Cosmic Express! If we could go to Venus, to a new life on a new world, and get away from all this hateful conventional society—" "We can go to their office—it's only five minutes. The chap that operates the machine for the company is a pal of mine. He's not supposed to take passengers except between the offices they have scattered about the world. But I know his weak point—" Eric laughed, fumbled with a hidden spring under his desk. A small polished object, gleaming silvery, slid down into his hand. "Old friendship, plus this, would make him—like spinach." Five minutes later Mr. Eric Stokes-Harding and his pretty wife were in street clothes, light silk tunics of loose, flowing lines—little clothing being required in the artificially warmed city. They entered an elevator and dropped thirty stories to the ground floor of the great building. There they entered a cylindrical car, with rows of seats down the sides. Not greatly different from an ancient subway car, except that it was air-tight, and was hurled by magnetic attraction and repulsion through a tube exhausted of air, at a speed that would have made an old subway rider gasp with amazement. In five more minutes their car had whipped up to the base of another building, in the business section, where there was no room for parks between the mighty structures that held the unbroken glass roofs two hundred stories above the concrete pavement. An elevator brought them up a hundred and fifty stories. Eric led Nada down a long, carpeted corridor to a wide glass door, which bore the words: COSMIC EXPRESS stenciled in gold capitals across it. As they approached, a lean man, carrying a black bag, darted out of an elevator shaft opposite the door, ran across the corridor, and entered. They pushed in after him. They were in a little room, cut in two by a high brass grill. In front of it was a long bench against the wall, that reminded one of the waiting room in an old railroad depot. In the grill was a little window, with a lazy, brown-eyed youth leaning on the shelf behind it. Beyond him was a great, glittering piece of mechanism, half hidden by the brass. A little door gave access to the machine from the space before the grill. The thin man in black, whom Eric now recognized as a prominent French heart-specialist, was dancing before the window, waving his bag frantically, raving at the sleepy boy. "Queek! I have tell you zee truth! I have zee most urgent necessity to go queekly. A patient I have in Paree, zat ees in zee most creetical condition!" "Hold your horses just a minute, Mister. We got a client in the machine now. Russian diplomat from Moscow to Rio de Janeiro.... Two hundred seventy dollars and eighty cents, please.... Your turn next. Remember this is just an experimental service. Regular installations all over the world in a year.... Ready now. Come on in." The youth took the money, pressed a button. The door sprang open in the grill, and the frantic physician leaped through it. "Lie down on the crystal, face up," the young man ordered. "Hands at your sides, don't breathe. Ready!" He manipulated his dials and switches, and pressed another button. "Why, hello, Eric, old man!" he cried. "That's the lady you were telling me about? Congratulations!" A bell jangled before him on the panel. "Just a minute. I've got a call." He punched the board again. Little bulbs lit and glowed for a second. The youth turned toward the half-hidden machine, spoke courteously. "All right, madam. Walk out. Hope you found the transit pleasant." "But my Violet! My precious Violet!" a shrill female voice came from the machine. "Sir, what have you done with my darling Violet?" "I'm sure I don't know, madam. You lost it off your hat?" "None of your impertinence, sir! I want my dog." "Ah, a dog. Must have jumped off the crystal. You can have him sent on for three hundred and—" "Young man, if any harm comes to my Violet—I'll—I'll—I'll appeal to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals!" "Very good, madam. We appreciate your patronage." The door flew open again. A very fat woman, puffing angrily, face highly colored, clothing shimmering with artificial gems, waddled pompously out of the door through which the frantic French doctor had so recently vanished. She rolled heavily across the room, and out into the corridor. Shrill words floated back: "I'm going to see my lawyer! My precious Violet—" The sallow youth winked. "And now what can I do for you, Eric?" "We want to go to Venus, if that ray of yours can put us there." "To Venus? Impossible. My orders are to use the Express merely between the sixteen designated stations, at New York, San Francisco, Tokyo, London, Paris—" "See here, Charley," with a cautious glance toward the door, Eric held up the silver flask. "For old time's sake, and for this—" The boy seemed dazed at sight of the bright flask. Then, with a single swift motion, he snatched it out of Eric's hand, and bent to conceal it below his instrument panel. "Sure, old boy. I'd send you to heaven for that, if you'd give me the micrometer readings to set the ray with. But I tell you, this is dangerous. I've got a sort of television attachment, for focusing the ray. I can turn that on Venus—I've been amusing myself, watching the life there, already. Terrible place. Savage. I can pick a place on high land to set you down. But I can't be responsible for what happens afterward." "Simple, primitive life is what we're looking for. And now what do I owe you—" "Oh, that's all right. Between friends. Provided that stuff's genuine! Walk in and lie down on the crystal block. Hands at your sides. Don't move." The little door had swung open again, and Eric led Nada through. They stepped into a little cell, completely surrounded with mirrors and vast prisms and lenses and electron tubes. In the center was a slab of transparent crystal, eight feet square and two inches thick, with an intricate mass of machinery below it. Eric helped Nada to a place on the crystal, lay down at her side. "I think the Express Ray is focused just at the surface of the crystal, from below," he said. "It dissolves our substance, to be transmitted by the beam. It would look as if we were melting into the crystal." "Ready," called the youth. "Think I've got it for you. Sort of a high island in the jungle. Nothing bad in sight now. But, I say—how're you coming back? I haven't got time to watch you." "Go ahead. We aren't coming back." "Gee! What is it? Elopement? I thought you were married already. Or is it business difficulties? The Bears did make an awful raid last night. But you better let me set you down in Hong Kong." A bell jangled. "So long," the youth called. Nada and Eric felt themselves enveloped in fire. Sheets of white flame seemed to lap up about them from the crystal block. Suddenly there was a sharp tingling sensation where they touched the polished surface. Then blackness, blankness. The next thing they knew, the fires were gone from about them. They were lying in something extremely soft and fluid; and warm rain was beating in their faces. Eric sat up, found himself in a mud-puddle. Beside him was Nada, opening her eyes and struggling up, her bright garments stained with black mud. All about rose a thick jungle, dark and gloomy—and very wet. Palm-like, the gigantic trees were, or fern-like, flinging clouds of feathery green foliage high against a somber sky of unbroken gloom. They stood up, triumphant. "At last!" Nada cried. "We're free! Free of that hateful old civilization! We're back to Nature!" "Yes, we're on our feet now, not parasites on the machines." "It's wonderful to have a fine, strong man like you to trust in, Eric. You're just like one of the heroes in your books!" "You're the perfect companion, Nada.... But now we must be practical. We must build a fire, find weapons, set up a shelter of some kind. I guess it will be night, pretty soon. And Charley said something about savage animals he had seen in the television. "We'll find a nice dry cave, and have a fire in front of the door. And skins of animals to sleep on. And pottery vessels to cook in. And you will find seeds and grown grain." "But first we must find a flint-bed. We need flint for tools, and to strike sparks to make a fire with. We will probably come across a chunk of virgin copper, too—it's found native." Presently they set off through the jungle. The mud seemed to be very abundant, and of a most sticky consistence. They sank into it ankle deep at every step, and vast masses of it clung to their feet. A mile they struggled on, without finding where a provident nature had left them even a single fragment of quartz, to say nothing of a mass of pure copper. "A darned shame," Eric grumbled, "to come forty million miles, and meet such a reception as this!" Nada stopped. "Eric," she said, "I'm tired. And I don't believe there's any rock here, anyway. You'll have to use wooden tools, sharpened in the fire." "Probably you're right. This soil seemed to be of alluvial origin. Shouldn't be surprised if the native rock is some hundreds of feet underground. Your idea is better." "You can make a fire by rubbing sticks together, can't you?" "It can be done, I'm sure. I've never tried it, myself. We need some dry sticks, first." They resumed the weary march, with a good fraction of the new planet adhering to their feet. Rain was still falling from the dark heavens in a steady, warm downpour. Dry wood seemed scarce as the proverbial hen's teeth. "You didn't bring any matches, dear?" "Matches! Of course not! We're going back to Nature." "I hope we get a fire pretty soon." "If dry wood were gold dust, we couldn't buy a hot dog." "Eric, that reminds me that I'm hungry." He confessed to a few pangs of his own. They turned their attention to looking for banana trees, and coconut palms, but they did not seem to abound in the Venerian jungle. Even small animals that might have been slain with a broken branch had contrary ideas about the matter. At last, from sheer weariness, they stopped, and gathered branches to make a sloping shelter by a vast fallen tree-trunk. "This will keep out the rain—maybe—" Eric said hopefully. "And tomorrow, when it has quit raining—I'm sure we'll do better." They crept in, as gloomy night fell without. They lay in each other's arms, the body warmth oddly comforting. Nada cried a little. "Buck up," Eric advised her. "We're back to nature—where we've always wanted to be." With the darkness, the temperature fell somewhat, and a high wind rose, whipping cold rain into the little shelter, and threatening to demolish it. Swarms of mosquito-like insects, seemingly not inconvenienced in the least by the inclement elements, swarmed about them in clouds. Then came a sound from the dismal stormy night, a hoarse, bellowing roar, raucous, terrifying. Nada clung against Eric. "What is it, dear?" she chattered. "Must be a reptile. Dinosaur, or something of the sort. This world seems to be in about the same state as the Earth when they flourished there.... But maybe it won't find us." The roar was repeated, nearer. The earth trembled beneath a mighty tread. "Eric," a thin voice trembled. "Don't you think—it might have been better— You know the old life was not so bad, after all." "I was just thinking of our rooms, nice and warm and bright, with hot foods coming up the shaft whenever we pushed the button, and the gay crowds in the park, and my old typewriter." "Eric?" she called softly. "Yes, dear." "Don't you wish—we had known better?" "I do." If he winced at the "we" the girl did not notice. The roaring outside was closer. And suddenly it was answered by another raucous bellow, at considerable distance, that echoed strangely through the forest. The fearful sounds were repeated, alternately. And always the more distant seemed nearer, until the two sounds were together. And then an infernal din broke out in the darkness. Bellows. Screams. Deafening shrieks. Mighty splashes, as if struggling Titans had upset oceans. Thunderous crashes, as if they were demolishing forests. Eric and Nada clung to each other, in doubt whether to stay or to fly through the storm. Gradually the sound of the conflict came nearer, until the earth shook beneath them, and they were afraid to move. Suddenly the great fallen tree against which they had erected the flimsy shelter was rolled back, evidently by a chance blow from the invisible monsters. The pitiful roof collapsed on the bedraggled humans. Nada burst into tears. "Oh, if only—if only—" Suddenly flame lapped up about them, the same white fire they had seen as they lay on the crystal block. Dizziness, insensibility overcame them. A few moments later, they were lying on the transparent table in the Cosmic Express office, with all those great mirrors and prisms and lenses about them. A bustling, red-faced official appeared through the door in the grill, fairly bubbling apologies. "So sorry—an accident—inconceivable. I can't see how he got it! We got you back as soon as we could find a focus. I sincerely hope you haven't been injured." "Why—what—what—" "Why I happened in, found our operator drunk. I've no idea where he got the stuff. He muttered something about Venus. I consulted the auto-register, and found two more passengers registered here than had been recorded at our other stations. I looked up the duplicate beam coordinates, and found that it had been set on Venus. I got men on the television at once, and we happened to find you. "I can't imagine how it happened. I've had the fellow locked up, and the 'dry-laws' are on the job. I hope you won't hold us for excessive damages." "No, I ask nothing except that you don't press charges against the boy. I don't want him to suffer for it in any way. My wife and I will be perfectly satisfied to get back to our apartment." "I don't wonder. You look like you've been through—I don't know what. But I'll have you there in five minutes. My private car—" Mr. Eric Stokes-Harding, noted author of primitive life and love, ate a hearty meal with his pretty spouse, after they had washed off the grime of another planet. He spent the next twelve hours in bed. At the end of the month he delivered his promised story to his publishers, a thrilling tale of a man marooned on Venus, with a beautiful girl. The hero made stone tools, erected a dwelling for himself and his mate, hunted food for her, defended her from the mammoth saurian monsters of the Venerian jungles. The book was a huge success. THE END

Reading books by some of the most illustrious science fiction authors as a child and adolescent

Watching his father make sacrifices to provide for him, his mother, and younger siblings

Growing up with little protection from exposure to the suffering from the elements

Not having the same access to innovative, life-saving technology in his formative years

26066_T3J3I3D3_4

What is ironic about Eric's contempt for the glass edifice over New York City?

Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Amazing Stories December 1961 and was first published in Amazing Stories November 1930. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note. A Classic Reprint from AMAZING STORIES, November, 1930 Copyright 1931, by Experimenter Publications Inc. The Cosmic Express By JACK WILLIAMSON Introduction by Sam Moskowitz The year 1928 was a great year of discovery for AMAZING STORIES . They were uncovering new talent at such a great rate, (Harl Vincent, David H. Keller, E. E. Smith, Philip Francis Nowlan, Fletcher Pratt and Miles J. Breuer), that Jack Williamson barely managed to become one of a distinguished group of discoveries by stealing the cover of the December issue for his first story The Metal Man. A disciple of A. Merritt, he attempted to imitate in style, mood and subject the magic of that late lamented master of fantasy. The imitation found great favor from the readership and almost instantly Jack Williamson became an important name on the contents page of AMAZING STORIES . He followed his initial success with two short novels , The Green Girl in AMAZING STORIES and The Alien Intelligence in SCIENCE WONDER STORIES , another Gernsback publication. Both of these stories were close copies of A. Merritt, whose style and method Jack Williamson parlayed into popularity for eight years. Yet the strange thing about it was that Jack Williamson was one of the most versatile science fiction authors ever to sit down at the typewriter. When the vogue for science-fantasy altered to super science, he created the memorable super lock-picker Giles Habilula as the major attraction in a rousing trio of space operas , The Legion of Space, The Cometeers and One Against the Legion. When grim realism was the order of the day, he produced Crucible of Power and when they wanted extrapolated theory in present tense, he assumed the disguise of Will Stewart and popularized the concept of contra terrene matter in science fiction with Seetee Ship and Seetee Shock. Finally, when only psychological studies of the future would do, he produced "With Folded Hands ..." "... And Searching Mind." The Cosmic Express is of special interest because it was written during Williamson's A. Merritt "kick," when he was writing little else but, and it gave the earliest indication of a more general capability. The lightness of the handling is especially modern, barely avoiding the farcical by the validity of the notion that wireless transmission of matter is the next big transportation frontier to be conquered. It is especially important because it stylistically forecast a later trend to accept the background for granted, regardless of the quantity of wonders, and proceed with the story. With only a few thousand scanning-disk television sets in existence at the time of the writing, the surmise that this media would be a natural for westerns was particularly astute. Jack Williamson was born in 1908 in the Arizona territory when covered wagons were the primary form of transportation and apaches still raided the settlers. His father was a cattle man, but for young Jack, the ranch was anything but glamorous. "My days were filled," he remembers, "with monotonous rounds of what seemed an endless, heart-breaking war with drought and frost and dust-storms, poison-weeds and hail, for the sake of survival on the Llano Estacado." The discovery of AMAZING STORIES was the escape he sought and his goal was to be a science fiction writer. He labored to this end and the first he knew that a story of his had been accepted was when he bought the December, 1929 issue of AMAZING STORIES . Since then, he has written millions of words of science fiction and has gone on record as follows: "I feel that science-fiction is the folklore of the new world of science, and the expression of man's reaction to a technological environment. By which I mean that it is the most interesting and stimulating form of literature today." Mr. Eric Stokes-Harding tumbled out of the rumpled bed-clothing, a striking slender figure in purple-striped pajamas. He smiled fondly across to the other of the twin beds, where Nada, his pretty bride, lay quiet beneath light silk covers. With a groan, he stood up and began a series of fantastic bending exercises. But after a few half-hearted movements, he gave it up, and walked through an open door into a small bright room, its walls covered with bookcases and also with scientific appliances that would have been strange to the man of four or five centuries before, when the Age of Aviation was beginning. Suddenly there was a sharp tingling sensation where they touched the polished surface. Yawning, Mr. Eric Stokes-Harding stood before the great open window, staring out. Below him was a wide, park-like space, green with emerald lawns, and bright with flowering plants. Two hundred yards across it rose an immense pyramidal building—an artistic structure, gleaming with white marble and bright metal, striped with the verdure of terraced roof-gardens, its slender peak rising to help support the gray, steel-ribbed glass roof above. Beyond, the park stretched away in illimitable vistas, broken with the graceful columned buildings that held up the great glass roof. Above the glass, over this New York of 2432 A. D., a freezing blizzard was sweeping. But small concern was that to the lightly clad man at the window, who was inhaling deeply the fragrant air from the plants below—air kept, winter and summer, exactly at 20° C. With another yawn, Mr. Eric Stokes-Harding turned back to the room, which was bright with the rich golden light that poured in from the suspended globes of the cold ato-light that illuminated the snow-covered city. With a distasteful grimace, he seated himself before a broad, paper-littered desk, sat a few minutes leaning back, with his hands clasped behind his head. At last he straightened reluctantly, slid a small typewriter out of its drawer, and began pecking at it impatiently. For Mr. Eric Stokes-Harding was an author. There was a whole shelf of his books on the wall, in bright jackets, red and blue and green, that brought a thrill of pleasure to the young novelist's heart when he looked up from his clattering machine. He wrote "thrilling action romances," as his enthusiastic publishers and television directors said, "of ages past, when men were men. Red-blooded heroes responding vigorously to the stirring passions of primordial life!" He was impartial as to the source of his thrills—provided they were distant enough from modern civilization. His hero was likely to be an ape-man roaring through the jungle, with a bloody rock in one hand and a beautiful girl in the other. Or a cowboy, "hard-riding, hard-shooting," the vanishing hero of the ancient ranches. Or a man marooned with a lovely woman on a desert South Sea island. His heroes were invariably strong, fearless, resourceful fellows, who could handle a club on equal terms with a cave-man, or call science to aid them in defending a beautiful mate from the terrors of a desolate wilderness. And a hundred million read Eric's novels, and watched the dramatization of them on the television screens. They thrilled at the simple, romantic lives his heroes led, paid him handsome royalties, and subconsciously shared his opinion that civilization had taken all the best from the life of man. Eric had settled down to the artistic satisfaction of describing the sensuous delight of his hero in the roasted marrow-bones of a dead mammoth, when the pretty woman in the other room stirred, and presently came tripping into the study, gay and vivacious, and—as her husband of a few months most justly thought—altogether beautiful in a bright silk dressing gown. Recklessly, he slammed the machine back into its place, and resolved to forget that his next "red-blooded action thriller" was due in the publisher's office at the end of the month. He sprang up to kiss his wife, held her embraced for a long happy moment. And then they went hand in hand, to the side of the room and punched a series of buttons on a panel—a simple way of ordering breakfast sent up the automatic shaft from the kitchens below. Nada Stokes-Harding was also an author. She wrote poems—"back to nature stuff"—simple lyrics of the sea, of sunsets, of bird songs, of bright flowers and warm winds, of thrilling communion with Nature, and growing things. Men read her poems and called her a genius. Even though the whole world had grown up into a city, the birds were extinct, there were no wild flowers, and no one had time to bother about sunsets. "Eric, darling," she said, "isn't it terrible to be cooped up here in this little flat, away from the things we both love?" "Yes, dear. Civilization has ruined the world. If we could only have lived a thousand years ago, when life was simple and natural, when men hunted and killed their meat, instead of drinking synthetic stuff, when men still had the joys of conflict, instead of living under glass, like hot-house flowers." "If we could only go somewhere—" "There isn't anywhere to go. I write about the West, Africa, South Sea Islands. But they were all filled up two hundred years ago. Pleasure resorts, sanatoriums, cities, factories." "If only we lived on Venus! I was listening to a lecture on the television, last night. The speaker said that the Planet Venus is younger than the Earth, that it has not cooled so much. It has a thick, cloudy atmosphere, and low, rainy forests. There's simple, elemental life there—like Earth had before civilization ruined it." "Yes, Kinsley, with his new infra-red ray telescope, that penetrates the cloud layers of the planet, proved that Venus rotates in about the same period as Earth; and it must be much like Earth was a million years ago." "Eric, I wonder if we could go there! It would be so thrilling to begin life like the characters in your stories, to get away from this hateful civilization, and live natural lives. Maybe a rocket—" The young author's eyes were glowing. He skipped across the floor, seized Nada, kissed her ecstatically. "Splendid! Think of hunting in the virgin forest, and bringing the game home to you! But I'm afraid there is no way.—Wait! The Cosmic Express." "The Cosmic Express?" "A new invention. Just perfected a few weeks ago, I understand. By Ludwig Von der Valls, the German physicist." "I've quit bothering about science. It has ruined nature, filled the world with silly, artificial people, doing silly, artificial things." "But this is quite remarkable, dear. A new way to travel—by ether!" "By ether!" "Yes. You know of course that energy and matter are interchangeable terms; both are simply etheric vibration, of different sorts." "Of course. That's elementary." She smiled proudly. "I can give you examples, even of the change. The disintegration of the radium atom, making helium and lead and energy . And Millikan's old proof that his Cosmic Ray is generated when particles of electricity are united to form an atom." "Fine! I thought you said you weren't a scientist." He glowed with pride. "But the method, in the new Cosmic Express, is simply to convert the matter to be carried into power, send it out as a radiant beam and focus the beam to convert it back into atoms at the destination." "But the amount of energy must be terrific—" "It is. You know short waves carry more energy than long ones. The Express Ray is an electromagnetic vibration of frequency far higher than that of even the Cosmic Ray, and correspondingly more powerful and more penetrating." The girl frowned, running slim fingers through golden-brown hair. "But I don't see how they get any recognizable object, not even how they get the radiation turned back into matter." "The beam is focused, just like the light that passes through a camera lens. The photographic lens, using light rays, picks up a picture and reproduces it again on the plate—just the same as the Express Ray picks up an object and sets it down on the other side of the world. "An analogy from television might help. You know that by means of the scanning disc, the picture is transformed into mere rapid fluctuations in the brightness of a beam of light. In a parallel manner, the focal plane of the Express Ray moves slowly through the object, progressively, dissolving layers of the thickness of a single atom, which are accurately reproduced at the other focus of the instrument—which might be in Venus! "But the analogy of the lens is the better of the two. For no receiving instrument is required, as in television. The object is built up of an infinite series of plane layers, at the focus of the ray, no matter where that may be. Such a thing would be impossible with radio apparatus because even with the best beam transmission, all but a tiny fraction of the power is lost, and power is required to rebuild the atoms. Do you understand, dear?" "Not altogether. But I should worry! Here comes breakfast. Let me butter your toast." A bell had rung at the shaft. She ran to it, and returned with a great silver tray, laden with dainty dishes, which she set on a little side table. They sat down opposite each other, and ate, getting as much satisfaction from contemplation of each other's faces as from the excellent food. When they had finished, she carried the tray to the shaft, slid it in a slot, and touched a button—thus disposing of the culinary cares of the morning. She ran back to Eric, who was once more staring distastefully at his typewriter. "Oh, darling! I'm thrilled to death about the Cosmic Express! If we could go to Venus, to a new life on a new world, and get away from all this hateful conventional society—" "We can go to their office—it's only five minutes. The chap that operates the machine for the company is a pal of mine. He's not supposed to take passengers except between the offices they have scattered about the world. But I know his weak point—" Eric laughed, fumbled with a hidden spring under his desk. A small polished object, gleaming silvery, slid down into his hand. "Old friendship, plus this, would make him—like spinach." Five minutes later Mr. Eric Stokes-Harding and his pretty wife were in street clothes, light silk tunics of loose, flowing lines—little clothing being required in the artificially warmed city. They entered an elevator and dropped thirty stories to the ground floor of the great building. There they entered a cylindrical car, with rows of seats down the sides. Not greatly different from an ancient subway car, except that it was air-tight, and was hurled by magnetic attraction and repulsion through a tube exhausted of air, at a speed that would have made an old subway rider gasp with amazement. In five more minutes their car had whipped up to the base of another building, in the business section, where there was no room for parks between the mighty structures that held the unbroken glass roofs two hundred stories above the concrete pavement. An elevator brought them up a hundred and fifty stories. Eric led Nada down a long, carpeted corridor to a wide glass door, which bore the words: COSMIC EXPRESS stenciled in gold capitals across it. As they approached, a lean man, carrying a black bag, darted out of an elevator shaft opposite the door, ran across the corridor, and entered. They pushed in after him. They were in a little room, cut in two by a high brass grill. In front of it was a long bench against the wall, that reminded one of the waiting room in an old railroad depot. In the grill was a little window, with a lazy, brown-eyed youth leaning on the shelf behind it. Beyond him was a great, glittering piece of mechanism, half hidden by the brass. A little door gave access to the machine from the space before the grill. The thin man in black, whom Eric now recognized as a prominent French heart-specialist, was dancing before the window, waving his bag frantically, raving at the sleepy boy. "Queek! I have tell you zee truth! I have zee most urgent necessity to go queekly. A patient I have in Paree, zat ees in zee most creetical condition!" "Hold your horses just a minute, Mister. We got a client in the machine now. Russian diplomat from Moscow to Rio de Janeiro.... Two hundred seventy dollars and eighty cents, please.... Your turn next. Remember this is just an experimental service. Regular installations all over the world in a year.... Ready now. Come on in." The youth took the money, pressed a button. The door sprang open in the grill, and the frantic physician leaped through it. "Lie down on the crystal, face up," the young man ordered. "Hands at your sides, don't breathe. Ready!" He manipulated his dials and switches, and pressed another button. "Why, hello, Eric, old man!" he cried. "That's the lady you were telling me about? Congratulations!" A bell jangled before him on the panel. "Just a minute. I've got a call." He punched the board again. Little bulbs lit and glowed for a second. The youth turned toward the half-hidden machine, spoke courteously. "All right, madam. Walk out. Hope you found the transit pleasant." "But my Violet! My precious Violet!" a shrill female voice came from the machine. "Sir, what have you done with my darling Violet?" "I'm sure I don't know, madam. You lost it off your hat?" "None of your impertinence, sir! I want my dog." "Ah, a dog. Must have jumped off the crystal. You can have him sent on for three hundred and—" "Young man, if any harm comes to my Violet—I'll—I'll—I'll appeal to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals!" "Very good, madam. We appreciate your patronage." The door flew open again. A very fat woman, puffing angrily, face highly colored, clothing shimmering with artificial gems, waddled pompously out of the door through which the frantic French doctor had so recently vanished. She rolled heavily across the room, and out into the corridor. Shrill words floated back: "I'm going to see my lawyer! My precious Violet—" The sallow youth winked. "And now what can I do for you, Eric?" "We want to go to Venus, if that ray of yours can put us there." "To Venus? Impossible. My orders are to use the Express merely between the sixteen designated stations, at New York, San Francisco, Tokyo, London, Paris—" "See here, Charley," with a cautious glance toward the door, Eric held up the silver flask. "For old time's sake, and for this—" The boy seemed dazed at sight of the bright flask. Then, with a single swift motion, he snatched it out of Eric's hand, and bent to conceal it below his instrument panel. "Sure, old boy. I'd send you to heaven for that, if you'd give me the micrometer readings to set the ray with. But I tell you, this is dangerous. I've got a sort of television attachment, for focusing the ray. I can turn that on Venus—I've been amusing myself, watching the life there, already. Terrible place. Savage. I can pick a place on high land to set you down. But I can't be responsible for what happens afterward." "Simple, primitive life is what we're looking for. And now what do I owe you—" "Oh, that's all right. Between friends. Provided that stuff's genuine! Walk in and lie down on the crystal block. Hands at your sides. Don't move." The little door had swung open again, and Eric led Nada through. They stepped into a little cell, completely surrounded with mirrors and vast prisms and lenses and electron tubes. In the center was a slab of transparent crystal, eight feet square and two inches thick, with an intricate mass of machinery below it. Eric helped Nada to a place on the crystal, lay down at her side. "I think the Express Ray is focused just at the surface of the crystal, from below," he said. "It dissolves our substance, to be transmitted by the beam. It would look as if we were melting into the crystal." "Ready," called the youth. "Think I've got it for you. Sort of a high island in the jungle. Nothing bad in sight now. But, I say—how're you coming back? I haven't got time to watch you." "Go ahead. We aren't coming back." "Gee! What is it? Elopement? I thought you were married already. Or is it business difficulties? The Bears did make an awful raid last night. But you better let me set you down in Hong Kong." A bell jangled. "So long," the youth called. Nada and Eric felt themselves enveloped in fire. Sheets of white flame seemed to lap up about them from the crystal block. Suddenly there was a sharp tingling sensation where they touched the polished surface. Then blackness, blankness. The next thing they knew, the fires were gone from about them. They were lying in something extremely soft and fluid; and warm rain was beating in their faces. Eric sat up, found himself in a mud-puddle. Beside him was Nada, opening her eyes and struggling up, her bright garments stained with black mud. All about rose a thick jungle, dark and gloomy—and very wet. Palm-like, the gigantic trees were, or fern-like, flinging clouds of feathery green foliage high against a somber sky of unbroken gloom. They stood up, triumphant. "At last!" Nada cried. "We're free! Free of that hateful old civilization! We're back to Nature!" "Yes, we're on our feet now, not parasites on the machines." "It's wonderful to have a fine, strong man like you to trust in, Eric. You're just like one of the heroes in your books!" "You're the perfect companion, Nada.... But now we must be practical. We must build a fire, find weapons, set up a shelter of some kind. I guess it will be night, pretty soon. And Charley said something about savage animals he had seen in the television. "We'll find a nice dry cave, and have a fire in front of the door. And skins of animals to sleep on. And pottery vessels to cook in. And you will find seeds and grown grain." "But first we must find a flint-bed. We need flint for tools, and to strike sparks to make a fire with. We will probably come across a chunk of virgin copper, too—it's found native." Presently they set off through the jungle. The mud seemed to be very abundant, and of a most sticky consistence. They sank into it ankle deep at every step, and vast masses of it clung to their feet. A mile they struggled on, without finding where a provident nature had left them even a single fragment of quartz, to say nothing of a mass of pure copper. "A darned shame," Eric grumbled, "to come forty million miles, and meet such a reception as this!" Nada stopped. "Eric," she said, "I'm tired. And I don't believe there's any rock here, anyway. You'll have to use wooden tools, sharpened in the fire." "Probably you're right. This soil seemed to be of alluvial origin. Shouldn't be surprised if the native rock is some hundreds of feet underground. Your idea is better." "You can make a fire by rubbing sticks together, can't you?" "It can be done, I'm sure. I've never tried it, myself. We need some dry sticks, first." They resumed the weary march, with a good fraction of the new planet adhering to their feet. Rain was still falling from the dark heavens in a steady, warm downpour. Dry wood seemed scarce as the proverbial hen's teeth. "You didn't bring any matches, dear?" "Matches! Of course not! We're going back to Nature." "I hope we get a fire pretty soon." "If dry wood were gold dust, we couldn't buy a hot dog." "Eric, that reminds me that I'm hungry." He confessed to a few pangs of his own. They turned their attention to looking for banana trees, and coconut palms, but they did not seem to abound in the Venerian jungle. Even small animals that might have been slain with a broken branch had contrary ideas about the matter. At last, from sheer weariness, they stopped, and gathered branches to make a sloping shelter by a vast fallen tree-trunk. "This will keep out the rain—maybe—" Eric said hopefully. "And tomorrow, when it has quit raining—I'm sure we'll do better." They crept in, as gloomy night fell without. They lay in each other's arms, the body warmth oddly comforting. Nada cried a little. "Buck up," Eric advised her. "We're back to nature—where we've always wanted to be." With the darkness, the temperature fell somewhat, and a high wind rose, whipping cold rain into the little shelter, and threatening to demolish it. Swarms of mosquito-like insects, seemingly not inconvenienced in the least by the inclement elements, swarmed about them in clouds. Then came a sound from the dismal stormy night, a hoarse, bellowing roar, raucous, terrifying. Nada clung against Eric. "What is it, dear?" she chattered. "Must be a reptile. Dinosaur, or something of the sort. This world seems to be in about the same state as the Earth when they flourished there.... But maybe it won't find us." The roar was repeated, nearer. The earth trembled beneath a mighty tread. "Eric," a thin voice trembled. "Don't you think—it might have been better— You know the old life was not so bad, after all." "I was just thinking of our rooms, nice and warm and bright, with hot foods coming up the shaft whenever we pushed the button, and the gay crowds in the park, and my old typewriter." "Eric?" she called softly. "Yes, dear." "Don't you wish—we had known better?" "I do." If he winced at the "we" the girl did not notice. The roaring outside was closer. And suddenly it was answered by another raucous bellow, at considerable distance, that echoed strangely through the forest. The fearful sounds were repeated, alternately. And always the more distant seemed nearer, until the two sounds were together. And then an infernal din broke out in the darkness. Bellows. Screams. Deafening shrieks. Mighty splashes, as if struggling Titans had upset oceans. Thunderous crashes, as if they were demolishing forests. Eric and Nada clung to each other, in doubt whether to stay or to fly through the storm. Gradually the sound of the conflict came nearer, until the earth shook beneath them, and they were afraid to move. Suddenly the great fallen tree against which they had erected the flimsy shelter was rolled back, evidently by a chance blow from the invisible monsters. The pitiful roof collapsed on the bedraggled humans. Nada burst into tears. "Oh, if only—if only—" Suddenly flame lapped up about them, the same white fire they had seen as they lay on the crystal block. Dizziness, insensibility overcame them. A few moments later, they were lying on the transparent table in the Cosmic Express office, with all those great mirrors and prisms and lenses about them. A bustling, red-faced official appeared through the door in the grill, fairly bubbling apologies. "So sorry—an accident—inconceivable. I can't see how he got it! We got you back as soon as we could find a focus. I sincerely hope you haven't been injured." "Why—what—what—" "Why I happened in, found our operator drunk. I've no idea where he got the stuff. He muttered something about Venus. I consulted the auto-register, and found two more passengers registered here than had been recorded at our other stations. I looked up the duplicate beam coordinates, and found that it had been set on Venus. I got men on the television at once, and we happened to find you. "I can't imagine how it happened. I've had the fellow locked up, and the 'dry-laws' are on the job. I hope you won't hold us for excessive damages." "No, I ask nothing except that you don't press charges against the boy. I don't want him to suffer for it in any way. My wife and I will be perfectly satisfied to get back to our apartment." "I don't wonder. You look like you've been through—I don't know what. But I'll have you there in five minutes. My private car—" Mr. Eric Stokes-Harding, noted author of primitive life and love, ate a hearty meal with his pretty spouse, after they had washed off the grime of another planet. He spent the next twelve hours in bed. At the end of the month he delivered his promised story to his publishers, a thrilling tale of a man marooned on Venus, with a beautiful girl. The hero made stone tools, erected a dwelling for himself and his mate, hunted food for her, defended her from the mammoth saurian monsters of the Venerian jungles. The book was a huge success. THE END

If the glass was penetrated, he and Nada and all of New York would immediately perish

Its invention was inspired by the author of one of Eric's favorite science fiction novels

Something similar might have protected him and Nada from the harsh Venusian elements

Similar inventions are main features in his science fiction novels

26066_T3J3I3D3_5

Where does Eric view himself and others in relation to the modern world?

Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Amazing Stories December 1961 and was first published in Amazing Stories November 1930. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note. A Classic Reprint from AMAZING STORIES, November, 1930 Copyright 1931, by Experimenter Publications Inc. The Cosmic Express By JACK WILLIAMSON Introduction by Sam Moskowitz The year 1928 was a great year of discovery for AMAZING STORIES . They were uncovering new talent at such a great rate, (Harl Vincent, David H. Keller, E. E. Smith, Philip Francis Nowlan, Fletcher Pratt and Miles J. Breuer), that Jack Williamson barely managed to become one of a distinguished group of discoveries by stealing the cover of the December issue for his first story The Metal Man. A disciple of A. Merritt, he attempted to imitate in style, mood and subject the magic of that late lamented master of fantasy. The imitation found great favor from the readership and almost instantly Jack Williamson became an important name on the contents page of AMAZING STORIES . He followed his initial success with two short novels , The Green Girl in AMAZING STORIES and The Alien Intelligence in SCIENCE WONDER STORIES , another Gernsback publication. Both of these stories were close copies of A. Merritt, whose style and method Jack Williamson parlayed into popularity for eight years. Yet the strange thing about it was that Jack Williamson was one of the most versatile science fiction authors ever to sit down at the typewriter. When the vogue for science-fantasy altered to super science, he created the memorable super lock-picker Giles Habilula as the major attraction in a rousing trio of space operas , The Legion of Space, The Cometeers and One Against the Legion. When grim realism was the order of the day, he produced Crucible of Power and when they wanted extrapolated theory in present tense, he assumed the disguise of Will Stewart and popularized the concept of contra terrene matter in science fiction with Seetee Ship and Seetee Shock. Finally, when only psychological studies of the future would do, he produced "With Folded Hands ..." "... And Searching Mind." The Cosmic Express is of special interest because it was written during Williamson's A. Merritt "kick," when he was writing little else but, and it gave the earliest indication of a more general capability. The lightness of the handling is especially modern, barely avoiding the farcical by the validity of the notion that wireless transmission of matter is the next big transportation frontier to be conquered. It is especially important because it stylistically forecast a later trend to accept the background for granted, regardless of the quantity of wonders, and proceed with the story. With only a few thousand scanning-disk television sets in existence at the time of the writing, the surmise that this media would be a natural for westerns was particularly astute. Jack Williamson was born in 1908 in the Arizona territory when covered wagons were the primary form of transportation and apaches still raided the settlers. His father was a cattle man, but for young Jack, the ranch was anything but glamorous. "My days were filled," he remembers, "with monotonous rounds of what seemed an endless, heart-breaking war with drought and frost and dust-storms, poison-weeds and hail, for the sake of survival on the Llano Estacado." The discovery of AMAZING STORIES was the escape he sought and his goal was to be a science fiction writer. He labored to this end and the first he knew that a story of his had been accepted was when he bought the December, 1929 issue of AMAZING STORIES . Since then, he has written millions of words of science fiction and has gone on record as follows: "I feel that science-fiction is the folklore of the new world of science, and the expression of man's reaction to a technological environment. By which I mean that it is the most interesting and stimulating form of literature today." Mr. Eric Stokes-Harding tumbled out of the rumpled bed-clothing, a striking slender figure in purple-striped pajamas. He smiled fondly across to the other of the twin beds, where Nada, his pretty bride, lay quiet beneath light silk covers. With a groan, he stood up and began a series of fantastic bending exercises. But after a few half-hearted movements, he gave it up, and walked through an open door into a small bright room, its walls covered with bookcases and also with scientific appliances that would have been strange to the man of four or five centuries before, when the Age of Aviation was beginning. Suddenly there was a sharp tingling sensation where they touched the polished surface. Yawning, Mr. Eric Stokes-Harding stood before the great open window, staring out. Below him was a wide, park-like space, green with emerald lawns, and bright with flowering plants. Two hundred yards across it rose an immense pyramidal building—an artistic structure, gleaming with white marble and bright metal, striped with the verdure of terraced roof-gardens, its slender peak rising to help support the gray, steel-ribbed glass roof above. Beyond, the park stretched away in illimitable vistas, broken with the graceful columned buildings that held up the great glass roof. Above the glass, over this New York of 2432 A. D., a freezing blizzard was sweeping. But small concern was that to the lightly clad man at the window, who was inhaling deeply the fragrant air from the plants below—air kept, winter and summer, exactly at 20° C. With another yawn, Mr. Eric Stokes-Harding turned back to the room, which was bright with the rich golden light that poured in from the suspended globes of the cold ato-light that illuminated the snow-covered city. With a distasteful grimace, he seated himself before a broad, paper-littered desk, sat a few minutes leaning back, with his hands clasped behind his head. At last he straightened reluctantly, slid a small typewriter out of its drawer, and began pecking at it impatiently. For Mr. Eric Stokes-Harding was an author. There was a whole shelf of his books on the wall, in bright jackets, red and blue and green, that brought a thrill of pleasure to the young novelist's heart when he looked up from his clattering machine. He wrote "thrilling action romances," as his enthusiastic publishers and television directors said, "of ages past, when men were men. Red-blooded heroes responding vigorously to the stirring passions of primordial life!" He was impartial as to the source of his thrills—provided they were distant enough from modern civilization. His hero was likely to be an ape-man roaring through the jungle, with a bloody rock in one hand and a beautiful girl in the other. Or a cowboy, "hard-riding, hard-shooting," the vanishing hero of the ancient ranches. Or a man marooned with a lovely woman on a desert South Sea island. His heroes were invariably strong, fearless, resourceful fellows, who could handle a club on equal terms with a cave-man, or call science to aid them in defending a beautiful mate from the terrors of a desolate wilderness. And a hundred million read Eric's novels, and watched the dramatization of them on the television screens. They thrilled at the simple, romantic lives his heroes led, paid him handsome royalties, and subconsciously shared his opinion that civilization had taken all the best from the life of man. Eric had settled down to the artistic satisfaction of describing the sensuous delight of his hero in the roasted marrow-bones of a dead mammoth, when the pretty woman in the other room stirred, and presently came tripping into the study, gay and vivacious, and—as her husband of a few months most justly thought—altogether beautiful in a bright silk dressing gown. Recklessly, he slammed the machine back into its place, and resolved to forget that his next "red-blooded action thriller" was due in the publisher's office at the end of the month. He sprang up to kiss his wife, held her embraced for a long happy moment. And then they went hand in hand, to the side of the room and punched a series of buttons on a panel—a simple way of ordering breakfast sent up the automatic shaft from the kitchens below. Nada Stokes-Harding was also an author. She wrote poems—"back to nature stuff"—simple lyrics of the sea, of sunsets, of bird songs, of bright flowers and warm winds, of thrilling communion with Nature, and growing things. Men read her poems and called her a genius. Even though the whole world had grown up into a city, the birds were extinct, there were no wild flowers, and no one had time to bother about sunsets. "Eric, darling," she said, "isn't it terrible to be cooped up here in this little flat, away from the things we both love?" "Yes, dear. Civilization has ruined the world. If we could only have lived a thousand years ago, when life was simple and natural, when men hunted and killed their meat, instead of drinking synthetic stuff, when men still had the joys of conflict, instead of living under glass, like hot-house flowers." "If we could only go somewhere—" "There isn't anywhere to go. I write about the West, Africa, South Sea Islands. But they were all filled up two hundred years ago. Pleasure resorts, sanatoriums, cities, factories." "If only we lived on Venus! I was listening to a lecture on the television, last night. The speaker said that the Planet Venus is younger than the Earth, that it has not cooled so much. It has a thick, cloudy atmosphere, and low, rainy forests. There's simple, elemental life there—like Earth had before civilization ruined it." "Yes, Kinsley, with his new infra-red ray telescope, that penetrates the cloud layers of the planet, proved that Venus rotates in about the same period as Earth; and it must be much like Earth was a million years ago." "Eric, I wonder if we could go there! It would be so thrilling to begin life like the characters in your stories, to get away from this hateful civilization, and live natural lives. Maybe a rocket—" The young author's eyes were glowing. He skipped across the floor, seized Nada, kissed her ecstatically. "Splendid! Think of hunting in the virgin forest, and bringing the game home to you! But I'm afraid there is no way.—Wait! The Cosmic Express." "The Cosmic Express?" "A new invention. Just perfected a few weeks ago, I understand. By Ludwig Von der Valls, the German physicist." "I've quit bothering about science. It has ruined nature, filled the world with silly, artificial people, doing silly, artificial things." "But this is quite remarkable, dear. A new way to travel—by ether!" "By ether!" "Yes. You know of course that energy and matter are interchangeable terms; both are simply etheric vibration, of different sorts." "Of course. That's elementary." She smiled proudly. "I can give you examples, even of the change. The disintegration of the radium atom, making helium and lead and energy . And Millikan's old proof that his Cosmic Ray is generated when particles of electricity are united to form an atom." "Fine! I thought you said you weren't a scientist." He glowed with pride. "But the method, in the new Cosmic Express, is simply to convert the matter to be carried into power, send it out as a radiant beam and focus the beam to convert it back into atoms at the destination." "But the amount of energy must be terrific—" "It is. You know short waves carry more energy than long ones. The Express Ray is an electromagnetic vibration of frequency far higher than that of even the Cosmic Ray, and correspondingly more powerful and more penetrating." The girl frowned, running slim fingers through golden-brown hair. "But I don't see how they get any recognizable object, not even how they get the radiation turned back into matter." "The beam is focused, just like the light that passes through a camera lens. The photographic lens, using light rays, picks up a picture and reproduces it again on the plate—just the same as the Express Ray picks up an object and sets it down on the other side of the world. "An analogy from television might help. You know that by means of the scanning disc, the picture is transformed into mere rapid fluctuations in the brightness of a beam of light. In a parallel manner, the focal plane of the Express Ray moves slowly through the object, progressively, dissolving layers of the thickness of a single atom, which are accurately reproduced at the other focus of the instrument—which might be in Venus! "But the analogy of the lens is the better of the two. For no receiving instrument is required, as in television. The object is built up of an infinite series of plane layers, at the focus of the ray, no matter where that may be. Such a thing would be impossible with radio apparatus because even with the best beam transmission, all but a tiny fraction of the power is lost, and power is required to rebuild the atoms. Do you understand, dear?" "Not altogether. But I should worry! Here comes breakfast. Let me butter your toast." A bell had rung at the shaft. She ran to it, and returned with a great silver tray, laden with dainty dishes, which she set on a little side table. They sat down opposite each other, and ate, getting as much satisfaction from contemplation of each other's faces as from the excellent food. When they had finished, she carried the tray to the shaft, slid it in a slot, and touched a button—thus disposing of the culinary cares of the morning. She ran back to Eric, who was once more staring distastefully at his typewriter. "Oh, darling! I'm thrilled to death about the Cosmic Express! If we could go to Venus, to a new life on a new world, and get away from all this hateful conventional society—" "We can go to their office—it's only five minutes. The chap that operates the machine for the company is a pal of mine. He's not supposed to take passengers except between the offices they have scattered about the world. But I know his weak point—" Eric laughed, fumbled with a hidden spring under his desk. A small polished object, gleaming silvery, slid down into his hand. "Old friendship, plus this, would make him—like spinach." Five minutes later Mr. Eric Stokes-Harding and his pretty wife were in street clothes, light silk tunics of loose, flowing lines—little clothing being required in the artificially warmed city. They entered an elevator and dropped thirty stories to the ground floor of the great building. There they entered a cylindrical car, with rows of seats down the sides. Not greatly different from an ancient subway car, except that it was air-tight, and was hurled by magnetic attraction and repulsion through a tube exhausted of air, at a speed that would have made an old subway rider gasp with amazement. In five more minutes their car had whipped up to the base of another building, in the business section, where there was no room for parks between the mighty structures that held the unbroken glass roofs two hundred stories above the concrete pavement. An elevator brought them up a hundred and fifty stories. Eric led Nada down a long, carpeted corridor to a wide glass door, which bore the words: COSMIC EXPRESS stenciled in gold capitals across it. As they approached, a lean man, carrying a black bag, darted out of an elevator shaft opposite the door, ran across the corridor, and entered. They pushed in after him. They were in a little room, cut in two by a high brass grill. In front of it was a long bench against the wall, that reminded one of the waiting room in an old railroad depot. In the grill was a little window, with a lazy, brown-eyed youth leaning on the shelf behind it. Beyond him was a great, glittering piece of mechanism, half hidden by the brass. A little door gave access to the machine from the space before the grill. The thin man in black, whom Eric now recognized as a prominent French heart-specialist, was dancing before the window, waving his bag frantically, raving at the sleepy boy. "Queek! I have tell you zee truth! I have zee most urgent necessity to go queekly. A patient I have in Paree, zat ees in zee most creetical condition!" "Hold your horses just a minute, Mister. We got a client in the machine now. Russian diplomat from Moscow to Rio de Janeiro.... Two hundred seventy dollars and eighty cents, please.... Your turn next. Remember this is just an experimental service. Regular installations all over the world in a year.... Ready now. Come on in." The youth took the money, pressed a button. The door sprang open in the grill, and the frantic physician leaped through it. "Lie down on the crystal, face up," the young man ordered. "Hands at your sides, don't breathe. Ready!" He manipulated his dials and switches, and pressed another button. "Why, hello, Eric, old man!" he cried. "That's the lady you were telling me about? Congratulations!" A bell jangled before him on the panel. "Just a minute. I've got a call." He punched the board again. Little bulbs lit and glowed for a second. The youth turned toward the half-hidden machine, spoke courteously. "All right, madam. Walk out. Hope you found the transit pleasant." "But my Violet! My precious Violet!" a shrill female voice came from the machine. "Sir, what have you done with my darling Violet?" "I'm sure I don't know, madam. You lost it off your hat?" "None of your impertinence, sir! I want my dog." "Ah, a dog. Must have jumped off the crystal. You can have him sent on for three hundred and—" "Young man, if any harm comes to my Violet—I'll—I'll—I'll appeal to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals!" "Very good, madam. We appreciate your patronage." The door flew open again. A very fat woman, puffing angrily, face highly colored, clothing shimmering with artificial gems, waddled pompously out of the door through which the frantic French doctor had so recently vanished. She rolled heavily across the room, and out into the corridor. Shrill words floated back: "I'm going to see my lawyer! My precious Violet—" The sallow youth winked. "And now what can I do for you, Eric?" "We want to go to Venus, if that ray of yours can put us there." "To Venus? Impossible. My orders are to use the Express merely between the sixteen designated stations, at New York, San Francisco, Tokyo, London, Paris—" "See here, Charley," with a cautious glance toward the door, Eric held up the silver flask. "For old time's sake, and for this—" The boy seemed dazed at sight of the bright flask. Then, with a single swift motion, he snatched it out of Eric's hand, and bent to conceal it below his instrument panel. "Sure, old boy. I'd send you to heaven for that, if you'd give me the micrometer readings to set the ray with. But I tell you, this is dangerous. I've got a sort of television attachment, for focusing the ray. I can turn that on Venus—I've been amusing myself, watching the life there, already. Terrible place. Savage. I can pick a place on high land to set you down. But I can't be responsible for what happens afterward." "Simple, primitive life is what we're looking for. And now what do I owe you—" "Oh, that's all right. Between friends. Provided that stuff's genuine! Walk in and lie down on the crystal block. Hands at your sides. Don't move." The little door had swung open again, and Eric led Nada through. They stepped into a little cell, completely surrounded with mirrors and vast prisms and lenses and electron tubes. In the center was a slab of transparent crystal, eight feet square and two inches thick, with an intricate mass of machinery below it. Eric helped Nada to a place on the crystal, lay down at her side. "I think the Express Ray is focused just at the surface of the crystal, from below," he said. "It dissolves our substance, to be transmitted by the beam. It would look as if we were melting into the crystal." "Ready," called the youth. "Think I've got it for you. Sort of a high island in the jungle. Nothing bad in sight now. But, I say—how're you coming back? I haven't got time to watch you." "Go ahead. We aren't coming back." "Gee! What is it? Elopement? I thought you were married already. Or is it business difficulties? The Bears did make an awful raid last night. But you better let me set you down in Hong Kong." A bell jangled. "So long," the youth called. Nada and Eric felt themselves enveloped in fire. Sheets of white flame seemed to lap up about them from the crystal block. Suddenly there was a sharp tingling sensation where they touched the polished surface. Then blackness, blankness. The next thing they knew, the fires were gone from about them. They were lying in something extremely soft and fluid; and warm rain was beating in their faces. Eric sat up, found himself in a mud-puddle. Beside him was Nada, opening her eyes and struggling up, her bright garments stained with black mud. All about rose a thick jungle, dark and gloomy—and very wet. Palm-like, the gigantic trees were, or fern-like, flinging clouds of feathery green foliage high against a somber sky of unbroken gloom. They stood up, triumphant. "At last!" Nada cried. "We're free! Free of that hateful old civilization! We're back to Nature!" "Yes, we're on our feet now, not parasites on the machines." "It's wonderful to have a fine, strong man like you to trust in, Eric. You're just like one of the heroes in your books!" "You're the perfect companion, Nada.... But now we must be practical. We must build a fire, find weapons, set up a shelter of some kind. I guess it will be night, pretty soon. And Charley said something about savage animals he had seen in the television. "We'll find a nice dry cave, and have a fire in front of the door. And skins of animals to sleep on. And pottery vessels to cook in. And you will find seeds and grown grain." "But first we must find a flint-bed. We need flint for tools, and to strike sparks to make a fire with. We will probably come across a chunk of virgin copper, too—it's found native." Presently they set off through the jungle. The mud seemed to be very abundant, and of a most sticky consistence. They sank into it ankle deep at every step, and vast masses of it clung to their feet. A mile they struggled on, without finding where a provident nature had left them even a single fragment of quartz, to say nothing of a mass of pure copper. "A darned shame," Eric grumbled, "to come forty million miles, and meet such a reception as this!" Nada stopped. "Eric," she said, "I'm tired. And I don't believe there's any rock here, anyway. You'll have to use wooden tools, sharpened in the fire." "Probably you're right. This soil seemed to be of alluvial origin. Shouldn't be surprised if the native rock is some hundreds of feet underground. Your idea is better." "You can make a fire by rubbing sticks together, can't you?" "It can be done, I'm sure. I've never tried it, myself. We need some dry sticks, first." They resumed the weary march, with a good fraction of the new planet adhering to their feet. Rain was still falling from the dark heavens in a steady, warm downpour. Dry wood seemed scarce as the proverbial hen's teeth. "You didn't bring any matches, dear?" "Matches! Of course not! We're going back to Nature." "I hope we get a fire pretty soon." "If dry wood were gold dust, we couldn't buy a hot dog." "Eric, that reminds me that I'm hungry." He confessed to a few pangs of his own. They turned their attention to looking for banana trees, and coconut palms, but they did not seem to abound in the Venerian jungle. Even small animals that might have been slain with a broken branch had contrary ideas about the matter. At last, from sheer weariness, they stopped, and gathered branches to make a sloping shelter by a vast fallen tree-trunk. "This will keep out the rain—maybe—" Eric said hopefully. "And tomorrow, when it has quit raining—I'm sure we'll do better." They crept in, as gloomy night fell without. They lay in each other's arms, the body warmth oddly comforting. Nada cried a little. "Buck up," Eric advised her. "We're back to nature—where we've always wanted to be." With the darkness, the temperature fell somewhat, and a high wind rose, whipping cold rain into the little shelter, and threatening to demolish it. Swarms of mosquito-like insects, seemingly not inconvenienced in the least by the inclement elements, swarmed about them in clouds. Then came a sound from the dismal stormy night, a hoarse, bellowing roar, raucous, terrifying. Nada clung against Eric. "What is it, dear?" she chattered. "Must be a reptile. Dinosaur, or something of the sort. This world seems to be in about the same state as the Earth when they flourished there.... But maybe it won't find us." The roar was repeated, nearer. The earth trembled beneath a mighty tread. "Eric," a thin voice trembled. "Don't you think—it might have been better— You know the old life was not so bad, after all." "I was just thinking of our rooms, nice and warm and bright, with hot foods coming up the shaft whenever we pushed the button, and the gay crowds in the park, and my old typewriter." "Eric?" she called softly. "Yes, dear." "Don't you wish—we had known better?" "I do." If he winced at the "we" the girl did not notice. The roaring outside was closer. And suddenly it was answered by another raucous bellow, at considerable distance, that echoed strangely through the forest. The fearful sounds were repeated, alternately. And always the more distant seemed nearer, until the two sounds were together. And then an infernal din broke out in the darkness. Bellows. Screams. Deafening shrieks. Mighty splashes, as if struggling Titans had upset oceans. Thunderous crashes, as if they were demolishing forests. Eric and Nada clung to each other, in doubt whether to stay or to fly through the storm. Gradually the sound of the conflict came nearer, until the earth shook beneath them, and they were afraid to move. Suddenly the great fallen tree against which they had erected the flimsy shelter was rolled back, evidently by a chance blow from the invisible monsters. The pitiful roof collapsed on the bedraggled humans. Nada burst into tears. "Oh, if only—if only—" Suddenly flame lapped up about them, the same white fire they had seen as they lay on the crystal block. Dizziness, insensibility overcame them. A few moments later, they were lying on the transparent table in the Cosmic Express office, with all those great mirrors and prisms and lenses about them. A bustling, red-faced official appeared through the door in the grill, fairly bubbling apologies. "So sorry—an accident—inconceivable. I can't see how he got it! We got you back as soon as we could find a focus. I sincerely hope you haven't been injured." "Why—what—what—" "Why I happened in, found our operator drunk. I've no idea where he got the stuff. He muttered something about Venus. I consulted the auto-register, and found two more passengers registered here than had been recorded at our other stations. I looked up the duplicate beam coordinates, and found that it had been set on Venus. I got men on the television at once, and we happened to find you. "I can't imagine how it happened. I've had the fellow locked up, and the 'dry-laws' are on the job. I hope you won't hold us for excessive damages." "No, I ask nothing except that you don't press charges against the boy. I don't want him to suffer for it in any way. My wife and I will be perfectly satisfied to get back to our apartment." "I don't wonder. You look like you've been through—I don't know what. But I'll have you there in five minutes. My private car—" Mr. Eric Stokes-Harding, noted author of primitive life and love, ate a hearty meal with his pretty spouse, after they had washed off the grime of another planet. He spent the next twelve hours in bed. At the end of the month he delivered his promised story to his publishers, a thrilling tale of a man marooned on Venus, with a beautiful girl. The hero made stone tools, erected a dwelling for himself and his mate, hunted food for her, defended her from the mammoth saurian monsters of the Venerian jungles. The book was a huge success. THE END

He believes that humans rely too much on modern technological advancements and are devolving as a result

He believes that scientists and inventors are responsible for the downfall of society

He believes that humans will never be content until they are able to perform any task without leaving the confines of their homes

He believes that technological advancement has swindled humans of their natural gifts and activities

26066_T3J3I3D3_6

How does Eric compare to the protagonists of his novels?

Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Amazing Stories December 1961 and was first published in Amazing Stories November 1930. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note. A Classic Reprint from AMAZING STORIES, November, 1930 Copyright 1931, by Experimenter Publications Inc. The Cosmic Express By JACK WILLIAMSON Introduction by Sam Moskowitz The year 1928 was a great year of discovery for AMAZING STORIES . They were uncovering new talent at such a great rate, (Harl Vincent, David H. Keller, E. E. Smith, Philip Francis Nowlan, Fletcher Pratt and Miles J. Breuer), that Jack Williamson barely managed to become one of a distinguished group of discoveries by stealing the cover of the December issue for his first story The Metal Man. A disciple of A. Merritt, he attempted to imitate in style, mood and subject the magic of that late lamented master of fantasy. The imitation found great favor from the readership and almost instantly Jack Williamson became an important name on the contents page of AMAZING STORIES . He followed his initial success with two short novels , The Green Girl in AMAZING STORIES and The Alien Intelligence in SCIENCE WONDER STORIES , another Gernsback publication. Both of these stories were close copies of A. Merritt, whose style and method Jack Williamson parlayed into popularity for eight years. Yet the strange thing about it was that Jack Williamson was one of the most versatile science fiction authors ever to sit down at the typewriter. When the vogue for science-fantasy altered to super science, he created the memorable super lock-picker Giles Habilula as the major attraction in a rousing trio of space operas , The Legion of Space, The Cometeers and One Against the Legion. When grim realism was the order of the day, he produced Crucible of Power and when they wanted extrapolated theory in present tense, he assumed the disguise of Will Stewart and popularized the concept of contra terrene matter in science fiction with Seetee Ship and Seetee Shock. Finally, when only psychological studies of the future would do, he produced "With Folded Hands ..." "... And Searching Mind." The Cosmic Express is of special interest because it was written during Williamson's A. Merritt "kick," when he was writing little else but, and it gave the earliest indication of a more general capability. The lightness of the handling is especially modern, barely avoiding the farcical by the validity of the notion that wireless transmission of matter is the next big transportation frontier to be conquered. It is especially important because it stylistically forecast a later trend to accept the background for granted, regardless of the quantity of wonders, and proceed with the story. With only a few thousand scanning-disk television sets in existence at the time of the writing, the surmise that this media would be a natural for westerns was particularly astute. Jack Williamson was born in 1908 in the Arizona territory when covered wagons were the primary form of transportation and apaches still raided the settlers. His father was a cattle man, but for young Jack, the ranch was anything but glamorous. "My days were filled," he remembers, "with monotonous rounds of what seemed an endless, heart-breaking war with drought and frost and dust-storms, poison-weeds and hail, for the sake of survival on the Llano Estacado." The discovery of AMAZING STORIES was the escape he sought and his goal was to be a science fiction writer. He labored to this end and the first he knew that a story of his had been accepted was when he bought the December, 1929 issue of AMAZING STORIES . Since then, he has written millions of words of science fiction and has gone on record as follows: "I feel that science-fiction is the folklore of the new world of science, and the expression of man's reaction to a technological environment. By which I mean that it is the most interesting and stimulating form of literature today." Mr. Eric Stokes-Harding tumbled out of the rumpled bed-clothing, a striking slender figure in purple-striped pajamas. He smiled fondly across to the other of the twin beds, where Nada, his pretty bride, lay quiet beneath light silk covers. With a groan, he stood up and began a series of fantastic bending exercises. But after a few half-hearted movements, he gave it up, and walked through an open door into a small bright room, its walls covered with bookcases and also with scientific appliances that would have been strange to the man of four or five centuries before, when the Age of Aviation was beginning. Suddenly there was a sharp tingling sensation where they touched the polished surface. Yawning, Mr. Eric Stokes-Harding stood before the great open window, staring out. Below him was a wide, park-like space, green with emerald lawns, and bright with flowering plants. Two hundred yards across it rose an immense pyramidal building—an artistic structure, gleaming with white marble and bright metal, striped with the verdure of terraced roof-gardens, its slender peak rising to help support the gray, steel-ribbed glass roof above. Beyond, the park stretched away in illimitable vistas, broken with the graceful columned buildings that held up the great glass roof. Above the glass, over this New York of 2432 A. D., a freezing blizzard was sweeping. But small concern was that to the lightly clad man at the window, who was inhaling deeply the fragrant air from the plants below—air kept, winter and summer, exactly at 20° C. With another yawn, Mr. Eric Stokes-Harding turned back to the room, which was bright with the rich golden light that poured in from the suspended globes of the cold ato-light that illuminated the snow-covered city. With a distasteful grimace, he seated himself before a broad, paper-littered desk, sat a few minutes leaning back, with his hands clasped behind his head. At last he straightened reluctantly, slid a small typewriter out of its drawer, and began pecking at it impatiently. For Mr. Eric Stokes-Harding was an author. There was a whole shelf of his books on the wall, in bright jackets, red and blue and green, that brought a thrill of pleasure to the young novelist's heart when he looked up from his clattering machine. He wrote "thrilling action romances," as his enthusiastic publishers and television directors said, "of ages past, when men were men. Red-blooded heroes responding vigorously to the stirring passions of primordial life!" He was impartial as to the source of his thrills—provided they were distant enough from modern civilization. His hero was likely to be an ape-man roaring through the jungle, with a bloody rock in one hand and a beautiful girl in the other. Or a cowboy, "hard-riding, hard-shooting," the vanishing hero of the ancient ranches. Or a man marooned with a lovely woman on a desert South Sea island. His heroes were invariably strong, fearless, resourceful fellows, who could handle a club on equal terms with a cave-man, or call science to aid them in defending a beautiful mate from the terrors of a desolate wilderness. And a hundred million read Eric's novels, and watched the dramatization of them on the television screens. They thrilled at the simple, romantic lives his heroes led, paid him handsome royalties, and subconsciously shared his opinion that civilization had taken all the best from the life of man. Eric had settled down to the artistic satisfaction of describing the sensuous delight of his hero in the roasted marrow-bones of a dead mammoth, when the pretty woman in the other room stirred, and presently came tripping into the study, gay and vivacious, and—as her husband of a few months most justly thought—altogether beautiful in a bright silk dressing gown. Recklessly, he slammed the machine back into its place, and resolved to forget that his next "red-blooded action thriller" was due in the publisher's office at the end of the month. He sprang up to kiss his wife, held her embraced for a long happy moment. And then they went hand in hand, to the side of the room and punched a series of buttons on a panel—a simple way of ordering breakfast sent up the automatic shaft from the kitchens below. Nada Stokes-Harding was also an author. She wrote poems—"back to nature stuff"—simple lyrics of the sea, of sunsets, of bird songs, of bright flowers and warm winds, of thrilling communion with Nature, and growing things. Men read her poems and called her a genius. Even though the whole world had grown up into a city, the birds were extinct, there were no wild flowers, and no one had time to bother about sunsets. "Eric, darling," she said, "isn't it terrible to be cooped up here in this little flat, away from the things we both love?" "Yes, dear. Civilization has ruined the world. If we could only have lived a thousand years ago, when life was simple and natural, when men hunted and killed their meat, instead of drinking synthetic stuff, when men still had the joys of conflict, instead of living under glass, like hot-house flowers." "If we could only go somewhere—" "There isn't anywhere to go. I write about the West, Africa, South Sea Islands. But they were all filled up two hundred years ago. Pleasure resorts, sanatoriums, cities, factories." "If only we lived on Venus! I was listening to a lecture on the television, last night. The speaker said that the Planet Venus is younger than the Earth, that it has not cooled so much. It has a thick, cloudy atmosphere, and low, rainy forests. There's simple, elemental life there—like Earth had before civilization ruined it." "Yes, Kinsley, with his new infra-red ray telescope, that penetrates the cloud layers of the planet, proved that Venus rotates in about the same period as Earth; and it must be much like Earth was a million years ago." "Eric, I wonder if we could go there! It would be so thrilling to begin life like the characters in your stories, to get away from this hateful civilization, and live natural lives. Maybe a rocket—" The young author's eyes were glowing. He skipped across the floor, seized Nada, kissed her ecstatically. "Splendid! Think of hunting in the virgin forest, and bringing the game home to you! But I'm afraid there is no way.—Wait! The Cosmic Express." "The Cosmic Express?" "A new invention. Just perfected a few weeks ago, I understand. By Ludwig Von der Valls, the German physicist." "I've quit bothering about science. It has ruined nature, filled the world with silly, artificial people, doing silly, artificial things." "But this is quite remarkable, dear. A new way to travel—by ether!" "By ether!" "Yes. You know of course that energy and matter are interchangeable terms; both are simply etheric vibration, of different sorts." "Of course. That's elementary." She smiled proudly. "I can give you examples, even of the change. The disintegration of the radium atom, making helium and lead and energy . And Millikan's old proof that his Cosmic Ray is generated when particles of electricity are united to form an atom." "Fine! I thought you said you weren't a scientist." He glowed with pride. "But the method, in the new Cosmic Express, is simply to convert the matter to be carried into power, send it out as a radiant beam and focus the beam to convert it back into atoms at the destination." "But the amount of energy must be terrific—" "It is. You know short waves carry more energy than long ones. The Express Ray is an electromagnetic vibration of frequency far higher than that of even the Cosmic Ray, and correspondingly more powerful and more penetrating." The girl frowned, running slim fingers through golden-brown hair. "But I don't see how they get any recognizable object, not even how they get the radiation turned back into matter." "The beam is focused, just like the light that passes through a camera lens. The photographic lens, using light rays, picks up a picture and reproduces it again on the plate—just the same as the Express Ray picks up an object and sets it down on the other side of the world. "An analogy from television might help. You know that by means of the scanning disc, the picture is transformed into mere rapid fluctuations in the brightness of a beam of light. In a parallel manner, the focal plane of the Express Ray moves slowly through the object, progressively, dissolving layers of the thickness of a single atom, which are accurately reproduced at the other focus of the instrument—which might be in Venus! "But the analogy of the lens is the better of the two. For no receiving instrument is required, as in television. The object is built up of an infinite series of plane layers, at the focus of the ray, no matter where that may be. Such a thing would be impossible with radio apparatus because even with the best beam transmission, all but a tiny fraction of the power is lost, and power is required to rebuild the atoms. Do you understand, dear?" "Not altogether. But I should worry! Here comes breakfast. Let me butter your toast." A bell had rung at the shaft. She ran to it, and returned with a great silver tray, laden with dainty dishes, which she set on a little side table. They sat down opposite each other, and ate, getting as much satisfaction from contemplation of each other's faces as from the excellent food. When they had finished, she carried the tray to the shaft, slid it in a slot, and touched a button—thus disposing of the culinary cares of the morning. She ran back to Eric, who was once more staring distastefully at his typewriter. "Oh, darling! I'm thrilled to death about the Cosmic Express! If we could go to Venus, to a new life on a new world, and get away from all this hateful conventional society—" "We can go to their office—it's only five minutes. The chap that operates the machine for the company is a pal of mine. He's not supposed to take passengers except between the offices they have scattered about the world. But I know his weak point—" Eric laughed, fumbled with a hidden spring under his desk. A small polished object, gleaming silvery, slid down into his hand. "Old friendship, plus this, would make him—like spinach." Five minutes later Mr. Eric Stokes-Harding and his pretty wife were in street clothes, light silk tunics of loose, flowing lines—little clothing being required in the artificially warmed city. They entered an elevator and dropped thirty stories to the ground floor of the great building. There they entered a cylindrical car, with rows of seats down the sides. Not greatly different from an ancient subway car, except that it was air-tight, and was hurled by magnetic attraction and repulsion through a tube exhausted of air, at a speed that would have made an old subway rider gasp with amazement. In five more minutes their car had whipped up to the base of another building, in the business section, where there was no room for parks between the mighty structures that held the unbroken glass roofs two hundred stories above the concrete pavement. An elevator brought them up a hundred and fifty stories. Eric led Nada down a long, carpeted corridor to a wide glass door, which bore the words: COSMIC EXPRESS stenciled in gold capitals across it. As they approached, a lean man, carrying a black bag, darted out of an elevator shaft opposite the door, ran across the corridor, and entered. They pushed in after him. They were in a little room, cut in two by a high brass grill. In front of it was a long bench against the wall, that reminded one of the waiting room in an old railroad depot. In the grill was a little window, with a lazy, brown-eyed youth leaning on the shelf behind it. Beyond him was a great, glittering piece of mechanism, half hidden by the brass. A little door gave access to the machine from the space before the grill. The thin man in black, whom Eric now recognized as a prominent French heart-specialist, was dancing before the window, waving his bag frantically, raving at the sleepy boy. "Queek! I have tell you zee truth! I have zee most urgent necessity to go queekly. A patient I have in Paree, zat ees in zee most creetical condition!" "Hold your horses just a minute, Mister. We got a client in the machine now. Russian diplomat from Moscow to Rio de Janeiro.... Two hundred seventy dollars and eighty cents, please.... Your turn next. Remember this is just an experimental service. Regular installations all over the world in a year.... Ready now. Come on in." The youth took the money, pressed a button. The door sprang open in the grill, and the frantic physician leaped through it. "Lie down on the crystal, face up," the young man ordered. "Hands at your sides, don't breathe. Ready!" He manipulated his dials and switches, and pressed another button. "Why, hello, Eric, old man!" he cried. "That's the lady you were telling me about? Congratulations!" A bell jangled before him on the panel. "Just a minute. I've got a call." He punched the board again. Little bulbs lit and glowed for a second. The youth turned toward the half-hidden machine, spoke courteously. "All right, madam. Walk out. Hope you found the transit pleasant." "But my Violet! My precious Violet!" a shrill female voice came from the machine. "Sir, what have you done with my darling Violet?" "I'm sure I don't know, madam. You lost it off your hat?" "None of your impertinence, sir! I want my dog." "Ah, a dog. Must have jumped off the crystal. You can have him sent on for three hundred and—" "Young man, if any harm comes to my Violet—I'll—I'll—I'll appeal to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals!" "Very good, madam. We appreciate your patronage." The door flew open again. A very fat woman, puffing angrily, face highly colored, clothing shimmering with artificial gems, waddled pompously out of the door through which the frantic French doctor had so recently vanished. She rolled heavily across the room, and out into the corridor. Shrill words floated back: "I'm going to see my lawyer! My precious Violet—" The sallow youth winked. "And now what can I do for you, Eric?" "We want to go to Venus, if that ray of yours can put us there." "To Venus? Impossible. My orders are to use the Express merely between the sixteen designated stations, at New York, San Francisco, Tokyo, London, Paris—" "See here, Charley," with a cautious glance toward the door, Eric held up the silver flask. "For old time's sake, and for this—" The boy seemed dazed at sight of the bright flask. Then, with a single swift motion, he snatched it out of Eric's hand, and bent to conceal it below his instrument panel. "Sure, old boy. I'd send you to heaven for that, if you'd give me the micrometer readings to set the ray with. But I tell you, this is dangerous. I've got a sort of television attachment, for focusing the ray. I can turn that on Venus—I've been amusing myself, watching the life there, already. Terrible place. Savage. I can pick a place on high land to set you down. But I can't be responsible for what happens afterward." "Simple, primitive life is what we're looking for. And now what do I owe you—" "Oh, that's all right. Between friends. Provided that stuff's genuine! Walk in and lie down on the crystal block. Hands at your sides. Don't move." The little door had swung open again, and Eric led Nada through. They stepped into a little cell, completely surrounded with mirrors and vast prisms and lenses and electron tubes. In the center was a slab of transparent crystal, eight feet square and two inches thick, with an intricate mass of machinery below it. Eric helped Nada to a place on the crystal, lay down at her side. "I think the Express Ray is focused just at the surface of the crystal, from below," he said. "It dissolves our substance, to be transmitted by the beam. It would look as if we were melting into the crystal." "Ready," called the youth. "Think I've got it for you. Sort of a high island in the jungle. Nothing bad in sight now. But, I say—how're you coming back? I haven't got time to watch you." "Go ahead. We aren't coming back." "Gee! What is it? Elopement? I thought you were married already. Or is it business difficulties? The Bears did make an awful raid last night. But you better let me set you down in Hong Kong." A bell jangled. "So long," the youth called. Nada and Eric felt themselves enveloped in fire. Sheets of white flame seemed to lap up about them from the crystal block. Suddenly there was a sharp tingling sensation where they touched the polished surface. Then blackness, blankness. The next thing they knew, the fires were gone from about them. They were lying in something extremely soft and fluid; and warm rain was beating in their faces. Eric sat up, found himself in a mud-puddle. Beside him was Nada, opening her eyes and struggling up, her bright garments stained with black mud. All about rose a thick jungle, dark and gloomy—and very wet. Palm-like, the gigantic trees were, or fern-like, flinging clouds of feathery green foliage high against a somber sky of unbroken gloom. They stood up, triumphant. "At last!" Nada cried. "We're free! Free of that hateful old civilization! We're back to Nature!" "Yes, we're on our feet now, not parasites on the machines." "It's wonderful to have a fine, strong man like you to trust in, Eric. You're just like one of the heroes in your books!" "You're the perfect companion, Nada.... But now we must be practical. We must build a fire, find weapons, set up a shelter of some kind. I guess it will be night, pretty soon. And Charley said something about savage animals he had seen in the television. "We'll find a nice dry cave, and have a fire in front of the door. And skins of animals to sleep on. And pottery vessels to cook in. And you will find seeds and grown grain." "But first we must find a flint-bed. We need flint for tools, and to strike sparks to make a fire with. We will probably come across a chunk of virgin copper, too—it's found native." Presently they set off through the jungle. The mud seemed to be very abundant, and of a most sticky consistence. They sank into it ankle deep at every step, and vast masses of it clung to their feet. A mile they struggled on, without finding where a provident nature had left them even a single fragment of quartz, to say nothing of a mass of pure copper. "A darned shame," Eric grumbled, "to come forty million miles, and meet such a reception as this!" Nada stopped. "Eric," she said, "I'm tired. And I don't believe there's any rock here, anyway. You'll have to use wooden tools, sharpened in the fire." "Probably you're right. This soil seemed to be of alluvial origin. Shouldn't be surprised if the native rock is some hundreds of feet underground. Your idea is better." "You can make a fire by rubbing sticks together, can't you?" "It can be done, I'm sure. I've never tried it, myself. We need some dry sticks, first." They resumed the weary march, with a good fraction of the new planet adhering to their feet. Rain was still falling from the dark heavens in a steady, warm downpour. Dry wood seemed scarce as the proverbial hen's teeth. "You didn't bring any matches, dear?" "Matches! Of course not! We're going back to Nature." "I hope we get a fire pretty soon." "If dry wood were gold dust, we couldn't buy a hot dog." "Eric, that reminds me that I'm hungry." He confessed to a few pangs of his own. They turned their attention to looking for banana trees, and coconut palms, but they did not seem to abound in the Venerian jungle. Even small animals that might have been slain with a broken branch had contrary ideas about the matter. At last, from sheer weariness, they stopped, and gathered branches to make a sloping shelter by a vast fallen tree-trunk. "This will keep out the rain—maybe—" Eric said hopefully. "And tomorrow, when it has quit raining—I'm sure we'll do better." They crept in, as gloomy night fell without. They lay in each other's arms, the body warmth oddly comforting. Nada cried a little. "Buck up," Eric advised her. "We're back to nature—where we've always wanted to be." With the darkness, the temperature fell somewhat, and a high wind rose, whipping cold rain into the little shelter, and threatening to demolish it. Swarms of mosquito-like insects, seemingly not inconvenienced in the least by the inclement elements, swarmed about them in clouds. Then came a sound from the dismal stormy night, a hoarse, bellowing roar, raucous, terrifying. Nada clung against Eric. "What is it, dear?" she chattered. "Must be a reptile. Dinosaur, or something of the sort. This world seems to be in about the same state as the Earth when they flourished there.... But maybe it won't find us." The roar was repeated, nearer. The earth trembled beneath a mighty tread. "Eric," a thin voice trembled. "Don't you think—it might have been better— You know the old life was not so bad, after all." "I was just thinking of our rooms, nice and warm and bright, with hot foods coming up the shaft whenever we pushed the button, and the gay crowds in the park, and my old typewriter." "Eric?" she called softly. "Yes, dear." "Don't you wish—we had known better?" "I do." If he winced at the "we" the girl did not notice. The roaring outside was closer. And suddenly it was answered by another raucous bellow, at considerable distance, that echoed strangely through the forest. The fearful sounds were repeated, alternately. And always the more distant seemed nearer, until the two sounds were together. And then an infernal din broke out in the darkness. Bellows. Screams. Deafening shrieks. Mighty splashes, as if struggling Titans had upset oceans. Thunderous crashes, as if they were demolishing forests. Eric and Nada clung to each other, in doubt whether to stay or to fly through the storm. Gradually the sound of the conflict came nearer, until the earth shook beneath them, and they were afraid to move. Suddenly the great fallen tree against which they had erected the flimsy shelter was rolled back, evidently by a chance blow from the invisible monsters. The pitiful roof collapsed on the bedraggled humans. Nada burst into tears. "Oh, if only—if only—" Suddenly flame lapped up about them, the same white fire they had seen as they lay on the crystal block. Dizziness, insensibility overcame them. A few moments later, they were lying on the transparent table in the Cosmic Express office, with all those great mirrors and prisms and lenses about them. A bustling, red-faced official appeared through the door in the grill, fairly bubbling apologies. "So sorry—an accident—inconceivable. I can't see how he got it! We got you back as soon as we could find a focus. I sincerely hope you haven't been injured." "Why—what—what—" "Why I happened in, found our operator drunk. I've no idea where he got the stuff. He muttered something about Venus. I consulted the auto-register, and found two more passengers registered here than had been recorded at our other stations. I looked up the duplicate beam coordinates, and found that it had been set on Venus. I got men on the television at once, and we happened to find you. "I can't imagine how it happened. I've had the fellow locked up, and the 'dry-laws' are on the job. I hope you won't hold us for excessive damages." "No, I ask nothing except that you don't press charges against the boy. I don't want him to suffer for it in any way. My wife and I will be perfectly satisfied to get back to our apartment." "I don't wonder. You look like you've been through—I don't know what. But I'll have you there in five minutes. My private car—" Mr. Eric Stokes-Harding, noted author of primitive life and love, ate a hearty meal with his pretty spouse, after they had washed off the grime of another planet. He spent the next twelve hours in bed. At the end of the month he delivered his promised story to his publishers, a thrilling tale of a man marooned on Venus, with a beautiful girl. The hero made stone tools, erected a dwelling for himself and his mate, hunted food for her, defended her from the mammoth saurian monsters of the Venerian jungles. The book was a huge success. THE END

He shares neither a passion nor aptitude for survival

He shares an aptitude for survival, but not a passion

He shares a passion and aptitude for survival

He shares a passion for survival, but not an aptitude

26066_T3J3I3D3_7

What attitude does Eric display towards modern technological appliances?

Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Amazing Stories December 1961 and was first published in Amazing Stories November 1930. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note. A Classic Reprint from AMAZING STORIES, November, 1930 Copyright 1931, by Experimenter Publications Inc. The Cosmic Express By JACK WILLIAMSON Introduction by Sam Moskowitz The year 1928 was a great year of discovery for AMAZING STORIES . They were uncovering new talent at such a great rate, (Harl Vincent, David H. Keller, E. E. Smith, Philip Francis Nowlan, Fletcher Pratt and Miles J. Breuer), that Jack Williamson barely managed to become one of a distinguished group of discoveries by stealing the cover of the December issue for his first story The Metal Man. A disciple of A. Merritt, he attempted to imitate in style, mood and subject the magic of that late lamented master of fantasy. The imitation found great favor from the readership and almost instantly Jack Williamson became an important name on the contents page of AMAZING STORIES . He followed his initial success with two short novels , The Green Girl in AMAZING STORIES and The Alien Intelligence in SCIENCE WONDER STORIES , another Gernsback publication. Both of these stories were close copies of A. Merritt, whose style and method Jack Williamson parlayed into popularity for eight years. Yet the strange thing about it was that Jack Williamson was one of the most versatile science fiction authors ever to sit down at the typewriter. When the vogue for science-fantasy altered to super science, he created the memorable super lock-picker Giles Habilula as the major attraction in a rousing trio of space operas , The Legion of Space, The Cometeers and One Against the Legion. When grim realism was the order of the day, he produced Crucible of Power and when they wanted extrapolated theory in present tense, he assumed the disguise of Will Stewart and popularized the concept of contra terrene matter in science fiction with Seetee Ship and Seetee Shock. Finally, when only psychological studies of the future would do, he produced "With Folded Hands ..." "... And Searching Mind." The Cosmic Express is of special interest because it was written during Williamson's A. Merritt "kick," when he was writing little else but, and it gave the earliest indication of a more general capability. The lightness of the handling is especially modern, barely avoiding the farcical by the validity of the notion that wireless transmission of matter is the next big transportation frontier to be conquered. It is especially important because it stylistically forecast a later trend to accept the background for granted, regardless of the quantity of wonders, and proceed with the story. With only a few thousand scanning-disk television sets in existence at the time of the writing, the surmise that this media would be a natural for westerns was particularly astute. Jack Williamson was born in 1908 in the Arizona territory when covered wagons were the primary form of transportation and apaches still raided the settlers. His father was a cattle man, but for young Jack, the ranch was anything but glamorous. "My days were filled," he remembers, "with monotonous rounds of what seemed an endless, heart-breaking war with drought and frost and dust-storms, poison-weeds and hail, for the sake of survival on the Llano Estacado." The discovery of AMAZING STORIES was the escape he sought and his goal was to be a science fiction writer. He labored to this end and the first he knew that a story of his had been accepted was when he bought the December, 1929 issue of AMAZING STORIES . Since then, he has written millions of words of science fiction and has gone on record as follows: "I feel that science-fiction is the folklore of the new world of science, and the expression of man's reaction to a technological environment. By which I mean that it is the most interesting and stimulating form of literature today." Mr. Eric Stokes-Harding tumbled out of the rumpled bed-clothing, a striking slender figure in purple-striped pajamas. He smiled fondly across to the other of the twin beds, where Nada, his pretty bride, lay quiet beneath light silk covers. With a groan, he stood up and began a series of fantastic bending exercises. But after a few half-hearted movements, he gave it up, and walked through an open door into a small bright room, its walls covered with bookcases and also with scientific appliances that would have been strange to the man of four or five centuries before, when the Age of Aviation was beginning. Suddenly there was a sharp tingling sensation where they touched the polished surface. Yawning, Mr. Eric Stokes-Harding stood before the great open window, staring out. Below him was a wide, park-like space, green with emerald lawns, and bright with flowering plants. Two hundred yards across it rose an immense pyramidal building—an artistic structure, gleaming with white marble and bright metal, striped with the verdure of terraced roof-gardens, its slender peak rising to help support the gray, steel-ribbed glass roof above. Beyond, the park stretched away in illimitable vistas, broken with the graceful columned buildings that held up the great glass roof. Above the glass, over this New York of 2432 A. D., a freezing blizzard was sweeping. But small concern was that to the lightly clad man at the window, who was inhaling deeply the fragrant air from the plants below—air kept, winter and summer, exactly at 20° C. With another yawn, Mr. Eric Stokes-Harding turned back to the room, which was bright with the rich golden light that poured in from the suspended globes of the cold ato-light that illuminated the snow-covered city. With a distasteful grimace, he seated himself before a broad, paper-littered desk, sat a few minutes leaning back, with his hands clasped behind his head. At last he straightened reluctantly, slid a small typewriter out of its drawer, and began pecking at it impatiently. For Mr. Eric Stokes-Harding was an author. There was a whole shelf of his books on the wall, in bright jackets, red and blue and green, that brought a thrill of pleasure to the young novelist's heart when he looked up from his clattering machine. He wrote "thrilling action romances," as his enthusiastic publishers and television directors said, "of ages past, when men were men. Red-blooded heroes responding vigorously to the stirring passions of primordial life!" He was impartial as to the source of his thrills—provided they were distant enough from modern civilization. His hero was likely to be an ape-man roaring through the jungle, with a bloody rock in one hand and a beautiful girl in the other. Or a cowboy, "hard-riding, hard-shooting," the vanishing hero of the ancient ranches. Or a man marooned with a lovely woman on a desert South Sea island. His heroes were invariably strong, fearless, resourceful fellows, who could handle a club on equal terms with a cave-man, or call science to aid them in defending a beautiful mate from the terrors of a desolate wilderness. And a hundred million read Eric's novels, and watched the dramatization of them on the television screens. They thrilled at the simple, romantic lives his heroes led, paid him handsome royalties, and subconsciously shared his opinion that civilization had taken all the best from the life of man. Eric had settled down to the artistic satisfaction of describing the sensuous delight of his hero in the roasted marrow-bones of a dead mammoth, when the pretty woman in the other room stirred, and presently came tripping into the study, gay and vivacious, and—as her husband of a few months most justly thought—altogether beautiful in a bright silk dressing gown. Recklessly, he slammed the machine back into its place, and resolved to forget that his next "red-blooded action thriller" was due in the publisher's office at the end of the month. He sprang up to kiss his wife, held her embraced for a long happy moment. And then they went hand in hand, to the side of the room and punched a series of buttons on a panel—a simple way of ordering breakfast sent up the automatic shaft from the kitchens below. Nada Stokes-Harding was also an author. She wrote poems—"back to nature stuff"—simple lyrics of the sea, of sunsets, of bird songs, of bright flowers and warm winds, of thrilling communion with Nature, and growing things. Men read her poems and called her a genius. Even though the whole world had grown up into a city, the birds were extinct, there were no wild flowers, and no one had time to bother about sunsets. "Eric, darling," she said, "isn't it terrible to be cooped up here in this little flat, away from the things we both love?" "Yes, dear. Civilization has ruined the world. If we could only have lived a thousand years ago, when life was simple and natural, when men hunted and killed their meat, instead of drinking synthetic stuff, when men still had the joys of conflict, instead of living under glass, like hot-house flowers." "If we could only go somewhere—" "There isn't anywhere to go. I write about the West, Africa, South Sea Islands. But they were all filled up two hundred years ago. Pleasure resorts, sanatoriums, cities, factories." "If only we lived on Venus! I was listening to a lecture on the television, last night. The speaker said that the Planet Venus is younger than the Earth, that it has not cooled so much. It has a thick, cloudy atmosphere, and low, rainy forests. There's simple, elemental life there—like Earth had before civilization ruined it." "Yes, Kinsley, with his new infra-red ray telescope, that penetrates the cloud layers of the planet, proved that Venus rotates in about the same period as Earth; and it must be much like Earth was a million years ago." "Eric, I wonder if we could go there! It would be so thrilling to begin life like the characters in your stories, to get away from this hateful civilization, and live natural lives. Maybe a rocket—" The young author's eyes were glowing. He skipped across the floor, seized Nada, kissed her ecstatically. "Splendid! Think of hunting in the virgin forest, and bringing the game home to you! But I'm afraid there is no way.—Wait! The Cosmic Express." "The Cosmic Express?" "A new invention. Just perfected a few weeks ago, I understand. By Ludwig Von der Valls, the German physicist." "I've quit bothering about science. It has ruined nature, filled the world with silly, artificial people, doing silly, artificial things." "But this is quite remarkable, dear. A new way to travel—by ether!" "By ether!" "Yes. You know of course that energy and matter are interchangeable terms; both are simply etheric vibration, of different sorts." "Of course. That's elementary." She smiled proudly. "I can give you examples, even of the change. The disintegration of the radium atom, making helium and lead and energy . And Millikan's old proof that his Cosmic Ray is generated when particles of electricity are united to form an atom." "Fine! I thought you said you weren't a scientist." He glowed with pride. "But the method, in the new Cosmic Express, is simply to convert the matter to be carried into power, send it out as a radiant beam and focus the beam to convert it back into atoms at the destination." "But the amount of energy must be terrific—" "It is. You know short waves carry more energy than long ones. The Express Ray is an electromagnetic vibration of frequency far higher than that of even the Cosmic Ray, and correspondingly more powerful and more penetrating." The girl frowned, running slim fingers through golden-brown hair. "But I don't see how they get any recognizable object, not even how they get the radiation turned back into matter." "The beam is focused, just like the light that passes through a camera lens. The photographic lens, using light rays, picks up a picture and reproduces it again on the plate—just the same as the Express Ray picks up an object and sets it down on the other side of the world. "An analogy from television might help. You know that by means of the scanning disc, the picture is transformed into mere rapid fluctuations in the brightness of a beam of light. In a parallel manner, the focal plane of the Express Ray moves slowly through the object, progressively, dissolving layers of the thickness of a single atom, which are accurately reproduced at the other focus of the instrument—which might be in Venus! "But the analogy of the lens is the better of the two. For no receiving instrument is required, as in television. The object is built up of an infinite series of plane layers, at the focus of the ray, no matter where that may be. Such a thing would be impossible with radio apparatus because even with the best beam transmission, all but a tiny fraction of the power is lost, and power is required to rebuild the atoms. Do you understand, dear?" "Not altogether. But I should worry! Here comes breakfast. Let me butter your toast." A bell had rung at the shaft. She ran to it, and returned with a great silver tray, laden with dainty dishes, which she set on a little side table. They sat down opposite each other, and ate, getting as much satisfaction from contemplation of each other's faces as from the excellent food. When they had finished, she carried the tray to the shaft, slid it in a slot, and touched a button—thus disposing of the culinary cares of the morning. She ran back to Eric, who was once more staring distastefully at his typewriter. "Oh, darling! I'm thrilled to death about the Cosmic Express! If we could go to Venus, to a new life on a new world, and get away from all this hateful conventional society—" "We can go to their office—it's only five minutes. The chap that operates the machine for the company is a pal of mine. He's not supposed to take passengers except between the offices they have scattered about the world. But I know his weak point—" Eric laughed, fumbled with a hidden spring under his desk. A small polished object, gleaming silvery, slid down into his hand. "Old friendship, plus this, would make him—like spinach." Five minutes later Mr. Eric Stokes-Harding and his pretty wife were in street clothes, light silk tunics of loose, flowing lines—little clothing being required in the artificially warmed city. They entered an elevator and dropped thirty stories to the ground floor of the great building. There they entered a cylindrical car, with rows of seats down the sides. Not greatly different from an ancient subway car, except that it was air-tight, and was hurled by magnetic attraction and repulsion through a tube exhausted of air, at a speed that would have made an old subway rider gasp with amazement. In five more minutes their car had whipped up to the base of another building, in the business section, where there was no room for parks between the mighty structures that held the unbroken glass roofs two hundred stories above the concrete pavement. An elevator brought them up a hundred and fifty stories. Eric led Nada down a long, carpeted corridor to a wide glass door, which bore the words: COSMIC EXPRESS stenciled in gold capitals across it. As they approached, a lean man, carrying a black bag, darted out of an elevator shaft opposite the door, ran across the corridor, and entered. They pushed in after him. They were in a little room, cut in two by a high brass grill. In front of it was a long bench against the wall, that reminded one of the waiting room in an old railroad depot. In the grill was a little window, with a lazy, brown-eyed youth leaning on the shelf behind it. Beyond him was a great, glittering piece of mechanism, half hidden by the brass. A little door gave access to the machine from the space before the grill. The thin man in black, whom Eric now recognized as a prominent French heart-specialist, was dancing before the window, waving his bag frantically, raving at the sleepy boy. "Queek! I have tell you zee truth! I have zee most urgent necessity to go queekly. A patient I have in Paree, zat ees in zee most creetical condition!" "Hold your horses just a minute, Mister. We got a client in the machine now. Russian diplomat from Moscow to Rio de Janeiro.... Two hundred seventy dollars and eighty cents, please.... Your turn next. Remember this is just an experimental service. Regular installations all over the world in a year.... Ready now. Come on in." The youth took the money, pressed a button. The door sprang open in the grill, and the frantic physician leaped through it. "Lie down on the crystal, face up," the young man ordered. "Hands at your sides, don't breathe. Ready!" He manipulated his dials and switches, and pressed another button. "Why, hello, Eric, old man!" he cried. "That's the lady you were telling me about? Congratulations!" A bell jangled before him on the panel. "Just a minute. I've got a call." He punched the board again. Little bulbs lit and glowed for a second. The youth turned toward the half-hidden machine, spoke courteously. "All right, madam. Walk out. Hope you found the transit pleasant." "But my Violet! My precious Violet!" a shrill female voice came from the machine. "Sir, what have you done with my darling Violet?" "I'm sure I don't know, madam. You lost it off your hat?" "None of your impertinence, sir! I want my dog." "Ah, a dog. Must have jumped off the crystal. You can have him sent on for three hundred and—" "Young man, if any harm comes to my Violet—I'll—I'll—I'll appeal to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals!" "Very good, madam. We appreciate your patronage." The door flew open again. A very fat woman, puffing angrily, face highly colored, clothing shimmering with artificial gems, waddled pompously out of the door through which the frantic French doctor had so recently vanished. She rolled heavily across the room, and out into the corridor. Shrill words floated back: "I'm going to see my lawyer! My precious Violet—" The sallow youth winked. "And now what can I do for you, Eric?" "We want to go to Venus, if that ray of yours can put us there." "To Venus? Impossible. My orders are to use the Express merely between the sixteen designated stations, at New York, San Francisco, Tokyo, London, Paris—" "See here, Charley," with a cautious glance toward the door, Eric held up the silver flask. "For old time's sake, and for this—" The boy seemed dazed at sight of the bright flask. Then, with a single swift motion, he snatched it out of Eric's hand, and bent to conceal it below his instrument panel. "Sure, old boy. I'd send you to heaven for that, if you'd give me the micrometer readings to set the ray with. But I tell you, this is dangerous. I've got a sort of television attachment, for focusing the ray. I can turn that on Venus—I've been amusing myself, watching the life there, already. Terrible place. Savage. I can pick a place on high land to set you down. But I can't be responsible for what happens afterward." "Simple, primitive life is what we're looking for. And now what do I owe you—" "Oh, that's all right. Between friends. Provided that stuff's genuine! Walk in and lie down on the crystal block. Hands at your sides. Don't move." The little door had swung open again, and Eric led Nada through. They stepped into a little cell, completely surrounded with mirrors and vast prisms and lenses and electron tubes. In the center was a slab of transparent crystal, eight feet square and two inches thick, with an intricate mass of machinery below it. Eric helped Nada to a place on the crystal, lay down at her side. "I think the Express Ray is focused just at the surface of the crystal, from below," he said. "It dissolves our substance, to be transmitted by the beam. It would look as if we were melting into the crystal." "Ready," called the youth. "Think I've got it for you. Sort of a high island in the jungle. Nothing bad in sight now. But, I say—how're you coming back? I haven't got time to watch you." "Go ahead. We aren't coming back." "Gee! What is it? Elopement? I thought you were married already. Or is it business difficulties? The Bears did make an awful raid last night. But you better let me set you down in Hong Kong." A bell jangled. "So long," the youth called. Nada and Eric felt themselves enveloped in fire. Sheets of white flame seemed to lap up about them from the crystal block. Suddenly there was a sharp tingling sensation where they touched the polished surface. Then blackness, blankness. The next thing they knew, the fires were gone from about them. They were lying in something extremely soft and fluid; and warm rain was beating in their faces. Eric sat up, found himself in a mud-puddle. Beside him was Nada, opening her eyes and struggling up, her bright garments stained with black mud. All about rose a thick jungle, dark and gloomy—and very wet. Palm-like, the gigantic trees were, or fern-like, flinging clouds of feathery green foliage high against a somber sky of unbroken gloom. They stood up, triumphant. "At last!" Nada cried. "We're free! Free of that hateful old civilization! We're back to Nature!" "Yes, we're on our feet now, not parasites on the machines." "It's wonderful to have a fine, strong man like you to trust in, Eric. You're just like one of the heroes in your books!" "You're the perfect companion, Nada.... But now we must be practical. We must build a fire, find weapons, set up a shelter of some kind. I guess it will be night, pretty soon. And Charley said something about savage animals he had seen in the television. "We'll find a nice dry cave, and have a fire in front of the door. And skins of animals to sleep on. And pottery vessels to cook in. And you will find seeds and grown grain." "But first we must find a flint-bed. We need flint for tools, and to strike sparks to make a fire with. We will probably come across a chunk of virgin copper, too—it's found native." Presently they set off through the jungle. The mud seemed to be very abundant, and of a most sticky consistence. They sank into it ankle deep at every step, and vast masses of it clung to their feet. A mile they struggled on, without finding where a provident nature had left them even a single fragment of quartz, to say nothing of a mass of pure copper. "A darned shame," Eric grumbled, "to come forty million miles, and meet such a reception as this!" Nada stopped. "Eric," she said, "I'm tired. And I don't believe there's any rock here, anyway. You'll have to use wooden tools, sharpened in the fire." "Probably you're right. This soil seemed to be of alluvial origin. Shouldn't be surprised if the native rock is some hundreds of feet underground. Your idea is better." "You can make a fire by rubbing sticks together, can't you?" "It can be done, I'm sure. I've never tried it, myself. We need some dry sticks, first." They resumed the weary march, with a good fraction of the new planet adhering to their feet. Rain was still falling from the dark heavens in a steady, warm downpour. Dry wood seemed scarce as the proverbial hen's teeth. "You didn't bring any matches, dear?" "Matches! Of course not! We're going back to Nature." "I hope we get a fire pretty soon." "If dry wood were gold dust, we couldn't buy a hot dog." "Eric, that reminds me that I'm hungry." He confessed to a few pangs of his own. They turned their attention to looking for banana trees, and coconut palms, but they did not seem to abound in the Venerian jungle. Even small animals that might have been slain with a broken branch had contrary ideas about the matter. At last, from sheer weariness, they stopped, and gathered branches to make a sloping shelter by a vast fallen tree-trunk. "This will keep out the rain—maybe—" Eric said hopefully. "And tomorrow, when it has quit raining—I'm sure we'll do better." They crept in, as gloomy night fell without. They lay in each other's arms, the body warmth oddly comforting. Nada cried a little. "Buck up," Eric advised her. "We're back to nature—where we've always wanted to be." With the darkness, the temperature fell somewhat, and a high wind rose, whipping cold rain into the little shelter, and threatening to demolish it. Swarms of mosquito-like insects, seemingly not inconvenienced in the least by the inclement elements, swarmed about them in clouds. Then came a sound from the dismal stormy night, a hoarse, bellowing roar, raucous, terrifying. Nada clung against Eric. "What is it, dear?" she chattered. "Must be a reptile. Dinosaur, or something of the sort. This world seems to be in about the same state as the Earth when they flourished there.... But maybe it won't find us." The roar was repeated, nearer. The earth trembled beneath a mighty tread. "Eric," a thin voice trembled. "Don't you think—it might have been better— You know the old life was not so bad, after all." "I was just thinking of our rooms, nice and warm and bright, with hot foods coming up the shaft whenever we pushed the button, and the gay crowds in the park, and my old typewriter." "Eric?" she called softly. "Yes, dear." "Don't you wish—we had known better?" "I do." If he winced at the "we" the girl did not notice. The roaring outside was closer. And suddenly it was answered by another raucous bellow, at considerable distance, that echoed strangely through the forest. The fearful sounds were repeated, alternately. And always the more distant seemed nearer, until the two sounds were together. And then an infernal din broke out in the darkness. Bellows. Screams. Deafening shrieks. Mighty splashes, as if struggling Titans had upset oceans. Thunderous crashes, as if they were demolishing forests. Eric and Nada clung to each other, in doubt whether to stay or to fly through the storm. Gradually the sound of the conflict came nearer, until the earth shook beneath them, and they were afraid to move. Suddenly the great fallen tree against which they had erected the flimsy shelter was rolled back, evidently by a chance blow from the invisible monsters. The pitiful roof collapsed on the bedraggled humans. Nada burst into tears. "Oh, if only—if only—" Suddenly flame lapped up about them, the same white fire they had seen as they lay on the crystal block. Dizziness, insensibility overcame them. A few moments later, they were lying on the transparent table in the Cosmic Express office, with all those great mirrors and prisms and lenses about them. A bustling, red-faced official appeared through the door in the grill, fairly bubbling apologies. "So sorry—an accident—inconceivable. I can't see how he got it! We got you back as soon as we could find a focus. I sincerely hope you haven't been injured." "Why—what—what—" "Why I happened in, found our operator drunk. I've no idea where he got the stuff. He muttered something about Venus. I consulted the auto-register, and found two more passengers registered here than had been recorded at our other stations. I looked up the duplicate beam coordinates, and found that it had been set on Venus. I got men on the television at once, and we happened to find you. "I can't imagine how it happened. I've had the fellow locked up, and the 'dry-laws' are on the job. I hope you won't hold us for excessive damages." "No, I ask nothing except that you don't press charges against the boy. I don't want him to suffer for it in any way. My wife and I will be perfectly satisfied to get back to our apartment." "I don't wonder. You look like you've been through—I don't know what. But I'll have you there in five minutes. My private car—" Mr. Eric Stokes-Harding, noted author of primitive life and love, ate a hearty meal with his pretty spouse, after they had washed off the grime of another planet. He spent the next twelve hours in bed. At the end of the month he delivered his promised story to his publishers, a thrilling tale of a man marooned on Venus, with a beautiful girl. The hero made stone tools, erected a dwelling for himself and his mate, hunted food for her, defended her from the mammoth saurian monsters of the Venerian jungles. The book was a huge success. THE END

Bewilderment

Repugnance

Veneration

Forbearance

26066_T3J3I3D3_8

What is ironic about Eric and Nada's desire to return to nature?

Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Amazing Stories December 1961 and was first published in Amazing Stories November 1930. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note. A Classic Reprint from AMAZING STORIES, November, 1930 Copyright 1931, by Experimenter Publications Inc. The Cosmic Express By JACK WILLIAMSON Introduction by Sam Moskowitz The year 1928 was a great year of discovery for AMAZING STORIES . They were uncovering new talent at such a great rate, (Harl Vincent, David H. Keller, E. E. Smith, Philip Francis Nowlan, Fletcher Pratt and Miles J. Breuer), that Jack Williamson barely managed to become one of a distinguished group of discoveries by stealing the cover of the December issue for his first story The Metal Man. A disciple of A. Merritt, he attempted to imitate in style, mood and subject the magic of that late lamented master of fantasy. The imitation found great favor from the readership and almost instantly Jack Williamson became an important name on the contents page of AMAZING STORIES . He followed his initial success with two short novels , The Green Girl in AMAZING STORIES and The Alien Intelligence in SCIENCE WONDER STORIES , another Gernsback publication. Both of these stories were close copies of A. Merritt, whose style and method Jack Williamson parlayed into popularity for eight years. Yet the strange thing about it was that Jack Williamson was one of the most versatile science fiction authors ever to sit down at the typewriter. When the vogue for science-fantasy altered to super science, he created the memorable super lock-picker Giles Habilula as the major attraction in a rousing trio of space operas , The Legion of Space, The Cometeers and One Against the Legion. When grim realism was the order of the day, he produced Crucible of Power and when they wanted extrapolated theory in present tense, he assumed the disguise of Will Stewart and popularized the concept of contra terrene matter in science fiction with Seetee Ship and Seetee Shock. Finally, when only psychological studies of the future would do, he produced "With Folded Hands ..." "... And Searching Mind." The Cosmic Express is of special interest because it was written during Williamson's A. Merritt "kick," when he was writing little else but, and it gave the earliest indication of a more general capability. The lightness of the handling is especially modern, barely avoiding the farcical by the validity of the notion that wireless transmission of matter is the next big transportation frontier to be conquered. It is especially important because it stylistically forecast a later trend to accept the background for granted, regardless of the quantity of wonders, and proceed with the story. With only a few thousand scanning-disk television sets in existence at the time of the writing, the surmise that this media would be a natural for westerns was particularly astute. Jack Williamson was born in 1908 in the Arizona territory when covered wagons were the primary form of transportation and apaches still raided the settlers. His father was a cattle man, but for young Jack, the ranch was anything but glamorous. "My days were filled," he remembers, "with monotonous rounds of what seemed an endless, heart-breaking war with drought and frost and dust-storms, poison-weeds and hail, for the sake of survival on the Llano Estacado." The discovery of AMAZING STORIES was the escape he sought and his goal was to be a science fiction writer. He labored to this end and the first he knew that a story of his had been accepted was when he bought the December, 1929 issue of AMAZING STORIES . Since then, he has written millions of words of science fiction and has gone on record as follows: "I feel that science-fiction is the folklore of the new world of science, and the expression of man's reaction to a technological environment. By which I mean that it is the most interesting and stimulating form of literature today." Mr. Eric Stokes-Harding tumbled out of the rumpled bed-clothing, a striking slender figure in purple-striped pajamas. He smiled fondly across to the other of the twin beds, where Nada, his pretty bride, lay quiet beneath light silk covers. With a groan, he stood up and began a series of fantastic bending exercises. But after a few half-hearted movements, he gave it up, and walked through an open door into a small bright room, its walls covered with bookcases and also with scientific appliances that would have been strange to the man of four or five centuries before, when the Age of Aviation was beginning. Suddenly there was a sharp tingling sensation where they touched the polished surface. Yawning, Mr. Eric Stokes-Harding stood before the great open window, staring out. Below him was a wide, park-like space, green with emerald lawns, and bright with flowering plants. Two hundred yards across it rose an immense pyramidal building—an artistic structure, gleaming with white marble and bright metal, striped with the verdure of terraced roof-gardens, its slender peak rising to help support the gray, steel-ribbed glass roof above. Beyond, the park stretched away in illimitable vistas, broken with the graceful columned buildings that held up the great glass roof. Above the glass, over this New York of 2432 A. D., a freezing blizzard was sweeping. But small concern was that to the lightly clad man at the window, who was inhaling deeply the fragrant air from the plants below—air kept, winter and summer, exactly at 20° C. With another yawn, Mr. Eric Stokes-Harding turned back to the room, which was bright with the rich golden light that poured in from the suspended globes of the cold ato-light that illuminated the snow-covered city. With a distasteful grimace, he seated himself before a broad, paper-littered desk, sat a few minutes leaning back, with his hands clasped behind his head. At last he straightened reluctantly, slid a small typewriter out of its drawer, and began pecking at it impatiently. For Mr. Eric Stokes-Harding was an author. There was a whole shelf of his books on the wall, in bright jackets, red and blue and green, that brought a thrill of pleasure to the young novelist's heart when he looked up from his clattering machine. He wrote "thrilling action romances," as his enthusiastic publishers and television directors said, "of ages past, when men were men. Red-blooded heroes responding vigorously to the stirring passions of primordial life!" He was impartial as to the source of his thrills—provided they were distant enough from modern civilization. His hero was likely to be an ape-man roaring through the jungle, with a bloody rock in one hand and a beautiful girl in the other. Or a cowboy, "hard-riding, hard-shooting," the vanishing hero of the ancient ranches. Or a man marooned with a lovely woman on a desert South Sea island. His heroes were invariably strong, fearless, resourceful fellows, who could handle a club on equal terms with a cave-man, or call science to aid them in defending a beautiful mate from the terrors of a desolate wilderness. And a hundred million read Eric's novels, and watched the dramatization of them on the television screens. They thrilled at the simple, romantic lives his heroes led, paid him handsome royalties, and subconsciously shared his opinion that civilization had taken all the best from the life of man. Eric had settled down to the artistic satisfaction of describing the sensuous delight of his hero in the roasted marrow-bones of a dead mammoth, when the pretty woman in the other room stirred, and presently came tripping into the study, gay and vivacious, and—as her husband of a few months most justly thought—altogether beautiful in a bright silk dressing gown. Recklessly, he slammed the machine back into its place, and resolved to forget that his next "red-blooded action thriller" was due in the publisher's office at the end of the month. He sprang up to kiss his wife, held her embraced for a long happy moment. And then they went hand in hand, to the side of the room and punched a series of buttons on a panel—a simple way of ordering breakfast sent up the automatic shaft from the kitchens below. Nada Stokes-Harding was also an author. She wrote poems—"back to nature stuff"—simple lyrics of the sea, of sunsets, of bird songs, of bright flowers and warm winds, of thrilling communion with Nature, and growing things. Men read her poems and called her a genius. Even though the whole world had grown up into a city, the birds were extinct, there were no wild flowers, and no one had time to bother about sunsets. "Eric, darling," she said, "isn't it terrible to be cooped up here in this little flat, away from the things we both love?" "Yes, dear. Civilization has ruined the world. If we could only have lived a thousand years ago, when life was simple and natural, when men hunted and killed their meat, instead of drinking synthetic stuff, when men still had the joys of conflict, instead of living under glass, like hot-house flowers." "If we could only go somewhere—" "There isn't anywhere to go. I write about the West, Africa, South Sea Islands. But they were all filled up two hundred years ago. Pleasure resorts, sanatoriums, cities, factories." "If only we lived on Venus! I was listening to a lecture on the television, last night. The speaker said that the Planet Venus is younger than the Earth, that it has not cooled so much. It has a thick, cloudy atmosphere, and low, rainy forests. There's simple, elemental life there—like Earth had before civilization ruined it." "Yes, Kinsley, with his new infra-red ray telescope, that penetrates the cloud layers of the planet, proved that Venus rotates in about the same period as Earth; and it must be much like Earth was a million years ago." "Eric, I wonder if we could go there! It would be so thrilling to begin life like the characters in your stories, to get away from this hateful civilization, and live natural lives. Maybe a rocket—" The young author's eyes were glowing. He skipped across the floor, seized Nada, kissed her ecstatically. "Splendid! Think of hunting in the virgin forest, and bringing the game home to you! But I'm afraid there is no way.—Wait! The Cosmic Express." "The Cosmic Express?" "A new invention. Just perfected a few weeks ago, I understand. By Ludwig Von der Valls, the German physicist." "I've quit bothering about science. It has ruined nature, filled the world with silly, artificial people, doing silly, artificial things." "But this is quite remarkable, dear. A new way to travel—by ether!" "By ether!" "Yes. You know of course that energy and matter are interchangeable terms; both are simply etheric vibration, of different sorts." "Of course. That's elementary." She smiled proudly. "I can give you examples, even of the change. The disintegration of the radium atom, making helium and lead and energy . And Millikan's old proof that his Cosmic Ray is generated when particles of electricity are united to form an atom." "Fine! I thought you said you weren't a scientist." He glowed with pride. "But the method, in the new Cosmic Express, is simply to convert the matter to be carried into power, send it out as a radiant beam and focus the beam to convert it back into atoms at the destination." "But the amount of energy must be terrific—" "It is. You know short waves carry more energy than long ones. The Express Ray is an electromagnetic vibration of frequency far higher than that of even the Cosmic Ray, and correspondingly more powerful and more penetrating." The girl frowned, running slim fingers through golden-brown hair. "But I don't see how they get any recognizable object, not even how they get the radiation turned back into matter." "The beam is focused, just like the light that passes through a camera lens. The photographic lens, using light rays, picks up a picture and reproduces it again on the plate—just the same as the Express Ray picks up an object and sets it down on the other side of the world. "An analogy from television might help. You know that by means of the scanning disc, the picture is transformed into mere rapid fluctuations in the brightness of a beam of light. In a parallel manner, the focal plane of the Express Ray moves slowly through the object, progressively, dissolving layers of the thickness of a single atom, which are accurately reproduced at the other focus of the instrument—which might be in Venus! "But the analogy of the lens is the better of the two. For no receiving instrument is required, as in television. The object is built up of an infinite series of plane layers, at the focus of the ray, no matter where that may be. Such a thing would be impossible with radio apparatus because even with the best beam transmission, all but a tiny fraction of the power is lost, and power is required to rebuild the atoms. Do you understand, dear?" "Not altogether. But I should worry! Here comes breakfast. Let me butter your toast." A bell had rung at the shaft. She ran to it, and returned with a great silver tray, laden with dainty dishes, which she set on a little side table. They sat down opposite each other, and ate, getting as much satisfaction from contemplation of each other's faces as from the excellent food. When they had finished, she carried the tray to the shaft, slid it in a slot, and touched a button—thus disposing of the culinary cares of the morning. She ran back to Eric, who was once more staring distastefully at his typewriter. "Oh, darling! I'm thrilled to death about the Cosmic Express! If we could go to Venus, to a new life on a new world, and get away from all this hateful conventional society—" "We can go to their office—it's only five minutes. The chap that operates the machine for the company is a pal of mine. He's not supposed to take passengers except between the offices they have scattered about the world. But I know his weak point—" Eric laughed, fumbled with a hidden spring under his desk. A small polished object, gleaming silvery, slid down into his hand. "Old friendship, plus this, would make him—like spinach." Five minutes later Mr. Eric Stokes-Harding and his pretty wife were in street clothes, light silk tunics of loose, flowing lines—little clothing being required in the artificially warmed city. They entered an elevator and dropped thirty stories to the ground floor of the great building. There they entered a cylindrical car, with rows of seats down the sides. Not greatly different from an ancient subway car, except that it was air-tight, and was hurled by magnetic attraction and repulsion through a tube exhausted of air, at a speed that would have made an old subway rider gasp with amazement. In five more minutes their car had whipped up to the base of another building, in the business section, where there was no room for parks between the mighty structures that held the unbroken glass roofs two hundred stories above the concrete pavement. An elevator brought them up a hundred and fifty stories. Eric led Nada down a long, carpeted corridor to a wide glass door, which bore the words: COSMIC EXPRESS stenciled in gold capitals across it. As they approached, a lean man, carrying a black bag, darted out of an elevator shaft opposite the door, ran across the corridor, and entered. They pushed in after him. They were in a little room, cut in two by a high brass grill. In front of it was a long bench against the wall, that reminded one of the waiting room in an old railroad depot. In the grill was a little window, with a lazy, brown-eyed youth leaning on the shelf behind it. Beyond him was a great, glittering piece of mechanism, half hidden by the brass. A little door gave access to the machine from the space before the grill. The thin man in black, whom Eric now recognized as a prominent French heart-specialist, was dancing before the window, waving his bag frantically, raving at the sleepy boy. "Queek! I have tell you zee truth! I have zee most urgent necessity to go queekly. A patient I have in Paree, zat ees in zee most creetical condition!" "Hold your horses just a minute, Mister. We got a client in the machine now. Russian diplomat from Moscow to Rio de Janeiro.... Two hundred seventy dollars and eighty cents, please.... Your turn next. Remember this is just an experimental service. Regular installations all over the world in a year.... Ready now. Come on in." The youth took the money, pressed a button. The door sprang open in the grill, and the frantic physician leaped through it. "Lie down on the crystal, face up," the young man ordered. "Hands at your sides, don't breathe. Ready!" He manipulated his dials and switches, and pressed another button. "Why, hello, Eric, old man!" he cried. "That's the lady you were telling me about? Congratulations!" A bell jangled before him on the panel. "Just a minute. I've got a call." He punched the board again. Little bulbs lit and glowed for a second. The youth turned toward the half-hidden machine, spoke courteously. "All right, madam. Walk out. Hope you found the transit pleasant." "But my Violet! My precious Violet!" a shrill female voice came from the machine. "Sir, what have you done with my darling Violet?" "I'm sure I don't know, madam. You lost it off your hat?" "None of your impertinence, sir! I want my dog." "Ah, a dog. Must have jumped off the crystal. You can have him sent on for three hundred and—" "Young man, if any harm comes to my Violet—I'll—I'll—I'll appeal to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals!" "Very good, madam. We appreciate your patronage." The door flew open again. A very fat woman, puffing angrily, face highly colored, clothing shimmering with artificial gems, waddled pompously out of the door through which the frantic French doctor had so recently vanished. She rolled heavily across the room, and out into the corridor. Shrill words floated back: "I'm going to see my lawyer! My precious Violet—" The sallow youth winked. "And now what can I do for you, Eric?" "We want to go to Venus, if that ray of yours can put us there." "To Venus? Impossible. My orders are to use the Express merely between the sixteen designated stations, at New York, San Francisco, Tokyo, London, Paris—" "See here, Charley," with a cautious glance toward the door, Eric held up the silver flask. "For old time's sake, and for this—" The boy seemed dazed at sight of the bright flask. Then, with a single swift motion, he snatched it out of Eric's hand, and bent to conceal it below his instrument panel. "Sure, old boy. I'd send you to heaven for that, if you'd give me the micrometer readings to set the ray with. But I tell you, this is dangerous. I've got a sort of television attachment, for focusing the ray. I can turn that on Venus—I've been amusing myself, watching the life there, already. Terrible place. Savage. I can pick a place on high land to set you down. But I can't be responsible for what happens afterward." "Simple, primitive life is what we're looking for. And now what do I owe you—" "Oh, that's all right. Between friends. Provided that stuff's genuine! Walk in and lie down on the crystal block. Hands at your sides. Don't move." The little door had swung open again, and Eric led Nada through. They stepped into a little cell, completely surrounded with mirrors and vast prisms and lenses and electron tubes. In the center was a slab of transparent crystal, eight feet square and two inches thick, with an intricate mass of machinery below it. Eric helped Nada to a place on the crystal, lay down at her side. "I think the Express Ray is focused just at the surface of the crystal, from below," he said. "It dissolves our substance, to be transmitted by the beam. It would look as if we were melting into the crystal." "Ready," called the youth. "Think I've got it for you. Sort of a high island in the jungle. Nothing bad in sight now. But, I say—how're you coming back? I haven't got time to watch you." "Go ahead. We aren't coming back." "Gee! What is it? Elopement? I thought you were married already. Or is it business difficulties? The Bears did make an awful raid last night. But you better let me set you down in Hong Kong." A bell jangled. "So long," the youth called. Nada and Eric felt themselves enveloped in fire. Sheets of white flame seemed to lap up about them from the crystal block. Suddenly there was a sharp tingling sensation where they touched the polished surface. Then blackness, blankness. The next thing they knew, the fires were gone from about them. They were lying in something extremely soft and fluid; and warm rain was beating in their faces. Eric sat up, found himself in a mud-puddle. Beside him was Nada, opening her eyes and struggling up, her bright garments stained with black mud. All about rose a thick jungle, dark and gloomy—and very wet. Palm-like, the gigantic trees were, or fern-like, flinging clouds of feathery green foliage high against a somber sky of unbroken gloom. They stood up, triumphant. "At last!" Nada cried. "We're free! Free of that hateful old civilization! We're back to Nature!" "Yes, we're on our feet now, not parasites on the machines." "It's wonderful to have a fine, strong man like you to trust in, Eric. You're just like one of the heroes in your books!" "You're the perfect companion, Nada.... But now we must be practical. We must build a fire, find weapons, set up a shelter of some kind. I guess it will be night, pretty soon. And Charley said something about savage animals he had seen in the television. "We'll find a nice dry cave, and have a fire in front of the door. And skins of animals to sleep on. And pottery vessels to cook in. And you will find seeds and grown grain." "But first we must find a flint-bed. We need flint for tools, and to strike sparks to make a fire with. We will probably come across a chunk of virgin copper, too—it's found native." Presently they set off through the jungle. The mud seemed to be very abundant, and of a most sticky consistence. They sank into it ankle deep at every step, and vast masses of it clung to their feet. A mile they struggled on, without finding where a provident nature had left them even a single fragment of quartz, to say nothing of a mass of pure copper. "A darned shame," Eric grumbled, "to come forty million miles, and meet such a reception as this!" Nada stopped. "Eric," she said, "I'm tired. And I don't believe there's any rock here, anyway. You'll have to use wooden tools, sharpened in the fire." "Probably you're right. This soil seemed to be of alluvial origin. Shouldn't be surprised if the native rock is some hundreds of feet underground. Your idea is better." "You can make a fire by rubbing sticks together, can't you?" "It can be done, I'm sure. I've never tried it, myself. We need some dry sticks, first." They resumed the weary march, with a good fraction of the new planet adhering to their feet. Rain was still falling from the dark heavens in a steady, warm downpour. Dry wood seemed scarce as the proverbial hen's teeth. "You didn't bring any matches, dear?" "Matches! Of course not! We're going back to Nature." "I hope we get a fire pretty soon." "If dry wood were gold dust, we couldn't buy a hot dog." "Eric, that reminds me that I'm hungry." He confessed to a few pangs of his own. They turned their attention to looking for banana trees, and coconut palms, but they did not seem to abound in the Venerian jungle. Even small animals that might have been slain with a broken branch had contrary ideas about the matter. At last, from sheer weariness, they stopped, and gathered branches to make a sloping shelter by a vast fallen tree-trunk. "This will keep out the rain—maybe—" Eric said hopefully. "And tomorrow, when it has quit raining—I'm sure we'll do better." They crept in, as gloomy night fell without. They lay in each other's arms, the body warmth oddly comforting. Nada cried a little. "Buck up," Eric advised her. "We're back to nature—where we've always wanted to be." With the darkness, the temperature fell somewhat, and a high wind rose, whipping cold rain into the little shelter, and threatening to demolish it. Swarms of mosquito-like insects, seemingly not inconvenienced in the least by the inclement elements, swarmed about them in clouds. Then came a sound from the dismal stormy night, a hoarse, bellowing roar, raucous, terrifying. Nada clung against Eric. "What is it, dear?" she chattered. "Must be a reptile. Dinosaur, or something of the sort. This world seems to be in about the same state as the Earth when they flourished there.... But maybe it won't find us." The roar was repeated, nearer. The earth trembled beneath a mighty tread. "Eric," a thin voice trembled. "Don't you think—it might have been better— You know the old life was not so bad, after all." "I was just thinking of our rooms, nice and warm and bright, with hot foods coming up the shaft whenever we pushed the button, and the gay crowds in the park, and my old typewriter." "Eric?" she called softly. "Yes, dear." "Don't you wish—we had known better?" "I do." If he winced at the "we" the girl did not notice. The roaring outside was closer. And suddenly it was answered by another raucous bellow, at considerable distance, that echoed strangely through the forest. The fearful sounds were repeated, alternately. And always the more distant seemed nearer, until the two sounds were together. And then an infernal din broke out in the darkness. Bellows. Screams. Deafening shrieks. Mighty splashes, as if struggling Titans had upset oceans. Thunderous crashes, as if they were demolishing forests. Eric and Nada clung to each other, in doubt whether to stay or to fly through the storm. Gradually the sound of the conflict came nearer, until the earth shook beneath them, and they were afraid to move. Suddenly the great fallen tree against which they had erected the flimsy shelter was rolled back, evidently by a chance blow from the invisible monsters. The pitiful roof collapsed on the bedraggled humans. Nada burst into tears. "Oh, if only—if only—" Suddenly flame lapped up about them, the same white fire they had seen as they lay on the crystal block. Dizziness, insensibility overcame them. A few moments later, they were lying on the transparent table in the Cosmic Express office, with all those great mirrors and prisms and lenses about them. A bustling, red-faced official appeared through the door in the grill, fairly bubbling apologies. "So sorry—an accident—inconceivable. I can't see how he got it! We got you back as soon as we could find a focus. I sincerely hope you haven't been injured." "Why—what—what—" "Why I happened in, found our operator drunk. I've no idea where he got the stuff. He muttered something about Venus. I consulted the auto-register, and found two more passengers registered here than had been recorded at our other stations. I looked up the duplicate beam coordinates, and found that it had been set on Venus. I got men on the television at once, and we happened to find you. "I can't imagine how it happened. I've had the fellow locked up, and the 'dry-laws' are on the job. I hope you won't hold us for excessive damages." "No, I ask nothing except that you don't press charges against the boy. I don't want him to suffer for it in any way. My wife and I will be perfectly satisfied to get back to our apartment." "I don't wonder. You look like you've been through—I don't know what. But I'll have you there in five minutes. My private car—" Mr. Eric Stokes-Harding, noted author of primitive life and love, ate a hearty meal with his pretty spouse, after they had washed off the grime of another planet. He spent the next twelve hours in bed. At the end of the month he delivered his promised story to his publishers, a thrilling tale of a man marooned on Venus, with a beautiful girl. The hero made stone tools, erected a dwelling for himself and his mate, hunted food for her, defended her from the mammoth saurian monsters of the Venerian jungles. The book was a huge success. THE END

They can only do so using the most advanced modern technology

Once they experience the return to nature, they don't know how to survive

Their current residence is similar to what it would be like on Venus

Their vision of nature is unrealistic and based solely on images from fictional novels

26066_T3J3I3D3_9

All of the following factors reveal that the Cosmic Express is in the initial stages of development EXCEPT for

Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Amazing Stories December 1961 and was first published in Amazing Stories November 1930. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note. A Classic Reprint from AMAZING STORIES, November, 1930 Copyright 1931, by Experimenter Publications Inc. The Cosmic Express By JACK WILLIAMSON Introduction by Sam Moskowitz The year 1928 was a great year of discovery for AMAZING STORIES . They were uncovering new talent at such a great rate, (Harl Vincent, David H. Keller, E. E. Smith, Philip Francis Nowlan, Fletcher Pratt and Miles J. Breuer), that Jack Williamson barely managed to become one of a distinguished group of discoveries by stealing the cover of the December issue for his first story The Metal Man. A disciple of A. Merritt, he attempted to imitate in style, mood and subject the magic of that late lamented master of fantasy. The imitation found great favor from the readership and almost instantly Jack Williamson became an important name on the contents page of AMAZING STORIES . He followed his initial success with two short novels , The Green Girl in AMAZING STORIES and The Alien Intelligence in SCIENCE WONDER STORIES , another Gernsback publication. Both of these stories were close copies of A. Merritt, whose style and method Jack Williamson parlayed into popularity for eight years. Yet the strange thing about it was that Jack Williamson was one of the most versatile science fiction authors ever to sit down at the typewriter. When the vogue for science-fantasy altered to super science, he created the memorable super lock-picker Giles Habilula as the major attraction in a rousing trio of space operas , The Legion of Space, The Cometeers and One Against the Legion. When grim realism was the order of the day, he produced Crucible of Power and when they wanted extrapolated theory in present tense, he assumed the disguise of Will Stewart and popularized the concept of contra terrene matter in science fiction with Seetee Ship and Seetee Shock. Finally, when only psychological studies of the future would do, he produced "With Folded Hands ..." "... And Searching Mind." The Cosmic Express is of special interest because it was written during Williamson's A. Merritt "kick," when he was writing little else but, and it gave the earliest indication of a more general capability. The lightness of the handling is especially modern, barely avoiding the farcical by the validity of the notion that wireless transmission of matter is the next big transportation frontier to be conquered. It is especially important because it stylistically forecast a later trend to accept the background for granted, regardless of the quantity of wonders, and proceed with the story. With only a few thousand scanning-disk television sets in existence at the time of the writing, the surmise that this media would be a natural for westerns was particularly astute. Jack Williamson was born in 1908 in the Arizona territory when covered wagons were the primary form of transportation and apaches still raided the settlers. His father was a cattle man, but for young Jack, the ranch was anything but glamorous. "My days were filled," he remembers, "with monotonous rounds of what seemed an endless, heart-breaking war with drought and frost and dust-storms, poison-weeds and hail, for the sake of survival on the Llano Estacado." The discovery of AMAZING STORIES was the escape he sought and his goal was to be a science fiction writer. He labored to this end and the first he knew that a story of his had been accepted was when he bought the December, 1929 issue of AMAZING STORIES . Since then, he has written millions of words of science fiction and has gone on record as follows: "I feel that science-fiction is the folklore of the new world of science, and the expression of man's reaction to a technological environment. By which I mean that it is the most interesting and stimulating form of literature today." Mr. Eric Stokes-Harding tumbled out of the rumpled bed-clothing, a striking slender figure in purple-striped pajamas. He smiled fondly across to the other of the twin beds, where Nada, his pretty bride, lay quiet beneath light silk covers. With a groan, he stood up and began a series of fantastic bending exercises. But after a few half-hearted movements, he gave it up, and walked through an open door into a small bright room, its walls covered with bookcases and also with scientific appliances that would have been strange to the man of four or five centuries before, when the Age of Aviation was beginning. Suddenly there was a sharp tingling sensation where they touched the polished surface. Yawning, Mr. Eric Stokes-Harding stood before the great open window, staring out. Below him was a wide, park-like space, green with emerald lawns, and bright with flowering plants. Two hundred yards across it rose an immense pyramidal building—an artistic structure, gleaming with white marble and bright metal, striped with the verdure of terraced roof-gardens, its slender peak rising to help support the gray, steel-ribbed glass roof above. Beyond, the park stretched away in illimitable vistas, broken with the graceful columned buildings that held up the great glass roof. Above the glass, over this New York of 2432 A. D., a freezing blizzard was sweeping. But small concern was that to the lightly clad man at the window, who was inhaling deeply the fragrant air from the plants below—air kept, winter and summer, exactly at 20° C. With another yawn, Mr. Eric Stokes-Harding turned back to the room, which was bright with the rich golden light that poured in from the suspended globes of the cold ato-light that illuminated the snow-covered city. With a distasteful grimace, he seated himself before a broad, paper-littered desk, sat a few minutes leaning back, with his hands clasped behind his head. At last he straightened reluctantly, slid a small typewriter out of its drawer, and began pecking at it impatiently. For Mr. Eric Stokes-Harding was an author. There was a whole shelf of his books on the wall, in bright jackets, red and blue and green, that brought a thrill of pleasure to the young novelist's heart when he looked up from his clattering machine. He wrote "thrilling action romances," as his enthusiastic publishers and television directors said, "of ages past, when men were men. Red-blooded heroes responding vigorously to the stirring passions of primordial life!" He was impartial as to the source of his thrills—provided they were distant enough from modern civilization. His hero was likely to be an ape-man roaring through the jungle, with a bloody rock in one hand and a beautiful girl in the other. Or a cowboy, "hard-riding, hard-shooting," the vanishing hero of the ancient ranches. Or a man marooned with a lovely woman on a desert South Sea island. His heroes were invariably strong, fearless, resourceful fellows, who could handle a club on equal terms with a cave-man, or call science to aid them in defending a beautiful mate from the terrors of a desolate wilderness. And a hundred million read Eric's novels, and watched the dramatization of them on the television screens. They thrilled at the simple, romantic lives his heroes led, paid him handsome royalties, and subconsciously shared his opinion that civilization had taken all the best from the life of man. Eric had settled down to the artistic satisfaction of describing the sensuous delight of his hero in the roasted marrow-bones of a dead mammoth, when the pretty woman in the other room stirred, and presently came tripping into the study, gay and vivacious, and—as her husband of a few months most justly thought—altogether beautiful in a bright silk dressing gown. Recklessly, he slammed the machine back into its place, and resolved to forget that his next "red-blooded action thriller" was due in the publisher's office at the end of the month. He sprang up to kiss his wife, held her embraced for a long happy moment. And then they went hand in hand, to the side of the room and punched a series of buttons on a panel—a simple way of ordering breakfast sent up the automatic shaft from the kitchens below. Nada Stokes-Harding was also an author. She wrote poems—"back to nature stuff"—simple lyrics of the sea, of sunsets, of bird songs, of bright flowers and warm winds, of thrilling communion with Nature, and growing things. Men read her poems and called her a genius. Even though the whole world had grown up into a city, the birds were extinct, there were no wild flowers, and no one had time to bother about sunsets. "Eric, darling," she said, "isn't it terrible to be cooped up here in this little flat, away from the things we both love?" "Yes, dear. Civilization has ruined the world. If we could only have lived a thousand years ago, when life was simple and natural, when men hunted and killed their meat, instead of drinking synthetic stuff, when men still had the joys of conflict, instead of living under glass, like hot-house flowers." "If we could only go somewhere—" "There isn't anywhere to go. I write about the West, Africa, South Sea Islands. But they were all filled up two hundred years ago. Pleasure resorts, sanatoriums, cities, factories." "If only we lived on Venus! I was listening to a lecture on the television, last night. The speaker said that the Planet Venus is younger than the Earth, that it has not cooled so much. It has a thick, cloudy atmosphere, and low, rainy forests. There's simple, elemental life there—like Earth had before civilization ruined it." "Yes, Kinsley, with his new infra-red ray telescope, that penetrates the cloud layers of the planet, proved that Venus rotates in about the same period as Earth; and it must be much like Earth was a million years ago." "Eric, I wonder if we could go there! It would be so thrilling to begin life like the characters in your stories, to get away from this hateful civilization, and live natural lives. Maybe a rocket—" The young author's eyes were glowing. He skipped across the floor, seized Nada, kissed her ecstatically. "Splendid! Think of hunting in the virgin forest, and bringing the game home to you! But I'm afraid there is no way.—Wait! The Cosmic Express." "The Cosmic Express?" "A new invention. Just perfected a few weeks ago, I understand. By Ludwig Von der Valls, the German physicist." "I've quit bothering about science. It has ruined nature, filled the world with silly, artificial people, doing silly, artificial things." "But this is quite remarkable, dear. A new way to travel—by ether!" "By ether!" "Yes. You know of course that energy and matter are interchangeable terms; both are simply etheric vibration, of different sorts." "Of course. That's elementary." She smiled proudly. "I can give you examples, even of the change. The disintegration of the radium atom, making helium and lead and energy . And Millikan's old proof that his Cosmic Ray is generated when particles of electricity are united to form an atom." "Fine! I thought you said you weren't a scientist." He glowed with pride. "But the method, in the new Cosmic Express, is simply to convert the matter to be carried into power, send it out as a radiant beam and focus the beam to convert it back into atoms at the destination." "But the amount of energy must be terrific—" "It is. You know short waves carry more energy than long ones. The Express Ray is an electromagnetic vibration of frequency far higher than that of even the Cosmic Ray, and correspondingly more powerful and more penetrating." The girl frowned, running slim fingers through golden-brown hair. "But I don't see how they get any recognizable object, not even how they get the radiation turned back into matter." "The beam is focused, just like the light that passes through a camera lens. The photographic lens, using light rays, picks up a picture and reproduces it again on the plate—just the same as the Express Ray picks up an object and sets it down on the other side of the world. "An analogy from television might help. You know that by means of the scanning disc, the picture is transformed into mere rapid fluctuations in the brightness of a beam of light. In a parallel manner, the focal plane of the Express Ray moves slowly through the object, progressively, dissolving layers of the thickness of a single atom, which are accurately reproduced at the other focus of the instrument—which might be in Venus! "But the analogy of the lens is the better of the two. For no receiving instrument is required, as in television. The object is built up of an infinite series of plane layers, at the focus of the ray, no matter where that may be. Such a thing would be impossible with radio apparatus because even with the best beam transmission, all but a tiny fraction of the power is lost, and power is required to rebuild the atoms. Do you understand, dear?" "Not altogether. But I should worry! Here comes breakfast. Let me butter your toast." A bell had rung at the shaft. She ran to it, and returned with a great silver tray, laden with dainty dishes, which she set on a little side table. They sat down opposite each other, and ate, getting as much satisfaction from contemplation of each other's faces as from the excellent food. When they had finished, she carried the tray to the shaft, slid it in a slot, and touched a button—thus disposing of the culinary cares of the morning. She ran back to Eric, who was once more staring distastefully at his typewriter. "Oh, darling! I'm thrilled to death about the Cosmic Express! If we could go to Venus, to a new life on a new world, and get away from all this hateful conventional society—" "We can go to their office—it's only five minutes. The chap that operates the machine for the company is a pal of mine. He's not supposed to take passengers except between the offices they have scattered about the world. But I know his weak point—" Eric laughed, fumbled with a hidden spring under his desk. A small polished object, gleaming silvery, slid down into his hand. "Old friendship, plus this, would make him—like spinach." Five minutes later Mr. Eric Stokes-Harding and his pretty wife were in street clothes, light silk tunics of loose, flowing lines—little clothing being required in the artificially warmed city. They entered an elevator and dropped thirty stories to the ground floor of the great building. There they entered a cylindrical car, with rows of seats down the sides. Not greatly different from an ancient subway car, except that it was air-tight, and was hurled by magnetic attraction and repulsion through a tube exhausted of air, at a speed that would have made an old subway rider gasp with amazement. In five more minutes their car had whipped up to the base of another building, in the business section, where there was no room for parks between the mighty structures that held the unbroken glass roofs two hundred stories above the concrete pavement. An elevator brought them up a hundred and fifty stories. Eric led Nada down a long, carpeted corridor to a wide glass door, which bore the words: COSMIC EXPRESS stenciled in gold capitals across it. As they approached, a lean man, carrying a black bag, darted out of an elevator shaft opposite the door, ran across the corridor, and entered. They pushed in after him. They were in a little room, cut in two by a high brass grill. In front of it was a long bench against the wall, that reminded one of the waiting room in an old railroad depot. In the grill was a little window, with a lazy, brown-eyed youth leaning on the shelf behind it. Beyond him was a great, glittering piece of mechanism, half hidden by the brass. A little door gave access to the machine from the space before the grill. The thin man in black, whom Eric now recognized as a prominent French heart-specialist, was dancing before the window, waving his bag frantically, raving at the sleepy boy. "Queek! I have tell you zee truth! I have zee most urgent necessity to go queekly. A patient I have in Paree, zat ees in zee most creetical condition!" "Hold your horses just a minute, Mister. We got a client in the machine now. Russian diplomat from Moscow to Rio de Janeiro.... Two hundred seventy dollars and eighty cents, please.... Your turn next. Remember this is just an experimental service. Regular installations all over the world in a year.... Ready now. Come on in." The youth took the money, pressed a button. The door sprang open in the grill, and the frantic physician leaped through it. "Lie down on the crystal, face up," the young man ordered. "Hands at your sides, don't breathe. Ready!" He manipulated his dials and switches, and pressed another button. "Why, hello, Eric, old man!" he cried. "That's the lady you were telling me about? Congratulations!" A bell jangled before him on the panel. "Just a minute. I've got a call." He punched the board again. Little bulbs lit and glowed for a second. The youth turned toward the half-hidden machine, spoke courteously. "All right, madam. Walk out. Hope you found the transit pleasant." "But my Violet! My precious Violet!" a shrill female voice came from the machine. "Sir, what have you done with my darling Violet?" "I'm sure I don't know, madam. You lost it off your hat?" "None of your impertinence, sir! I want my dog." "Ah, a dog. Must have jumped off the crystal. You can have him sent on for three hundred and—" "Young man, if any harm comes to my Violet—I'll—I'll—I'll appeal to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals!" "Very good, madam. We appreciate your patronage." The door flew open again. A very fat woman, puffing angrily, face highly colored, clothing shimmering with artificial gems, waddled pompously out of the door through which the frantic French doctor had so recently vanished. She rolled heavily across the room, and out into the corridor. Shrill words floated back: "I'm going to see my lawyer! My precious Violet—" The sallow youth winked. "And now what can I do for you, Eric?" "We want to go to Venus, if that ray of yours can put us there." "To Venus? Impossible. My orders are to use the Express merely between the sixteen designated stations, at New York, San Francisco, Tokyo, London, Paris—" "See here, Charley," with a cautious glance toward the door, Eric held up the silver flask. "For old time's sake, and for this—" The boy seemed dazed at sight of the bright flask. Then, with a single swift motion, he snatched it out of Eric's hand, and bent to conceal it below his instrument panel. "Sure, old boy. I'd send you to heaven for that, if you'd give me the micrometer readings to set the ray with. But I tell you, this is dangerous. I've got a sort of television attachment, for focusing the ray. I can turn that on Venus—I've been amusing myself, watching the life there, already. Terrible place. Savage. I can pick a place on high land to set you down. But I can't be responsible for what happens afterward." "Simple, primitive life is what we're looking for. And now what do I owe you—" "Oh, that's all right. Between friends. Provided that stuff's genuine! Walk in and lie down on the crystal block. Hands at your sides. Don't move." The little door had swung open again, and Eric led Nada through. They stepped into a little cell, completely surrounded with mirrors and vast prisms and lenses and electron tubes. In the center was a slab of transparent crystal, eight feet square and two inches thick, with an intricate mass of machinery below it. Eric helped Nada to a place on the crystal, lay down at her side. "I think the Express Ray is focused just at the surface of the crystal, from below," he said. "It dissolves our substance, to be transmitted by the beam. It would look as if we were melting into the crystal." "Ready," called the youth. "Think I've got it for you. Sort of a high island in the jungle. Nothing bad in sight now. But, I say—how're you coming back? I haven't got time to watch you." "Go ahead. We aren't coming back." "Gee! What is it? Elopement? I thought you were married already. Or is it business difficulties? The Bears did make an awful raid last night. But you better let me set you down in Hong Kong." A bell jangled. "So long," the youth called. Nada and Eric felt themselves enveloped in fire. Sheets of white flame seemed to lap up about them from the crystal block. Suddenly there was a sharp tingling sensation where they touched the polished surface. Then blackness, blankness. The next thing they knew, the fires were gone from about them. They were lying in something extremely soft and fluid; and warm rain was beating in their faces. Eric sat up, found himself in a mud-puddle. Beside him was Nada, opening her eyes and struggling up, her bright garments stained with black mud. All about rose a thick jungle, dark and gloomy—and very wet. Palm-like, the gigantic trees were, or fern-like, flinging clouds of feathery green foliage high against a somber sky of unbroken gloom. They stood up, triumphant. "At last!" Nada cried. "We're free! Free of that hateful old civilization! We're back to Nature!" "Yes, we're on our feet now, not parasites on the machines." "It's wonderful to have a fine, strong man like you to trust in, Eric. You're just like one of the heroes in your books!" "You're the perfect companion, Nada.... But now we must be practical. We must build a fire, find weapons, set up a shelter of some kind. I guess it will be night, pretty soon. And Charley said something about savage animals he had seen in the television. "We'll find a nice dry cave, and have a fire in front of the door. And skins of animals to sleep on. And pottery vessels to cook in. And you will find seeds and grown grain." "But first we must find a flint-bed. We need flint for tools, and to strike sparks to make a fire with. We will probably come across a chunk of virgin copper, too—it's found native." Presently they set off through the jungle. The mud seemed to be very abundant, and of a most sticky consistence. They sank into it ankle deep at every step, and vast masses of it clung to their feet. A mile they struggled on, without finding where a provident nature had left them even a single fragment of quartz, to say nothing of a mass of pure copper. "A darned shame," Eric grumbled, "to come forty million miles, and meet such a reception as this!" Nada stopped. "Eric," she said, "I'm tired. And I don't believe there's any rock here, anyway. You'll have to use wooden tools, sharpened in the fire." "Probably you're right. This soil seemed to be of alluvial origin. Shouldn't be surprised if the native rock is some hundreds of feet underground. Your idea is better." "You can make a fire by rubbing sticks together, can't you?" "It can be done, I'm sure. I've never tried it, myself. We need some dry sticks, first." They resumed the weary march, with a good fraction of the new planet adhering to their feet. Rain was still falling from the dark heavens in a steady, warm downpour. Dry wood seemed scarce as the proverbial hen's teeth. "You didn't bring any matches, dear?" "Matches! Of course not! We're going back to Nature." "I hope we get a fire pretty soon." "If dry wood were gold dust, we couldn't buy a hot dog." "Eric, that reminds me that I'm hungry." He confessed to a few pangs of his own. They turned their attention to looking for banana trees, and coconut palms, but they did not seem to abound in the Venerian jungle. Even small animals that might have been slain with a broken branch had contrary ideas about the matter. At last, from sheer weariness, they stopped, and gathered branches to make a sloping shelter by a vast fallen tree-trunk. "This will keep out the rain—maybe—" Eric said hopefully. "And tomorrow, when it has quit raining—I'm sure we'll do better." They crept in, as gloomy night fell without. They lay in each other's arms, the body warmth oddly comforting. Nada cried a little. "Buck up," Eric advised her. "We're back to nature—where we've always wanted to be." With the darkness, the temperature fell somewhat, and a high wind rose, whipping cold rain into the little shelter, and threatening to demolish it. Swarms of mosquito-like insects, seemingly not inconvenienced in the least by the inclement elements, swarmed about them in clouds. Then came a sound from the dismal stormy night, a hoarse, bellowing roar, raucous, terrifying. Nada clung against Eric. "What is it, dear?" she chattered. "Must be a reptile. Dinosaur, or something of the sort. This world seems to be in about the same state as the Earth when they flourished there.... But maybe it won't find us." The roar was repeated, nearer. The earth trembled beneath a mighty tread. "Eric," a thin voice trembled. "Don't you think—it might have been better— You know the old life was not so bad, after all." "I was just thinking of our rooms, nice and warm and bright, with hot foods coming up the shaft whenever we pushed the button, and the gay crowds in the park, and my old typewriter." "Eric?" she called softly. "Yes, dear." "Don't you wish—we had known better?" "I do." If he winced at the "we" the girl did not notice. The roaring outside was closer. And suddenly it was answered by another raucous bellow, at considerable distance, that echoed strangely through the forest. The fearful sounds were repeated, alternately. And always the more distant seemed nearer, until the two sounds were together. And then an infernal din broke out in the darkness. Bellows. Screams. Deafening shrieks. Mighty splashes, as if struggling Titans had upset oceans. Thunderous crashes, as if they were demolishing forests. Eric and Nada clung to each other, in doubt whether to stay or to fly through the storm. Gradually the sound of the conflict came nearer, until the earth shook beneath them, and they were afraid to move. Suddenly the great fallen tree against which they had erected the flimsy shelter was rolled back, evidently by a chance blow from the invisible monsters. The pitiful roof collapsed on the bedraggled humans. Nada burst into tears. "Oh, if only—if only—" Suddenly flame lapped up about them, the same white fire they had seen as they lay on the crystal block. Dizziness, insensibility overcame them. A few moments later, they were lying on the transparent table in the Cosmic Express office, with all those great mirrors and prisms and lenses about them. A bustling, red-faced official appeared through the door in the grill, fairly bubbling apologies. "So sorry—an accident—inconceivable. I can't see how he got it! We got you back as soon as we could find a focus. I sincerely hope you haven't been injured." "Why—what—what—" "Why I happened in, found our operator drunk. I've no idea where he got the stuff. He muttered something about Venus. I consulted the auto-register, and found two more passengers registered here than had been recorded at our other stations. I looked up the duplicate beam coordinates, and found that it had been set on Venus. I got men on the television at once, and we happened to find you. "I can't imagine how it happened. I've had the fellow locked up, and the 'dry-laws' are on the job. I hope you won't hold us for excessive damages." "No, I ask nothing except that you don't press charges against the boy. I don't want him to suffer for it in any way. My wife and I will be perfectly satisfied to get back to our apartment." "I don't wonder. You look like you've been through—I don't know what. But I'll have you there in five minutes. My private car—" Mr. Eric Stokes-Harding, noted author of primitive life and love, ate a hearty meal with his pretty spouse, after they had washed off the grime of another planet. He spent the next twelve hours in bed. At the end of the month he delivered his promised story to his publishers, a thrilling tale of a man marooned on Venus, with a beautiful girl. The hero made stone tools, erected a dwelling for himself and his mate, hunted food for her, defended her from the mammoth saurian monsters of the Venerian jungles. The book was a huge success. THE END

the qualifications of the operating staff

the limited number of receiving stations

the disappearance of Violet

the lack of micrometer readings

26066_T3J3I3D3_10

What prevents Williamson's writing style from venturing into the absurd?

Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Amazing Stories December 1961 and was first published in Amazing Stories November 1930. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note. A Classic Reprint from AMAZING STORIES, November, 1930 Copyright 1931, by Experimenter Publications Inc. The Cosmic Express By JACK WILLIAMSON Introduction by Sam Moskowitz The year 1928 was a great year of discovery for AMAZING STORIES . They were uncovering new talent at such a great rate, (Harl Vincent, David H. Keller, E. E. Smith, Philip Francis Nowlan, Fletcher Pratt and Miles J. Breuer), that Jack Williamson barely managed to become one of a distinguished group of discoveries by stealing the cover of the December issue for his first story The Metal Man. A disciple of A. Merritt, he attempted to imitate in style, mood and subject the magic of that late lamented master of fantasy. The imitation found great favor from the readership and almost instantly Jack Williamson became an important name on the contents page of AMAZING STORIES . He followed his initial success with two short novels , The Green Girl in AMAZING STORIES and The Alien Intelligence in SCIENCE WONDER STORIES , another Gernsback publication. Both of these stories were close copies of A. Merritt, whose style and method Jack Williamson parlayed into popularity for eight years. Yet the strange thing about it was that Jack Williamson was one of the most versatile science fiction authors ever to sit down at the typewriter. When the vogue for science-fantasy altered to super science, he created the memorable super lock-picker Giles Habilula as the major attraction in a rousing trio of space operas , The Legion of Space, The Cometeers and One Against the Legion. When grim realism was the order of the day, he produced Crucible of Power and when they wanted extrapolated theory in present tense, he assumed the disguise of Will Stewart and popularized the concept of contra terrene matter in science fiction with Seetee Ship and Seetee Shock. Finally, when only psychological studies of the future would do, he produced "With Folded Hands ..." "... And Searching Mind." The Cosmic Express is of special interest because it was written during Williamson's A. Merritt "kick," when he was writing little else but, and it gave the earliest indication of a more general capability. The lightness of the handling is especially modern, barely avoiding the farcical by the validity of the notion that wireless transmission of matter is the next big transportation frontier to be conquered. It is especially important because it stylistically forecast a later trend to accept the background for granted, regardless of the quantity of wonders, and proceed with the story. With only a few thousand scanning-disk television sets in existence at the time of the writing, the surmise that this media would be a natural for westerns was particularly astute. Jack Williamson was born in 1908 in the Arizona territory when covered wagons were the primary form of transportation and apaches still raided the settlers. His father was a cattle man, but for young Jack, the ranch was anything but glamorous. "My days were filled," he remembers, "with monotonous rounds of what seemed an endless, heart-breaking war with drought and frost and dust-storms, poison-weeds and hail, for the sake of survival on the Llano Estacado." The discovery of AMAZING STORIES was the escape he sought and his goal was to be a science fiction writer. He labored to this end and the first he knew that a story of his had been accepted was when he bought the December, 1929 issue of AMAZING STORIES . Since then, he has written millions of words of science fiction and has gone on record as follows: "I feel that science-fiction is the folklore of the new world of science, and the expression of man's reaction to a technological environment. By which I mean that it is the most interesting and stimulating form of literature today." Mr. Eric Stokes-Harding tumbled out of the rumpled bed-clothing, a striking slender figure in purple-striped pajamas. He smiled fondly across to the other of the twin beds, where Nada, his pretty bride, lay quiet beneath light silk covers. With a groan, he stood up and began a series of fantastic bending exercises. But after a few half-hearted movements, he gave it up, and walked through an open door into a small bright room, its walls covered with bookcases and also with scientific appliances that would have been strange to the man of four or five centuries before, when the Age of Aviation was beginning. Suddenly there was a sharp tingling sensation where they touched the polished surface. Yawning, Mr. Eric Stokes-Harding stood before the great open window, staring out. Below him was a wide, park-like space, green with emerald lawns, and bright with flowering plants. Two hundred yards across it rose an immense pyramidal building—an artistic structure, gleaming with white marble and bright metal, striped with the verdure of terraced roof-gardens, its slender peak rising to help support the gray, steel-ribbed glass roof above. Beyond, the park stretched away in illimitable vistas, broken with the graceful columned buildings that held up the great glass roof. Above the glass, over this New York of 2432 A. D., a freezing blizzard was sweeping. But small concern was that to the lightly clad man at the window, who was inhaling deeply the fragrant air from the plants below—air kept, winter and summer, exactly at 20° C. With another yawn, Mr. Eric Stokes-Harding turned back to the room, which was bright with the rich golden light that poured in from the suspended globes of the cold ato-light that illuminated the snow-covered city. With a distasteful grimace, he seated himself before a broad, paper-littered desk, sat a few minutes leaning back, with his hands clasped behind his head. At last he straightened reluctantly, slid a small typewriter out of its drawer, and began pecking at it impatiently. For Mr. Eric Stokes-Harding was an author. There was a whole shelf of his books on the wall, in bright jackets, red and blue and green, that brought a thrill of pleasure to the young novelist's heart when he looked up from his clattering machine. He wrote "thrilling action romances," as his enthusiastic publishers and television directors said, "of ages past, when men were men. Red-blooded heroes responding vigorously to the stirring passions of primordial life!" He was impartial as to the source of his thrills—provided they were distant enough from modern civilization. His hero was likely to be an ape-man roaring through the jungle, with a bloody rock in one hand and a beautiful girl in the other. Or a cowboy, "hard-riding, hard-shooting," the vanishing hero of the ancient ranches. Or a man marooned with a lovely woman on a desert South Sea island. His heroes were invariably strong, fearless, resourceful fellows, who could handle a club on equal terms with a cave-man, or call science to aid them in defending a beautiful mate from the terrors of a desolate wilderness. And a hundred million read Eric's novels, and watched the dramatization of them on the television screens. They thrilled at the simple, romantic lives his heroes led, paid him handsome royalties, and subconsciously shared his opinion that civilization had taken all the best from the life of man. Eric had settled down to the artistic satisfaction of describing the sensuous delight of his hero in the roasted marrow-bones of a dead mammoth, when the pretty woman in the other room stirred, and presently came tripping into the study, gay and vivacious, and—as her husband of a few months most justly thought—altogether beautiful in a bright silk dressing gown. Recklessly, he slammed the machine back into its place, and resolved to forget that his next "red-blooded action thriller" was due in the publisher's office at the end of the month. He sprang up to kiss his wife, held her embraced for a long happy moment. And then they went hand in hand, to the side of the room and punched a series of buttons on a panel—a simple way of ordering breakfast sent up the automatic shaft from the kitchens below. Nada Stokes-Harding was also an author. She wrote poems—"back to nature stuff"—simple lyrics of the sea, of sunsets, of bird songs, of bright flowers and warm winds, of thrilling communion with Nature, and growing things. Men read her poems and called her a genius. Even though the whole world had grown up into a city, the birds were extinct, there were no wild flowers, and no one had time to bother about sunsets. "Eric, darling," she said, "isn't it terrible to be cooped up here in this little flat, away from the things we both love?" "Yes, dear. Civilization has ruined the world. If we could only have lived a thousand years ago, when life was simple and natural, when men hunted and killed their meat, instead of drinking synthetic stuff, when men still had the joys of conflict, instead of living under glass, like hot-house flowers." "If we could only go somewhere—" "There isn't anywhere to go. I write about the West, Africa, South Sea Islands. But they were all filled up two hundred years ago. Pleasure resorts, sanatoriums, cities, factories." "If only we lived on Venus! I was listening to a lecture on the television, last night. The speaker said that the Planet Venus is younger than the Earth, that it has not cooled so much. It has a thick, cloudy atmosphere, and low, rainy forests. There's simple, elemental life there—like Earth had before civilization ruined it." "Yes, Kinsley, with his new infra-red ray telescope, that penetrates the cloud layers of the planet, proved that Venus rotates in about the same period as Earth; and it must be much like Earth was a million years ago." "Eric, I wonder if we could go there! It would be so thrilling to begin life like the characters in your stories, to get away from this hateful civilization, and live natural lives. Maybe a rocket—" The young author's eyes were glowing. He skipped across the floor, seized Nada, kissed her ecstatically. "Splendid! Think of hunting in the virgin forest, and bringing the game home to you! But I'm afraid there is no way.—Wait! The Cosmic Express." "The Cosmic Express?" "A new invention. Just perfected a few weeks ago, I understand. By Ludwig Von der Valls, the German physicist." "I've quit bothering about science. It has ruined nature, filled the world with silly, artificial people, doing silly, artificial things." "But this is quite remarkable, dear. A new way to travel—by ether!" "By ether!" "Yes. You know of course that energy and matter are interchangeable terms; both are simply etheric vibration, of different sorts." "Of course. That's elementary." She smiled proudly. "I can give you examples, even of the change. The disintegration of the radium atom, making helium and lead and energy . And Millikan's old proof that his Cosmic Ray is generated when particles of electricity are united to form an atom." "Fine! I thought you said you weren't a scientist." He glowed with pride. "But the method, in the new Cosmic Express, is simply to convert the matter to be carried into power, send it out as a radiant beam and focus the beam to convert it back into atoms at the destination." "But the amount of energy must be terrific—" "It is. You know short waves carry more energy than long ones. The Express Ray is an electromagnetic vibration of frequency far higher than that of even the Cosmic Ray, and correspondingly more powerful and more penetrating." The girl frowned, running slim fingers through golden-brown hair. "But I don't see how they get any recognizable object, not even how they get the radiation turned back into matter." "The beam is focused, just like the light that passes through a camera lens. The photographic lens, using light rays, picks up a picture and reproduces it again on the plate—just the same as the Express Ray picks up an object and sets it down on the other side of the world. "An analogy from television might help. You know that by means of the scanning disc, the picture is transformed into mere rapid fluctuations in the brightness of a beam of light. In a parallel manner, the focal plane of the Express Ray moves slowly through the object, progressively, dissolving layers of the thickness of a single atom, which are accurately reproduced at the other focus of the instrument—which might be in Venus! "But the analogy of the lens is the better of the two. For no receiving instrument is required, as in television. The object is built up of an infinite series of plane layers, at the focus of the ray, no matter where that may be. Such a thing would be impossible with radio apparatus because even with the best beam transmission, all but a tiny fraction of the power is lost, and power is required to rebuild the atoms. Do you understand, dear?" "Not altogether. But I should worry! Here comes breakfast. Let me butter your toast." A bell had rung at the shaft. She ran to it, and returned with a great silver tray, laden with dainty dishes, which she set on a little side table. They sat down opposite each other, and ate, getting as much satisfaction from contemplation of each other's faces as from the excellent food. When they had finished, she carried the tray to the shaft, slid it in a slot, and touched a button—thus disposing of the culinary cares of the morning. She ran back to Eric, who was once more staring distastefully at his typewriter. "Oh, darling! I'm thrilled to death about the Cosmic Express! If we could go to Venus, to a new life on a new world, and get away from all this hateful conventional society—" "We can go to their office—it's only five minutes. The chap that operates the machine for the company is a pal of mine. He's not supposed to take passengers except between the offices they have scattered about the world. But I know his weak point—" Eric laughed, fumbled with a hidden spring under his desk. A small polished object, gleaming silvery, slid down into his hand. "Old friendship, plus this, would make him—like spinach." Five minutes later Mr. Eric Stokes-Harding and his pretty wife were in street clothes, light silk tunics of loose, flowing lines—little clothing being required in the artificially warmed city. They entered an elevator and dropped thirty stories to the ground floor of the great building. There they entered a cylindrical car, with rows of seats down the sides. Not greatly different from an ancient subway car, except that it was air-tight, and was hurled by magnetic attraction and repulsion through a tube exhausted of air, at a speed that would have made an old subway rider gasp with amazement. In five more minutes their car had whipped up to the base of another building, in the business section, where there was no room for parks between the mighty structures that held the unbroken glass roofs two hundred stories above the concrete pavement. An elevator brought them up a hundred and fifty stories. Eric led Nada down a long, carpeted corridor to a wide glass door, which bore the words: COSMIC EXPRESS stenciled in gold capitals across it. As they approached, a lean man, carrying a black bag, darted out of an elevator shaft opposite the door, ran across the corridor, and entered. They pushed in after him. They were in a little room, cut in two by a high brass grill. In front of it was a long bench against the wall, that reminded one of the waiting room in an old railroad depot. In the grill was a little window, with a lazy, brown-eyed youth leaning on the shelf behind it. Beyond him was a great, glittering piece of mechanism, half hidden by the brass. A little door gave access to the machine from the space before the grill. The thin man in black, whom Eric now recognized as a prominent French heart-specialist, was dancing before the window, waving his bag frantically, raving at the sleepy boy. "Queek! I have tell you zee truth! I have zee most urgent necessity to go queekly. A patient I have in Paree, zat ees in zee most creetical condition!" "Hold your horses just a minute, Mister. We got a client in the machine now. Russian diplomat from Moscow to Rio de Janeiro.... Two hundred seventy dollars and eighty cents, please.... Your turn next. Remember this is just an experimental service. Regular installations all over the world in a year.... Ready now. Come on in." The youth took the money, pressed a button. The door sprang open in the grill, and the frantic physician leaped through it. "Lie down on the crystal, face up," the young man ordered. "Hands at your sides, don't breathe. Ready!" He manipulated his dials and switches, and pressed another button. "Why, hello, Eric, old man!" he cried. "That's the lady you were telling me about? Congratulations!" A bell jangled before him on the panel. "Just a minute. I've got a call." He punched the board again. Little bulbs lit and glowed for a second. The youth turned toward the half-hidden machine, spoke courteously. "All right, madam. Walk out. Hope you found the transit pleasant." "But my Violet! My precious Violet!" a shrill female voice came from the machine. "Sir, what have you done with my darling Violet?" "I'm sure I don't know, madam. You lost it off your hat?" "None of your impertinence, sir! I want my dog." "Ah, a dog. Must have jumped off the crystal. You can have him sent on for three hundred and—" "Young man, if any harm comes to my Violet—I'll—I'll—I'll appeal to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals!" "Very good, madam. We appreciate your patronage." The door flew open again. A very fat woman, puffing angrily, face highly colored, clothing shimmering with artificial gems, waddled pompously out of the door through which the frantic French doctor had so recently vanished. She rolled heavily across the room, and out into the corridor. Shrill words floated back: "I'm going to see my lawyer! My precious Violet—" The sallow youth winked. "And now what can I do for you, Eric?" "We want to go to Venus, if that ray of yours can put us there." "To Venus? Impossible. My orders are to use the Express merely between the sixteen designated stations, at New York, San Francisco, Tokyo, London, Paris—" "See here, Charley," with a cautious glance toward the door, Eric held up the silver flask. "For old time's sake, and for this—" The boy seemed dazed at sight of the bright flask. Then, with a single swift motion, he snatched it out of Eric's hand, and bent to conceal it below his instrument panel. "Sure, old boy. I'd send you to heaven for that, if you'd give me the micrometer readings to set the ray with. But I tell you, this is dangerous. I've got a sort of television attachment, for focusing the ray. I can turn that on Venus—I've been amusing myself, watching the life there, already. Terrible place. Savage. I can pick a place on high land to set you down. But I can't be responsible for what happens afterward." "Simple, primitive life is what we're looking for. And now what do I owe you—" "Oh, that's all right. Between friends. Provided that stuff's genuine! Walk in and lie down on the crystal block. Hands at your sides. Don't move." The little door had swung open again, and Eric led Nada through. They stepped into a little cell, completely surrounded with mirrors and vast prisms and lenses and electron tubes. In the center was a slab of transparent crystal, eight feet square and two inches thick, with an intricate mass of machinery below it. Eric helped Nada to a place on the crystal, lay down at her side. "I think the Express Ray is focused just at the surface of the crystal, from below," he said. "It dissolves our substance, to be transmitted by the beam. It would look as if we were melting into the crystal." "Ready," called the youth. "Think I've got it for you. Sort of a high island in the jungle. Nothing bad in sight now. But, I say—how're you coming back? I haven't got time to watch you." "Go ahead. We aren't coming back." "Gee! What is it? Elopement? I thought you were married already. Or is it business difficulties? The Bears did make an awful raid last night. But you better let me set you down in Hong Kong." A bell jangled. "So long," the youth called. Nada and Eric felt themselves enveloped in fire. Sheets of white flame seemed to lap up about them from the crystal block. Suddenly there was a sharp tingling sensation where they touched the polished surface. Then blackness, blankness. The next thing they knew, the fires were gone from about them. They were lying in something extremely soft and fluid; and warm rain was beating in their faces. Eric sat up, found himself in a mud-puddle. Beside him was Nada, opening her eyes and struggling up, her bright garments stained with black mud. All about rose a thick jungle, dark and gloomy—and very wet. Palm-like, the gigantic trees were, or fern-like, flinging clouds of feathery green foliage high against a somber sky of unbroken gloom. They stood up, triumphant. "At last!" Nada cried. "We're free! Free of that hateful old civilization! We're back to Nature!" "Yes, we're on our feet now, not parasites on the machines." "It's wonderful to have a fine, strong man like you to trust in, Eric. You're just like one of the heroes in your books!" "You're the perfect companion, Nada.... But now we must be practical. We must build a fire, find weapons, set up a shelter of some kind. I guess it will be night, pretty soon. And Charley said something about savage animals he had seen in the television. "We'll find a nice dry cave, and have a fire in front of the door. And skins of animals to sleep on. And pottery vessels to cook in. And you will find seeds and grown grain." "But first we must find a flint-bed. We need flint for tools, and to strike sparks to make a fire with. We will probably come across a chunk of virgin copper, too—it's found native." Presently they set off through the jungle. The mud seemed to be very abundant, and of a most sticky consistence. They sank into it ankle deep at every step, and vast masses of it clung to their feet. A mile they struggled on, without finding where a provident nature had left them even a single fragment of quartz, to say nothing of a mass of pure copper. "A darned shame," Eric grumbled, "to come forty million miles, and meet such a reception as this!" Nada stopped. "Eric," she said, "I'm tired. And I don't believe there's any rock here, anyway. You'll have to use wooden tools, sharpened in the fire." "Probably you're right. This soil seemed to be of alluvial origin. Shouldn't be surprised if the native rock is some hundreds of feet underground. Your idea is better." "You can make a fire by rubbing sticks together, can't you?" "It can be done, I'm sure. I've never tried it, myself. We need some dry sticks, first." They resumed the weary march, with a good fraction of the new planet adhering to their feet. Rain was still falling from the dark heavens in a steady, warm downpour. Dry wood seemed scarce as the proverbial hen's teeth. "You didn't bring any matches, dear?" "Matches! Of course not! We're going back to Nature." "I hope we get a fire pretty soon." "If dry wood were gold dust, we couldn't buy a hot dog." "Eric, that reminds me that I'm hungry." He confessed to a few pangs of his own. They turned their attention to looking for banana trees, and coconut palms, but they did not seem to abound in the Venerian jungle. Even small animals that might have been slain with a broken branch had contrary ideas about the matter. At last, from sheer weariness, they stopped, and gathered branches to make a sloping shelter by a vast fallen tree-trunk. "This will keep out the rain—maybe—" Eric said hopefully. "And tomorrow, when it has quit raining—I'm sure we'll do better." They crept in, as gloomy night fell without. They lay in each other's arms, the body warmth oddly comforting. Nada cried a little. "Buck up," Eric advised her. "We're back to nature—where we've always wanted to be." With the darkness, the temperature fell somewhat, and a high wind rose, whipping cold rain into the little shelter, and threatening to demolish it. Swarms of mosquito-like insects, seemingly not inconvenienced in the least by the inclement elements, swarmed about them in clouds. Then came a sound from the dismal stormy night, a hoarse, bellowing roar, raucous, terrifying. Nada clung against Eric. "What is it, dear?" she chattered. "Must be a reptile. Dinosaur, or something of the sort. This world seems to be in about the same state as the Earth when they flourished there.... But maybe it won't find us." The roar was repeated, nearer. The earth trembled beneath a mighty tread. "Eric," a thin voice trembled. "Don't you think—it might have been better— You know the old life was not so bad, after all." "I was just thinking of our rooms, nice and warm and bright, with hot foods coming up the shaft whenever we pushed the button, and the gay crowds in the park, and my old typewriter." "Eric?" she called softly. "Yes, dear." "Don't you wish—we had known better?" "I do." If he winced at the "we" the girl did not notice. The roaring outside was closer. And suddenly it was answered by another raucous bellow, at considerable distance, that echoed strangely through the forest. The fearful sounds were repeated, alternately. And always the more distant seemed nearer, until the two sounds were together. And then an infernal din broke out in the darkness. Bellows. Screams. Deafening shrieks. Mighty splashes, as if struggling Titans had upset oceans. Thunderous crashes, as if they were demolishing forests. Eric and Nada clung to each other, in doubt whether to stay or to fly through the storm. Gradually the sound of the conflict came nearer, until the earth shook beneath them, and they were afraid to move. Suddenly the great fallen tree against which they had erected the flimsy shelter was rolled back, evidently by a chance blow from the invisible monsters. The pitiful roof collapsed on the bedraggled humans. Nada burst into tears. "Oh, if only—if only—" Suddenly flame lapped up about them, the same white fire they had seen as they lay on the crystal block. Dizziness, insensibility overcame them. A few moments later, they were lying on the transparent table in the Cosmic Express office, with all those great mirrors and prisms and lenses about them. A bustling, red-faced official appeared through the door in the grill, fairly bubbling apologies. "So sorry—an accident—inconceivable. I can't see how he got it! We got you back as soon as we could find a focus. I sincerely hope you haven't been injured." "Why—what—what—" "Why I happened in, found our operator drunk. I've no idea where he got the stuff. He muttered something about Venus. I consulted the auto-register, and found two more passengers registered here than had been recorded at our other stations. I looked up the duplicate beam coordinates, and found that it had been set on Venus. I got men on the television at once, and we happened to find you. "I can't imagine how it happened. I've had the fellow locked up, and the 'dry-laws' are on the job. I hope you won't hold us for excessive damages." "No, I ask nothing except that you don't press charges against the boy. I don't want him to suffer for it in any way. My wife and I will be perfectly satisfied to get back to our apartment." "I don't wonder. You look like you've been through—I don't know what. But I'll have you there in five minutes. My private car—" Mr. Eric Stokes-Harding, noted author of primitive life and love, ate a hearty meal with his pretty spouse, after they had washed off the grime of another planet. He spent the next twelve hours in bed. At the end of the month he delivered his promised story to his publishers, a thrilling tale of a man marooned on Venus, with a beautiful girl. The hero made stone tools, erected a dwelling for himself and his mate, hunted food for her, defended her from the mammoth saurian monsters of the Venerian jungles. The book was a huge success. THE END

His characters -- though eclectic and sometimes bizarre -- share authentic feelings, thoughts, and experiences with human readers

His writing style does not contain unpredictable juxtapositions and irrational humor

It is socially accepted that broadcast information will soon explode as a major field of discovery and innovation

While his characters typically endure suffering, they adopt a comedic -- rather than tragic -- outlook toward their predicaments

26741_OUX1V2UX_1

The story takes place in _______.

One can't be too cautious about the people one meets in Tangier. They're all weirdies of one kind or another. Me? Oh, I'm A Stranger Here Myself By MACK REYNOLDS The Place de France is the town's hub. It marks the end of Boulevard Pasteur, the main drag of the westernized part of the city, and the beginning of Rue de la Liberté, which leads down to the Grand Socco and the medina. In a three-minute walk from the Place de France you can go from an ultra-modern, California-like resort to the Baghdad of Harun al-Rashid. It's quite a town, Tangier. King-size sidewalk cafes occupy three of the strategic corners on the Place de France. The Cafe de Paris serves the best draft beer in town, gets all the better custom, and has three shoeshine boys attached to the establishment. You can sit of a sunny morning and read the Paris edition of the New York Herald Tribune while getting your shoes done up like mirrors for thirty Moroccan francs which comes to about five cents at current exchange. You can sit there, after the paper's read, sip your expresso and watch the people go by. Tangier is possibly the most cosmopolitan city in the world. In native costume you'll see Berber and Rif, Arab and Blue Man, and occasionally a Senegalese from further south. In European dress you'll see Japs and Chinese, Hindus and Turks, Levantines and Filipinos, North Americans and South Americans, and, of course, even Europeans—from both sides of the Curtain. In Tangier you'll find some of the world's poorest and some of the richest. The poorest will try to sell you anything from a shoeshine to their not very lily-white bodies, and the richest will avoid your eyes, afraid you might try to sell them something. In spite of recent changes, the town still has its unique qualities. As a result of them the permanent population includes smugglers and black-marketeers, fugitives from justice and international con men, espionage and counter-espionage agents, homosexuals, nymphomaniacs, alcoholics, drug addicts, displaced persons, ex-royalty, and subversives of every flavor. Local law limits the activities of few of these. Like I said, it's quite a town. I looked up from my Herald Tribune and said, "Hello, Paul. Anything new cooking?" He sank into the chair opposite me and looked around for the waiter. The tables were all crowded and since mine was a face he recognized, he assumed he was welcome to intrude. It was more or less standard procedure at the Cafe de Paris. It wasn't a place to go if you wanted to be alone. Paul said, "How are you, Rupert? Haven't seen you for donkey's years." The waiter came along and Paul ordered a glass of beer. Paul was an easy-going, sallow-faced little man. I vaguely remembered somebody saying he was from Liverpool and in exports. "What's in the newspaper?" he said, disinterestedly. "Pogo and Albert are going to fight a duel," I told him, "and Lil Abner is becoming a rock'n'roll singer." He grunted. "Oh," I said, "the intellectual type." I scanned the front page. "The Russkies have put up another manned satellite." "They have, eh? How big?" "Several times bigger than anything we Americans have." The beer came and looked good, so I ordered a glass too. Paul said, "What ever happened to those poxy flying saucers?" "What flying saucers?" A French girl went by with a poodle so finely clipped as to look as though it'd been shaven. The girl was in the latest from Paris. Every pore in place. We both looked after her. "You know, what everybody was seeing a few years ago. It's too bad one of these bloody manned satellites wasn't up then. Maybe they would've seen one." "That's an idea," I said. We didn't say anything else for a while and I began to wonder if I could go back to my paper without rubbing him the wrong way. I didn't know Paul very well, but, for that matter, it's comparatively seldom you ever get to know anybody very well in Tangier. Largely, cards are played close to the chest. My beer came and a plate of tapas for us both. Tapas at the Cafe de Paris are apt to be potato salad, a few anchovies, olives, and possibly some cheese. Free lunch, they used to call it in the States. Just to say something, I said, "Where do you think they came from?" And when he looked blank, I added, "The Flying Saucers." He grinned. "From Mars or Venus, or someplace." "Ummmm," I said. "Too bad none of them ever crashed, or landed on the Yale football field and said Take me to your cheerleader , or something." Paul yawned and said, "That was always the trouble with those crackpot blokes' explanations of them. If they were aliens from space, then why not show themselves?" I ate one of the potato chips. It'd been cooked in rancid olive oil. I said, "Oh, there are various answers to that one. We could probably sit around here and think of two or three that made sense." Paul was mildly interested. "Like what?" "Well, hell, suppose for instance there's this big Galactic League of civilized planets. But it's restricted, see. You're not eligible for membership until you, well, say until you've developed space flight. Then you're invited into the club. Meanwhile, they send secret missions down from time to time to keep an eye on your progress." Paul grinned at me. "I see you read the same poxy stuff I do." A Moorish girl went by dressed in a neatly tailored gray jellaba, European style high-heeled shoes, and a pinkish silk veil so transparent that you could see she wore lipstick. Very provocative, dark eyes can be over a veil. We both looked after her. I said, "Or, here's another one. Suppose you have a very advanced civilization on, say, Mars." "Not Mars. No air, and too bloody dry to support life." "Don't interrupt, please," I said with mock severity. "This is a very old civilization and as the planet began to lose its water and air, it withdrew underground. Uses hydroponics and so forth, husbands its water and air. Isn't that what we'd do, in a few million years, if Earth lost its water and air?" "I suppose so," he said. "Anyway, what about them?" "Well, they observe how man is going through a scientific boom, an industrial boom, a population boom. A boom, period. Any day now he's going to have practical space ships. Meanwhile, he's also got the H-Bomb and the way he beats the drums on both sides of the Curtain, he's not against using it, if he could get away with it." Paul said, "I got it. So they're scared and are keeping an eye on us. That's an old one. I've read that a dozen times, dished up different." I shifted my shoulders. "Well, it's one possibility." "I got a better one. How's this. There's this alien life form that's way ahead of us. Their civilization is so old that they don't have any records of when it began and how it was in the early days. They've gone beyond things like wars and depressions and revolutions, and greed for power or any of these things giving us a bad time here on Earth. They're all like scholars, get it? And some of them are pretty jolly well taken by Earth, especially the way we are right now, with all the problems, get it? Things developing so fast we don't know where we're going or how we're going to get there." I finished my beer and clapped my hands for Mouley. "How do you mean, where we're going ?" "Well, take half the countries in the world today. They're trying to industrialize, modernize, catch up with the advanced countries. Look at Egypt, and Israel, and India and China, and Yugoslavia and Brazil, and all the rest. Trying to drag themselves up to the level of the advanced countries, and all using different methods of doing it. But look at the so-called advanced countries. Up to their bottoms in problems. Juvenile delinquents, climbing crime and suicide rates, the loony-bins full of the balmy, unemployed, threat of war, spending all their money on armaments instead of things like schools. All the bloody mess of it. Why, a man from Mars would be fascinated, like." Mouley came shuffling up in his babouche slippers and we both ordered another schooner of beer. Paul said seriously, "You know, there's only one big snag in this sort of talk. I've sorted the whole thing out before, and you always come up against this brick wall. Where are they, these observers, or scholars, or spies or whatever they are? Sooner or later we'd nab one of them. You know, Scotland Yard, or the F.B.I., or Russia's secret police, or the French Sûreté, or Interpol. This world is so deep in police, counter-espionage outfits and security agents that an alien would slip up in time, no matter how much he'd been trained. Sooner or later, he'd slip up, and they'd nab him." I shook my head. "Not necessarily. The first time I ever considered this possibility, it seemed to me that such an alien would base himself in London or New York. Somewhere where he could use the libraries for research, get the daily newspapers and the magazines. Be right in the center of things. But now I don't think so. I think he'd be right here in Tangier." "Why Tangier?" "It's the one town in the world where anything goes. Nobody gives a damn about you or your affairs. For instance, I've known you a year or more now, and I haven't the slightest idea of how you make your living." "That's right," Paul admitted. "In this town you seldom even ask a man where's he's from. He can be British, a White Russian, a Basque or a Sikh and nobody could care less. Where are you from, Rupert?" "California," I told him. "No, you're not," he grinned. I was taken aback. "What do you mean?" "I felt your mind probe back a few minutes ago when I was talking about Scotland Yard or the F.B.I. possibly flushing an alien. Telepathy is a sense not trained by the humanoids. If they had it, your job—and mine—would be considerably more difficult. Let's face it, in spite of these human bodies we're disguised in, neither of us is humanoid. Where are you really from, Rupert?" "Aldebaran," I said. "How about you?" "Deneb," he told me, shaking. We had a laugh and ordered another beer. "What're you doing here on Earth?" I asked him. "Researching for one of our meat trusts. We're protein eaters. Humanoid flesh is considered quite a delicacy. How about you?" "Scouting the place for thrill tourists. My job is to go around to these backward cultures and help stir up inter-tribal, or international, conflicts—all according to how advanced they are. Then our tourists come in—well shielded, of course—and get their kicks watching it." Paul frowned. "That sort of practice could spoil an awful lot of good meat." THE END Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Amazing Stories December 1960. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note.

Iraq

The United States

Morocco

France

26741_OUX1V2UX_2

The Tangier law enforcement's response to the influx of new populations can best be described as ________.

One can't be too cautious about the people one meets in Tangier. They're all weirdies of one kind or another. Me? Oh, I'm A Stranger Here Myself By MACK REYNOLDS The Place de France is the town's hub. It marks the end of Boulevard Pasteur, the main drag of the westernized part of the city, and the beginning of Rue de la Liberté, which leads down to the Grand Socco and the medina. In a three-minute walk from the Place de France you can go from an ultra-modern, California-like resort to the Baghdad of Harun al-Rashid. It's quite a town, Tangier. King-size sidewalk cafes occupy three of the strategic corners on the Place de France. The Cafe de Paris serves the best draft beer in town, gets all the better custom, and has three shoeshine boys attached to the establishment. You can sit of a sunny morning and read the Paris edition of the New York Herald Tribune while getting your shoes done up like mirrors for thirty Moroccan francs which comes to about five cents at current exchange. You can sit there, after the paper's read, sip your expresso and watch the people go by. Tangier is possibly the most cosmopolitan city in the world. In native costume you'll see Berber and Rif, Arab and Blue Man, and occasionally a Senegalese from further south. In European dress you'll see Japs and Chinese, Hindus and Turks, Levantines and Filipinos, North Americans and South Americans, and, of course, even Europeans—from both sides of the Curtain. In Tangier you'll find some of the world's poorest and some of the richest. The poorest will try to sell you anything from a shoeshine to their not very lily-white bodies, and the richest will avoid your eyes, afraid you might try to sell them something. In spite of recent changes, the town still has its unique qualities. As a result of them the permanent population includes smugglers and black-marketeers, fugitives from justice and international con men, espionage and counter-espionage agents, homosexuals, nymphomaniacs, alcoholics, drug addicts, displaced persons, ex-royalty, and subversives of every flavor. Local law limits the activities of few of these. Like I said, it's quite a town. I looked up from my Herald Tribune and said, "Hello, Paul. Anything new cooking?" He sank into the chair opposite me and looked around for the waiter. The tables were all crowded and since mine was a face he recognized, he assumed he was welcome to intrude. It was more or less standard procedure at the Cafe de Paris. It wasn't a place to go if you wanted to be alone. Paul said, "How are you, Rupert? Haven't seen you for donkey's years." The waiter came along and Paul ordered a glass of beer. Paul was an easy-going, sallow-faced little man. I vaguely remembered somebody saying he was from Liverpool and in exports. "What's in the newspaper?" he said, disinterestedly. "Pogo and Albert are going to fight a duel," I told him, "and Lil Abner is becoming a rock'n'roll singer." He grunted. "Oh," I said, "the intellectual type." I scanned the front page. "The Russkies have put up another manned satellite." "They have, eh? How big?" "Several times bigger than anything we Americans have." The beer came and looked good, so I ordered a glass too. Paul said, "What ever happened to those poxy flying saucers?" "What flying saucers?" A French girl went by with a poodle so finely clipped as to look as though it'd been shaven. The girl was in the latest from Paris. Every pore in place. We both looked after her. "You know, what everybody was seeing a few years ago. It's too bad one of these bloody manned satellites wasn't up then. Maybe they would've seen one." "That's an idea," I said. We didn't say anything else for a while and I began to wonder if I could go back to my paper without rubbing him the wrong way. I didn't know Paul very well, but, for that matter, it's comparatively seldom you ever get to know anybody very well in Tangier. Largely, cards are played close to the chest. My beer came and a plate of tapas for us both. Tapas at the Cafe de Paris are apt to be potato salad, a few anchovies, olives, and possibly some cheese. Free lunch, they used to call it in the States. Just to say something, I said, "Where do you think they came from?" And when he looked blank, I added, "The Flying Saucers." He grinned. "From Mars or Venus, or someplace." "Ummmm," I said. "Too bad none of them ever crashed, or landed on the Yale football field and said Take me to your cheerleader , or something." Paul yawned and said, "That was always the trouble with those crackpot blokes' explanations of them. If they were aliens from space, then why not show themselves?" I ate one of the potato chips. It'd been cooked in rancid olive oil. I said, "Oh, there are various answers to that one. We could probably sit around here and think of two or three that made sense." Paul was mildly interested. "Like what?" "Well, hell, suppose for instance there's this big Galactic League of civilized planets. But it's restricted, see. You're not eligible for membership until you, well, say until you've developed space flight. Then you're invited into the club. Meanwhile, they send secret missions down from time to time to keep an eye on your progress." Paul grinned at me. "I see you read the same poxy stuff I do." A Moorish girl went by dressed in a neatly tailored gray jellaba, European style high-heeled shoes, and a pinkish silk veil so transparent that you could see she wore lipstick. Very provocative, dark eyes can be over a veil. We both looked after her. I said, "Or, here's another one. Suppose you have a very advanced civilization on, say, Mars." "Not Mars. No air, and too bloody dry to support life." "Don't interrupt, please," I said with mock severity. "This is a very old civilization and as the planet began to lose its water and air, it withdrew underground. Uses hydroponics and so forth, husbands its water and air. Isn't that what we'd do, in a few million years, if Earth lost its water and air?" "I suppose so," he said. "Anyway, what about them?" "Well, they observe how man is going through a scientific boom, an industrial boom, a population boom. A boom, period. Any day now he's going to have practical space ships. Meanwhile, he's also got the H-Bomb and the way he beats the drums on both sides of the Curtain, he's not against using it, if he could get away with it." Paul said, "I got it. So they're scared and are keeping an eye on us. That's an old one. I've read that a dozen times, dished up different." I shifted my shoulders. "Well, it's one possibility." "I got a better one. How's this. There's this alien life form that's way ahead of us. Their civilization is so old that they don't have any records of when it began and how it was in the early days. They've gone beyond things like wars and depressions and revolutions, and greed for power or any of these things giving us a bad time here on Earth. They're all like scholars, get it? And some of them are pretty jolly well taken by Earth, especially the way we are right now, with all the problems, get it? Things developing so fast we don't know where we're going or how we're going to get there." I finished my beer and clapped my hands for Mouley. "How do you mean, where we're going ?" "Well, take half the countries in the world today. They're trying to industrialize, modernize, catch up with the advanced countries. Look at Egypt, and Israel, and India and China, and Yugoslavia and Brazil, and all the rest. Trying to drag themselves up to the level of the advanced countries, and all using different methods of doing it. But look at the so-called advanced countries. Up to their bottoms in problems. Juvenile delinquents, climbing crime and suicide rates, the loony-bins full of the balmy, unemployed, threat of war, spending all their money on armaments instead of things like schools. All the bloody mess of it. Why, a man from Mars would be fascinated, like." Mouley came shuffling up in his babouche slippers and we both ordered another schooner of beer. Paul said seriously, "You know, there's only one big snag in this sort of talk. I've sorted the whole thing out before, and you always come up against this brick wall. Where are they, these observers, or scholars, or spies or whatever they are? Sooner or later we'd nab one of them. You know, Scotland Yard, or the F.B.I., or Russia's secret police, or the French Sûreté, or Interpol. This world is so deep in police, counter-espionage outfits and security agents that an alien would slip up in time, no matter how much he'd been trained. Sooner or later, he'd slip up, and they'd nab him." I shook my head. "Not necessarily. The first time I ever considered this possibility, it seemed to me that such an alien would base himself in London or New York. Somewhere where he could use the libraries for research, get the daily newspapers and the magazines. Be right in the center of things. But now I don't think so. I think he'd be right here in Tangier." "Why Tangier?" "It's the one town in the world where anything goes. Nobody gives a damn about you or your affairs. For instance, I've known you a year or more now, and I haven't the slightest idea of how you make your living." "That's right," Paul admitted. "In this town you seldom even ask a man where's he's from. He can be British, a White Russian, a Basque or a Sikh and nobody could care less. Where are you from, Rupert?" "California," I told him. "No, you're not," he grinned. I was taken aback. "What do you mean?" "I felt your mind probe back a few minutes ago when I was talking about Scotland Yard or the F.B.I. possibly flushing an alien. Telepathy is a sense not trained by the humanoids. If they had it, your job—and mine—would be considerably more difficult. Let's face it, in spite of these human bodies we're disguised in, neither of us is humanoid. Where are you really from, Rupert?" "Aldebaran," I said. "How about you?" "Deneb," he told me, shaking. We had a laugh and ordered another beer. "What're you doing here on Earth?" I asked him. "Researching for one of our meat trusts. We're protein eaters. Humanoid flesh is considered quite a delicacy. How about you?" "Scouting the place for thrill tourists. My job is to go around to these backward cultures and help stir up inter-tribal, or international, conflicts—all according to how advanced they are. Then our tourists come in—well shielded, of course—and get their kicks watching it." Paul frowned. "That sort of practice could spoil an awful lot of good meat." THE END Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Amazing Stories December 1960. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note.

Laissez-faire

Perfunctory

Authoritarian

Capricious

26741_OUX1V2UX_3

It is challenging to get to know someone intimately in a place like Tangier because people are generally ________.

One can't be too cautious about the people one meets in Tangier. They're all weirdies of one kind or another. Me? Oh, I'm A Stranger Here Myself By MACK REYNOLDS The Place de France is the town's hub. It marks the end of Boulevard Pasteur, the main drag of the westernized part of the city, and the beginning of Rue de la Liberté, which leads down to the Grand Socco and the medina. In a three-minute walk from the Place de France you can go from an ultra-modern, California-like resort to the Baghdad of Harun al-Rashid. It's quite a town, Tangier. King-size sidewalk cafes occupy three of the strategic corners on the Place de France. The Cafe de Paris serves the best draft beer in town, gets all the better custom, and has three shoeshine boys attached to the establishment. You can sit of a sunny morning and read the Paris edition of the New York Herald Tribune while getting your shoes done up like mirrors for thirty Moroccan francs which comes to about five cents at current exchange. You can sit there, after the paper's read, sip your expresso and watch the people go by. Tangier is possibly the most cosmopolitan city in the world. In native costume you'll see Berber and Rif, Arab and Blue Man, and occasionally a Senegalese from further south. In European dress you'll see Japs and Chinese, Hindus and Turks, Levantines and Filipinos, North Americans and South Americans, and, of course, even Europeans—from both sides of the Curtain. In Tangier you'll find some of the world's poorest and some of the richest. The poorest will try to sell you anything from a shoeshine to their not very lily-white bodies, and the richest will avoid your eyes, afraid you might try to sell them something. In spite of recent changes, the town still has its unique qualities. As a result of them the permanent population includes smugglers and black-marketeers, fugitives from justice and international con men, espionage and counter-espionage agents, homosexuals, nymphomaniacs, alcoholics, drug addicts, displaced persons, ex-royalty, and subversives of every flavor. Local law limits the activities of few of these. Like I said, it's quite a town. I looked up from my Herald Tribune and said, "Hello, Paul. Anything new cooking?" He sank into the chair opposite me and looked around for the waiter. The tables were all crowded and since mine was a face he recognized, he assumed he was welcome to intrude. It was more or less standard procedure at the Cafe de Paris. It wasn't a place to go if you wanted to be alone. Paul said, "How are you, Rupert? Haven't seen you for donkey's years." The waiter came along and Paul ordered a glass of beer. Paul was an easy-going, sallow-faced little man. I vaguely remembered somebody saying he was from Liverpool and in exports. "What's in the newspaper?" he said, disinterestedly. "Pogo and Albert are going to fight a duel," I told him, "and Lil Abner is becoming a rock'n'roll singer." He grunted. "Oh," I said, "the intellectual type." I scanned the front page. "The Russkies have put up another manned satellite." "They have, eh? How big?" "Several times bigger than anything we Americans have." The beer came and looked good, so I ordered a glass too. Paul said, "What ever happened to those poxy flying saucers?" "What flying saucers?" A French girl went by with a poodle so finely clipped as to look as though it'd been shaven. The girl was in the latest from Paris. Every pore in place. We both looked after her. "You know, what everybody was seeing a few years ago. It's too bad one of these bloody manned satellites wasn't up then. Maybe they would've seen one." "That's an idea," I said. We didn't say anything else for a while and I began to wonder if I could go back to my paper without rubbing him the wrong way. I didn't know Paul very well, but, for that matter, it's comparatively seldom you ever get to know anybody very well in Tangier. Largely, cards are played close to the chest. My beer came and a plate of tapas for us both. Tapas at the Cafe de Paris are apt to be potato salad, a few anchovies, olives, and possibly some cheese. Free lunch, they used to call it in the States. Just to say something, I said, "Where do you think they came from?" And when he looked blank, I added, "The Flying Saucers." He grinned. "From Mars or Venus, or someplace." "Ummmm," I said. "Too bad none of them ever crashed, or landed on the Yale football field and said Take me to your cheerleader , or something." Paul yawned and said, "That was always the trouble with those crackpot blokes' explanations of them. If they were aliens from space, then why not show themselves?" I ate one of the potato chips. It'd been cooked in rancid olive oil. I said, "Oh, there are various answers to that one. We could probably sit around here and think of two or three that made sense." Paul was mildly interested. "Like what?" "Well, hell, suppose for instance there's this big Galactic League of civilized planets. But it's restricted, see. You're not eligible for membership until you, well, say until you've developed space flight. Then you're invited into the club. Meanwhile, they send secret missions down from time to time to keep an eye on your progress." Paul grinned at me. "I see you read the same poxy stuff I do." A Moorish girl went by dressed in a neatly tailored gray jellaba, European style high-heeled shoes, and a pinkish silk veil so transparent that you could see she wore lipstick. Very provocative, dark eyes can be over a veil. We both looked after her. I said, "Or, here's another one. Suppose you have a very advanced civilization on, say, Mars." "Not Mars. No air, and too bloody dry to support life." "Don't interrupt, please," I said with mock severity. "This is a very old civilization and as the planet began to lose its water and air, it withdrew underground. Uses hydroponics and so forth, husbands its water and air. Isn't that what we'd do, in a few million years, if Earth lost its water and air?" "I suppose so," he said. "Anyway, what about them?" "Well, they observe how man is going through a scientific boom, an industrial boom, a population boom. A boom, period. Any day now he's going to have practical space ships. Meanwhile, he's also got the H-Bomb and the way he beats the drums on both sides of the Curtain, he's not against using it, if he could get away with it." Paul said, "I got it. So they're scared and are keeping an eye on us. That's an old one. I've read that a dozen times, dished up different." I shifted my shoulders. "Well, it's one possibility." "I got a better one. How's this. There's this alien life form that's way ahead of us. Their civilization is so old that they don't have any records of when it began and how it was in the early days. They've gone beyond things like wars and depressions and revolutions, and greed for power or any of these things giving us a bad time here on Earth. They're all like scholars, get it? And some of them are pretty jolly well taken by Earth, especially the way we are right now, with all the problems, get it? Things developing so fast we don't know where we're going or how we're going to get there." I finished my beer and clapped my hands for Mouley. "How do you mean, where we're going ?" "Well, take half the countries in the world today. They're trying to industrialize, modernize, catch up with the advanced countries. Look at Egypt, and Israel, and India and China, and Yugoslavia and Brazil, and all the rest. Trying to drag themselves up to the level of the advanced countries, and all using different methods of doing it. But look at the so-called advanced countries. Up to their bottoms in problems. Juvenile delinquents, climbing crime and suicide rates, the loony-bins full of the balmy, unemployed, threat of war, spending all their money on armaments instead of things like schools. All the bloody mess of it. Why, a man from Mars would be fascinated, like." Mouley came shuffling up in his babouche slippers and we both ordered another schooner of beer. Paul said seriously, "You know, there's only one big snag in this sort of talk. I've sorted the whole thing out before, and you always come up against this brick wall. Where are they, these observers, or scholars, or spies or whatever they are? Sooner or later we'd nab one of them. You know, Scotland Yard, or the F.B.I., or Russia's secret police, or the French Sûreté, or Interpol. This world is so deep in police, counter-espionage outfits and security agents that an alien would slip up in time, no matter how much he'd been trained. Sooner or later, he'd slip up, and they'd nab him." I shook my head. "Not necessarily. The first time I ever considered this possibility, it seemed to me that such an alien would base himself in London or New York. Somewhere where he could use the libraries for research, get the daily newspapers and the magazines. Be right in the center of things. But now I don't think so. I think he'd be right here in Tangier." "Why Tangier?" "It's the one town in the world where anything goes. Nobody gives a damn about you or your affairs. For instance, I've known you a year or more now, and I haven't the slightest idea of how you make your living." "That's right," Paul admitted. "In this town you seldom even ask a man where's he's from. He can be British, a White Russian, a Basque or a Sikh and nobody could care less. Where are you from, Rupert?" "California," I told him. "No, you're not," he grinned. I was taken aback. "What do you mean?" "I felt your mind probe back a few minutes ago when I was talking about Scotland Yard or the F.B.I. possibly flushing an alien. Telepathy is a sense not trained by the humanoids. If they had it, your job—and mine—would be considerably more difficult. Let's face it, in spite of these human bodies we're disguised in, neither of us is humanoid. Where are you really from, Rupert?" "Aldebaran," I said. "How about you?" "Deneb," he told me, shaking. We had a laugh and ordered another beer. "What're you doing here on Earth?" I asked him. "Researching for one of our meat trusts. We're protein eaters. Humanoid flesh is considered quite a delicacy. How about you?" "Scouting the place for thrill tourists. My job is to go around to these backward cultures and help stir up inter-tribal, or international, conflicts—all according to how advanced they are. Then our tourists come in—well shielded, of course—and get their kicks watching it." Paul frowned. "That sort of practice could spoil an awful lot of good meat." THE END Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Amazing Stories December 1960. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note.

Prejudiced

Monolingual

Transient

Inscrutable

26741_OUX1V2UX_4

What do Paul and Rupert have in common with their conception of alien life forms?

One can't be too cautious about the people one meets in Tangier. They're all weirdies of one kind or another. Me? Oh, I'm A Stranger Here Myself By MACK REYNOLDS The Place de France is the town's hub. It marks the end of Boulevard Pasteur, the main drag of the westernized part of the city, and the beginning of Rue de la Liberté, which leads down to the Grand Socco and the medina. In a three-minute walk from the Place de France you can go from an ultra-modern, California-like resort to the Baghdad of Harun al-Rashid. It's quite a town, Tangier. King-size sidewalk cafes occupy three of the strategic corners on the Place de France. The Cafe de Paris serves the best draft beer in town, gets all the better custom, and has three shoeshine boys attached to the establishment. You can sit of a sunny morning and read the Paris edition of the New York Herald Tribune while getting your shoes done up like mirrors for thirty Moroccan francs which comes to about five cents at current exchange. You can sit there, after the paper's read, sip your expresso and watch the people go by. Tangier is possibly the most cosmopolitan city in the world. In native costume you'll see Berber and Rif, Arab and Blue Man, and occasionally a Senegalese from further south. In European dress you'll see Japs and Chinese, Hindus and Turks, Levantines and Filipinos, North Americans and South Americans, and, of course, even Europeans—from both sides of the Curtain. In Tangier you'll find some of the world's poorest and some of the richest. The poorest will try to sell you anything from a shoeshine to their not very lily-white bodies, and the richest will avoid your eyes, afraid you might try to sell them something. In spite of recent changes, the town still has its unique qualities. As a result of them the permanent population includes smugglers and black-marketeers, fugitives from justice and international con men, espionage and counter-espionage agents, homosexuals, nymphomaniacs, alcoholics, drug addicts, displaced persons, ex-royalty, and subversives of every flavor. Local law limits the activities of few of these. Like I said, it's quite a town. I looked up from my Herald Tribune and said, "Hello, Paul. Anything new cooking?" He sank into the chair opposite me and looked around for the waiter. The tables were all crowded and since mine was a face he recognized, he assumed he was welcome to intrude. It was more or less standard procedure at the Cafe de Paris. It wasn't a place to go if you wanted to be alone. Paul said, "How are you, Rupert? Haven't seen you for donkey's years." The waiter came along and Paul ordered a glass of beer. Paul was an easy-going, sallow-faced little man. I vaguely remembered somebody saying he was from Liverpool and in exports. "What's in the newspaper?" he said, disinterestedly. "Pogo and Albert are going to fight a duel," I told him, "and Lil Abner is becoming a rock'n'roll singer." He grunted. "Oh," I said, "the intellectual type." I scanned the front page. "The Russkies have put up another manned satellite." "They have, eh? How big?" "Several times bigger than anything we Americans have." The beer came and looked good, so I ordered a glass too. Paul said, "What ever happened to those poxy flying saucers?" "What flying saucers?" A French girl went by with a poodle so finely clipped as to look as though it'd been shaven. The girl was in the latest from Paris. Every pore in place. We both looked after her. "You know, what everybody was seeing a few years ago. It's too bad one of these bloody manned satellites wasn't up then. Maybe they would've seen one." "That's an idea," I said. We didn't say anything else for a while and I began to wonder if I could go back to my paper without rubbing him the wrong way. I didn't know Paul very well, but, for that matter, it's comparatively seldom you ever get to know anybody very well in Tangier. Largely, cards are played close to the chest. My beer came and a plate of tapas for us both. Tapas at the Cafe de Paris are apt to be potato salad, a few anchovies, olives, and possibly some cheese. Free lunch, they used to call it in the States. Just to say something, I said, "Where do you think they came from?" And when he looked blank, I added, "The Flying Saucers." He grinned. "From Mars or Venus, or someplace." "Ummmm," I said. "Too bad none of them ever crashed, or landed on the Yale football field and said Take me to your cheerleader , or something." Paul yawned and said, "That was always the trouble with those crackpot blokes' explanations of them. If they were aliens from space, then why not show themselves?" I ate one of the potato chips. It'd been cooked in rancid olive oil. I said, "Oh, there are various answers to that one. We could probably sit around here and think of two or three that made sense." Paul was mildly interested. "Like what?" "Well, hell, suppose for instance there's this big Galactic League of civilized planets. But it's restricted, see. You're not eligible for membership until you, well, say until you've developed space flight. Then you're invited into the club. Meanwhile, they send secret missions down from time to time to keep an eye on your progress." Paul grinned at me. "I see you read the same poxy stuff I do." A Moorish girl went by dressed in a neatly tailored gray jellaba, European style high-heeled shoes, and a pinkish silk veil so transparent that you could see she wore lipstick. Very provocative, dark eyes can be over a veil. We both looked after her. I said, "Or, here's another one. Suppose you have a very advanced civilization on, say, Mars." "Not Mars. No air, and too bloody dry to support life." "Don't interrupt, please," I said with mock severity. "This is a very old civilization and as the planet began to lose its water and air, it withdrew underground. Uses hydroponics and so forth, husbands its water and air. Isn't that what we'd do, in a few million years, if Earth lost its water and air?" "I suppose so," he said. "Anyway, what about them?" "Well, they observe how man is going through a scientific boom, an industrial boom, a population boom. A boom, period. Any day now he's going to have practical space ships. Meanwhile, he's also got the H-Bomb and the way he beats the drums on both sides of the Curtain, he's not against using it, if he could get away with it." Paul said, "I got it. So they're scared and are keeping an eye on us. That's an old one. I've read that a dozen times, dished up different." I shifted my shoulders. "Well, it's one possibility." "I got a better one. How's this. There's this alien life form that's way ahead of us. Their civilization is so old that they don't have any records of when it began and how it was in the early days. They've gone beyond things like wars and depressions and revolutions, and greed for power or any of these things giving us a bad time here on Earth. They're all like scholars, get it? And some of them are pretty jolly well taken by Earth, especially the way we are right now, with all the problems, get it? Things developing so fast we don't know where we're going or how we're going to get there." I finished my beer and clapped my hands for Mouley. "How do you mean, where we're going ?" "Well, take half the countries in the world today. They're trying to industrialize, modernize, catch up with the advanced countries. Look at Egypt, and Israel, and India and China, and Yugoslavia and Brazil, and all the rest. Trying to drag themselves up to the level of the advanced countries, and all using different methods of doing it. But look at the so-called advanced countries. Up to their bottoms in problems. Juvenile delinquents, climbing crime and suicide rates, the loony-bins full of the balmy, unemployed, threat of war, spending all their money on armaments instead of things like schools. All the bloody mess of it. Why, a man from Mars would be fascinated, like." Mouley came shuffling up in his babouche slippers and we both ordered another schooner of beer. Paul said seriously, "You know, there's only one big snag in this sort of talk. I've sorted the whole thing out before, and you always come up against this brick wall. Where are they, these observers, or scholars, or spies or whatever they are? Sooner or later we'd nab one of them. You know, Scotland Yard, or the F.B.I., or Russia's secret police, or the French Sûreté, or Interpol. This world is so deep in police, counter-espionage outfits and security agents that an alien would slip up in time, no matter how much he'd been trained. Sooner or later, he'd slip up, and they'd nab him." I shook my head. "Not necessarily. The first time I ever considered this possibility, it seemed to me that such an alien would base himself in London or New York. Somewhere where he could use the libraries for research, get the daily newspapers and the magazines. Be right in the center of things. But now I don't think so. I think he'd be right here in Tangier." "Why Tangier?" "It's the one town in the world where anything goes. Nobody gives a damn about you or your affairs. For instance, I've known you a year or more now, and I haven't the slightest idea of how you make your living." "That's right," Paul admitted. "In this town you seldom even ask a man where's he's from. He can be British, a White Russian, a Basque or a Sikh and nobody could care less. Where are you from, Rupert?" "California," I told him. "No, you're not," he grinned. I was taken aback. "What do you mean?" "I felt your mind probe back a few minutes ago when I was talking about Scotland Yard or the F.B.I. possibly flushing an alien. Telepathy is a sense not trained by the humanoids. If they had it, your job—and mine—would be considerably more difficult. Let's face it, in spite of these human bodies we're disguised in, neither of us is humanoid. Where are you really from, Rupert?" "Aldebaran," I said. "How about you?" "Deneb," he told me, shaking. We had a laugh and ordered another beer. "What're you doing here on Earth?" I asked him. "Researching for one of our meat trusts. We're protein eaters. Humanoid flesh is considered quite a delicacy. How about you?" "Scouting the place for thrill tourists. My job is to go around to these backward cultures and help stir up inter-tribal, or international, conflicts—all according to how advanced they are. Then our tourists come in—well shielded, of course—and get their kicks watching it." Paul frowned. "That sort of practice could spoil an awful lot of good meat." THE END Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Amazing Stories December 1960. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note.

The belief that Earth should be more receptive to foreign life forms

They make the effort to socialize and attend large gatherings but are actually introverted

They believe in a hierarchy of human life and that those at the lower end were better off not around

Their tendency to observe humans without interacting with them

26741_OUX1V2UX_5

How does Rupert accidentally reveal his identity to Paul?

One can't be too cautious about the people one meets in Tangier. They're all weirdies of one kind or another. Me? Oh, I'm A Stranger Here Myself By MACK REYNOLDS The Place de France is the town's hub. It marks the end of Boulevard Pasteur, the main drag of the westernized part of the city, and the beginning of Rue de la Liberté, which leads down to the Grand Socco and the medina. In a three-minute walk from the Place de France you can go from an ultra-modern, California-like resort to the Baghdad of Harun al-Rashid. It's quite a town, Tangier. King-size sidewalk cafes occupy three of the strategic corners on the Place de France. The Cafe de Paris serves the best draft beer in town, gets all the better custom, and has three shoeshine boys attached to the establishment. You can sit of a sunny morning and read the Paris edition of the New York Herald Tribune while getting your shoes done up like mirrors for thirty Moroccan francs which comes to about five cents at current exchange. You can sit there, after the paper's read, sip your expresso and watch the people go by. Tangier is possibly the most cosmopolitan city in the world. In native costume you'll see Berber and Rif, Arab and Blue Man, and occasionally a Senegalese from further south. In European dress you'll see Japs and Chinese, Hindus and Turks, Levantines and Filipinos, North Americans and South Americans, and, of course, even Europeans—from both sides of the Curtain. In Tangier you'll find some of the world's poorest and some of the richest. The poorest will try to sell you anything from a shoeshine to their not very lily-white bodies, and the richest will avoid your eyes, afraid you might try to sell them something. In spite of recent changes, the town still has its unique qualities. As a result of them the permanent population includes smugglers and black-marketeers, fugitives from justice and international con men, espionage and counter-espionage agents, homosexuals, nymphomaniacs, alcoholics, drug addicts, displaced persons, ex-royalty, and subversives of every flavor. Local law limits the activities of few of these. Like I said, it's quite a town. I looked up from my Herald Tribune and said, "Hello, Paul. Anything new cooking?" He sank into the chair opposite me and looked around for the waiter. The tables were all crowded and since mine was a face he recognized, he assumed he was welcome to intrude. It was more or less standard procedure at the Cafe de Paris. It wasn't a place to go if you wanted to be alone. Paul said, "How are you, Rupert? Haven't seen you for donkey's years." The waiter came along and Paul ordered a glass of beer. Paul was an easy-going, sallow-faced little man. I vaguely remembered somebody saying he was from Liverpool and in exports. "What's in the newspaper?" he said, disinterestedly. "Pogo and Albert are going to fight a duel," I told him, "and Lil Abner is becoming a rock'n'roll singer." He grunted. "Oh," I said, "the intellectual type." I scanned the front page. "The Russkies have put up another manned satellite." "They have, eh? How big?" "Several times bigger than anything we Americans have." The beer came and looked good, so I ordered a glass too. Paul said, "What ever happened to those poxy flying saucers?" "What flying saucers?" A French girl went by with a poodle so finely clipped as to look as though it'd been shaven. The girl was in the latest from Paris. Every pore in place. We both looked after her. "You know, what everybody was seeing a few years ago. It's too bad one of these bloody manned satellites wasn't up then. Maybe they would've seen one." "That's an idea," I said. We didn't say anything else for a while and I began to wonder if I could go back to my paper without rubbing him the wrong way. I didn't know Paul very well, but, for that matter, it's comparatively seldom you ever get to know anybody very well in Tangier. Largely, cards are played close to the chest. My beer came and a plate of tapas for us both. Tapas at the Cafe de Paris are apt to be potato salad, a few anchovies, olives, and possibly some cheese. Free lunch, they used to call it in the States. Just to say something, I said, "Where do you think they came from?" And when he looked blank, I added, "The Flying Saucers." He grinned. "From Mars or Venus, or someplace." "Ummmm," I said. "Too bad none of them ever crashed, or landed on the Yale football field and said Take me to your cheerleader , or something." Paul yawned and said, "That was always the trouble with those crackpot blokes' explanations of them. If they were aliens from space, then why not show themselves?" I ate one of the potato chips. It'd been cooked in rancid olive oil. I said, "Oh, there are various answers to that one. We could probably sit around here and think of two or three that made sense." Paul was mildly interested. "Like what?" "Well, hell, suppose for instance there's this big Galactic League of civilized planets. But it's restricted, see. You're not eligible for membership until you, well, say until you've developed space flight. Then you're invited into the club. Meanwhile, they send secret missions down from time to time to keep an eye on your progress." Paul grinned at me. "I see you read the same poxy stuff I do." A Moorish girl went by dressed in a neatly tailored gray jellaba, European style high-heeled shoes, and a pinkish silk veil so transparent that you could see she wore lipstick. Very provocative, dark eyes can be over a veil. We both looked after her. I said, "Or, here's another one. Suppose you have a very advanced civilization on, say, Mars." "Not Mars. No air, and too bloody dry to support life." "Don't interrupt, please," I said with mock severity. "This is a very old civilization and as the planet began to lose its water and air, it withdrew underground. Uses hydroponics and so forth, husbands its water and air. Isn't that what we'd do, in a few million years, if Earth lost its water and air?" "I suppose so," he said. "Anyway, what about them?" "Well, they observe how man is going through a scientific boom, an industrial boom, a population boom. A boom, period. Any day now he's going to have practical space ships. Meanwhile, he's also got the H-Bomb and the way he beats the drums on both sides of the Curtain, he's not against using it, if he could get away with it." Paul said, "I got it. So they're scared and are keeping an eye on us. That's an old one. I've read that a dozen times, dished up different." I shifted my shoulders. "Well, it's one possibility." "I got a better one. How's this. There's this alien life form that's way ahead of us. Their civilization is so old that they don't have any records of when it began and how it was in the early days. They've gone beyond things like wars and depressions and revolutions, and greed for power or any of these things giving us a bad time here on Earth. They're all like scholars, get it? And some of them are pretty jolly well taken by Earth, especially the way we are right now, with all the problems, get it? Things developing so fast we don't know where we're going or how we're going to get there." I finished my beer and clapped my hands for Mouley. "How do you mean, where we're going ?" "Well, take half the countries in the world today. They're trying to industrialize, modernize, catch up with the advanced countries. Look at Egypt, and Israel, and India and China, and Yugoslavia and Brazil, and all the rest. Trying to drag themselves up to the level of the advanced countries, and all using different methods of doing it. But look at the so-called advanced countries. Up to their bottoms in problems. Juvenile delinquents, climbing crime and suicide rates, the loony-bins full of the balmy, unemployed, threat of war, spending all their money on armaments instead of things like schools. All the bloody mess of it. Why, a man from Mars would be fascinated, like." Mouley came shuffling up in his babouche slippers and we both ordered another schooner of beer. Paul said seriously, "You know, there's only one big snag in this sort of talk. I've sorted the whole thing out before, and you always come up against this brick wall. Where are they, these observers, or scholars, or spies or whatever they are? Sooner or later we'd nab one of them. You know, Scotland Yard, or the F.B.I., or Russia's secret police, or the French Sûreté, or Interpol. This world is so deep in police, counter-espionage outfits and security agents that an alien would slip up in time, no matter how much he'd been trained. Sooner or later, he'd slip up, and they'd nab him." I shook my head. "Not necessarily. The first time I ever considered this possibility, it seemed to me that such an alien would base himself in London or New York. Somewhere where he could use the libraries for research, get the daily newspapers and the magazines. Be right in the center of things. But now I don't think so. I think he'd be right here in Tangier." "Why Tangier?" "It's the one town in the world where anything goes. Nobody gives a damn about you or your affairs. For instance, I've known you a year or more now, and I haven't the slightest idea of how you make your living." "That's right," Paul admitted. "In this town you seldom even ask a man where's he's from. He can be British, a White Russian, a Basque or a Sikh and nobody could care less. Where are you from, Rupert?" "California," I told him. "No, you're not," he grinned. I was taken aback. "What do you mean?" "I felt your mind probe back a few minutes ago when I was talking about Scotland Yard or the F.B.I. possibly flushing an alien. Telepathy is a sense not trained by the humanoids. If they had it, your job—and mine—would be considerably more difficult. Let's face it, in spite of these human bodies we're disguised in, neither of us is humanoid. Where are you really from, Rupert?" "Aldebaran," I said. "How about you?" "Deneb," he told me, shaking. We had a laugh and ordered another beer. "What're you doing here on Earth?" I asked him. "Researching for one of our meat trusts. We're protein eaters. Humanoid flesh is considered quite a delicacy. How about you?" "Scouting the place for thrill tourists. My job is to go around to these backward cultures and help stir up inter-tribal, or international, conflicts—all according to how advanced they are. Then our tourists come in—well shielded, of course—and get their kicks watching it." Paul frowned. "That sort of practice could spoil an awful lot of good meat." THE END Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Amazing Stories December 1960. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note.

He attempts to examine Paul's mind to determine if he is an alien

He reveals information that only Scotland Yard would know

He mentions technology that is only present in Paul's place of origin

He lingers for too long at an attractive female walking by

26741_OUX1V2UX_6

What, according to Rupert, would be the best place for an alien visitor to observe and learn about humans?

One can't be too cautious about the people one meets in Tangier. They're all weirdies of one kind or another. Me? Oh, I'm A Stranger Here Myself By MACK REYNOLDS The Place de France is the town's hub. It marks the end of Boulevard Pasteur, the main drag of the westernized part of the city, and the beginning of Rue de la Liberté, which leads down to the Grand Socco and the medina. In a three-minute walk from the Place de France you can go from an ultra-modern, California-like resort to the Baghdad of Harun al-Rashid. It's quite a town, Tangier. King-size sidewalk cafes occupy three of the strategic corners on the Place de France. The Cafe de Paris serves the best draft beer in town, gets all the better custom, and has three shoeshine boys attached to the establishment. You can sit of a sunny morning and read the Paris edition of the New York Herald Tribune while getting your shoes done up like mirrors for thirty Moroccan francs which comes to about five cents at current exchange. You can sit there, after the paper's read, sip your expresso and watch the people go by. Tangier is possibly the most cosmopolitan city in the world. In native costume you'll see Berber and Rif, Arab and Blue Man, and occasionally a Senegalese from further south. In European dress you'll see Japs and Chinese, Hindus and Turks, Levantines and Filipinos, North Americans and South Americans, and, of course, even Europeans—from both sides of the Curtain. In Tangier you'll find some of the world's poorest and some of the richest. The poorest will try to sell you anything from a shoeshine to their not very lily-white bodies, and the richest will avoid your eyes, afraid you might try to sell them something. In spite of recent changes, the town still has its unique qualities. As a result of them the permanent population includes smugglers and black-marketeers, fugitives from justice and international con men, espionage and counter-espionage agents, homosexuals, nymphomaniacs, alcoholics, drug addicts, displaced persons, ex-royalty, and subversives of every flavor. Local law limits the activities of few of these. Like I said, it's quite a town. I looked up from my Herald Tribune and said, "Hello, Paul. Anything new cooking?" He sank into the chair opposite me and looked around for the waiter. The tables were all crowded and since mine was a face he recognized, he assumed he was welcome to intrude. It was more or less standard procedure at the Cafe de Paris. It wasn't a place to go if you wanted to be alone. Paul said, "How are you, Rupert? Haven't seen you for donkey's years." The waiter came along and Paul ordered a glass of beer. Paul was an easy-going, sallow-faced little man. I vaguely remembered somebody saying he was from Liverpool and in exports. "What's in the newspaper?" he said, disinterestedly. "Pogo and Albert are going to fight a duel," I told him, "and Lil Abner is becoming a rock'n'roll singer." He grunted. "Oh," I said, "the intellectual type." I scanned the front page. "The Russkies have put up another manned satellite." "They have, eh? How big?" "Several times bigger than anything we Americans have." The beer came and looked good, so I ordered a glass too. Paul said, "What ever happened to those poxy flying saucers?" "What flying saucers?" A French girl went by with a poodle so finely clipped as to look as though it'd been shaven. The girl was in the latest from Paris. Every pore in place. We both looked after her. "You know, what everybody was seeing a few years ago. It's too bad one of these bloody manned satellites wasn't up then. Maybe they would've seen one." "That's an idea," I said. We didn't say anything else for a while and I began to wonder if I could go back to my paper without rubbing him the wrong way. I didn't know Paul very well, but, for that matter, it's comparatively seldom you ever get to know anybody very well in Tangier. Largely, cards are played close to the chest. My beer came and a plate of tapas for us both. Tapas at the Cafe de Paris are apt to be potato salad, a few anchovies, olives, and possibly some cheese. Free lunch, they used to call it in the States. Just to say something, I said, "Where do you think they came from?" And when he looked blank, I added, "The Flying Saucers." He grinned. "From Mars or Venus, or someplace." "Ummmm," I said. "Too bad none of them ever crashed, or landed on the Yale football field and said Take me to your cheerleader , or something." Paul yawned and said, "That was always the trouble with those crackpot blokes' explanations of them. If they were aliens from space, then why not show themselves?" I ate one of the potato chips. It'd been cooked in rancid olive oil. I said, "Oh, there are various answers to that one. We could probably sit around here and think of two or three that made sense." Paul was mildly interested. "Like what?" "Well, hell, suppose for instance there's this big Galactic League of civilized planets. But it's restricted, see. You're not eligible for membership until you, well, say until you've developed space flight. Then you're invited into the club. Meanwhile, they send secret missions down from time to time to keep an eye on your progress." Paul grinned at me. "I see you read the same poxy stuff I do." A Moorish girl went by dressed in a neatly tailored gray jellaba, European style high-heeled shoes, and a pinkish silk veil so transparent that you could see she wore lipstick. Very provocative, dark eyes can be over a veil. We both looked after her. I said, "Or, here's another one. Suppose you have a very advanced civilization on, say, Mars." "Not Mars. No air, and too bloody dry to support life." "Don't interrupt, please," I said with mock severity. "This is a very old civilization and as the planet began to lose its water and air, it withdrew underground. Uses hydroponics and so forth, husbands its water and air. Isn't that what we'd do, in a few million years, if Earth lost its water and air?" "I suppose so," he said. "Anyway, what about them?" "Well, they observe how man is going through a scientific boom, an industrial boom, a population boom. A boom, period. Any day now he's going to have practical space ships. Meanwhile, he's also got the H-Bomb and the way he beats the drums on both sides of the Curtain, he's not against using it, if he could get away with it." Paul said, "I got it. So they're scared and are keeping an eye on us. That's an old one. I've read that a dozen times, dished up different." I shifted my shoulders. "Well, it's one possibility." "I got a better one. How's this. There's this alien life form that's way ahead of us. Their civilization is so old that they don't have any records of when it began and how it was in the early days. They've gone beyond things like wars and depressions and revolutions, and greed for power or any of these things giving us a bad time here on Earth. They're all like scholars, get it? And some of them are pretty jolly well taken by Earth, especially the way we are right now, with all the problems, get it? Things developing so fast we don't know where we're going or how we're going to get there." I finished my beer and clapped my hands for Mouley. "How do you mean, where we're going ?" "Well, take half the countries in the world today. They're trying to industrialize, modernize, catch up with the advanced countries. Look at Egypt, and Israel, and India and China, and Yugoslavia and Brazil, and all the rest. Trying to drag themselves up to the level of the advanced countries, and all using different methods of doing it. But look at the so-called advanced countries. Up to their bottoms in problems. Juvenile delinquents, climbing crime and suicide rates, the loony-bins full of the balmy, unemployed, threat of war, spending all their money on armaments instead of things like schools. All the bloody mess of it. Why, a man from Mars would be fascinated, like." Mouley came shuffling up in his babouche slippers and we both ordered another schooner of beer. Paul said seriously, "You know, there's only one big snag in this sort of talk. I've sorted the whole thing out before, and you always come up against this brick wall. Where are they, these observers, or scholars, or spies or whatever they are? Sooner or later we'd nab one of them. You know, Scotland Yard, or the F.B.I., or Russia's secret police, or the French Sûreté, or Interpol. This world is so deep in police, counter-espionage outfits and security agents that an alien would slip up in time, no matter how much he'd been trained. Sooner or later, he'd slip up, and they'd nab him." I shook my head. "Not necessarily. The first time I ever considered this possibility, it seemed to me that such an alien would base himself in London or New York. Somewhere where he could use the libraries for research, get the daily newspapers and the magazines. Be right in the center of things. But now I don't think so. I think he'd be right here in Tangier." "Why Tangier?" "It's the one town in the world where anything goes. Nobody gives a damn about you or your affairs. For instance, I've known you a year or more now, and I haven't the slightest idea of how you make your living." "That's right," Paul admitted. "In this town you seldom even ask a man where's he's from. He can be British, a White Russian, a Basque or a Sikh and nobody could care less. Where are you from, Rupert?" "California," I told him. "No, you're not," he grinned. I was taken aback. "What do you mean?" "I felt your mind probe back a few minutes ago when I was talking about Scotland Yard or the F.B.I. possibly flushing an alien. Telepathy is a sense not trained by the humanoids. If they had it, your job—and mine—would be considerably more difficult. Let's face it, in spite of these human bodies we're disguised in, neither of us is humanoid. Where are you really from, Rupert?" "Aldebaran," I said. "How about you?" "Deneb," he told me, shaking. We had a laugh and ordered another beer. "What're you doing here on Earth?" I asked him. "Researching for one of our meat trusts. We're protein eaters. Humanoid flesh is considered quite a delicacy. How about you?" "Scouting the place for thrill tourists. My job is to go around to these backward cultures and help stir up inter-tribal, or international, conflicts—all according to how advanced they are. Then our tourists come in—well shielded, of course—and get their kicks watching it." Paul frowned. "That sort of practice could spoil an awful lot of good meat." THE END Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Amazing Stories December 1960. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note.

Harun al-Rashid

The Cafe de Paris

A New York City library

The FBI headquarters

26741_OUX1V2UX_7

What do Paul and Rupert share in common?

One can't be too cautious about the people one meets in Tangier. They're all weirdies of one kind or another. Me? Oh, I'm A Stranger Here Myself By MACK REYNOLDS The Place de France is the town's hub. It marks the end of Boulevard Pasteur, the main drag of the westernized part of the city, and the beginning of Rue de la Liberté, which leads down to the Grand Socco and the medina. In a three-minute walk from the Place de France you can go from an ultra-modern, California-like resort to the Baghdad of Harun al-Rashid. It's quite a town, Tangier. King-size sidewalk cafes occupy three of the strategic corners on the Place de France. The Cafe de Paris serves the best draft beer in town, gets all the better custom, and has three shoeshine boys attached to the establishment. You can sit of a sunny morning and read the Paris edition of the New York Herald Tribune while getting your shoes done up like mirrors for thirty Moroccan francs which comes to about five cents at current exchange. You can sit there, after the paper's read, sip your expresso and watch the people go by. Tangier is possibly the most cosmopolitan city in the world. In native costume you'll see Berber and Rif, Arab and Blue Man, and occasionally a Senegalese from further south. In European dress you'll see Japs and Chinese, Hindus and Turks, Levantines and Filipinos, North Americans and South Americans, and, of course, even Europeans—from both sides of the Curtain. In Tangier you'll find some of the world's poorest and some of the richest. The poorest will try to sell you anything from a shoeshine to their not very lily-white bodies, and the richest will avoid your eyes, afraid you might try to sell them something. In spite of recent changes, the town still has its unique qualities. As a result of them the permanent population includes smugglers and black-marketeers, fugitives from justice and international con men, espionage and counter-espionage agents, homosexuals, nymphomaniacs, alcoholics, drug addicts, displaced persons, ex-royalty, and subversives of every flavor. Local law limits the activities of few of these. Like I said, it's quite a town. I looked up from my Herald Tribune and said, "Hello, Paul. Anything new cooking?" He sank into the chair opposite me and looked around for the waiter. The tables were all crowded and since mine was a face he recognized, he assumed he was welcome to intrude. It was more or less standard procedure at the Cafe de Paris. It wasn't a place to go if you wanted to be alone. Paul said, "How are you, Rupert? Haven't seen you for donkey's years." The waiter came along and Paul ordered a glass of beer. Paul was an easy-going, sallow-faced little man. I vaguely remembered somebody saying he was from Liverpool and in exports. "What's in the newspaper?" he said, disinterestedly. "Pogo and Albert are going to fight a duel," I told him, "and Lil Abner is becoming a rock'n'roll singer." He grunted. "Oh," I said, "the intellectual type." I scanned the front page. "The Russkies have put up another manned satellite." "They have, eh? How big?" "Several times bigger than anything we Americans have." The beer came and looked good, so I ordered a glass too. Paul said, "What ever happened to those poxy flying saucers?" "What flying saucers?" A French girl went by with a poodle so finely clipped as to look as though it'd been shaven. The girl was in the latest from Paris. Every pore in place. We both looked after her. "You know, what everybody was seeing a few years ago. It's too bad one of these bloody manned satellites wasn't up then. Maybe they would've seen one." "That's an idea," I said. We didn't say anything else for a while and I began to wonder if I could go back to my paper without rubbing him the wrong way. I didn't know Paul very well, but, for that matter, it's comparatively seldom you ever get to know anybody very well in Tangier. Largely, cards are played close to the chest. My beer came and a plate of tapas for us both. Tapas at the Cafe de Paris are apt to be potato salad, a few anchovies, olives, and possibly some cheese. Free lunch, they used to call it in the States. Just to say something, I said, "Where do you think they came from?" And when he looked blank, I added, "The Flying Saucers." He grinned. "From Mars or Venus, or someplace." "Ummmm," I said. "Too bad none of them ever crashed, or landed on the Yale football field and said Take me to your cheerleader , or something." Paul yawned and said, "That was always the trouble with those crackpot blokes' explanations of them. If they were aliens from space, then why not show themselves?" I ate one of the potato chips. It'd been cooked in rancid olive oil. I said, "Oh, there are various answers to that one. We could probably sit around here and think of two or three that made sense." Paul was mildly interested. "Like what?" "Well, hell, suppose for instance there's this big Galactic League of civilized planets. But it's restricted, see. You're not eligible for membership until you, well, say until you've developed space flight. Then you're invited into the club. Meanwhile, they send secret missions down from time to time to keep an eye on your progress." Paul grinned at me. "I see you read the same poxy stuff I do." A Moorish girl went by dressed in a neatly tailored gray jellaba, European style high-heeled shoes, and a pinkish silk veil so transparent that you could see she wore lipstick. Very provocative, dark eyes can be over a veil. We both looked after her. I said, "Or, here's another one. Suppose you have a very advanced civilization on, say, Mars." "Not Mars. No air, and too bloody dry to support life." "Don't interrupt, please," I said with mock severity. "This is a very old civilization and as the planet began to lose its water and air, it withdrew underground. Uses hydroponics and so forth, husbands its water and air. Isn't that what we'd do, in a few million years, if Earth lost its water and air?" "I suppose so," he said. "Anyway, what about them?" "Well, they observe how man is going through a scientific boom, an industrial boom, a population boom. A boom, period. Any day now he's going to have practical space ships. Meanwhile, he's also got the H-Bomb and the way he beats the drums on both sides of the Curtain, he's not against using it, if he could get away with it." Paul said, "I got it. So they're scared and are keeping an eye on us. That's an old one. I've read that a dozen times, dished up different." I shifted my shoulders. "Well, it's one possibility." "I got a better one. How's this. There's this alien life form that's way ahead of us. Their civilization is so old that they don't have any records of when it began and how it was in the early days. They've gone beyond things like wars and depressions and revolutions, and greed for power or any of these things giving us a bad time here on Earth. They're all like scholars, get it? And some of them are pretty jolly well taken by Earth, especially the way we are right now, with all the problems, get it? Things developing so fast we don't know where we're going or how we're going to get there." I finished my beer and clapped my hands for Mouley. "How do you mean, where we're going ?" "Well, take half the countries in the world today. They're trying to industrialize, modernize, catch up with the advanced countries. Look at Egypt, and Israel, and India and China, and Yugoslavia and Brazil, and all the rest. Trying to drag themselves up to the level of the advanced countries, and all using different methods of doing it. But look at the so-called advanced countries. Up to their bottoms in problems. Juvenile delinquents, climbing crime and suicide rates, the loony-bins full of the balmy, unemployed, threat of war, spending all their money on armaments instead of things like schools. All the bloody mess of it. Why, a man from Mars would be fascinated, like." Mouley came shuffling up in his babouche slippers and we both ordered another schooner of beer. Paul said seriously, "You know, there's only one big snag in this sort of talk. I've sorted the whole thing out before, and you always come up against this brick wall. Where are they, these observers, or scholars, or spies or whatever they are? Sooner or later we'd nab one of them. You know, Scotland Yard, or the F.B.I., or Russia's secret police, or the French Sûreté, or Interpol. This world is so deep in police, counter-espionage outfits and security agents that an alien would slip up in time, no matter how much he'd been trained. Sooner or later, he'd slip up, and they'd nab him." I shook my head. "Not necessarily. The first time I ever considered this possibility, it seemed to me that such an alien would base himself in London or New York. Somewhere where he could use the libraries for research, get the daily newspapers and the magazines. Be right in the center of things. But now I don't think so. I think he'd be right here in Tangier." "Why Tangier?" "It's the one town in the world where anything goes. Nobody gives a damn about you or your affairs. For instance, I've known you a year or more now, and I haven't the slightest idea of how you make your living." "That's right," Paul admitted. "In this town you seldom even ask a man where's he's from. He can be British, a White Russian, a Basque or a Sikh and nobody could care less. Where are you from, Rupert?" "California," I told him. "No, you're not," he grinned. I was taken aback. "What do you mean?" "I felt your mind probe back a few minutes ago when I was talking about Scotland Yard or the F.B.I. possibly flushing an alien. Telepathy is a sense not trained by the humanoids. If they had it, your job—and mine—would be considerably more difficult. Let's face it, in spite of these human bodies we're disguised in, neither of us is humanoid. Where are you really from, Rupert?" "Aldebaran," I said. "How about you?" "Deneb," he told me, shaking. We had a laugh and ordered another beer. "What're you doing here on Earth?" I asked him. "Researching for one of our meat trusts. We're protein eaters. Humanoid flesh is considered quite a delicacy. How about you?" "Scouting the place for thrill tourists. My job is to go around to these backward cultures and help stir up inter-tribal, or international, conflicts—all according to how advanced they are. Then our tourists come in—well shielded, of course—and get their kicks watching it." Paul frowned. "That sort of practice could spoil an awful lot of good meat." THE END Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Amazing Stories December 1960. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note.

They are both aliens

They are both lonely

They are both have disdain for Tangier

They are both espionage agents

26957_MIRU64C4_1

What is the star mother's attitude toward space exploration? (leave it alone) she misses her son

STAR MOTHER By ROBERT F. YOUNG A touching story of the most enduring love in all eternity. That night her son was the first star. She stood motionless in the garden, one hand pressed against her heart, watching him rise above the fields where he had played as a boy, where he had worked as a young man; and she wondered whether he was thinking of those fields now, whether he was thinking of her standing alone in the April night with her memories; whether he was thinking of the verandahed house behind her, with its empty rooms and silent halls, that once upon a time had been his birthplace. Higher still and higher he rose in the southern sky, and then, when he had reached his zenith, he dropped swiftly down past the dark edge of the Earth and disappeared from sight. A boy grown up too soon, riding round and round the world on a celestial carousel, encased in an airtight metal capsule in an airtight metal chariot ... Why don't they leave the stars alone? she thought. Why don't they leave the stars to God? The general's second telegram came early the next morning: Explorer XII doing splendidly. Expect to bring your son down sometime tomorrow . She went about her work as usual, collecting the eggs and allocating them in their cardboard boxes, then setting off in the station wagon on her Tuesday morning run. She had expected a deluge of questions from her customers. She was not disappointed. "Is Terry really way up there all alone, Martha?" "Aren't you scared , Martha?" "I do hope they can get him back down all right, Martha." She supposed it must have given them quite a turn to have their egg woman change into a star mother overnight. She hadn't expected the TV interview, though, and she would have avoided it if it had been politely possible. But what could she do when the line of cars and trucks pulled into the drive and the technicians got out and started setting up their equipment in the backyard? What could she say when the suave young man came up to her and said, "We want you to know that we're all very proud of your boy up there, ma'am, and we hope you'll do us the honor of answering a few questions." Most of the questions concerned Terry, as was fitting. From the way the suave young man asked them, though, she got the impression that he was trying to prove that her son was just like any other average American boy, and such just didn't happen to be the case. But whenever she opened her mouth to mention, say, how he used to study till all hours of the night, or how difficult it had been for him to make friends because of his shyness, or the fact that he had never gone out for football—whenever she started to mention any of these things, the suave young man was in great haste to interrupt her and to twist her words, by requestioning, into a different meaning altogether, till Terry's behavior pattern seemed to coincide with the behavior pattern which the suave young man apparently considered the norm, but which, if followed, Martha was sure, would produce not young men bent on exploring space but young men bent on exploring trivia. A few of the questions concerned herself: Was Terry her only child? ("Yes.") What had happened to her husband? ("He was killed in the Korean War.") What did she think of the new law granting star mothers top priority on any and all information relating to their sons? ("I think it's a fine law ... It's too bad they couldn't have shown similar humanity toward the war mothers of World War II.") It was late in the afternoon by the time the TV crew got everything repacked into their cars and trucks and made their departure. Martha fixed herself a light supper, then donned an old suede jacket of Terry's and went out into the garden to wait for the sun to go down. According to the time table the general had outlined in his first telegram, Terry's first Tuesday night passage wasn't due to occur till 9:05. But it seemed only right that she should be outside when the stars started to come out. Presently they did, and she watched them wink on, one by one, in the deepening darkness of the sky. She'd never been much of a one for the stars; most of her life she'd been much too busy on Earth to bother with things celestial. She could remember, when she was much younger and Bill was courting her, looking up at the moon sometimes; and once in a while, when a star fell, making a wish. But this was different. It was different because now she had a personal interest in the sky, a new affinity with its myriad inhabitants. And how bright they became when you kept looking at them! They seemed to come alive, almost, pulsing brilliantly down out of the blackness of the night ... And they were different colors, too, she noticed with a start. Some of them were blue and some were red, others were yellow ... green ... orange ... It grew cold in the April garden and she could see her breath. There was a strange crispness, a strange clarity about the night, that she had never known before ... She glanced at her watch, was astonished to see that the hands indicated two minutes after nine. Where had the time gone? Tremulously she faced the southern horizon ... and saw her Terry appear in his shining chariot, riding up the star-pebbled path of his orbit, a star in his own right, dropping swiftly now, down, down, and out of sight beyond the dark wheeling mass of the Earth ... She took a deep, proud breath, realized that she was wildly waving her hand and let it fall slowly to her side. Make a wish! she thought, like a little girl, and she wished him pleasant dreams and a safe return and wrapped the wish in all her love and cast it starward. Sometime tomorrow, the general's telegram had said— That meant sometime today! She rose with the sun and fed the chickens, fixed and ate her breakfast, collected the eggs and put them in their cardboard boxes, then started out on her Wednesday morning run. "My land, Martha, I don't see how you stand it with him way up there! Doesn't it get on your nerves ?" ("Yes ... Yes, it does.") "Martha, when are they bringing him back down?" ("Today ... Today !") "It must be wonderful being a star mother, Martha." ("Yes, it is—in a way.") Wonderful ... and terrible. If only he can last it out for a few more hours, she thought. If only they can bring him down safe and sound. Then the vigil will be over, and some other mother can take over the awesome responsibility of having a son become a star— If only ... The general's third telegram arrived that afternoon: Regret to inform you that meteorite impact on satellite hull severely damaged capsule-detachment mechanism, making ejection impossible. Will make every effort to find another means of accomplishing your son's return. Terry!— See the little boy playing beneath the maple tree, moving his tiny cars up and down the tiny streets of his make-believe village; the little boy, his fuzz of hair gold in the sunlight, his cherub-cheeks pink in the summer wind— Terry!— Up the lane the blue-denimed young man walks, swinging his thin tanned arms, his long legs making near-grownup strides over the sun-seared grass; the sky blue and bright behind him, the song of cicada rising and falling in the hazy September air— Terry ... —probably won't get a chance to write you again before take-off, but don't worry, Ma. The Explorer XII is the greatest bird they ever built. Nothing short of a direct meteorite hit can hurt it, and the odds are a million to one ... Why don't they leave the stars alone? Why don't they leave the stars to God? The afternoon shadows lengthened on the lawn and the sun grew red and swollen over the western hills. Martha fixed supper, tried to eat, and couldn't. After a while, when the light began to fade, she slipped into Terry's jacket and went outside. Slowly the sky darkened and the stars began to appear. At length her star appeared, but its swift passage blurred before her eyes. Tires crunched on the gravel then, and headlights washed the darkness from the drive. A car door slammed. Martha did not move. Please God , she thought, let it be Terry , even though she knew that it couldn't possibly be Terry. Footsteps sounded behind her, paused. Someone coughed softly. She turned then— "Good evening, ma'am." She saw the circlet of stars on the gray epaulet; she saw the stern handsome face; she saw the dark tired eyes. And she knew. Even before he spoke again, she knew— "The same meteorite that damaged the ejection mechanism, ma'am. It penetrated the capsule, too. We didn't find out till just a while ago—but there was nothing we could have done anyway ... Are you all right, ma'am?" "Yes. I'm all right." "I wanted to express my regrets personally. I know how you must feel." "It's all right." "We will, of course, make every effort to bring back his ... remains ... so that he can have a fitting burial on Earth." "No," she said. "I beg your pardon, ma'am?" She raised her eyes to the patch of sky where her son had passed in his shining metal sarcophagus. Sirius blossomed there, blue-white and beautiful. She raised her eyes still higher—and beheld the vast parterre of Orion with its central motif of vivid forget-me-nots, its far-flung blooms of Betelguese and Rigel, of Bellatrix and Saiph ... And higher yet—and there flamed the exquisite flower beds of Taurus and Gemini, there burgeoned the riotous wreath of the Crab; there lay the pulsing petals of the Pleiades ... And down the ecliptic garden path, wafted by a stellar breeze, drifted the ocher rose of Mars ... "No," she said again. The general had raised his eyes, too; now, slowly, he lowered them. "I think I understand, ma'am. And I'm glad that's the way you want it ... The stars are beautiful tonight, aren't they." "More beautiful than they've ever been," she said. After the general had gone, she looked up once more at the vast and variegated garden of the sky where her son lay buried, then she turned and walked slowly back to the memoried house. THE END Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Amazing Stories January 1959. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note.

She feels ambivalent and thinks the government's money is better spent elsewhere

She wishes that humans and governments would abandon their space-related pursuits

She obsesses over learning all she can about new stars and planets

She displays strong curiosity about how discoveries could benefit life on Earth

26957_MIRU64C4_2

What is Terry's mother's attitude toward the suave reporters?

STAR MOTHER By ROBERT F. YOUNG A touching story of the most enduring love in all eternity. That night her son was the first star. She stood motionless in the garden, one hand pressed against her heart, watching him rise above the fields where he had played as a boy, where he had worked as a young man; and she wondered whether he was thinking of those fields now, whether he was thinking of her standing alone in the April night with her memories; whether he was thinking of the verandahed house behind her, with its empty rooms and silent halls, that once upon a time had been his birthplace. Higher still and higher he rose in the southern sky, and then, when he had reached his zenith, he dropped swiftly down past the dark edge of the Earth and disappeared from sight. A boy grown up too soon, riding round and round the world on a celestial carousel, encased in an airtight metal capsule in an airtight metal chariot ... Why don't they leave the stars alone? she thought. Why don't they leave the stars to God? The general's second telegram came early the next morning: Explorer XII doing splendidly. Expect to bring your son down sometime tomorrow . She went about her work as usual, collecting the eggs and allocating them in their cardboard boxes, then setting off in the station wagon on her Tuesday morning run. She had expected a deluge of questions from her customers. She was not disappointed. "Is Terry really way up there all alone, Martha?" "Aren't you scared , Martha?" "I do hope they can get him back down all right, Martha." She supposed it must have given them quite a turn to have their egg woman change into a star mother overnight. She hadn't expected the TV interview, though, and she would have avoided it if it had been politely possible. But what could she do when the line of cars and trucks pulled into the drive and the technicians got out and started setting up their equipment in the backyard? What could she say when the suave young man came up to her and said, "We want you to know that we're all very proud of your boy up there, ma'am, and we hope you'll do us the honor of answering a few questions." Most of the questions concerned Terry, as was fitting. From the way the suave young man asked them, though, she got the impression that he was trying to prove that her son was just like any other average American boy, and such just didn't happen to be the case. But whenever she opened her mouth to mention, say, how he used to study till all hours of the night, or how difficult it had been for him to make friends because of his shyness, or the fact that he had never gone out for football—whenever she started to mention any of these things, the suave young man was in great haste to interrupt her and to twist her words, by requestioning, into a different meaning altogether, till Terry's behavior pattern seemed to coincide with the behavior pattern which the suave young man apparently considered the norm, but which, if followed, Martha was sure, would produce not young men bent on exploring space but young men bent on exploring trivia. A few of the questions concerned herself: Was Terry her only child? ("Yes.") What had happened to her husband? ("He was killed in the Korean War.") What did she think of the new law granting star mothers top priority on any and all information relating to their sons? ("I think it's a fine law ... It's too bad they couldn't have shown similar humanity toward the war mothers of World War II.") It was late in the afternoon by the time the TV crew got everything repacked into their cars and trucks and made their departure. Martha fixed herself a light supper, then donned an old suede jacket of Terry's and went out into the garden to wait for the sun to go down. According to the time table the general had outlined in his first telegram, Terry's first Tuesday night passage wasn't due to occur till 9:05. But it seemed only right that she should be outside when the stars started to come out. Presently they did, and she watched them wink on, one by one, in the deepening darkness of the sky. She'd never been much of a one for the stars; most of her life she'd been much too busy on Earth to bother with things celestial. She could remember, when she was much younger and Bill was courting her, looking up at the moon sometimes; and once in a while, when a star fell, making a wish. But this was different. It was different because now she had a personal interest in the sky, a new affinity with its myriad inhabitants. And how bright they became when you kept looking at them! They seemed to come alive, almost, pulsing brilliantly down out of the blackness of the night ... And they were different colors, too, she noticed with a start. Some of them were blue and some were red, others were yellow ... green ... orange ... It grew cold in the April garden and she could see her breath. There was a strange crispness, a strange clarity about the night, that she had never known before ... She glanced at her watch, was astonished to see that the hands indicated two minutes after nine. Where had the time gone? Tremulously she faced the southern horizon ... and saw her Terry appear in his shining chariot, riding up the star-pebbled path of his orbit, a star in his own right, dropping swiftly now, down, down, and out of sight beyond the dark wheeling mass of the Earth ... She took a deep, proud breath, realized that she was wildly waving her hand and let it fall slowly to her side. Make a wish! she thought, like a little girl, and she wished him pleasant dreams and a safe return and wrapped the wish in all her love and cast it starward. Sometime tomorrow, the general's telegram had said— That meant sometime today! She rose with the sun and fed the chickens, fixed and ate her breakfast, collected the eggs and put them in their cardboard boxes, then started out on her Wednesday morning run. "My land, Martha, I don't see how you stand it with him way up there! Doesn't it get on your nerves ?" ("Yes ... Yes, it does.") "Martha, when are they bringing him back down?" ("Today ... Today !") "It must be wonderful being a star mother, Martha." ("Yes, it is—in a way.") Wonderful ... and terrible. If only he can last it out for a few more hours, she thought. If only they can bring him down safe and sound. Then the vigil will be over, and some other mother can take over the awesome responsibility of having a son become a star— If only ... The general's third telegram arrived that afternoon: Regret to inform you that meteorite impact on satellite hull severely damaged capsule-detachment mechanism, making ejection impossible. Will make every effort to find another means of accomplishing your son's return. Terry!— See the little boy playing beneath the maple tree, moving his tiny cars up and down the tiny streets of his make-believe village; the little boy, his fuzz of hair gold in the sunlight, his cherub-cheeks pink in the summer wind— Terry!— Up the lane the blue-denimed young man walks, swinging his thin tanned arms, his long legs making near-grownup strides over the sun-seared grass; the sky blue and bright behind him, the song of cicada rising and falling in the hazy September air— Terry ... —probably won't get a chance to write you again before take-off, but don't worry, Ma. The Explorer XII is the greatest bird they ever built. Nothing short of a direct meteorite hit can hurt it, and the odds are a million to one ... Why don't they leave the stars alone? Why don't they leave the stars to God? The afternoon shadows lengthened on the lawn and the sun grew red and swollen over the western hills. Martha fixed supper, tried to eat, and couldn't. After a while, when the light began to fade, she slipped into Terry's jacket and went outside. Slowly the sky darkened and the stars began to appear. At length her star appeared, but its swift passage blurred before her eyes. Tires crunched on the gravel then, and headlights washed the darkness from the drive. A car door slammed. Martha did not move. Please God , she thought, let it be Terry , even though she knew that it couldn't possibly be Terry. Footsteps sounded behind her, paused. Someone coughed softly. She turned then— "Good evening, ma'am." She saw the circlet of stars on the gray epaulet; she saw the stern handsome face; she saw the dark tired eyes. And she knew. Even before he spoke again, she knew— "The same meteorite that damaged the ejection mechanism, ma'am. It penetrated the capsule, too. We didn't find out till just a while ago—but there was nothing we could have done anyway ... Are you all right, ma'am?" "Yes. I'm all right." "I wanted to express my regrets personally. I know how you must feel." "It's all right." "We will, of course, make every effort to bring back his ... remains ... so that he can have a fitting burial on Earth." "No," she said. "I beg your pardon, ma'am?" She raised her eyes to the patch of sky where her son had passed in his shining metal sarcophagus. Sirius blossomed there, blue-white and beautiful. She raised her eyes still higher—and beheld the vast parterre of Orion with its central motif of vivid forget-me-nots, its far-flung blooms of Betelguese and Rigel, of Bellatrix and Saiph ... And higher yet—and there flamed the exquisite flower beds of Taurus and Gemini, there burgeoned the riotous wreath of the Crab; there lay the pulsing petals of the Pleiades ... And down the ecliptic garden path, wafted by a stellar breeze, drifted the ocher rose of Mars ... "No," she said again. The general had raised his eyes, too; now, slowly, he lowered them. "I think I understand, ma'am. And I'm glad that's the way you want it ... The stars are beautiful tonight, aren't they." "More beautiful than they've ever been," she said. After the general had gone, she looked up once more at the vast and variegated garden of the sky where her son lay buried, then she turned and walked slowly back to the memoried house. THE END Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Amazing Stories January 1959. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note.

She is frustrated with their tendency to fit her interview responses to a narrative

She is angry that they are trespassing on her property

She is grateful for their interest in her son's exploration

She is hopeful that they will accurately represent her experience as a star mother

26957_MIRU64C4_3

Why is Terry's mother able to learn so much about his progress in space?

STAR MOTHER By ROBERT F. YOUNG A touching story of the most enduring love in all eternity. That night her son was the first star. She stood motionless in the garden, one hand pressed against her heart, watching him rise above the fields where he had played as a boy, where he had worked as a young man; and she wondered whether he was thinking of those fields now, whether he was thinking of her standing alone in the April night with her memories; whether he was thinking of the verandahed house behind her, with its empty rooms and silent halls, that once upon a time had been his birthplace. Higher still and higher he rose in the southern sky, and then, when he had reached his zenith, he dropped swiftly down past the dark edge of the Earth and disappeared from sight. A boy grown up too soon, riding round and round the world on a celestial carousel, encased in an airtight metal capsule in an airtight metal chariot ... Why don't they leave the stars alone? she thought. Why don't they leave the stars to God? The general's second telegram came early the next morning: Explorer XII doing splendidly. Expect to bring your son down sometime tomorrow . She went about her work as usual, collecting the eggs and allocating them in their cardboard boxes, then setting off in the station wagon on her Tuesday morning run. She had expected a deluge of questions from her customers. She was not disappointed. "Is Terry really way up there all alone, Martha?" "Aren't you scared , Martha?" "I do hope they can get him back down all right, Martha." She supposed it must have given them quite a turn to have their egg woman change into a star mother overnight. She hadn't expected the TV interview, though, and she would have avoided it if it had been politely possible. But what could she do when the line of cars and trucks pulled into the drive and the technicians got out and started setting up their equipment in the backyard? What could she say when the suave young man came up to her and said, "We want you to know that we're all very proud of your boy up there, ma'am, and we hope you'll do us the honor of answering a few questions." Most of the questions concerned Terry, as was fitting. From the way the suave young man asked them, though, she got the impression that he was trying to prove that her son was just like any other average American boy, and such just didn't happen to be the case. But whenever she opened her mouth to mention, say, how he used to study till all hours of the night, or how difficult it had been for him to make friends because of his shyness, or the fact that he had never gone out for football—whenever she started to mention any of these things, the suave young man was in great haste to interrupt her and to twist her words, by requestioning, into a different meaning altogether, till Terry's behavior pattern seemed to coincide with the behavior pattern which the suave young man apparently considered the norm, but which, if followed, Martha was sure, would produce not young men bent on exploring space but young men bent on exploring trivia. A few of the questions concerned herself: Was Terry her only child? ("Yes.") What had happened to her husband? ("He was killed in the Korean War.") What did she think of the new law granting star mothers top priority on any and all information relating to their sons? ("I think it's a fine law ... It's too bad they couldn't have shown similar humanity toward the war mothers of World War II.") It was late in the afternoon by the time the TV crew got everything repacked into their cars and trucks and made their departure. Martha fixed herself a light supper, then donned an old suede jacket of Terry's and went out into the garden to wait for the sun to go down. According to the time table the general had outlined in his first telegram, Terry's first Tuesday night passage wasn't due to occur till 9:05. But it seemed only right that she should be outside when the stars started to come out. Presently they did, and she watched them wink on, one by one, in the deepening darkness of the sky. She'd never been much of a one for the stars; most of her life she'd been much too busy on Earth to bother with things celestial. She could remember, when she was much younger and Bill was courting her, looking up at the moon sometimes; and once in a while, when a star fell, making a wish. But this was different. It was different because now she had a personal interest in the sky, a new affinity with its myriad inhabitants. And how bright they became when you kept looking at them! They seemed to come alive, almost, pulsing brilliantly down out of the blackness of the night ... And they were different colors, too, she noticed with a start. Some of them were blue and some were red, others were yellow ... green ... orange ... It grew cold in the April garden and she could see her breath. There was a strange crispness, a strange clarity about the night, that she had never known before ... She glanced at her watch, was astonished to see that the hands indicated two minutes after nine. Where had the time gone? Tremulously she faced the southern horizon ... and saw her Terry appear in his shining chariot, riding up the star-pebbled path of his orbit, a star in his own right, dropping swiftly now, down, down, and out of sight beyond the dark wheeling mass of the Earth ... She took a deep, proud breath, realized that she was wildly waving her hand and let it fall slowly to her side. Make a wish! she thought, like a little girl, and she wished him pleasant dreams and a safe return and wrapped the wish in all her love and cast it starward. Sometime tomorrow, the general's telegram had said— That meant sometime today! She rose with the sun and fed the chickens, fixed and ate her breakfast, collected the eggs and put them in their cardboard boxes, then started out on her Wednesday morning run. "My land, Martha, I don't see how you stand it with him way up there! Doesn't it get on your nerves ?" ("Yes ... Yes, it does.") "Martha, when are they bringing him back down?" ("Today ... Today !") "It must be wonderful being a star mother, Martha." ("Yes, it is—in a way.") Wonderful ... and terrible. If only he can last it out for a few more hours, she thought. If only they can bring him down safe and sound. Then the vigil will be over, and some other mother can take over the awesome responsibility of having a son become a star— If only ... The general's third telegram arrived that afternoon: Regret to inform you that meteorite impact on satellite hull severely damaged capsule-detachment mechanism, making ejection impossible. Will make every effort to find another means of accomplishing your son's return. Terry!— See the little boy playing beneath the maple tree, moving his tiny cars up and down the tiny streets of his make-believe village; the little boy, his fuzz of hair gold in the sunlight, his cherub-cheeks pink in the summer wind— Terry!— Up the lane the blue-denimed young man walks, swinging his thin tanned arms, his long legs making near-grownup strides over the sun-seared grass; the sky blue and bright behind him, the song of cicada rising and falling in the hazy September air— Terry ... —probably won't get a chance to write you again before take-off, but don't worry, Ma. The Explorer XII is the greatest bird they ever built. Nothing short of a direct meteorite hit can hurt it, and the odds are a million to one ... Why don't they leave the stars alone? Why don't they leave the stars to God? The afternoon shadows lengthened on the lawn and the sun grew red and swollen over the western hills. Martha fixed supper, tried to eat, and couldn't. After a while, when the light began to fade, she slipped into Terry's jacket and went outside. Slowly the sky darkened and the stars began to appear. At length her star appeared, but its swift passage blurred before her eyes. Tires crunched on the gravel then, and headlights washed the darkness from the drive. A car door slammed. Martha did not move. Please God , she thought, let it be Terry , even though she knew that it couldn't possibly be Terry. Footsteps sounded behind her, paused. Someone coughed softly. She turned then— "Good evening, ma'am." She saw the circlet of stars on the gray epaulet; she saw the stern handsome face; she saw the dark tired eyes. And she knew. Even before he spoke again, she knew— "The same meteorite that damaged the ejection mechanism, ma'am. It penetrated the capsule, too. We didn't find out till just a while ago—but there was nothing we could have done anyway ... Are you all right, ma'am?" "Yes. I'm all right." "I wanted to express my regrets personally. I know how you must feel." "It's all right." "We will, of course, make every effort to bring back his ... remains ... so that he can have a fitting burial on Earth." "No," she said. "I beg your pardon, ma'am?" She raised her eyes to the patch of sky where her son had passed in his shining metal sarcophagus. Sirius blossomed there, blue-white and beautiful. She raised her eyes still higher—and beheld the vast parterre of Orion with its central motif of vivid forget-me-nots, its far-flung blooms of Betelguese and Rigel, of Bellatrix and Saiph ... And higher yet—and there flamed the exquisite flower beds of Taurus and Gemini, there burgeoned the riotous wreath of the Crab; there lay the pulsing petals of the Pleiades ... And down the ecliptic garden path, wafted by a stellar breeze, drifted the ocher rose of Mars ... "No," she said again. The general had raised his eyes, too; now, slowly, he lowered them. "I think I understand, ma'am. And I'm glad that's the way you want it ... The stars are beautiful tonight, aren't they." "More beautiful than they've ever been," she said. After the general had gone, she looked up once more at the vast and variegated garden of the sky where her son lay buried, then she turned and walked slowly back to the memoried house. THE END Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Amazing Stories January 1959. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note.

A new law allows women like Terry to receive regular updates on their children's journeys in space

Star mothers have access to their sons' digital journal entries while they are orbiting in space

Terry stipulated that his mother be informed of his progress if he agreed to volunteer for the space mission

The general is Terry's father, Bill, and he breaks the law in informing Terry's mother of Terry's progress

26957_MIRU64C4_4

How does Terry's mother's attitude toward celestial matters change as she grows older?

STAR MOTHER By ROBERT F. YOUNG A touching story of the most enduring love in all eternity. That night her son was the first star. She stood motionless in the garden, one hand pressed against her heart, watching him rise above the fields where he had played as a boy, where he had worked as a young man; and she wondered whether he was thinking of those fields now, whether he was thinking of her standing alone in the April night with her memories; whether he was thinking of the verandahed house behind her, with its empty rooms and silent halls, that once upon a time had been his birthplace. Higher still and higher he rose in the southern sky, and then, when he had reached his zenith, he dropped swiftly down past the dark edge of the Earth and disappeared from sight. A boy grown up too soon, riding round and round the world on a celestial carousel, encased in an airtight metal capsule in an airtight metal chariot ... Why don't they leave the stars alone? she thought. Why don't they leave the stars to God? The general's second telegram came early the next morning: Explorer XII doing splendidly. Expect to bring your son down sometime tomorrow . She went about her work as usual, collecting the eggs and allocating them in their cardboard boxes, then setting off in the station wagon on her Tuesday morning run. She had expected a deluge of questions from her customers. She was not disappointed. "Is Terry really way up there all alone, Martha?" "Aren't you scared , Martha?" "I do hope they can get him back down all right, Martha." She supposed it must have given them quite a turn to have their egg woman change into a star mother overnight. She hadn't expected the TV interview, though, and she would have avoided it if it had been politely possible. But what could she do when the line of cars and trucks pulled into the drive and the technicians got out and started setting up their equipment in the backyard? What could she say when the suave young man came up to her and said, "We want you to know that we're all very proud of your boy up there, ma'am, and we hope you'll do us the honor of answering a few questions." Most of the questions concerned Terry, as was fitting. From the way the suave young man asked them, though, she got the impression that he was trying to prove that her son was just like any other average American boy, and such just didn't happen to be the case. But whenever she opened her mouth to mention, say, how he used to study till all hours of the night, or how difficult it had been for him to make friends because of his shyness, or the fact that he had never gone out for football—whenever she started to mention any of these things, the suave young man was in great haste to interrupt her and to twist her words, by requestioning, into a different meaning altogether, till Terry's behavior pattern seemed to coincide with the behavior pattern which the suave young man apparently considered the norm, but which, if followed, Martha was sure, would produce not young men bent on exploring space but young men bent on exploring trivia. A few of the questions concerned herself: Was Terry her only child? ("Yes.") What had happened to her husband? ("He was killed in the Korean War.") What did she think of the new law granting star mothers top priority on any and all information relating to their sons? ("I think it's a fine law ... It's too bad they couldn't have shown similar humanity toward the war mothers of World War II.") It was late in the afternoon by the time the TV crew got everything repacked into their cars and trucks and made their departure. Martha fixed herself a light supper, then donned an old suede jacket of Terry's and went out into the garden to wait for the sun to go down. According to the time table the general had outlined in his first telegram, Terry's first Tuesday night passage wasn't due to occur till 9:05. But it seemed only right that she should be outside when the stars started to come out. Presently they did, and she watched them wink on, one by one, in the deepening darkness of the sky. She'd never been much of a one for the stars; most of her life she'd been much too busy on Earth to bother with things celestial. She could remember, when she was much younger and Bill was courting her, looking up at the moon sometimes; and once in a while, when a star fell, making a wish. But this was different. It was different because now she had a personal interest in the sky, a new affinity with its myriad inhabitants. And how bright they became when you kept looking at them! They seemed to come alive, almost, pulsing brilliantly down out of the blackness of the night ... And they were different colors, too, she noticed with a start. Some of them were blue and some were red, others were yellow ... green ... orange ... It grew cold in the April garden and she could see her breath. There was a strange crispness, a strange clarity about the night, that she had never known before ... She glanced at her watch, was astonished to see that the hands indicated two minutes after nine. Where had the time gone? Tremulously she faced the southern horizon ... and saw her Terry appear in his shining chariot, riding up the star-pebbled path of his orbit, a star in his own right, dropping swiftly now, down, down, and out of sight beyond the dark wheeling mass of the Earth ... She took a deep, proud breath, realized that she was wildly waving her hand and let it fall slowly to her side. Make a wish! she thought, like a little girl, and she wished him pleasant dreams and a safe return and wrapped the wish in all her love and cast it starward. Sometime tomorrow, the general's telegram had said— That meant sometime today! She rose with the sun and fed the chickens, fixed and ate her breakfast, collected the eggs and put them in their cardboard boxes, then started out on her Wednesday morning run. "My land, Martha, I don't see how you stand it with him way up there! Doesn't it get on your nerves ?" ("Yes ... Yes, it does.") "Martha, when are they bringing him back down?" ("Today ... Today !") "It must be wonderful being a star mother, Martha." ("Yes, it is—in a way.") Wonderful ... and terrible. If only he can last it out for a few more hours, she thought. If only they can bring him down safe and sound. Then the vigil will be over, and some other mother can take over the awesome responsibility of having a son become a star— If only ... The general's third telegram arrived that afternoon: Regret to inform you that meteorite impact on satellite hull severely damaged capsule-detachment mechanism, making ejection impossible. Will make every effort to find another means of accomplishing your son's return. Terry!— See the little boy playing beneath the maple tree, moving his tiny cars up and down the tiny streets of his make-believe village; the little boy, his fuzz of hair gold in the sunlight, his cherub-cheeks pink in the summer wind— Terry!— Up the lane the blue-denimed young man walks, swinging his thin tanned arms, his long legs making near-grownup strides over the sun-seared grass; the sky blue and bright behind him, the song of cicada rising and falling in the hazy September air— Terry ... —probably won't get a chance to write you again before take-off, but don't worry, Ma. The Explorer XII is the greatest bird they ever built. Nothing short of a direct meteorite hit can hurt it, and the odds are a million to one ... Why don't they leave the stars alone? Why don't they leave the stars to God? The afternoon shadows lengthened on the lawn and the sun grew red and swollen over the western hills. Martha fixed supper, tried to eat, and couldn't. After a while, when the light began to fade, she slipped into Terry's jacket and went outside. Slowly the sky darkened and the stars began to appear. At length her star appeared, but its swift passage blurred before her eyes. Tires crunched on the gravel then, and headlights washed the darkness from the drive. A car door slammed. Martha did not move. Please God , she thought, let it be Terry , even though she knew that it couldn't possibly be Terry. Footsteps sounded behind her, paused. Someone coughed softly. She turned then— "Good evening, ma'am." She saw the circlet of stars on the gray epaulet; she saw the stern handsome face; she saw the dark tired eyes. And she knew. Even before he spoke again, she knew— "The same meteorite that damaged the ejection mechanism, ma'am. It penetrated the capsule, too. We didn't find out till just a while ago—but there was nothing we could have done anyway ... Are you all right, ma'am?" "Yes. I'm all right." "I wanted to express my regrets personally. I know how you must feel." "It's all right." "We will, of course, make every effort to bring back his ... remains ... so that he can have a fitting burial on Earth." "No," she said. "I beg your pardon, ma'am?" She raised her eyes to the patch of sky where her son had passed in his shining metal sarcophagus. Sirius blossomed there, blue-white and beautiful. She raised her eyes still higher—and beheld the vast parterre of Orion with its central motif of vivid forget-me-nots, its far-flung blooms of Betelguese and Rigel, of Bellatrix and Saiph ... And higher yet—and there flamed the exquisite flower beds of Taurus and Gemini, there burgeoned the riotous wreath of the Crab; there lay the pulsing petals of the Pleiades ... And down the ecliptic garden path, wafted by a stellar breeze, drifted the ocher rose of Mars ... "No," she said again. The general had raised his eyes, too; now, slowly, he lowered them. "I think I understand, ma'am. And I'm glad that's the way you want it ... The stars are beautiful tonight, aren't they." "More beautiful than they've ever been," she said. After the general had gone, she looked up once more at the vast and variegated garden of the sky where her son lay buried, then she turned and walked slowly back to the memoried house. THE END Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Amazing Stories January 1959. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note.

She becomes infuriated at her younger self for engaging in such trivial behaviors as wishing upon a star

She feels more of a personal connection to the stars

She believes more in the 'magic' of wishing upon a star

She longs to venture up into space in order to understand her own son's affinity for it

26957_MIRU64C4_5

In what what does Terry unknowingly foreshadow his own death?

STAR MOTHER By ROBERT F. YOUNG A touching story of the most enduring love in all eternity. That night her son was the first star. She stood motionless in the garden, one hand pressed against her heart, watching him rise above the fields where he had played as a boy, where he had worked as a young man; and she wondered whether he was thinking of those fields now, whether he was thinking of her standing alone in the April night with her memories; whether he was thinking of the verandahed house behind her, with its empty rooms and silent halls, that once upon a time had been his birthplace. Higher still and higher he rose in the southern sky, and then, when he had reached his zenith, he dropped swiftly down past the dark edge of the Earth and disappeared from sight. A boy grown up too soon, riding round and round the world on a celestial carousel, encased in an airtight metal capsule in an airtight metal chariot ... Why don't they leave the stars alone? she thought. Why don't they leave the stars to God? The general's second telegram came early the next morning: Explorer XII doing splendidly. Expect to bring your son down sometime tomorrow . She went about her work as usual, collecting the eggs and allocating them in their cardboard boxes, then setting off in the station wagon on her Tuesday morning run. She had expected a deluge of questions from her customers. She was not disappointed. "Is Terry really way up there all alone, Martha?" "Aren't you scared , Martha?" "I do hope they can get him back down all right, Martha." She supposed it must have given them quite a turn to have their egg woman change into a star mother overnight. She hadn't expected the TV interview, though, and she would have avoided it if it had been politely possible. But what could she do when the line of cars and trucks pulled into the drive and the technicians got out and started setting up their equipment in the backyard? What could she say when the suave young man came up to her and said, "We want you to know that we're all very proud of your boy up there, ma'am, and we hope you'll do us the honor of answering a few questions." Most of the questions concerned Terry, as was fitting. From the way the suave young man asked them, though, she got the impression that he was trying to prove that her son was just like any other average American boy, and such just didn't happen to be the case. But whenever she opened her mouth to mention, say, how he used to study till all hours of the night, or how difficult it had been for him to make friends because of his shyness, or the fact that he had never gone out for football—whenever she started to mention any of these things, the suave young man was in great haste to interrupt her and to twist her words, by requestioning, into a different meaning altogether, till Terry's behavior pattern seemed to coincide with the behavior pattern which the suave young man apparently considered the norm, but which, if followed, Martha was sure, would produce not young men bent on exploring space but young men bent on exploring trivia. A few of the questions concerned herself: Was Terry her only child? ("Yes.") What had happened to her husband? ("He was killed in the Korean War.") What did she think of the new law granting star mothers top priority on any and all information relating to their sons? ("I think it's a fine law ... It's too bad they couldn't have shown similar humanity toward the war mothers of World War II.") It was late in the afternoon by the time the TV crew got everything repacked into their cars and trucks and made their departure. Martha fixed herself a light supper, then donned an old suede jacket of Terry's and went out into the garden to wait for the sun to go down. According to the time table the general had outlined in his first telegram, Terry's first Tuesday night passage wasn't due to occur till 9:05. But it seemed only right that she should be outside when the stars started to come out. Presently they did, and she watched them wink on, one by one, in the deepening darkness of the sky. She'd never been much of a one for the stars; most of her life she'd been much too busy on Earth to bother with things celestial. She could remember, when she was much younger and Bill was courting her, looking up at the moon sometimes; and once in a while, when a star fell, making a wish. But this was different. It was different because now she had a personal interest in the sky, a new affinity with its myriad inhabitants. And how bright they became when you kept looking at them! They seemed to come alive, almost, pulsing brilliantly down out of the blackness of the night ... And they were different colors, too, she noticed with a start. Some of them were blue and some were red, others were yellow ... green ... orange ... It grew cold in the April garden and she could see her breath. There was a strange crispness, a strange clarity about the night, that she had never known before ... She glanced at her watch, was astonished to see that the hands indicated two minutes after nine. Where had the time gone? Tremulously she faced the southern horizon ... and saw her Terry appear in his shining chariot, riding up the star-pebbled path of his orbit, a star in his own right, dropping swiftly now, down, down, and out of sight beyond the dark wheeling mass of the Earth ... She took a deep, proud breath, realized that she was wildly waving her hand and let it fall slowly to her side. Make a wish! she thought, like a little girl, and she wished him pleasant dreams and a safe return and wrapped the wish in all her love and cast it starward. Sometime tomorrow, the general's telegram had said— That meant sometime today! She rose with the sun and fed the chickens, fixed and ate her breakfast, collected the eggs and put them in their cardboard boxes, then started out on her Wednesday morning run. "My land, Martha, I don't see how you stand it with him way up there! Doesn't it get on your nerves ?" ("Yes ... Yes, it does.") "Martha, when are they bringing him back down?" ("Today ... Today !") "It must be wonderful being a star mother, Martha." ("Yes, it is—in a way.") Wonderful ... and terrible. If only he can last it out for a few more hours, she thought. If only they can bring him down safe and sound. Then the vigil will be over, and some other mother can take over the awesome responsibility of having a son become a star— If only ... The general's third telegram arrived that afternoon: Regret to inform you that meteorite impact on satellite hull severely damaged capsule-detachment mechanism, making ejection impossible. Will make every effort to find another means of accomplishing your son's return. Terry!— See the little boy playing beneath the maple tree, moving his tiny cars up and down the tiny streets of his make-believe village; the little boy, his fuzz of hair gold in the sunlight, his cherub-cheeks pink in the summer wind— Terry!— Up the lane the blue-denimed young man walks, swinging his thin tanned arms, his long legs making near-grownup strides over the sun-seared grass; the sky blue and bright behind him, the song of cicada rising and falling in the hazy September air— Terry ... —probably won't get a chance to write you again before take-off, but don't worry, Ma. The Explorer XII is the greatest bird they ever built. Nothing short of a direct meteorite hit can hurt it, and the odds are a million to one ... Why don't they leave the stars alone? Why don't they leave the stars to God? The afternoon shadows lengthened on the lawn and the sun grew red and swollen over the western hills. Martha fixed supper, tried to eat, and couldn't. After a while, when the light began to fade, she slipped into Terry's jacket and went outside. Slowly the sky darkened and the stars began to appear. At length her star appeared, but its swift passage blurred before her eyes. Tires crunched on the gravel then, and headlights washed the darkness from the drive. A car door slammed. Martha did not move. Please God , she thought, let it be Terry , even though she knew that it couldn't possibly be Terry. Footsteps sounded behind her, paused. Someone coughed softly. She turned then— "Good evening, ma'am." She saw the circlet of stars on the gray epaulet; she saw the stern handsome face; she saw the dark tired eyes. And she knew. Even before he spoke again, she knew— "The same meteorite that damaged the ejection mechanism, ma'am. It penetrated the capsule, too. We didn't find out till just a while ago—but there was nothing we could have done anyway ... Are you all right, ma'am?" "Yes. I'm all right." "I wanted to express my regrets personally. I know how you must feel." "It's all right." "We will, of course, make every effort to bring back his ... remains ... so that he can have a fitting burial on Earth." "No," she said. "I beg your pardon, ma'am?" She raised her eyes to the patch of sky where her son had passed in his shining metal sarcophagus. Sirius blossomed there, blue-white and beautiful. She raised her eyes still higher—and beheld the vast parterre of Orion with its central motif of vivid forget-me-nots, its far-flung blooms of Betelguese and Rigel, of Bellatrix and Saiph ... And higher yet—and there flamed the exquisite flower beds of Taurus and Gemini, there burgeoned the riotous wreath of the Crab; there lay the pulsing petals of the Pleiades ... And down the ecliptic garden path, wafted by a stellar breeze, drifted the ocher rose of Mars ... "No," she said again. The general had raised his eyes, too; now, slowly, he lowered them. "I think I understand, ma'am. And I'm glad that's the way you want it ... The stars are beautiful tonight, aren't they." "More beautiful than they've ever been," she said. After the general had gone, she looked up once more at the vast and variegated garden of the sky where her son lay buried, then she turned and walked slowly back to the memoried house. THE END Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Amazing Stories January 1959. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note.

By joking about the odds of his spacecraft being hit by an object

By playing roughly with toy cars in the street as a child

By granting his mother permission to share exciting details of his progress to reporters

By promising to update his mother as often as possible on his progress

26957_MIRU64C4_6

Why does Terry's mom not want them to bring back his remains?

STAR MOTHER By ROBERT F. YOUNG A touching story of the most enduring love in all eternity. That night her son was the first star. She stood motionless in the garden, one hand pressed against her heart, watching him rise above the fields where he had played as a boy, where he had worked as a young man; and she wondered whether he was thinking of those fields now, whether he was thinking of her standing alone in the April night with her memories; whether he was thinking of the verandahed house behind her, with its empty rooms and silent halls, that once upon a time had been his birthplace. Higher still and higher he rose in the southern sky, and then, when he had reached his zenith, he dropped swiftly down past the dark edge of the Earth and disappeared from sight. A boy grown up too soon, riding round and round the world on a celestial carousel, encased in an airtight metal capsule in an airtight metal chariot ... Why don't they leave the stars alone? she thought. Why don't they leave the stars to God? The general's second telegram came early the next morning: Explorer XII doing splendidly. Expect to bring your son down sometime tomorrow . She went about her work as usual, collecting the eggs and allocating them in their cardboard boxes, then setting off in the station wagon on her Tuesday morning run. She had expected a deluge of questions from her customers. She was not disappointed. "Is Terry really way up there all alone, Martha?" "Aren't you scared , Martha?" "I do hope they can get him back down all right, Martha." She supposed it must have given them quite a turn to have their egg woman change into a star mother overnight. She hadn't expected the TV interview, though, and she would have avoided it if it had been politely possible. But what could she do when the line of cars and trucks pulled into the drive and the technicians got out and started setting up their equipment in the backyard? What could she say when the suave young man came up to her and said, "We want you to know that we're all very proud of your boy up there, ma'am, and we hope you'll do us the honor of answering a few questions." Most of the questions concerned Terry, as was fitting. From the way the suave young man asked them, though, she got the impression that he was trying to prove that her son was just like any other average American boy, and such just didn't happen to be the case. But whenever she opened her mouth to mention, say, how he used to study till all hours of the night, or how difficult it had been for him to make friends because of his shyness, or the fact that he had never gone out for football—whenever she started to mention any of these things, the suave young man was in great haste to interrupt her and to twist her words, by requestioning, into a different meaning altogether, till Terry's behavior pattern seemed to coincide with the behavior pattern which the suave young man apparently considered the norm, but which, if followed, Martha was sure, would produce not young men bent on exploring space but young men bent on exploring trivia. A few of the questions concerned herself: Was Terry her only child? ("Yes.") What had happened to her husband? ("He was killed in the Korean War.") What did she think of the new law granting star mothers top priority on any and all information relating to their sons? ("I think it's a fine law ... It's too bad they couldn't have shown similar humanity toward the war mothers of World War II.") It was late in the afternoon by the time the TV crew got everything repacked into their cars and trucks and made their departure. Martha fixed herself a light supper, then donned an old suede jacket of Terry's and went out into the garden to wait for the sun to go down. According to the time table the general had outlined in his first telegram, Terry's first Tuesday night passage wasn't due to occur till 9:05. But it seemed only right that she should be outside when the stars started to come out. Presently they did, and she watched them wink on, one by one, in the deepening darkness of the sky. She'd never been much of a one for the stars; most of her life she'd been much too busy on Earth to bother with things celestial. She could remember, when she was much younger and Bill was courting her, looking up at the moon sometimes; and once in a while, when a star fell, making a wish. But this was different. It was different because now she had a personal interest in the sky, a new affinity with its myriad inhabitants. And how bright they became when you kept looking at them! They seemed to come alive, almost, pulsing brilliantly down out of the blackness of the night ... And they were different colors, too, she noticed with a start. Some of them were blue and some were red, others were yellow ... green ... orange ... It grew cold in the April garden and she could see her breath. There was a strange crispness, a strange clarity about the night, that she had never known before ... She glanced at her watch, was astonished to see that the hands indicated two minutes after nine. Where had the time gone? Tremulously she faced the southern horizon ... and saw her Terry appear in his shining chariot, riding up the star-pebbled path of his orbit, a star in his own right, dropping swiftly now, down, down, and out of sight beyond the dark wheeling mass of the Earth ... She took a deep, proud breath, realized that she was wildly waving her hand and let it fall slowly to her side. Make a wish! she thought, like a little girl, and she wished him pleasant dreams and a safe return and wrapped the wish in all her love and cast it starward. Sometime tomorrow, the general's telegram had said— That meant sometime today! She rose with the sun and fed the chickens, fixed and ate her breakfast, collected the eggs and put them in their cardboard boxes, then started out on her Wednesday morning run. "My land, Martha, I don't see how you stand it with him way up there! Doesn't it get on your nerves ?" ("Yes ... Yes, it does.") "Martha, when are they bringing him back down?" ("Today ... Today !") "It must be wonderful being a star mother, Martha." ("Yes, it is—in a way.") Wonderful ... and terrible. If only he can last it out for a few more hours, she thought. If only they can bring him down safe and sound. Then the vigil will be over, and some other mother can take over the awesome responsibility of having a son become a star— If only ... The general's third telegram arrived that afternoon: Regret to inform you that meteorite impact on satellite hull severely damaged capsule-detachment mechanism, making ejection impossible. Will make every effort to find another means of accomplishing your son's return. Terry!— See the little boy playing beneath the maple tree, moving his tiny cars up and down the tiny streets of his make-believe village; the little boy, his fuzz of hair gold in the sunlight, his cherub-cheeks pink in the summer wind— Terry!— Up the lane the blue-denimed young man walks, swinging his thin tanned arms, his long legs making near-grownup strides over the sun-seared grass; the sky blue and bright behind him, the song of cicada rising and falling in the hazy September air— Terry ... —probably won't get a chance to write you again before take-off, but don't worry, Ma. The Explorer XII is the greatest bird they ever built. Nothing short of a direct meteorite hit can hurt it, and the odds are a million to one ... Why don't they leave the stars alone? Why don't they leave the stars to God? The afternoon shadows lengthened on the lawn and the sun grew red and swollen over the western hills. Martha fixed supper, tried to eat, and couldn't. After a while, when the light began to fade, she slipped into Terry's jacket and went outside. Slowly the sky darkened and the stars began to appear. At length her star appeared, but its swift passage blurred before her eyes. Tires crunched on the gravel then, and headlights washed the darkness from the drive. A car door slammed. Martha did not move. Please God , she thought, let it be Terry , even though she knew that it couldn't possibly be Terry. Footsteps sounded behind her, paused. Someone coughed softly. She turned then— "Good evening, ma'am." She saw the circlet of stars on the gray epaulet; she saw the stern handsome face; she saw the dark tired eyes. And she knew. Even before he spoke again, she knew— "The same meteorite that damaged the ejection mechanism, ma'am. It penetrated the capsule, too. We didn't find out till just a while ago—but there was nothing we could have done anyway ... Are you all right, ma'am?" "Yes. I'm all right." "I wanted to express my regrets personally. I know how you must feel." "It's all right." "We will, of course, make every effort to bring back his ... remains ... so that he can have a fitting burial on Earth." "No," she said. "I beg your pardon, ma'am?" She raised her eyes to the patch of sky where her son had passed in his shining metal sarcophagus. Sirius blossomed there, blue-white and beautiful. She raised her eyes still higher—and beheld the vast parterre of Orion with its central motif of vivid forget-me-nots, its far-flung blooms of Betelguese and Rigel, of Bellatrix and Saiph ... And higher yet—and there flamed the exquisite flower beds of Taurus and Gemini, there burgeoned the riotous wreath of the Crab; there lay the pulsing petals of the Pleiades ... And down the ecliptic garden path, wafted by a stellar breeze, drifted the ocher rose of Mars ... "No," she said again. The general had raised his eyes, too; now, slowly, he lowered them. "I think I understand, ma'am. And I'm glad that's the way you want it ... The stars are beautiful tonight, aren't they." "More beautiful than they've ever been," she said. After the general had gone, she looked up once more at the vast and variegated garden of the sky where her son lay buried, then she turned and walked slowly back to the memoried house. THE END Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Amazing Stories January 1959. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note.

She knows that her son would not find it practical to return to Earth

She knows that it will not be physically possible for them to return him to Earth

She cannot bear to see the tainted carcass of her beloved son

She wishes to continue the ritual of greeting him every night when she looks to the sky

26957_MIRU64C4_7

Why does the general support Terry's mother's decision not to bring her son's remains back to Earth?

STAR MOTHER By ROBERT F. YOUNG A touching story of the most enduring love in all eternity. That night her son was the first star. She stood motionless in the garden, one hand pressed against her heart, watching him rise above the fields where he had played as a boy, where he had worked as a young man; and she wondered whether he was thinking of those fields now, whether he was thinking of her standing alone in the April night with her memories; whether he was thinking of the verandahed house behind her, with its empty rooms and silent halls, that once upon a time had been his birthplace. Higher still and higher he rose in the southern sky, and then, when he had reached his zenith, he dropped swiftly down past the dark edge of the Earth and disappeared from sight. A boy grown up too soon, riding round and round the world on a celestial carousel, encased in an airtight metal capsule in an airtight metal chariot ... Why don't they leave the stars alone? she thought. Why don't they leave the stars to God? The general's second telegram came early the next morning: Explorer XII doing splendidly. Expect to bring your son down sometime tomorrow . She went about her work as usual, collecting the eggs and allocating them in their cardboard boxes, then setting off in the station wagon on her Tuesday morning run. She had expected a deluge of questions from her customers. She was not disappointed. "Is Terry really way up there all alone, Martha?" "Aren't you scared , Martha?" "I do hope they can get him back down all right, Martha." She supposed it must have given them quite a turn to have their egg woman change into a star mother overnight. She hadn't expected the TV interview, though, and she would have avoided it if it had been politely possible. But what could she do when the line of cars and trucks pulled into the drive and the technicians got out and started setting up their equipment in the backyard? What could she say when the suave young man came up to her and said, "We want you to know that we're all very proud of your boy up there, ma'am, and we hope you'll do us the honor of answering a few questions." Most of the questions concerned Terry, as was fitting. From the way the suave young man asked them, though, she got the impression that he was trying to prove that her son was just like any other average American boy, and such just didn't happen to be the case. But whenever she opened her mouth to mention, say, how he used to study till all hours of the night, or how difficult it had been for him to make friends because of his shyness, or the fact that he had never gone out for football—whenever she started to mention any of these things, the suave young man was in great haste to interrupt her and to twist her words, by requestioning, into a different meaning altogether, till Terry's behavior pattern seemed to coincide with the behavior pattern which the suave young man apparently considered the norm, but which, if followed, Martha was sure, would produce not young men bent on exploring space but young men bent on exploring trivia. A few of the questions concerned herself: Was Terry her only child? ("Yes.") What had happened to her husband? ("He was killed in the Korean War.") What did she think of the new law granting star mothers top priority on any and all information relating to their sons? ("I think it's a fine law ... It's too bad they couldn't have shown similar humanity toward the war mothers of World War II.") It was late in the afternoon by the time the TV crew got everything repacked into their cars and trucks and made their departure. Martha fixed herself a light supper, then donned an old suede jacket of Terry's and went out into the garden to wait for the sun to go down. According to the time table the general had outlined in his first telegram, Terry's first Tuesday night passage wasn't due to occur till 9:05. But it seemed only right that she should be outside when the stars started to come out. Presently they did, and she watched them wink on, one by one, in the deepening darkness of the sky. She'd never been much of a one for the stars; most of her life she'd been much too busy on Earth to bother with things celestial. She could remember, when she was much younger and Bill was courting her, looking up at the moon sometimes; and once in a while, when a star fell, making a wish. But this was different. It was different because now she had a personal interest in the sky, a new affinity with its myriad inhabitants. And how bright they became when you kept looking at them! They seemed to come alive, almost, pulsing brilliantly down out of the blackness of the night ... And they were different colors, too, she noticed with a start. Some of them were blue and some were red, others were yellow ... green ... orange ... It grew cold in the April garden and she could see her breath. There was a strange crispness, a strange clarity about the night, that she had never known before ... She glanced at her watch, was astonished to see that the hands indicated two minutes after nine. Where had the time gone? Tremulously she faced the southern horizon ... and saw her Terry appear in his shining chariot, riding up the star-pebbled path of his orbit, a star in his own right, dropping swiftly now, down, down, and out of sight beyond the dark wheeling mass of the Earth ... She took a deep, proud breath, realized that she was wildly waving her hand and let it fall slowly to her side. Make a wish! she thought, like a little girl, and she wished him pleasant dreams and a safe return and wrapped the wish in all her love and cast it starward. Sometime tomorrow, the general's telegram had said— That meant sometime today! She rose with the sun and fed the chickens, fixed and ate her breakfast, collected the eggs and put them in their cardboard boxes, then started out on her Wednesday morning run. "My land, Martha, I don't see how you stand it with him way up there! Doesn't it get on your nerves ?" ("Yes ... Yes, it does.") "Martha, when are they bringing him back down?" ("Today ... Today !") "It must be wonderful being a star mother, Martha." ("Yes, it is—in a way.") Wonderful ... and terrible. If only he can last it out for a few more hours, she thought. If only they can bring him down safe and sound. Then the vigil will be over, and some other mother can take over the awesome responsibility of having a son become a star— If only ... The general's third telegram arrived that afternoon: Regret to inform you that meteorite impact on satellite hull severely damaged capsule-detachment mechanism, making ejection impossible. Will make every effort to find another means of accomplishing your son's return. Terry!— See the little boy playing beneath the maple tree, moving his tiny cars up and down the tiny streets of his make-believe village; the little boy, his fuzz of hair gold in the sunlight, his cherub-cheeks pink in the summer wind— Terry!— Up the lane the blue-denimed young man walks, swinging his thin tanned arms, his long legs making near-grownup strides over the sun-seared grass; the sky blue and bright behind him, the song of cicada rising and falling in the hazy September air— Terry ... —probably won't get a chance to write you again before take-off, but don't worry, Ma. The Explorer XII is the greatest bird they ever built. Nothing short of a direct meteorite hit can hurt it, and the odds are a million to one ... Why don't they leave the stars alone? Why don't they leave the stars to God? The afternoon shadows lengthened on the lawn and the sun grew red and swollen over the western hills. Martha fixed supper, tried to eat, and couldn't. After a while, when the light began to fade, she slipped into Terry's jacket and went outside. Slowly the sky darkened and the stars began to appear. At length her star appeared, but its swift passage blurred before her eyes. Tires crunched on the gravel then, and headlights washed the darkness from the drive. A car door slammed. Martha did not move. Please God , she thought, let it be Terry , even though she knew that it couldn't possibly be Terry. Footsteps sounded behind her, paused. Someone coughed softly. She turned then— "Good evening, ma'am." She saw the circlet of stars on the gray epaulet; she saw the stern handsome face; she saw the dark tired eyes. And she knew. Even before he spoke again, she knew— "The same meteorite that damaged the ejection mechanism, ma'am. It penetrated the capsule, too. We didn't find out till just a while ago—but there was nothing we could have done anyway ... Are you all right, ma'am?" "Yes. I'm all right." "I wanted to express my regrets personally. I know how you must feel." "It's all right." "We will, of course, make every effort to bring back his ... remains ... so that he can have a fitting burial on Earth." "No," she said. "I beg your pardon, ma'am?" She raised her eyes to the patch of sky where her son had passed in his shining metal sarcophagus. Sirius blossomed there, blue-white and beautiful. She raised her eyes still higher—and beheld the vast parterre of Orion with its central motif of vivid forget-me-nots, its far-flung blooms of Betelguese and Rigel, of Bellatrix and Saiph ... And higher yet—and there flamed the exquisite flower beds of Taurus and Gemini, there burgeoned the riotous wreath of the Crab; there lay the pulsing petals of the Pleiades ... And down the ecliptic garden path, wafted by a stellar breeze, drifted the ocher rose of Mars ... "No," she said again. The general had raised his eyes, too; now, slowly, he lowered them. "I think I understand, ma'am. And I'm glad that's the way you want it ... The stars are beautiful tonight, aren't they." "More beautiful than they've ever been," she said. After the general had gone, she looked up once more at the vast and variegated garden of the sky where her son lay buried, then she turned and walked slowly back to the memoried house. THE END Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Amazing Stories January 1959. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note.

It would be too expensive to initiate a recovery mission that might be unsuccessful

The new law grants star mothers priority over what happens to a deceased son, and he must obey her wishes

He realizes that by keeping Terry in orbit, his mother will be able to maintain a special connection with her son

He must swiftly move his attention to the next explorer and, therefore, space mother

26957_MIRU64C4_8

What is Terry's mother's core tension of being a star mother?

STAR MOTHER By ROBERT F. YOUNG A touching story of the most enduring love in all eternity. That night her son was the first star. She stood motionless in the garden, one hand pressed against her heart, watching him rise above the fields where he had played as a boy, where he had worked as a young man; and she wondered whether he was thinking of those fields now, whether he was thinking of her standing alone in the April night with her memories; whether he was thinking of the verandahed house behind her, with its empty rooms and silent halls, that once upon a time had been his birthplace. Higher still and higher he rose in the southern sky, and then, when he had reached his zenith, he dropped swiftly down past the dark edge of the Earth and disappeared from sight. A boy grown up too soon, riding round and round the world on a celestial carousel, encased in an airtight metal capsule in an airtight metal chariot ... Why don't they leave the stars alone? she thought. Why don't they leave the stars to God? The general's second telegram came early the next morning: Explorer XII doing splendidly. Expect to bring your son down sometime tomorrow . She went about her work as usual, collecting the eggs and allocating them in their cardboard boxes, then setting off in the station wagon on her Tuesday morning run. She had expected a deluge of questions from her customers. She was not disappointed. "Is Terry really way up there all alone, Martha?" "Aren't you scared , Martha?" "I do hope they can get him back down all right, Martha." She supposed it must have given them quite a turn to have their egg woman change into a star mother overnight. She hadn't expected the TV interview, though, and she would have avoided it if it had been politely possible. But what could she do when the line of cars and trucks pulled into the drive and the technicians got out and started setting up their equipment in the backyard? What could she say when the suave young man came up to her and said, "We want you to know that we're all very proud of your boy up there, ma'am, and we hope you'll do us the honor of answering a few questions." Most of the questions concerned Terry, as was fitting. From the way the suave young man asked them, though, she got the impression that he was trying to prove that her son was just like any other average American boy, and such just didn't happen to be the case. But whenever she opened her mouth to mention, say, how he used to study till all hours of the night, or how difficult it had been for him to make friends because of his shyness, or the fact that he had never gone out for football—whenever she started to mention any of these things, the suave young man was in great haste to interrupt her and to twist her words, by requestioning, into a different meaning altogether, till Terry's behavior pattern seemed to coincide with the behavior pattern which the suave young man apparently considered the norm, but which, if followed, Martha was sure, would produce not young men bent on exploring space but young men bent on exploring trivia. A few of the questions concerned herself: Was Terry her only child? ("Yes.") What had happened to her husband? ("He was killed in the Korean War.") What did she think of the new law granting star mothers top priority on any and all information relating to their sons? ("I think it's a fine law ... It's too bad they couldn't have shown similar humanity toward the war mothers of World War II.") It was late in the afternoon by the time the TV crew got everything repacked into their cars and trucks and made their departure. Martha fixed herself a light supper, then donned an old suede jacket of Terry's and went out into the garden to wait for the sun to go down. According to the time table the general had outlined in his first telegram, Terry's first Tuesday night passage wasn't due to occur till 9:05. But it seemed only right that she should be outside when the stars started to come out. Presently they did, and she watched them wink on, one by one, in the deepening darkness of the sky. She'd never been much of a one for the stars; most of her life she'd been much too busy on Earth to bother with things celestial. She could remember, when she was much younger and Bill was courting her, looking up at the moon sometimes; and once in a while, when a star fell, making a wish. But this was different. It was different because now she had a personal interest in the sky, a new affinity with its myriad inhabitants. And how bright they became when you kept looking at them! They seemed to come alive, almost, pulsing brilliantly down out of the blackness of the night ... And they were different colors, too, she noticed with a start. Some of them were blue and some were red, others were yellow ... green ... orange ... It grew cold in the April garden and she could see her breath. There was a strange crispness, a strange clarity about the night, that she had never known before ... She glanced at her watch, was astonished to see that the hands indicated two minutes after nine. Where had the time gone? Tremulously she faced the southern horizon ... and saw her Terry appear in his shining chariot, riding up the star-pebbled path of his orbit, a star in his own right, dropping swiftly now, down, down, and out of sight beyond the dark wheeling mass of the Earth ... She took a deep, proud breath, realized that she was wildly waving her hand and let it fall slowly to her side. Make a wish! she thought, like a little girl, and she wished him pleasant dreams and a safe return and wrapped the wish in all her love and cast it starward. Sometime tomorrow, the general's telegram had said— That meant sometime today! She rose with the sun and fed the chickens, fixed and ate her breakfast, collected the eggs and put them in their cardboard boxes, then started out on her Wednesday morning run. "My land, Martha, I don't see how you stand it with him way up there! Doesn't it get on your nerves ?" ("Yes ... Yes, it does.") "Martha, when are they bringing him back down?" ("Today ... Today !") "It must be wonderful being a star mother, Martha." ("Yes, it is—in a way.") Wonderful ... and terrible. If only he can last it out for a few more hours, she thought. If only they can bring him down safe and sound. Then the vigil will be over, and some other mother can take over the awesome responsibility of having a son become a star— If only ... The general's third telegram arrived that afternoon: Regret to inform you that meteorite impact on satellite hull severely damaged capsule-detachment mechanism, making ejection impossible. Will make every effort to find another means of accomplishing your son's return. Terry!— See the little boy playing beneath the maple tree, moving his tiny cars up and down the tiny streets of his make-believe village; the little boy, his fuzz of hair gold in the sunlight, his cherub-cheeks pink in the summer wind— Terry!— Up the lane the blue-denimed young man walks, swinging his thin tanned arms, his long legs making near-grownup strides over the sun-seared grass; the sky blue and bright behind him, the song of cicada rising and falling in the hazy September air— Terry ... —probably won't get a chance to write you again before take-off, but don't worry, Ma. The Explorer XII is the greatest bird they ever built. Nothing short of a direct meteorite hit can hurt it, and the odds are a million to one ... Why don't they leave the stars alone? Why don't they leave the stars to God? The afternoon shadows lengthened on the lawn and the sun grew red and swollen over the western hills. Martha fixed supper, tried to eat, and couldn't. After a while, when the light began to fade, she slipped into Terry's jacket and went outside. Slowly the sky darkened and the stars began to appear. At length her star appeared, but its swift passage blurred before her eyes. Tires crunched on the gravel then, and headlights washed the darkness from the drive. A car door slammed. Martha did not move. Please God , she thought, let it be Terry , even though she knew that it couldn't possibly be Terry. Footsteps sounded behind her, paused. Someone coughed softly. She turned then— "Good evening, ma'am." She saw the circlet of stars on the gray epaulet; she saw the stern handsome face; she saw the dark tired eyes. And she knew. Even before he spoke again, she knew— "The same meteorite that damaged the ejection mechanism, ma'am. It penetrated the capsule, too. We didn't find out till just a while ago—but there was nothing we could have done anyway ... Are you all right, ma'am?" "Yes. I'm all right." "I wanted to express my regrets personally. I know how you must feel." "It's all right." "We will, of course, make every effort to bring back his ... remains ... so that he can have a fitting burial on Earth." "No," she said. "I beg your pardon, ma'am?" She raised her eyes to the patch of sky where her son had passed in his shining metal sarcophagus. Sirius blossomed there, blue-white and beautiful. She raised her eyes still higher—and beheld the vast parterre of Orion with its central motif of vivid forget-me-nots, its far-flung blooms of Betelguese and Rigel, of Bellatrix and Saiph ... And higher yet—and there flamed the exquisite flower beds of Taurus and Gemini, there burgeoned the riotous wreath of the Crab; there lay the pulsing petals of the Pleiades ... And down the ecliptic garden path, wafted by a stellar breeze, drifted the ocher rose of Mars ... "No," she said again. The general had raised his eyes, too; now, slowly, he lowered them. "I think I understand, ma'am. And I'm glad that's the way you want it ... The stars are beautiful tonight, aren't they." "More beautiful than they've ever been," she said. After the general had gone, she looked up once more at the vast and variegated garden of the sky where her son lay buried, then she turned and walked slowly back to the memoried house. THE END Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Amazing Stories January 1959. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note.

People see her star mother status as an opportunity, while she wishes someone else could have it

People are generally critical of the star mother law, but she is grateful for it

People want to know more about Terry's journey, and she has no way of accurately representing it

People are skeptical of the exploration, while she is a firm supporter

26957_MIRU64C4_9

Terry's mother uses the following metaphors to describe the sky except for ______.

STAR MOTHER By ROBERT F. YOUNG A touching story of the most enduring love in all eternity. That night her son was the first star. She stood motionless in the garden, one hand pressed against her heart, watching him rise above the fields where he had played as a boy, where he had worked as a young man; and she wondered whether he was thinking of those fields now, whether he was thinking of her standing alone in the April night with her memories; whether he was thinking of the verandahed house behind her, with its empty rooms and silent halls, that once upon a time had been his birthplace. Higher still and higher he rose in the southern sky, and then, when he had reached his zenith, he dropped swiftly down past the dark edge of the Earth and disappeared from sight. A boy grown up too soon, riding round and round the world on a celestial carousel, encased in an airtight metal capsule in an airtight metal chariot ... Why don't they leave the stars alone? she thought. Why don't they leave the stars to God? The general's second telegram came early the next morning: Explorer XII doing splendidly. Expect to bring your son down sometime tomorrow . She went about her work as usual, collecting the eggs and allocating them in their cardboard boxes, then setting off in the station wagon on her Tuesday morning run. She had expected a deluge of questions from her customers. She was not disappointed. "Is Terry really way up there all alone, Martha?" "Aren't you scared , Martha?" "I do hope they can get him back down all right, Martha." She supposed it must have given them quite a turn to have their egg woman change into a star mother overnight. She hadn't expected the TV interview, though, and she would have avoided it if it had been politely possible. But what could she do when the line of cars and trucks pulled into the drive and the technicians got out and started setting up their equipment in the backyard? What could she say when the suave young man came up to her and said, "We want you to know that we're all very proud of your boy up there, ma'am, and we hope you'll do us the honor of answering a few questions." Most of the questions concerned Terry, as was fitting. From the way the suave young man asked them, though, she got the impression that he was trying to prove that her son was just like any other average American boy, and such just didn't happen to be the case. But whenever she opened her mouth to mention, say, how he used to study till all hours of the night, or how difficult it had been for him to make friends because of his shyness, or the fact that he had never gone out for football—whenever she started to mention any of these things, the suave young man was in great haste to interrupt her and to twist her words, by requestioning, into a different meaning altogether, till Terry's behavior pattern seemed to coincide with the behavior pattern which the suave young man apparently considered the norm, but which, if followed, Martha was sure, would produce not young men bent on exploring space but young men bent on exploring trivia. A few of the questions concerned herself: Was Terry her only child? ("Yes.") What had happened to her husband? ("He was killed in the Korean War.") What did she think of the new law granting star mothers top priority on any and all information relating to their sons? ("I think it's a fine law ... It's too bad they couldn't have shown similar humanity toward the war mothers of World War II.") It was late in the afternoon by the time the TV crew got everything repacked into their cars and trucks and made their departure. Martha fixed herself a light supper, then donned an old suede jacket of Terry's and went out into the garden to wait for the sun to go down. According to the time table the general had outlined in his first telegram, Terry's first Tuesday night passage wasn't due to occur till 9:05. But it seemed only right that she should be outside when the stars started to come out. Presently they did, and she watched them wink on, one by one, in the deepening darkness of the sky. She'd never been much of a one for the stars; most of her life she'd been much too busy on Earth to bother with things celestial. She could remember, when she was much younger and Bill was courting her, looking up at the moon sometimes; and once in a while, when a star fell, making a wish. But this was different. It was different because now she had a personal interest in the sky, a new affinity with its myriad inhabitants. And how bright they became when you kept looking at them! They seemed to come alive, almost, pulsing brilliantly down out of the blackness of the night ... And they were different colors, too, she noticed with a start. Some of them were blue and some were red, others were yellow ... green ... orange ... It grew cold in the April garden and she could see her breath. There was a strange crispness, a strange clarity about the night, that she had never known before ... She glanced at her watch, was astonished to see that the hands indicated two minutes after nine. Where had the time gone? Tremulously she faced the southern horizon ... and saw her Terry appear in his shining chariot, riding up the star-pebbled path of his orbit, a star in his own right, dropping swiftly now, down, down, and out of sight beyond the dark wheeling mass of the Earth ... She took a deep, proud breath, realized that she was wildly waving her hand and let it fall slowly to her side. Make a wish! she thought, like a little girl, and she wished him pleasant dreams and a safe return and wrapped the wish in all her love and cast it starward. Sometime tomorrow, the general's telegram had said— That meant sometime today! She rose with the sun and fed the chickens, fixed and ate her breakfast, collected the eggs and put them in their cardboard boxes, then started out on her Wednesday morning run. "My land, Martha, I don't see how you stand it with him way up there! Doesn't it get on your nerves ?" ("Yes ... Yes, it does.") "Martha, when are they bringing him back down?" ("Today ... Today !") "It must be wonderful being a star mother, Martha." ("Yes, it is—in a way.") Wonderful ... and terrible. If only he can last it out for a few more hours, she thought. If only they can bring him down safe and sound. Then the vigil will be over, and some other mother can take over the awesome responsibility of having a son become a star— If only ... The general's third telegram arrived that afternoon: Regret to inform you that meteorite impact on satellite hull severely damaged capsule-detachment mechanism, making ejection impossible. Will make every effort to find another means of accomplishing your son's return. Terry!— See the little boy playing beneath the maple tree, moving his tiny cars up and down the tiny streets of his make-believe village; the little boy, his fuzz of hair gold in the sunlight, his cherub-cheeks pink in the summer wind— Terry!— Up the lane the blue-denimed young man walks, swinging his thin tanned arms, his long legs making near-grownup strides over the sun-seared grass; the sky blue and bright behind him, the song of cicada rising and falling in the hazy September air— Terry ... —probably won't get a chance to write you again before take-off, but don't worry, Ma. The Explorer XII is the greatest bird they ever built. Nothing short of a direct meteorite hit can hurt it, and the odds are a million to one ... Why don't they leave the stars alone? Why don't they leave the stars to God? The afternoon shadows lengthened on the lawn and the sun grew red and swollen over the western hills. Martha fixed supper, tried to eat, and couldn't. After a while, when the light began to fade, she slipped into Terry's jacket and went outside. Slowly the sky darkened and the stars began to appear. At length her star appeared, but its swift passage blurred before her eyes. Tires crunched on the gravel then, and headlights washed the darkness from the drive. A car door slammed. Martha did not move. Please God , she thought, let it be Terry , even though she knew that it couldn't possibly be Terry. Footsteps sounded behind her, paused. Someone coughed softly. She turned then— "Good evening, ma'am." She saw the circlet of stars on the gray epaulet; she saw the stern handsome face; she saw the dark tired eyes. And she knew. Even before he spoke again, she knew— "The same meteorite that damaged the ejection mechanism, ma'am. It penetrated the capsule, too. We didn't find out till just a while ago—but there was nothing we could have done anyway ... Are you all right, ma'am?" "Yes. I'm all right." "I wanted to express my regrets personally. I know how you must feel." "It's all right." "We will, of course, make every effort to bring back his ... remains ... so that he can have a fitting burial on Earth." "No," she said. "I beg your pardon, ma'am?" She raised her eyes to the patch of sky where her son had passed in his shining metal sarcophagus. Sirius blossomed there, blue-white and beautiful. She raised her eyes still higher—and beheld the vast parterre of Orion with its central motif of vivid forget-me-nots, its far-flung blooms of Betelguese and Rigel, of Bellatrix and Saiph ... And higher yet—and there flamed the exquisite flower beds of Taurus and Gemini, there burgeoned the riotous wreath of the Crab; there lay the pulsing petals of the Pleiades ... And down the ecliptic garden path, wafted by a stellar breeze, drifted the ocher rose of Mars ... "No," she said again. The general had raised his eyes, too; now, slowly, he lowered them. "I think I understand, ma'am. And I'm glad that's the way you want it ... The stars are beautiful tonight, aren't they." "More beautiful than they've ever been," she said. After the general had gone, she looked up once more at the vast and variegated garden of the sky where her son lay buried, then she turned and walked slowly back to the memoried house. THE END Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Amazing Stories January 1959. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note.

An ocean

A chariot pathway

A graveyard

A garden

26957_MIRU64C4_10

How does Terry's mother's description of her son not match the reporter's preconceived image?

STAR MOTHER By ROBERT F. YOUNG A touching story of the most enduring love in all eternity. That night her son was the first star. She stood motionless in the garden, one hand pressed against her heart, watching him rise above the fields where he had played as a boy, where he had worked as a young man; and she wondered whether he was thinking of those fields now, whether he was thinking of her standing alone in the April night with her memories; whether he was thinking of the verandahed house behind her, with its empty rooms and silent halls, that once upon a time had been his birthplace. Higher still and higher he rose in the southern sky, and then, when he had reached his zenith, he dropped swiftly down past the dark edge of the Earth and disappeared from sight. A boy grown up too soon, riding round and round the world on a celestial carousel, encased in an airtight metal capsule in an airtight metal chariot ... Why don't they leave the stars alone? she thought. Why don't they leave the stars to God? The general's second telegram came early the next morning: Explorer XII doing splendidly. Expect to bring your son down sometime tomorrow . She went about her work as usual, collecting the eggs and allocating them in their cardboard boxes, then setting off in the station wagon on her Tuesday morning run. She had expected a deluge of questions from her customers. She was not disappointed. "Is Terry really way up there all alone, Martha?" "Aren't you scared , Martha?" "I do hope they can get him back down all right, Martha." She supposed it must have given them quite a turn to have their egg woman change into a star mother overnight. She hadn't expected the TV interview, though, and she would have avoided it if it had been politely possible. But what could she do when the line of cars and trucks pulled into the drive and the technicians got out and started setting up their equipment in the backyard? What could she say when the suave young man came up to her and said, "We want you to know that we're all very proud of your boy up there, ma'am, and we hope you'll do us the honor of answering a few questions." Most of the questions concerned Terry, as was fitting. From the way the suave young man asked them, though, she got the impression that he was trying to prove that her son was just like any other average American boy, and such just didn't happen to be the case. But whenever she opened her mouth to mention, say, how he used to study till all hours of the night, or how difficult it had been for him to make friends because of his shyness, or the fact that he had never gone out for football—whenever she started to mention any of these things, the suave young man was in great haste to interrupt her and to twist her words, by requestioning, into a different meaning altogether, till Terry's behavior pattern seemed to coincide with the behavior pattern which the suave young man apparently considered the norm, but which, if followed, Martha was sure, would produce not young men bent on exploring space but young men bent on exploring trivia. A few of the questions concerned herself: Was Terry her only child? ("Yes.") What had happened to her husband? ("He was killed in the Korean War.") What did she think of the new law granting star mothers top priority on any and all information relating to their sons? ("I think it's a fine law ... It's too bad they couldn't have shown similar humanity toward the war mothers of World War II.") It was late in the afternoon by the time the TV crew got everything repacked into their cars and trucks and made their departure. Martha fixed herself a light supper, then donned an old suede jacket of Terry's and went out into the garden to wait for the sun to go down. According to the time table the general had outlined in his first telegram, Terry's first Tuesday night passage wasn't due to occur till 9:05. But it seemed only right that she should be outside when the stars started to come out. Presently they did, and she watched them wink on, one by one, in the deepening darkness of the sky. She'd never been much of a one for the stars; most of her life she'd been much too busy on Earth to bother with things celestial. She could remember, when she was much younger and Bill was courting her, looking up at the moon sometimes; and once in a while, when a star fell, making a wish. But this was different. It was different because now she had a personal interest in the sky, a new affinity with its myriad inhabitants. And how bright they became when you kept looking at them! They seemed to come alive, almost, pulsing brilliantly down out of the blackness of the night ... And they were different colors, too, she noticed with a start. Some of them were blue and some were red, others were yellow ... green ... orange ... It grew cold in the April garden and she could see her breath. There was a strange crispness, a strange clarity about the night, that she had never known before ... She glanced at her watch, was astonished to see that the hands indicated two minutes after nine. Where had the time gone? Tremulously she faced the southern horizon ... and saw her Terry appear in his shining chariot, riding up the star-pebbled path of his orbit, a star in his own right, dropping swiftly now, down, down, and out of sight beyond the dark wheeling mass of the Earth ... She took a deep, proud breath, realized that she was wildly waving her hand and let it fall slowly to her side. Make a wish! she thought, like a little girl, and she wished him pleasant dreams and a safe return and wrapped the wish in all her love and cast it starward. Sometime tomorrow, the general's telegram had said— That meant sometime today! She rose with the sun and fed the chickens, fixed and ate her breakfast, collected the eggs and put them in their cardboard boxes, then started out on her Wednesday morning run. "My land, Martha, I don't see how you stand it with him way up there! Doesn't it get on your nerves ?" ("Yes ... Yes, it does.") "Martha, when are they bringing him back down?" ("Today ... Today !") "It must be wonderful being a star mother, Martha." ("Yes, it is—in a way.") Wonderful ... and terrible. If only he can last it out for a few more hours, she thought. If only they can bring him down safe and sound. Then the vigil will be over, and some other mother can take over the awesome responsibility of having a son become a star— If only ... The general's third telegram arrived that afternoon: Regret to inform you that meteorite impact on satellite hull severely damaged capsule-detachment mechanism, making ejection impossible. Will make every effort to find another means of accomplishing your son's return. Terry!— See the little boy playing beneath the maple tree, moving his tiny cars up and down the tiny streets of his make-believe village; the little boy, his fuzz of hair gold in the sunlight, his cherub-cheeks pink in the summer wind— Terry!— Up the lane the blue-denimed young man walks, swinging his thin tanned arms, his long legs making near-grownup strides over the sun-seared grass; the sky blue and bright behind him, the song of cicada rising and falling in the hazy September air— Terry ... —probably won't get a chance to write you again before take-off, but don't worry, Ma. The Explorer XII is the greatest bird they ever built. Nothing short of a direct meteorite hit can hurt it, and the odds are a million to one ... Why don't they leave the stars alone? Why don't they leave the stars to God? The afternoon shadows lengthened on the lawn and the sun grew red and swollen over the western hills. Martha fixed supper, tried to eat, and couldn't. After a while, when the light began to fade, she slipped into Terry's jacket and went outside. Slowly the sky darkened and the stars began to appear. At length her star appeared, but its swift passage blurred before her eyes. Tires crunched on the gravel then, and headlights washed the darkness from the drive. A car door slammed. Martha did not move. Please God , she thought, let it be Terry , even though she knew that it couldn't possibly be Terry. Footsteps sounded behind her, paused. Someone coughed softly. She turned then— "Good evening, ma'am." She saw the circlet of stars on the gray epaulet; she saw the stern handsome face; she saw the dark tired eyes. And she knew. Even before he spoke again, she knew— "The same meteorite that damaged the ejection mechanism, ma'am. It penetrated the capsule, too. We didn't find out till just a while ago—but there was nothing we could have done anyway ... Are you all right, ma'am?" "Yes. I'm all right." "I wanted to express my regrets personally. I know how you must feel." "It's all right." "We will, of course, make every effort to bring back his ... remains ... so that he can have a fitting burial on Earth." "No," she said. "I beg your pardon, ma'am?" She raised her eyes to the patch of sky where her son had passed in his shining metal sarcophagus. Sirius blossomed there, blue-white and beautiful. She raised her eyes still higher—and beheld the vast parterre of Orion with its central motif of vivid forget-me-nots, its far-flung blooms of Betelguese and Rigel, of Bellatrix and Saiph ... And higher yet—and there flamed the exquisite flower beds of Taurus and Gemini, there burgeoned the riotous wreath of the Crab; there lay the pulsing petals of the Pleiades ... And down the ecliptic garden path, wafted by a stellar breeze, drifted the ocher rose of Mars ... "No," she said again. The general had raised his eyes, too; now, slowly, he lowered them. "I think I understand, ma'am. And I'm glad that's the way you want it ... The stars are beautiful tonight, aren't they." "More beautiful than they've ever been," she said. After the general had gone, she looked up once more at the vast and variegated garden of the sky where her son lay buried, then she turned and walked slowly back to the memoried house. THE END Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Amazing Stories January 1959. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note.

He is reserved and has difficulty making friends

He is an average American boy

He did not perform well in school

He preferred athletics over academics

27110_HKV3Z17H_1

Upon waking up after one million years, Ned feels all of the following emotions at an extreme level, EXCEPT for ______.

THE ETERNAL WALL By RAYMOND Z. GALLUN A scream of brakes, the splash into icy waters, a long descent into alkaline depths ... it was death. But Ned Vince lived again—a million years later! "See you in half an hour, Betty," said Ned Vince over the party telephone. "We'll be out at the Silver Basket before ten-thirty...." Ned Vince was eager for the company of the girl he loved. That was why he was in a hurry to get to the neighboring town of Hurley, where she lived. His old car rattled and roared as he swung it recklessly around Pit Bend. There was where Death tapped him on the shoulder. Another car leaped suddenly into view, its lights glaring blindingly past a high, up-jutting mass of Jurassic rock at the turn of the road. Dazzled, and befuddled by his own rash speed, Ned Vince had only swift young reflexes to rely on to avoid a fearful, telescoping collision. He flicked his wheel smoothly to the right; but the County Highway Commission hadn't yet tarred the traffic-loosened gravel at the Bend. An incredible science, millions of years old, lay in the minds of these creatures. Ned could scarcely have chosen a worse place to start sliding and spinning. His car hit the white-painted wooden rail sideways, crashed through, tumbled down a steep slope, struck a huge boulder, bounced up a little, and arced outward, falling as gracefully as a swan-diver toward the inky waters of the Pit, fifty feet beneath.... Ned Vince was still dimly conscious when that black, quiet pool geysered around him in a mighty splash. He had only a dazing welt on his forehead, and a gag of terror in his throat. Movement was slower now, as he began to sink, trapped inside his wrecked car. Nothing that he could imagine could mean doom more certainly than this. The Pit was a tremendously deep pocket in the ground, spring-fed. The edges of that almost bottomless pool were caked with a rim of white—for the water, on which dead birds so often floated, was surcharged with alkali. As that heavy, natronous liquid rushed up through the openings and cracks beneath his feet, Ned Vince knew that his friends and his family would never see his body again, lost beyond recovery in this abyss. The car was deeply submerged. The light had blinked out on the dash-panel, leaving Ned in absolute darkness. A flood rushed in at the shattered window. He clawed at the door, trying to open it, but it was jammed in the crash-bent frame, and he couldn't fight against the force of that incoming water. The welt, left by the blow he had received on his forehead, put a thickening mist over his brain, so that he could not think clearly. Presently, when he could no longer hold his breath, bitter liquid was sucked into his lungs. His last thoughts were those of a drowning man. The machine-shop he and his dad had had in Harwich. Betty Moore, with the smiling Irish eyes—like in the song. Betty and he had planned to go to the State University this Fall. They'd planned to be married sometime.... Goodbye, Betty ... The ripples that had ruffled the surface waters in the Pit, quieted again to glassy smoothness. The eternal stars shone calmly. The geologic Dakota hills, which might have seen the dinosaurs, still bulked along the highway. Time, the Brother of Death, and the Father of Change, seemed to wait.... "Kaalleee! Tik!... Tik, tik, tik!... Kaalleee!..." The excited cry, which no human throat could quite have duplicated accurately, arose thinly from the depths of a powder-dry gulch, water-scarred from an inconceivable antiquity. The noon-day Sun was red and huge. The air was tenuous, dehydrated, chill. "Kaalleee!... Tik, tik, tik!..." At first there was only one voice uttering those weird, triumphant sounds. Then other vocal organs took up that trilling wail, and those short, sharp chuckles of eagerness. Other questioning, wondering notes mixed with the cadence. Lacking qualities identifiable as human, the disturbance was still like the babble of a group of workmen who have discovered something remarkable. The desolate expanse around the gulch, was all but without motion. The icy breeze tore tiny puffs of dust from grotesque, angling drifts of soil, nearly waterless for eons. Patches of drab lichen grew here and there on the up-jutting rocks, but in the desert itself, no other life was visible. Even the hills had sagged away, flattened by incalculable ages of erosion. At a mile distance, a crumbling heap of rubble arose. Once it had been a building. A gigantic, jagged mass of detritus slanted upward from its crest—red debris that had once been steel. A launching catapult for the last space ships built by the gods in exodus, perhaps it was—half a million years ago. Man was gone from the Earth. Glacial ages, war, decadence, disease, and a final scattering of those ultimate superhumans to newer worlds in other solar systems, had done that. "Kaalleee!... Tik, tik, tik!..." The sounds were not human. They were more like the chatter and wail of small desert animals. But there was a seeming paradox here in the depths of that gulch, too. The glint of metal, sharp and burnished. The flat, streamlined bulk of a flying machine, shiny and new. The bell-like muzzle of a strange excavator-apparatus, which seemed to depend on a blast of atoms to clear away rock and soil. Thus the gulch had been cleared of the accumulated rubbish of antiquity. Man, it seemed, had a successor, as ruler of the Earth. Loy Chuk had flown his geological expedition out from the far lowlands to the east, out from the city of Kar-Rah. And he was very happy now—flushed with a vast and unlooked-for success. He crouched there on his haunches, at the dry bottom of the Pit. The breeze rumpled his long, brown fur. He wasn't very different in appearance from his ancestors. A foot tall, perhaps, as he squatted there in that antique stance of his kind. His tail was short and furred, his undersides creamy. White whiskers spread around his inquisitive, pink-tipped snout. But his cranium bulged up and forward between shrewd, beady eyes, betraying the slow heritage of time, of survival of the fittest, of evolution. He could think and dream and invent, and the civilization of his kind was already far beyond that of the ancient Twentieth Century. Loy Chuk and his fellow workers were gathered, tense and gleeful, around the things their digging had exposed to the daylight. There was a gob of junk—scarcely more than an irregular formation of flaky rust. But imbedded in it was a huddled form, brown and hard as old wood. The dry mud that had encased it like an airtight coffin, had by now been chipped away by the tiny investigators; but soiled clothing still clung to it, after perhaps a million years. Metal had gone into decay—yes. But not this body. The answer to this was simple—alkali. A mineral saturation that had held time and change in stasis. A perfect preservative for organic tissue, aided probably during most of those passing eras by desert dryness. The Dakotas had turned arid very swiftly. This body was not a mere fossil. It was a mummy. "Kaalleee!" Man, that meant. Not the star-conquering demi-gods, but the ancestral stock that had built the first machines on Earth, and in the early Twenty-first Century, the first interplanetary rockets. No wonder Loy Chuk and his co-workers were happy in their paleontological enthusiasm! A strange accident, happening in a legendary antiquity, had aided them in their quest for knowledge. At last Loy Chuk gave a soft, chirping signal. The chant of triumph ended, while instruments flicked in his tiny hands. The final instrument he used to test the mummy, looked like a miniature stereoscope, with complicated details. He held it over his eyes. On the tiny screen within, through the agency of focused X-rays, he saw magnified images of the internal organs of this ancient human corpse. What his probing gaze revealed to him, made his pleasure even greater than before. In twittering, chattering sounds, he communicated his further knowledge to his henchmen. Though devoid of moisture, the mummy was perfectly preserved, even to its brain cells! Medical and biological sciences were far advanced among Loy Chuk's kind. Perhaps, by the application of principles long known to them, this long-dead body could be made to live again! It might move, speak, remember its past! What a marvelous subject for study it would make, back there in the museums of Kar-Rah! "Tik, tik, tik!..." But Loy silenced this fresh, eager chattering with a command. Work was always more substantial than cheering. With infinite care—small, sharp hand-tools were used, now—the mummy of Ned Vince was disengaged from the worthless rust of his primitive automobile. With infinite care it was crated in a metal case, and hauled into the flying machine. Flashing flame, the latter arose, bearing the entire hundred members of the expedition. The craft shot eastward at bullet-like speed. The spreading continental plateau of North America seemed to crawl backward, beneath. A tremendous sand desert, marked with low, washed-down mountains, and the vague, angular, geometric mounds of human cities that were gone forever. Beyond the eastern rim of the continent, the plain dipped downward steeply. The white of dried salt was on the hills, but there was a little green growth here, too. The dead sea-bottom of the vanished Atlantic was not as dead as the highlands. Far out in a deep valley, Kar-Rah, the city of the rodents, came into view—a crystalline maze of low, bubble-like structures, glinting in the red sunshine. But this was only its surface aspect. Loy Chuk's people had built their homes mostly underground, since the beginning of their foggy evolution. Besides, in this latter day, the nights were very cold, the shelter of subterranean passages and rooms was welcome. The mummy was taken to Loy Chuk's laboratory, a short distance below the surface. Here at once, the scientist began his work. The body of the ancient man was put in a large vat. Fluids submerged it, slowly soaking from that hardened flesh the alkali that had preserved it for so long. The fluid was changed often, until woody muscles and other tissues became pliable once more. Then the more delicate processes began. Still submerged in liquid, the corpse was submitted to a flow of restorative energy, passing between complicated electrodes. The cells of antique flesh and brain gradually took on a chemical composition nearer to that of the life that they had once known. At last the final liquid was drained away, and the mummy lay there, a mummy no more, but a pale, silent figure in its tatters of clothing. Loy Chuk put an odd, metal-fabric helmet on its head, and a second, much smaller helmet on his own. Connected with this arrangement, was a black box of many uses. For hours he worked with his apparatus, studying, and guiding the recording instruments. The time passed swiftly. At last, eager and ready for whatever might happen now, Loy Chuk pushed another switch. With a cold, rosy flare, energy blazed around that moveless form. For Ned Vince, timeless eternity ended like a gradual fading mist. When he could see clearly again, he experienced that inevitable shock of vast change around him. Though it had been dehydrated, his brain had been kept perfectly intact through the ages, and now it was restored. So his memories were as vivid as yesterday. Yet, through that crystalline vat in which he lay, he could see a broad, low room, in which he could barely have stood erect. He saw instruments and equipment whose weird shapes suggested alienness, and knowledge beyond the era he had known! The walls were lavender and phosphorescent. Fossil bone-fragments were mounted in shallow cases. Dinosaur bones, some of them seemed, from their size. But there was a complete skeleton of a dog, too, and the skeleton of a man, and a second man-skeleton that was not quite human. Its neck-vertebrae were very thick and solid, its shoulders were wide, and its skull was gigantic. All this weirdness had a violent effect on Ned Vince—a sudden, nostalgic panic. Something was fearfully wrong! The nervous terror of the unknown was on him. Feeble and dizzy after his weird resurrection, which he could not understand, remembering as he did that moment of sinking to certain death in the pool at Pit Bend, he caught the edge of the transparent vat, and pulled himself to a sitting posture. There was a muffled murmur around him, as of some vast, un-Earthly metropolis. "Take it easy, Ned Vince...." The words themselves, and the way they were assembled, were old, familiar friends. But the tone was wrong. It was high, shrill, parrot-like, and mechanical. Ned's gaze searched for the source of the voice—located the black box just outside of his crystal vat. From that box the voice seemed to have originated. Before it crouched a small, brownish animal with a bulging head. The animal's tiny-fingered paws—hands they were, really—were touching rows of keys. To Ned Vince, it was all utterly insane and incomprehensible. A rodent, looking like a prairie dog, a little; but plainly possessing a high order of intelligence. And a voice whose soothingly familiar words were more repugnant somehow, simply because they could never belong in a place as eerie as this. Ned Vince did not know how Loy Chuk had probed his brain, with the aid of a pair of helmets, and the black box apparatus. He did not know that in the latter, his language, taken from his own revitalized mind, was recorded, and that Loy Chuk had only to press certain buttons to make the instrument express his thoughts in common, long-dead English. Loy, whose vocal organs were not human, would have had great difficulty speaking English words, anyway. Ned's dark hair was wildly awry. His gaunt, young face held befuddled terror. He gasped in the thin atmosphere. "I've gone nuts," he pronounced with a curious calm. "Stark—starin'—nuts...." Loy's box, with its recorded English words and its sonic detectors, could translate for its master, too. As the man spoke, Loy read the illuminated symbols in his own language, flashed on a frosted crystal plate before him. Thus he knew what Ned Vince was saying. Loy Chuk pressed more keys, and the box reproduced his answer: "No, Ned, not nuts. Not a bit of it! There are just a lot of things that you've got to get used to, that's all. You drowned about a million years ago. I discovered your body. I brought you back to life. We have science that can do that. I'm Loy Chuk...." It took only a moment for the box to tell the full story in clear, bold, friendly terms. Thus Loy sought, with calm, human logic, to make his charge feel at home. Probably, though, he was a fool, to suppose that he could succeed, thus. Vince started to mutter, struggling desperately to reason it out. "A prairie dog," he said. "Speaking to me. One million years. Evolution. The scientists say that people grew up from fishes in the sea. Prairie dogs are smart. So maybe super-prairie-dogs could come from them. A lot easier than men from fish...." It was all sound logic. Even Ned Vince knew that. Still, his mind, tuned to ordinary, simple things, couldn't quite realize all the vast things that had happened to himself, and to the world. The scope of it all was too staggeringly big. One million years. God!... Ned Vince made a last effort to control himself. His knuckles tightened on the edge of the vat. "I don't know what you've been talking about," he grated wildly. "But I want to get out of here! I want to go back where I came from! Do you understand—whoever, or whatever you are?" Loy Chuk pressed more keys. "But you can't go back to the Twentieth Century," said the box. "Nor is there any better place for you to be now, than Kar-Rah. You are the only man left on Earth. Those men that exist in other star systems are not really your kind anymore, though their forefathers originated on this planet. They have gone far beyond you in evolution. To them you would be only a senseless curiosity. You are much better off with my people—our minds are much more like yours. We will take care of you, and make you comfortable...." But Ned Vince wasn't listening, now. "You are the only man left on Earth." That had been enough for him to hear. He didn't more than half believe it. His mind was too confused for conviction about anything. Everything he saw and felt and heard might be some kind of nightmare. But then it might all be real instead, and that was abysmal horror. Ned was no coward—death and danger of any ordinary Earthly kind, he could have faced bravely. But the loneliness here, and the utter strangeness, were hideous like being stranded alone on another world! His heart was pounding heavily, and his eyes were wide. He looked across this eerie room. There was a ramp there at the other side, leading upward instead of a stairway. Fierce impulse to escape this nameless lair, to try to learn the facts for himself, possessed him. He bounded out of the vat, and with head down, dashed for the ramp. He had to go most of the way on his hands and knees, for the up-slanting passage was low. Excited animal chucklings around him, and the occasional touch of a furry body, hurried his feverish scrambling. But he emerged at last at the surface. He stood there panting in that frigid, rarefied air. It was night. The Moon was a gigantic, pock-marked bulk. The constellations were unrecognizable. The rodent city was a glowing expanse of shallow, crystalline domes, set among odd, scrub trees and bushes. The crags loomed on all sides, all their jaggedness lost after a million years of erosion under an ocean that was gone. In that ghastly moonlight, the ground glistened with dry salt. "Well, I guess it's all true, huh?" Ned Vince muttered in a flat tone. Behind him he heard an excited, squeaky chattering. Rodents in pursuit. Looking back, he saw the pinpoint gleams of countless little eyes. Yes, he might as well be an exile on another planet—so changed had the Earth become. A wave of intolerable homesickness came over him as he sensed the distances of time that had passed—those inconceivable eons, separating himself from his friends, from Betty, from almost everything that was familiar. He started to run, away from those glittering rodent eyes. He sensed death in that cold sea-bottom, but what of it? What reason did he have left to live? He'd be only a museum piece here, a thing to be caged and studied.... Prison or a madhouse would be far better. He tried to get hold of his courage. But what was there to inspire it? Nothing! He laughed harshly as he ran, welcoming that bitter, killing cold. Nostalgia had him in its clutch, and there was no answer in his hell-world, lost beyond the barrier of the years.... Loy Chuk and his followers presently came upon Ned Vince's unconscious form, a mile from the city of Kar-Rah. In a flying machine they took him back, and applied stimulants. He came to, in the same laboratory room as before. But he was firmly strapped to a low platform this time, so that he could not escape again. There he lay, helpless, until presently an idea occurred to him. It gave him a few crumbs of hope. "Hey, somebody!" he called. "You'd better get some rest, Ned Vince," came the answer from the black box. It was Loy Chuk speaking again. "But listen!" Ned protested. "You know a lot more than we did in the Twentieth Century. And—well—there's that thing called time-travel, that I used to read about. Maybe you know how to make it work! Maybe you could send me back to my own time after all!" Little Loy Chuk was in a black, discouraged mood, himself. He could understand the utter, sick dejection of this giant from the past, lost from his own kind. Probably insanity looming. In far less extreme circumstances than this, death from homesickness had come. Loy Chuk was a scientist. In common with all real scientists, regardless of the species from which they spring, he loved the subjects of his researches. He wanted this ancient man to live and to be happy. Or this creature would be of scant value for study. So Loy considered carefully what Ned Vince had suggested. Time-travel. Almost a legend. An assault upon an intangible wall that had baffled far keener wits than Loy's. But he was bent, now, on the well-being of this anachronism he had so miraculously resurrected—this human, this Kaalleee.... Loy jabbed buttons on the black box. "Yes, Ned Vince," said the sonic apparatus. "Time-travel. Perhaps that is the only thing to do—to send you back to your own period of history. For I see that you will never be yourself, here. It will be hard to accomplish, but we'll try. Now I shall put you under an anesthetic...." Ned felt better immediately, for there was real hope now, where there had been none before. Maybe he'd be back in his home-town of Harwich again. Maybe he'd see the old machine-shop, there. And the trees greening out in Spring. Maybe he'd be seeing Betty Moore in Hurley, soon.... Ned relaxed, as a tiny hypo-needle bit into his arm.... As soon as Ned Vince passed into unconsciousness, Loy Chuk went to work once more, using that pair of brain-helmets again, exploring carefully the man's mind. After hours of research, he proceeded to prepare his plans. The government of Kar-Rah was a scientific oligarchy, of which Loy was a prime member. It would be easy to get the help he needed. A horde of small, grey-furred beings and their machines, toiled for many days. Ned Vince's mind swam gradually out of the blur that had enveloped it. He was wandering aimlessly about in a familiar room. The girders of the roof above were of red-painted steel. His tool-benches were there, greasy and littered with metal filings, just as they had always been. He had a tractor to repair, and a seed-drill. Outside of the machine-shop, the old, familiar yellow sun was shining. Across the street was the small brown house, where he lived. With a sudden startlement, he saw Betty Moore in the doorway. She wore a blue dress, and a mischievous smile curved her lips. As though she had succeeded in creeping up on him, for a surprise. "Why, Ned," she chuckled. "You look as though you've been dreaming, and just woke up!" He grimaced ruefully as she approached. With a kind of fierce gratitude, he took her in his arms. Yes, she was just like always. "I guess I was dreaming, Betty," he whispered, feeling that mighty sense of relief. "I must have fallen asleep at the bench, here, and had a nightmare. I thought I had an accident at Pit Bend—and that a lot of worse things happened.... But it wasn't true ..." Ned Vince's mind, over which there was still an elusive fog that he did not try to shake off, accepted apparent facts simply. He did not know anything about the invisible radiations beating down upon him, soothing and dimming his brain, so that it would never question or doubt, or observe too closely the incongruous circumstances that must often appear. The lack of traffic in the street without, for instance—and the lack of people besides himself and Betty. He didn't know that this machine-shop was built from his own memories of the original. He didn't know that this Betty was of the same origin—a miraculous fabrication of metal and energy-units and soft plastic. The trees outside were only lantern-slide illusions. It was all built inside a great, opaque dome. But there were hidden television systems, too. Thus Loy Chuk's kind could study this ancient man—this Kaalleee. Thus, their motives were mostly selfish. Loy, though, was not observing, now. He had wandered far out into cold, sad sea-bottom, to ponder. He squeaked and chatted to himself, contemplating the magnificent, inexorable march of the ages. He remembered the ancient ruins, left by the final supermen. "The Kaalleee believes himself home," Loy was thinking. "He will survive and be happy. But there was no other way. Time is an Eternal Wall. Our archeological researches among the cities of the supermen show the truth. Even they, who once ruled Earth, never escaped from the present by so much as an instant...." THE END PRINTED IN U. S. A. Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Amazing Stories April 1956 and was first published in Amazing Stories November 1942. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note.

Confusion

Homesickness

Fear

Regret

27110_HKV3Z17H_2

Why does the author focus on the water returning to smoothness after Ned's wreck?

THE ETERNAL WALL By RAYMOND Z. GALLUN A scream of brakes, the splash into icy waters, a long descent into alkaline depths ... it was death. But Ned Vince lived again—a million years later! "See you in half an hour, Betty," said Ned Vince over the party telephone. "We'll be out at the Silver Basket before ten-thirty...." Ned Vince was eager for the company of the girl he loved. That was why he was in a hurry to get to the neighboring town of Hurley, where she lived. His old car rattled and roared as he swung it recklessly around Pit Bend. There was where Death tapped him on the shoulder. Another car leaped suddenly into view, its lights glaring blindingly past a high, up-jutting mass of Jurassic rock at the turn of the road. Dazzled, and befuddled by his own rash speed, Ned Vince had only swift young reflexes to rely on to avoid a fearful, telescoping collision. He flicked his wheel smoothly to the right; but the County Highway Commission hadn't yet tarred the traffic-loosened gravel at the Bend. An incredible science, millions of years old, lay in the minds of these creatures. Ned could scarcely have chosen a worse place to start sliding and spinning. His car hit the white-painted wooden rail sideways, crashed through, tumbled down a steep slope, struck a huge boulder, bounced up a little, and arced outward, falling as gracefully as a swan-diver toward the inky waters of the Pit, fifty feet beneath.... Ned Vince was still dimly conscious when that black, quiet pool geysered around him in a mighty splash. He had only a dazing welt on his forehead, and a gag of terror in his throat. Movement was slower now, as he began to sink, trapped inside his wrecked car. Nothing that he could imagine could mean doom more certainly than this. The Pit was a tremendously deep pocket in the ground, spring-fed. The edges of that almost bottomless pool were caked with a rim of white—for the water, on which dead birds so often floated, was surcharged with alkali. As that heavy, natronous liquid rushed up through the openings and cracks beneath his feet, Ned Vince knew that his friends and his family would never see his body again, lost beyond recovery in this abyss. The car was deeply submerged. The light had blinked out on the dash-panel, leaving Ned in absolute darkness. A flood rushed in at the shattered window. He clawed at the door, trying to open it, but it was jammed in the crash-bent frame, and he couldn't fight against the force of that incoming water. The welt, left by the blow he had received on his forehead, put a thickening mist over his brain, so that he could not think clearly. Presently, when he could no longer hold his breath, bitter liquid was sucked into his lungs. His last thoughts were those of a drowning man. The machine-shop he and his dad had had in Harwich. Betty Moore, with the smiling Irish eyes—like in the song. Betty and he had planned to go to the State University this Fall. They'd planned to be married sometime.... Goodbye, Betty ... The ripples that had ruffled the surface waters in the Pit, quieted again to glassy smoothness. The eternal stars shone calmly. The geologic Dakota hills, which might have seen the dinosaurs, still bulked along the highway. Time, the Brother of Death, and the Father of Change, seemed to wait.... "Kaalleee! Tik!... Tik, tik, tik!... Kaalleee!..." The excited cry, which no human throat could quite have duplicated accurately, arose thinly from the depths of a powder-dry gulch, water-scarred from an inconceivable antiquity. The noon-day Sun was red and huge. The air was tenuous, dehydrated, chill. "Kaalleee!... Tik, tik, tik!..." At first there was only one voice uttering those weird, triumphant sounds. Then other vocal organs took up that trilling wail, and those short, sharp chuckles of eagerness. Other questioning, wondering notes mixed with the cadence. Lacking qualities identifiable as human, the disturbance was still like the babble of a group of workmen who have discovered something remarkable. The desolate expanse around the gulch, was all but without motion. The icy breeze tore tiny puffs of dust from grotesque, angling drifts of soil, nearly waterless for eons. Patches of drab lichen grew here and there on the up-jutting rocks, but in the desert itself, no other life was visible. Even the hills had sagged away, flattened by incalculable ages of erosion. At a mile distance, a crumbling heap of rubble arose. Once it had been a building. A gigantic, jagged mass of detritus slanted upward from its crest—red debris that had once been steel. A launching catapult for the last space ships built by the gods in exodus, perhaps it was—half a million years ago. Man was gone from the Earth. Glacial ages, war, decadence, disease, and a final scattering of those ultimate superhumans to newer worlds in other solar systems, had done that. "Kaalleee!... Tik, tik, tik!..." The sounds were not human. They were more like the chatter and wail of small desert animals. But there was a seeming paradox here in the depths of that gulch, too. The glint of metal, sharp and burnished. The flat, streamlined bulk of a flying machine, shiny and new. The bell-like muzzle of a strange excavator-apparatus, which seemed to depend on a blast of atoms to clear away rock and soil. Thus the gulch had been cleared of the accumulated rubbish of antiquity. Man, it seemed, had a successor, as ruler of the Earth. Loy Chuk had flown his geological expedition out from the far lowlands to the east, out from the city of Kar-Rah. And he was very happy now—flushed with a vast and unlooked-for success. He crouched there on his haunches, at the dry bottom of the Pit. The breeze rumpled his long, brown fur. He wasn't very different in appearance from his ancestors. A foot tall, perhaps, as he squatted there in that antique stance of his kind. His tail was short and furred, his undersides creamy. White whiskers spread around his inquisitive, pink-tipped snout. But his cranium bulged up and forward between shrewd, beady eyes, betraying the slow heritage of time, of survival of the fittest, of evolution. He could think and dream and invent, and the civilization of his kind was already far beyond that of the ancient Twentieth Century. Loy Chuk and his fellow workers were gathered, tense and gleeful, around the things their digging had exposed to the daylight. There was a gob of junk—scarcely more than an irregular formation of flaky rust. But imbedded in it was a huddled form, brown and hard as old wood. The dry mud that had encased it like an airtight coffin, had by now been chipped away by the tiny investigators; but soiled clothing still clung to it, after perhaps a million years. Metal had gone into decay—yes. But not this body. The answer to this was simple—alkali. A mineral saturation that had held time and change in stasis. A perfect preservative for organic tissue, aided probably during most of those passing eras by desert dryness. The Dakotas had turned arid very swiftly. This body was not a mere fossil. It was a mummy. "Kaalleee!" Man, that meant. Not the star-conquering demi-gods, but the ancestral stock that had built the first machines on Earth, and in the early Twenty-first Century, the first interplanetary rockets. No wonder Loy Chuk and his co-workers were happy in their paleontological enthusiasm! A strange accident, happening in a legendary antiquity, had aided them in their quest for knowledge. At last Loy Chuk gave a soft, chirping signal. The chant of triumph ended, while instruments flicked in his tiny hands. The final instrument he used to test the mummy, looked like a miniature stereoscope, with complicated details. He held it over his eyes. On the tiny screen within, through the agency of focused X-rays, he saw magnified images of the internal organs of this ancient human corpse. What his probing gaze revealed to him, made his pleasure even greater than before. In twittering, chattering sounds, he communicated his further knowledge to his henchmen. Though devoid of moisture, the mummy was perfectly preserved, even to its brain cells! Medical and biological sciences were far advanced among Loy Chuk's kind. Perhaps, by the application of principles long known to them, this long-dead body could be made to live again! It might move, speak, remember its past! What a marvelous subject for study it would make, back there in the museums of Kar-Rah! "Tik, tik, tik!..." But Loy silenced this fresh, eager chattering with a command. Work was always more substantial than cheering. With infinite care—small, sharp hand-tools were used, now—the mummy of Ned Vince was disengaged from the worthless rust of his primitive automobile. With infinite care it was crated in a metal case, and hauled into the flying machine. Flashing flame, the latter arose, bearing the entire hundred members of the expedition. The craft shot eastward at bullet-like speed. The spreading continental plateau of North America seemed to crawl backward, beneath. A tremendous sand desert, marked with low, washed-down mountains, and the vague, angular, geometric mounds of human cities that were gone forever. Beyond the eastern rim of the continent, the plain dipped downward steeply. The white of dried salt was on the hills, but there was a little green growth here, too. The dead sea-bottom of the vanished Atlantic was not as dead as the highlands. Far out in a deep valley, Kar-Rah, the city of the rodents, came into view—a crystalline maze of low, bubble-like structures, glinting in the red sunshine. But this was only its surface aspect. Loy Chuk's people had built their homes mostly underground, since the beginning of their foggy evolution. Besides, in this latter day, the nights were very cold, the shelter of subterranean passages and rooms was welcome. The mummy was taken to Loy Chuk's laboratory, a short distance below the surface. Here at once, the scientist began his work. The body of the ancient man was put in a large vat. Fluids submerged it, slowly soaking from that hardened flesh the alkali that had preserved it for so long. The fluid was changed often, until woody muscles and other tissues became pliable once more. Then the more delicate processes began. Still submerged in liquid, the corpse was submitted to a flow of restorative energy, passing between complicated electrodes. The cells of antique flesh and brain gradually took on a chemical composition nearer to that of the life that they had once known. At last the final liquid was drained away, and the mummy lay there, a mummy no more, but a pale, silent figure in its tatters of clothing. Loy Chuk put an odd, metal-fabric helmet on its head, and a second, much smaller helmet on his own. Connected with this arrangement, was a black box of many uses. For hours he worked with his apparatus, studying, and guiding the recording instruments. The time passed swiftly. At last, eager and ready for whatever might happen now, Loy Chuk pushed another switch. With a cold, rosy flare, energy blazed around that moveless form. For Ned Vince, timeless eternity ended like a gradual fading mist. When he could see clearly again, he experienced that inevitable shock of vast change around him. Though it had been dehydrated, his brain had been kept perfectly intact through the ages, and now it was restored. So his memories were as vivid as yesterday. Yet, through that crystalline vat in which he lay, he could see a broad, low room, in which he could barely have stood erect. He saw instruments and equipment whose weird shapes suggested alienness, and knowledge beyond the era he had known! The walls were lavender and phosphorescent. Fossil bone-fragments were mounted in shallow cases. Dinosaur bones, some of them seemed, from their size. But there was a complete skeleton of a dog, too, and the skeleton of a man, and a second man-skeleton that was not quite human. Its neck-vertebrae were very thick and solid, its shoulders were wide, and its skull was gigantic. All this weirdness had a violent effect on Ned Vince—a sudden, nostalgic panic. Something was fearfully wrong! The nervous terror of the unknown was on him. Feeble and dizzy after his weird resurrection, which he could not understand, remembering as he did that moment of sinking to certain death in the pool at Pit Bend, he caught the edge of the transparent vat, and pulled himself to a sitting posture. There was a muffled murmur around him, as of some vast, un-Earthly metropolis. "Take it easy, Ned Vince...." The words themselves, and the way they were assembled, were old, familiar friends. But the tone was wrong. It was high, shrill, parrot-like, and mechanical. Ned's gaze searched for the source of the voice—located the black box just outside of his crystal vat. From that box the voice seemed to have originated. Before it crouched a small, brownish animal with a bulging head. The animal's tiny-fingered paws—hands they were, really—were touching rows of keys. To Ned Vince, it was all utterly insane and incomprehensible. A rodent, looking like a prairie dog, a little; but plainly possessing a high order of intelligence. And a voice whose soothingly familiar words were more repugnant somehow, simply because they could never belong in a place as eerie as this. Ned Vince did not know how Loy Chuk had probed his brain, with the aid of a pair of helmets, and the black box apparatus. He did not know that in the latter, his language, taken from his own revitalized mind, was recorded, and that Loy Chuk had only to press certain buttons to make the instrument express his thoughts in common, long-dead English. Loy, whose vocal organs were not human, would have had great difficulty speaking English words, anyway. Ned's dark hair was wildly awry. His gaunt, young face held befuddled terror. He gasped in the thin atmosphere. "I've gone nuts," he pronounced with a curious calm. "Stark—starin'—nuts...." Loy's box, with its recorded English words and its sonic detectors, could translate for its master, too. As the man spoke, Loy read the illuminated symbols in his own language, flashed on a frosted crystal plate before him. Thus he knew what Ned Vince was saying. Loy Chuk pressed more keys, and the box reproduced his answer: "No, Ned, not nuts. Not a bit of it! There are just a lot of things that you've got to get used to, that's all. You drowned about a million years ago. I discovered your body. I brought you back to life. We have science that can do that. I'm Loy Chuk...." It took only a moment for the box to tell the full story in clear, bold, friendly terms. Thus Loy sought, with calm, human logic, to make his charge feel at home. Probably, though, he was a fool, to suppose that he could succeed, thus. Vince started to mutter, struggling desperately to reason it out. "A prairie dog," he said. "Speaking to me. One million years. Evolution. The scientists say that people grew up from fishes in the sea. Prairie dogs are smart. So maybe super-prairie-dogs could come from them. A lot easier than men from fish...." It was all sound logic. Even Ned Vince knew that. Still, his mind, tuned to ordinary, simple things, couldn't quite realize all the vast things that had happened to himself, and to the world. The scope of it all was too staggeringly big. One million years. God!... Ned Vince made a last effort to control himself. His knuckles tightened on the edge of the vat. "I don't know what you've been talking about," he grated wildly. "But I want to get out of here! I want to go back where I came from! Do you understand—whoever, or whatever you are?" Loy Chuk pressed more keys. "But you can't go back to the Twentieth Century," said the box. "Nor is there any better place for you to be now, than Kar-Rah. You are the only man left on Earth. Those men that exist in other star systems are not really your kind anymore, though their forefathers originated on this planet. They have gone far beyond you in evolution. To them you would be only a senseless curiosity. You are much better off with my people—our minds are much more like yours. We will take care of you, and make you comfortable...." But Ned Vince wasn't listening, now. "You are the only man left on Earth." That had been enough for him to hear. He didn't more than half believe it. His mind was too confused for conviction about anything. Everything he saw and felt and heard might be some kind of nightmare. But then it might all be real instead, and that was abysmal horror. Ned was no coward—death and danger of any ordinary Earthly kind, he could have faced bravely. But the loneliness here, and the utter strangeness, were hideous like being stranded alone on another world! His heart was pounding heavily, and his eyes were wide. He looked across this eerie room. There was a ramp there at the other side, leading upward instead of a stairway. Fierce impulse to escape this nameless lair, to try to learn the facts for himself, possessed him. He bounded out of the vat, and with head down, dashed for the ramp. He had to go most of the way on his hands and knees, for the up-slanting passage was low. Excited animal chucklings around him, and the occasional touch of a furry body, hurried his feverish scrambling. But he emerged at last at the surface. He stood there panting in that frigid, rarefied air. It was night. The Moon was a gigantic, pock-marked bulk. The constellations were unrecognizable. The rodent city was a glowing expanse of shallow, crystalline domes, set among odd, scrub trees and bushes. The crags loomed on all sides, all their jaggedness lost after a million years of erosion under an ocean that was gone. In that ghastly moonlight, the ground glistened with dry salt. "Well, I guess it's all true, huh?" Ned Vince muttered in a flat tone. Behind him he heard an excited, squeaky chattering. Rodents in pursuit. Looking back, he saw the pinpoint gleams of countless little eyes. Yes, he might as well be an exile on another planet—so changed had the Earth become. A wave of intolerable homesickness came over him as he sensed the distances of time that had passed—those inconceivable eons, separating himself from his friends, from Betty, from almost everything that was familiar. He started to run, away from those glittering rodent eyes. He sensed death in that cold sea-bottom, but what of it? What reason did he have left to live? He'd be only a museum piece here, a thing to be caged and studied.... Prison or a madhouse would be far better. He tried to get hold of his courage. But what was there to inspire it? Nothing! He laughed harshly as he ran, welcoming that bitter, killing cold. Nostalgia had him in its clutch, and there was no answer in his hell-world, lost beyond the barrier of the years.... Loy Chuk and his followers presently came upon Ned Vince's unconscious form, a mile from the city of Kar-Rah. In a flying machine they took him back, and applied stimulants. He came to, in the same laboratory room as before. But he was firmly strapped to a low platform this time, so that he could not escape again. There he lay, helpless, until presently an idea occurred to him. It gave him a few crumbs of hope. "Hey, somebody!" he called. "You'd better get some rest, Ned Vince," came the answer from the black box. It was Loy Chuk speaking again. "But listen!" Ned protested. "You know a lot more than we did in the Twentieth Century. And—well—there's that thing called time-travel, that I used to read about. Maybe you know how to make it work! Maybe you could send me back to my own time after all!" Little Loy Chuk was in a black, discouraged mood, himself. He could understand the utter, sick dejection of this giant from the past, lost from his own kind. Probably insanity looming. In far less extreme circumstances than this, death from homesickness had come. Loy Chuk was a scientist. In common with all real scientists, regardless of the species from which they spring, he loved the subjects of his researches. He wanted this ancient man to live and to be happy. Or this creature would be of scant value for study. So Loy considered carefully what Ned Vince had suggested. Time-travel. Almost a legend. An assault upon an intangible wall that had baffled far keener wits than Loy's. But he was bent, now, on the well-being of this anachronism he had so miraculously resurrected—this human, this Kaalleee.... Loy jabbed buttons on the black box. "Yes, Ned Vince," said the sonic apparatus. "Time-travel. Perhaps that is the only thing to do—to send you back to your own period of history. For I see that you will never be yourself, here. It will be hard to accomplish, but we'll try. Now I shall put you under an anesthetic...." Ned felt better immediately, for there was real hope now, where there had been none before. Maybe he'd be back in his home-town of Harwich again. Maybe he'd see the old machine-shop, there. And the trees greening out in Spring. Maybe he'd be seeing Betty Moore in Hurley, soon.... Ned relaxed, as a tiny hypo-needle bit into his arm.... As soon as Ned Vince passed into unconsciousness, Loy Chuk went to work once more, using that pair of brain-helmets again, exploring carefully the man's mind. After hours of research, he proceeded to prepare his plans. The government of Kar-Rah was a scientific oligarchy, of which Loy was a prime member. It would be easy to get the help he needed. A horde of small, grey-furred beings and their machines, toiled for many days. Ned Vince's mind swam gradually out of the blur that had enveloped it. He was wandering aimlessly about in a familiar room. The girders of the roof above were of red-painted steel. His tool-benches were there, greasy and littered with metal filings, just as they had always been. He had a tractor to repair, and a seed-drill. Outside of the machine-shop, the old, familiar yellow sun was shining. Across the street was the small brown house, where he lived. With a sudden startlement, he saw Betty Moore in the doorway. She wore a blue dress, and a mischievous smile curved her lips. As though she had succeeded in creeping up on him, for a surprise. "Why, Ned," she chuckled. "You look as though you've been dreaming, and just woke up!" He grimaced ruefully as she approached. With a kind of fierce gratitude, he took her in his arms. Yes, she was just like always. "I guess I was dreaming, Betty," he whispered, feeling that mighty sense of relief. "I must have fallen asleep at the bench, here, and had a nightmare. I thought I had an accident at Pit Bend—and that a lot of worse things happened.... But it wasn't true ..." Ned Vince's mind, over which there was still an elusive fog that he did not try to shake off, accepted apparent facts simply. He did not know anything about the invisible radiations beating down upon him, soothing and dimming his brain, so that it would never question or doubt, or observe too closely the incongruous circumstances that must often appear. The lack of traffic in the street without, for instance—and the lack of people besides himself and Betty. He didn't know that this machine-shop was built from his own memories of the original. He didn't know that this Betty was of the same origin—a miraculous fabrication of metal and energy-units and soft plastic. The trees outside were only lantern-slide illusions. It was all built inside a great, opaque dome. But there were hidden television systems, too. Thus Loy Chuk's kind could study this ancient man—this Kaalleee. Thus, their motives were mostly selfish. Loy, though, was not observing, now. He had wandered far out into cold, sad sea-bottom, to ponder. He squeaked and chatted to himself, contemplating the magnificent, inexorable march of the ages. He remembered the ancient ruins, left by the final supermen. "The Kaalleee believes himself home," Loy was thinking. "He will survive and be happy. But there was no other way. Time is an Eternal Wall. Our archeological researches among the cities of the supermen show the truth. Even they, who once ruled Earth, never escaped from the present by so much as an instant...." THE END PRINTED IN U. S. A. Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Amazing Stories April 1956 and was first published in Amazing Stories November 1942. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note.

To demonstrate how time and progress move forward, without taking pause for the loss of a single or entire society

To depict the difference between a 20th century moment and the future, when water has vanished from the continent

To illustrate the biological effects of alkali on the composition of the human body

To personify the all-consuming effects of nostalgia and fear in the last moments of a human's brief life

27110_HKV3Z17H_3

What is Ned Vince's ultimate fate?

THE ETERNAL WALL By RAYMOND Z. GALLUN A scream of brakes, the splash into icy waters, a long descent into alkaline depths ... it was death. But Ned Vince lived again—a million years later! "See you in half an hour, Betty," said Ned Vince over the party telephone. "We'll be out at the Silver Basket before ten-thirty...." Ned Vince was eager for the company of the girl he loved. That was why he was in a hurry to get to the neighboring town of Hurley, where she lived. His old car rattled and roared as he swung it recklessly around Pit Bend. There was where Death tapped him on the shoulder. Another car leaped suddenly into view, its lights glaring blindingly past a high, up-jutting mass of Jurassic rock at the turn of the road. Dazzled, and befuddled by his own rash speed, Ned Vince had only swift young reflexes to rely on to avoid a fearful, telescoping collision. He flicked his wheel smoothly to the right; but the County Highway Commission hadn't yet tarred the traffic-loosened gravel at the Bend. An incredible science, millions of years old, lay in the minds of these creatures. Ned could scarcely have chosen a worse place to start sliding and spinning. His car hit the white-painted wooden rail sideways, crashed through, tumbled down a steep slope, struck a huge boulder, bounced up a little, and arced outward, falling as gracefully as a swan-diver toward the inky waters of the Pit, fifty feet beneath.... Ned Vince was still dimly conscious when that black, quiet pool geysered around him in a mighty splash. He had only a dazing welt on his forehead, and a gag of terror in his throat. Movement was slower now, as he began to sink, trapped inside his wrecked car. Nothing that he could imagine could mean doom more certainly than this. The Pit was a tremendously deep pocket in the ground, spring-fed. The edges of that almost bottomless pool were caked with a rim of white—for the water, on which dead birds so often floated, was surcharged with alkali. As that heavy, natronous liquid rushed up through the openings and cracks beneath his feet, Ned Vince knew that his friends and his family would never see his body again, lost beyond recovery in this abyss. The car was deeply submerged. The light had blinked out on the dash-panel, leaving Ned in absolute darkness. A flood rushed in at the shattered window. He clawed at the door, trying to open it, but it was jammed in the crash-bent frame, and he couldn't fight against the force of that incoming water. The welt, left by the blow he had received on his forehead, put a thickening mist over his brain, so that he could not think clearly. Presently, when he could no longer hold his breath, bitter liquid was sucked into his lungs. His last thoughts were those of a drowning man. The machine-shop he and his dad had had in Harwich. Betty Moore, with the smiling Irish eyes—like in the song. Betty and he had planned to go to the State University this Fall. They'd planned to be married sometime.... Goodbye, Betty ... The ripples that had ruffled the surface waters in the Pit, quieted again to glassy smoothness. The eternal stars shone calmly. The geologic Dakota hills, which might have seen the dinosaurs, still bulked along the highway. Time, the Brother of Death, and the Father of Change, seemed to wait.... "Kaalleee! Tik!... Tik, tik, tik!... Kaalleee!..." The excited cry, which no human throat could quite have duplicated accurately, arose thinly from the depths of a powder-dry gulch, water-scarred from an inconceivable antiquity. The noon-day Sun was red and huge. The air was tenuous, dehydrated, chill. "Kaalleee!... Tik, tik, tik!..." At first there was only one voice uttering those weird, triumphant sounds. Then other vocal organs took up that trilling wail, and those short, sharp chuckles of eagerness. Other questioning, wondering notes mixed with the cadence. Lacking qualities identifiable as human, the disturbance was still like the babble of a group of workmen who have discovered something remarkable. The desolate expanse around the gulch, was all but without motion. The icy breeze tore tiny puffs of dust from grotesque, angling drifts of soil, nearly waterless for eons. Patches of drab lichen grew here and there on the up-jutting rocks, but in the desert itself, no other life was visible. Even the hills had sagged away, flattened by incalculable ages of erosion. At a mile distance, a crumbling heap of rubble arose. Once it had been a building. A gigantic, jagged mass of detritus slanted upward from its crest—red debris that had once been steel. A launching catapult for the last space ships built by the gods in exodus, perhaps it was—half a million years ago. Man was gone from the Earth. Glacial ages, war, decadence, disease, and a final scattering of those ultimate superhumans to newer worlds in other solar systems, had done that. "Kaalleee!... Tik, tik, tik!..." The sounds were not human. They were more like the chatter and wail of small desert animals. But there was a seeming paradox here in the depths of that gulch, too. The glint of metal, sharp and burnished. The flat, streamlined bulk of a flying machine, shiny and new. The bell-like muzzle of a strange excavator-apparatus, which seemed to depend on a blast of atoms to clear away rock and soil. Thus the gulch had been cleared of the accumulated rubbish of antiquity. Man, it seemed, had a successor, as ruler of the Earth. Loy Chuk had flown his geological expedition out from the far lowlands to the east, out from the city of Kar-Rah. And he was very happy now—flushed with a vast and unlooked-for success. He crouched there on his haunches, at the dry bottom of the Pit. The breeze rumpled his long, brown fur. He wasn't very different in appearance from his ancestors. A foot tall, perhaps, as he squatted there in that antique stance of his kind. His tail was short and furred, his undersides creamy. White whiskers spread around his inquisitive, pink-tipped snout. But his cranium bulged up and forward between shrewd, beady eyes, betraying the slow heritage of time, of survival of the fittest, of evolution. He could think and dream and invent, and the civilization of his kind was already far beyond that of the ancient Twentieth Century. Loy Chuk and his fellow workers were gathered, tense and gleeful, around the things their digging had exposed to the daylight. There was a gob of junk—scarcely more than an irregular formation of flaky rust. But imbedded in it was a huddled form, brown and hard as old wood. The dry mud that had encased it like an airtight coffin, had by now been chipped away by the tiny investigators; but soiled clothing still clung to it, after perhaps a million years. Metal had gone into decay—yes. But not this body. The answer to this was simple—alkali. A mineral saturation that had held time and change in stasis. A perfect preservative for organic tissue, aided probably during most of those passing eras by desert dryness. The Dakotas had turned arid very swiftly. This body was not a mere fossil. It was a mummy. "Kaalleee!" Man, that meant. Not the star-conquering demi-gods, but the ancestral stock that had built the first machines on Earth, and in the early Twenty-first Century, the first interplanetary rockets. No wonder Loy Chuk and his co-workers were happy in their paleontological enthusiasm! A strange accident, happening in a legendary antiquity, had aided them in their quest for knowledge. At last Loy Chuk gave a soft, chirping signal. The chant of triumph ended, while instruments flicked in his tiny hands. The final instrument he used to test the mummy, looked like a miniature stereoscope, with complicated details. He held it over his eyes. On the tiny screen within, through the agency of focused X-rays, he saw magnified images of the internal organs of this ancient human corpse. What his probing gaze revealed to him, made his pleasure even greater than before. In twittering, chattering sounds, he communicated his further knowledge to his henchmen. Though devoid of moisture, the mummy was perfectly preserved, even to its brain cells! Medical and biological sciences were far advanced among Loy Chuk's kind. Perhaps, by the application of principles long known to them, this long-dead body could be made to live again! It might move, speak, remember its past! What a marvelous subject for study it would make, back there in the museums of Kar-Rah! "Tik, tik, tik!..." But Loy silenced this fresh, eager chattering with a command. Work was always more substantial than cheering. With infinite care—small, sharp hand-tools were used, now—the mummy of Ned Vince was disengaged from the worthless rust of his primitive automobile. With infinite care it was crated in a metal case, and hauled into the flying machine. Flashing flame, the latter arose, bearing the entire hundred members of the expedition. The craft shot eastward at bullet-like speed. The spreading continental plateau of North America seemed to crawl backward, beneath. A tremendous sand desert, marked with low, washed-down mountains, and the vague, angular, geometric mounds of human cities that were gone forever. Beyond the eastern rim of the continent, the plain dipped downward steeply. The white of dried salt was on the hills, but there was a little green growth here, too. The dead sea-bottom of the vanished Atlantic was not as dead as the highlands. Far out in a deep valley, Kar-Rah, the city of the rodents, came into view—a crystalline maze of low, bubble-like structures, glinting in the red sunshine. But this was only its surface aspect. Loy Chuk's people had built their homes mostly underground, since the beginning of their foggy evolution. Besides, in this latter day, the nights were very cold, the shelter of subterranean passages and rooms was welcome. The mummy was taken to Loy Chuk's laboratory, a short distance below the surface. Here at once, the scientist began his work. The body of the ancient man was put in a large vat. Fluids submerged it, slowly soaking from that hardened flesh the alkali that had preserved it for so long. The fluid was changed often, until woody muscles and other tissues became pliable once more. Then the more delicate processes began. Still submerged in liquid, the corpse was submitted to a flow of restorative energy, passing between complicated electrodes. The cells of antique flesh and brain gradually took on a chemical composition nearer to that of the life that they had once known. At last the final liquid was drained away, and the mummy lay there, a mummy no more, but a pale, silent figure in its tatters of clothing. Loy Chuk put an odd, metal-fabric helmet on its head, and a second, much smaller helmet on his own. Connected with this arrangement, was a black box of many uses. For hours he worked with his apparatus, studying, and guiding the recording instruments. The time passed swiftly. At last, eager and ready for whatever might happen now, Loy Chuk pushed another switch. With a cold, rosy flare, energy blazed around that moveless form. For Ned Vince, timeless eternity ended like a gradual fading mist. When he could see clearly again, he experienced that inevitable shock of vast change around him. Though it had been dehydrated, his brain had been kept perfectly intact through the ages, and now it was restored. So his memories were as vivid as yesterday. Yet, through that crystalline vat in which he lay, he could see a broad, low room, in which he could barely have stood erect. He saw instruments and equipment whose weird shapes suggested alienness, and knowledge beyond the era he had known! The walls were lavender and phosphorescent. Fossil bone-fragments were mounted in shallow cases. Dinosaur bones, some of them seemed, from their size. But there was a complete skeleton of a dog, too, and the skeleton of a man, and a second man-skeleton that was not quite human. Its neck-vertebrae were very thick and solid, its shoulders were wide, and its skull was gigantic. All this weirdness had a violent effect on Ned Vince—a sudden, nostalgic panic. Something was fearfully wrong! The nervous terror of the unknown was on him. Feeble and dizzy after his weird resurrection, which he could not understand, remembering as he did that moment of sinking to certain death in the pool at Pit Bend, he caught the edge of the transparent vat, and pulled himself to a sitting posture. There was a muffled murmur around him, as of some vast, un-Earthly metropolis. "Take it easy, Ned Vince...." The words themselves, and the way they were assembled, were old, familiar friends. But the tone was wrong. It was high, shrill, parrot-like, and mechanical. Ned's gaze searched for the source of the voice—located the black box just outside of his crystal vat. From that box the voice seemed to have originated. Before it crouched a small, brownish animal with a bulging head. The animal's tiny-fingered paws—hands they were, really—were touching rows of keys. To Ned Vince, it was all utterly insane and incomprehensible. A rodent, looking like a prairie dog, a little; but plainly possessing a high order of intelligence. And a voice whose soothingly familiar words were more repugnant somehow, simply because they could never belong in a place as eerie as this. Ned Vince did not know how Loy Chuk had probed his brain, with the aid of a pair of helmets, and the black box apparatus. He did not know that in the latter, his language, taken from his own revitalized mind, was recorded, and that Loy Chuk had only to press certain buttons to make the instrument express his thoughts in common, long-dead English. Loy, whose vocal organs were not human, would have had great difficulty speaking English words, anyway. Ned's dark hair was wildly awry. His gaunt, young face held befuddled terror. He gasped in the thin atmosphere. "I've gone nuts," he pronounced with a curious calm. "Stark—starin'—nuts...." Loy's box, with its recorded English words and its sonic detectors, could translate for its master, too. As the man spoke, Loy read the illuminated symbols in his own language, flashed on a frosted crystal plate before him. Thus he knew what Ned Vince was saying. Loy Chuk pressed more keys, and the box reproduced his answer: "No, Ned, not nuts. Not a bit of it! There are just a lot of things that you've got to get used to, that's all. You drowned about a million years ago. I discovered your body. I brought you back to life. We have science that can do that. I'm Loy Chuk...." It took only a moment for the box to tell the full story in clear, bold, friendly terms. Thus Loy sought, with calm, human logic, to make his charge feel at home. Probably, though, he was a fool, to suppose that he could succeed, thus. Vince started to mutter, struggling desperately to reason it out. "A prairie dog," he said. "Speaking to me. One million years. Evolution. The scientists say that people grew up from fishes in the sea. Prairie dogs are smart. So maybe super-prairie-dogs could come from them. A lot easier than men from fish...." It was all sound logic. Even Ned Vince knew that. Still, his mind, tuned to ordinary, simple things, couldn't quite realize all the vast things that had happened to himself, and to the world. The scope of it all was too staggeringly big. One million years. God!... Ned Vince made a last effort to control himself. His knuckles tightened on the edge of the vat. "I don't know what you've been talking about," he grated wildly. "But I want to get out of here! I want to go back where I came from! Do you understand—whoever, or whatever you are?" Loy Chuk pressed more keys. "But you can't go back to the Twentieth Century," said the box. "Nor is there any better place for you to be now, than Kar-Rah. You are the only man left on Earth. Those men that exist in other star systems are not really your kind anymore, though their forefathers originated on this planet. They have gone far beyond you in evolution. To them you would be only a senseless curiosity. You are much better off with my people—our minds are much more like yours. We will take care of you, and make you comfortable...." But Ned Vince wasn't listening, now. "You are the only man left on Earth." That had been enough for him to hear. He didn't more than half believe it. His mind was too confused for conviction about anything. Everything he saw and felt and heard might be some kind of nightmare. But then it might all be real instead, and that was abysmal horror. Ned was no coward—death and danger of any ordinary Earthly kind, he could have faced bravely. But the loneliness here, and the utter strangeness, were hideous like being stranded alone on another world! His heart was pounding heavily, and his eyes were wide. He looked across this eerie room. There was a ramp there at the other side, leading upward instead of a stairway. Fierce impulse to escape this nameless lair, to try to learn the facts for himself, possessed him. He bounded out of the vat, and with head down, dashed for the ramp. He had to go most of the way on his hands and knees, for the up-slanting passage was low. Excited animal chucklings around him, and the occasional touch of a furry body, hurried his feverish scrambling. But he emerged at last at the surface. He stood there panting in that frigid, rarefied air. It was night. The Moon was a gigantic, pock-marked bulk. The constellations were unrecognizable. The rodent city was a glowing expanse of shallow, crystalline domes, set among odd, scrub trees and bushes. The crags loomed on all sides, all their jaggedness lost after a million years of erosion under an ocean that was gone. In that ghastly moonlight, the ground glistened with dry salt. "Well, I guess it's all true, huh?" Ned Vince muttered in a flat tone. Behind him he heard an excited, squeaky chattering. Rodents in pursuit. Looking back, he saw the pinpoint gleams of countless little eyes. Yes, he might as well be an exile on another planet—so changed had the Earth become. A wave of intolerable homesickness came over him as he sensed the distances of time that had passed—those inconceivable eons, separating himself from his friends, from Betty, from almost everything that was familiar. He started to run, away from those glittering rodent eyes. He sensed death in that cold sea-bottom, but what of it? What reason did he have left to live? He'd be only a museum piece here, a thing to be caged and studied.... Prison or a madhouse would be far better. He tried to get hold of his courage. But what was there to inspire it? Nothing! He laughed harshly as he ran, welcoming that bitter, killing cold. Nostalgia had him in its clutch, and there was no answer in his hell-world, lost beyond the barrier of the years.... Loy Chuk and his followers presently came upon Ned Vince's unconscious form, a mile from the city of Kar-Rah. In a flying machine they took him back, and applied stimulants. He came to, in the same laboratory room as before. But he was firmly strapped to a low platform this time, so that he could not escape again. There he lay, helpless, until presently an idea occurred to him. It gave him a few crumbs of hope. "Hey, somebody!" he called. "You'd better get some rest, Ned Vince," came the answer from the black box. It was Loy Chuk speaking again. "But listen!" Ned protested. "You know a lot more than we did in the Twentieth Century. And—well—there's that thing called time-travel, that I used to read about. Maybe you know how to make it work! Maybe you could send me back to my own time after all!" Little Loy Chuk was in a black, discouraged mood, himself. He could understand the utter, sick dejection of this giant from the past, lost from his own kind. Probably insanity looming. In far less extreme circumstances than this, death from homesickness had come. Loy Chuk was a scientist. In common with all real scientists, regardless of the species from which they spring, he loved the subjects of his researches. He wanted this ancient man to live and to be happy. Or this creature would be of scant value for study. So Loy considered carefully what Ned Vince had suggested. Time-travel. Almost a legend. An assault upon an intangible wall that had baffled far keener wits than Loy's. But he was bent, now, on the well-being of this anachronism he had so miraculously resurrected—this human, this Kaalleee.... Loy jabbed buttons on the black box. "Yes, Ned Vince," said the sonic apparatus. "Time-travel. Perhaps that is the only thing to do—to send you back to your own period of history. For I see that you will never be yourself, here. It will be hard to accomplish, but we'll try. Now I shall put you under an anesthetic...." Ned felt better immediately, for there was real hope now, where there had been none before. Maybe he'd be back in his home-town of Harwich again. Maybe he'd see the old machine-shop, there. And the trees greening out in Spring. Maybe he'd be seeing Betty Moore in Hurley, soon.... Ned relaxed, as a tiny hypo-needle bit into his arm.... As soon as Ned Vince passed into unconsciousness, Loy Chuk went to work once more, using that pair of brain-helmets again, exploring carefully the man's mind. After hours of research, he proceeded to prepare his plans. The government of Kar-Rah was a scientific oligarchy, of which Loy was a prime member. It would be easy to get the help he needed. A horde of small, grey-furred beings and their machines, toiled for many days. Ned Vince's mind swam gradually out of the blur that had enveloped it. He was wandering aimlessly about in a familiar room. The girders of the roof above were of red-painted steel. His tool-benches were there, greasy and littered with metal filings, just as they had always been. He had a tractor to repair, and a seed-drill. Outside of the machine-shop, the old, familiar yellow sun was shining. Across the street was the small brown house, where he lived. With a sudden startlement, he saw Betty Moore in the doorway. She wore a blue dress, and a mischievous smile curved her lips. As though she had succeeded in creeping up on him, for a surprise. "Why, Ned," she chuckled. "You look as though you've been dreaming, and just woke up!" He grimaced ruefully as she approached. With a kind of fierce gratitude, he took her in his arms. Yes, she was just like always. "I guess I was dreaming, Betty," he whispered, feeling that mighty sense of relief. "I must have fallen asleep at the bench, here, and had a nightmare. I thought I had an accident at Pit Bend—and that a lot of worse things happened.... But it wasn't true ..." Ned Vince's mind, over which there was still an elusive fog that he did not try to shake off, accepted apparent facts simply. He did not know anything about the invisible radiations beating down upon him, soothing and dimming his brain, so that it would never question or doubt, or observe too closely the incongruous circumstances that must often appear. The lack of traffic in the street without, for instance—and the lack of people besides himself and Betty. He didn't know that this machine-shop was built from his own memories of the original. He didn't know that this Betty was of the same origin—a miraculous fabrication of metal and energy-units and soft plastic. The trees outside were only lantern-slide illusions. It was all built inside a great, opaque dome. But there were hidden television systems, too. Thus Loy Chuk's kind could study this ancient man—this Kaalleee. Thus, their motives were mostly selfish. Loy, though, was not observing, now. He had wandered far out into cold, sad sea-bottom, to ponder. He squeaked and chatted to himself, contemplating the magnificent, inexorable march of the ages. He remembered the ancient ruins, left by the final supermen. "The Kaalleee believes himself home," Loy was thinking. "He will survive and be happy. But there was no other way. Time is an Eternal Wall. Our archeological researches among the cities of the supermen show the truth. Even they, who once ruled Earth, never escaped from the present by so much as an instant...." THE END PRINTED IN U. S. A. Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Amazing Stories April 1956 and was first published in Amazing Stories November 1942. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note.

He is tranquilized and moved to a simulation of his previous life, where the Kar-Rah can continue to study him

He dies in a fatal car crash by drowning at the bottom of a deep pit of water

His body is put on display in a museum managed by the Kar-Rah

He wakes up to discover that the car wreck and experience with Loy Chuk was all a dream

27110_HKV3Z17H_4

How has planetary leadership evolved since the 20th century?

THE ETERNAL WALL By RAYMOND Z. GALLUN A scream of brakes, the splash into icy waters, a long descent into alkaline depths ... it was death. But Ned Vince lived again—a million years later! "See you in half an hour, Betty," said Ned Vince over the party telephone. "We'll be out at the Silver Basket before ten-thirty...." Ned Vince was eager for the company of the girl he loved. That was why he was in a hurry to get to the neighboring town of Hurley, where she lived. His old car rattled and roared as he swung it recklessly around Pit Bend. There was where Death tapped him on the shoulder. Another car leaped suddenly into view, its lights glaring blindingly past a high, up-jutting mass of Jurassic rock at the turn of the road. Dazzled, and befuddled by his own rash speed, Ned Vince had only swift young reflexes to rely on to avoid a fearful, telescoping collision. He flicked his wheel smoothly to the right; but the County Highway Commission hadn't yet tarred the traffic-loosened gravel at the Bend. An incredible science, millions of years old, lay in the minds of these creatures. Ned could scarcely have chosen a worse place to start sliding and spinning. His car hit the white-painted wooden rail sideways, crashed through, tumbled down a steep slope, struck a huge boulder, bounced up a little, and arced outward, falling as gracefully as a swan-diver toward the inky waters of the Pit, fifty feet beneath.... Ned Vince was still dimly conscious when that black, quiet pool geysered around him in a mighty splash. He had only a dazing welt on his forehead, and a gag of terror in his throat. Movement was slower now, as he began to sink, trapped inside his wrecked car. Nothing that he could imagine could mean doom more certainly than this. The Pit was a tremendously deep pocket in the ground, spring-fed. The edges of that almost bottomless pool were caked with a rim of white—for the water, on which dead birds so often floated, was surcharged with alkali. As that heavy, natronous liquid rushed up through the openings and cracks beneath his feet, Ned Vince knew that his friends and his family would never see his body again, lost beyond recovery in this abyss. The car was deeply submerged. The light had blinked out on the dash-panel, leaving Ned in absolute darkness. A flood rushed in at the shattered window. He clawed at the door, trying to open it, but it was jammed in the crash-bent frame, and he couldn't fight against the force of that incoming water. The welt, left by the blow he had received on his forehead, put a thickening mist over his brain, so that he could not think clearly. Presently, when he could no longer hold his breath, bitter liquid was sucked into his lungs. His last thoughts were those of a drowning man. The machine-shop he and his dad had had in Harwich. Betty Moore, with the smiling Irish eyes—like in the song. Betty and he had planned to go to the State University this Fall. They'd planned to be married sometime.... Goodbye, Betty ... The ripples that had ruffled the surface waters in the Pit, quieted again to glassy smoothness. The eternal stars shone calmly. The geologic Dakota hills, which might have seen the dinosaurs, still bulked along the highway. Time, the Brother of Death, and the Father of Change, seemed to wait.... "Kaalleee! Tik!... Tik, tik, tik!... Kaalleee!..." The excited cry, which no human throat could quite have duplicated accurately, arose thinly from the depths of a powder-dry gulch, water-scarred from an inconceivable antiquity. The noon-day Sun was red and huge. The air was tenuous, dehydrated, chill. "Kaalleee!... Tik, tik, tik!..." At first there was only one voice uttering those weird, triumphant sounds. Then other vocal organs took up that trilling wail, and those short, sharp chuckles of eagerness. Other questioning, wondering notes mixed with the cadence. Lacking qualities identifiable as human, the disturbance was still like the babble of a group of workmen who have discovered something remarkable. The desolate expanse around the gulch, was all but without motion. The icy breeze tore tiny puffs of dust from grotesque, angling drifts of soil, nearly waterless for eons. Patches of drab lichen grew here and there on the up-jutting rocks, but in the desert itself, no other life was visible. Even the hills had sagged away, flattened by incalculable ages of erosion. At a mile distance, a crumbling heap of rubble arose. Once it had been a building. A gigantic, jagged mass of detritus slanted upward from its crest—red debris that had once been steel. A launching catapult for the last space ships built by the gods in exodus, perhaps it was—half a million years ago. Man was gone from the Earth. Glacial ages, war, decadence, disease, and a final scattering of those ultimate superhumans to newer worlds in other solar systems, had done that. "Kaalleee!... Tik, tik, tik!..." The sounds were not human. They were more like the chatter and wail of small desert animals. But there was a seeming paradox here in the depths of that gulch, too. The glint of metal, sharp and burnished. The flat, streamlined bulk of a flying machine, shiny and new. The bell-like muzzle of a strange excavator-apparatus, which seemed to depend on a blast of atoms to clear away rock and soil. Thus the gulch had been cleared of the accumulated rubbish of antiquity. Man, it seemed, had a successor, as ruler of the Earth. Loy Chuk had flown his geological expedition out from the far lowlands to the east, out from the city of Kar-Rah. And he was very happy now—flushed with a vast and unlooked-for success. He crouched there on his haunches, at the dry bottom of the Pit. The breeze rumpled his long, brown fur. He wasn't very different in appearance from his ancestors. A foot tall, perhaps, as he squatted there in that antique stance of his kind. His tail was short and furred, his undersides creamy. White whiskers spread around his inquisitive, pink-tipped snout. But his cranium bulged up and forward between shrewd, beady eyes, betraying the slow heritage of time, of survival of the fittest, of evolution. He could think and dream and invent, and the civilization of his kind was already far beyond that of the ancient Twentieth Century. Loy Chuk and his fellow workers were gathered, tense and gleeful, around the things their digging had exposed to the daylight. There was a gob of junk—scarcely more than an irregular formation of flaky rust. But imbedded in it was a huddled form, brown and hard as old wood. The dry mud that had encased it like an airtight coffin, had by now been chipped away by the tiny investigators; but soiled clothing still clung to it, after perhaps a million years. Metal had gone into decay—yes. But not this body. The answer to this was simple—alkali. A mineral saturation that had held time and change in stasis. A perfect preservative for organic tissue, aided probably during most of those passing eras by desert dryness. The Dakotas had turned arid very swiftly. This body was not a mere fossil. It was a mummy. "Kaalleee!" Man, that meant. Not the star-conquering demi-gods, but the ancestral stock that had built the first machines on Earth, and in the early Twenty-first Century, the first interplanetary rockets. No wonder Loy Chuk and his co-workers were happy in their paleontological enthusiasm! A strange accident, happening in a legendary antiquity, had aided them in their quest for knowledge. At last Loy Chuk gave a soft, chirping signal. The chant of triumph ended, while instruments flicked in his tiny hands. The final instrument he used to test the mummy, looked like a miniature stereoscope, with complicated details. He held it over his eyes. On the tiny screen within, through the agency of focused X-rays, he saw magnified images of the internal organs of this ancient human corpse. What his probing gaze revealed to him, made his pleasure even greater than before. In twittering, chattering sounds, he communicated his further knowledge to his henchmen. Though devoid of moisture, the mummy was perfectly preserved, even to its brain cells! Medical and biological sciences were far advanced among Loy Chuk's kind. Perhaps, by the application of principles long known to them, this long-dead body could be made to live again! It might move, speak, remember its past! What a marvelous subject for study it would make, back there in the museums of Kar-Rah! "Tik, tik, tik!..." But Loy silenced this fresh, eager chattering with a command. Work was always more substantial than cheering. With infinite care—small, sharp hand-tools were used, now—the mummy of Ned Vince was disengaged from the worthless rust of his primitive automobile. With infinite care it was crated in a metal case, and hauled into the flying machine. Flashing flame, the latter arose, bearing the entire hundred members of the expedition. The craft shot eastward at bullet-like speed. The spreading continental plateau of North America seemed to crawl backward, beneath. A tremendous sand desert, marked with low, washed-down mountains, and the vague, angular, geometric mounds of human cities that were gone forever. Beyond the eastern rim of the continent, the plain dipped downward steeply. The white of dried salt was on the hills, but there was a little green growth here, too. The dead sea-bottom of the vanished Atlantic was not as dead as the highlands. Far out in a deep valley, Kar-Rah, the city of the rodents, came into view—a crystalline maze of low, bubble-like structures, glinting in the red sunshine. But this was only its surface aspect. Loy Chuk's people had built their homes mostly underground, since the beginning of their foggy evolution. Besides, in this latter day, the nights were very cold, the shelter of subterranean passages and rooms was welcome. The mummy was taken to Loy Chuk's laboratory, a short distance below the surface. Here at once, the scientist began his work. The body of the ancient man was put in a large vat. Fluids submerged it, slowly soaking from that hardened flesh the alkali that had preserved it for so long. The fluid was changed often, until woody muscles and other tissues became pliable once more. Then the more delicate processes began. Still submerged in liquid, the corpse was submitted to a flow of restorative energy, passing between complicated electrodes. The cells of antique flesh and brain gradually took on a chemical composition nearer to that of the life that they had once known. At last the final liquid was drained away, and the mummy lay there, a mummy no more, but a pale, silent figure in its tatters of clothing. Loy Chuk put an odd, metal-fabric helmet on its head, and a second, much smaller helmet on his own. Connected with this arrangement, was a black box of many uses. For hours he worked with his apparatus, studying, and guiding the recording instruments. The time passed swiftly. At last, eager and ready for whatever might happen now, Loy Chuk pushed another switch. With a cold, rosy flare, energy blazed around that moveless form. For Ned Vince, timeless eternity ended like a gradual fading mist. When he could see clearly again, he experienced that inevitable shock of vast change around him. Though it had been dehydrated, his brain had been kept perfectly intact through the ages, and now it was restored. So his memories were as vivid as yesterday. Yet, through that crystalline vat in which he lay, he could see a broad, low room, in which he could barely have stood erect. He saw instruments and equipment whose weird shapes suggested alienness, and knowledge beyond the era he had known! The walls were lavender and phosphorescent. Fossil bone-fragments were mounted in shallow cases. Dinosaur bones, some of them seemed, from their size. But there was a complete skeleton of a dog, too, and the skeleton of a man, and a second man-skeleton that was not quite human. Its neck-vertebrae were very thick and solid, its shoulders were wide, and its skull was gigantic. All this weirdness had a violent effect on Ned Vince—a sudden, nostalgic panic. Something was fearfully wrong! The nervous terror of the unknown was on him. Feeble and dizzy after his weird resurrection, which he could not understand, remembering as he did that moment of sinking to certain death in the pool at Pit Bend, he caught the edge of the transparent vat, and pulled himself to a sitting posture. There was a muffled murmur around him, as of some vast, un-Earthly metropolis. "Take it easy, Ned Vince...." The words themselves, and the way they were assembled, were old, familiar friends. But the tone was wrong. It was high, shrill, parrot-like, and mechanical. Ned's gaze searched for the source of the voice—located the black box just outside of his crystal vat. From that box the voice seemed to have originated. Before it crouched a small, brownish animal with a bulging head. The animal's tiny-fingered paws—hands they were, really—were touching rows of keys. To Ned Vince, it was all utterly insane and incomprehensible. A rodent, looking like a prairie dog, a little; but plainly possessing a high order of intelligence. And a voice whose soothingly familiar words were more repugnant somehow, simply because they could never belong in a place as eerie as this. Ned Vince did not know how Loy Chuk had probed his brain, with the aid of a pair of helmets, and the black box apparatus. He did not know that in the latter, his language, taken from his own revitalized mind, was recorded, and that Loy Chuk had only to press certain buttons to make the instrument express his thoughts in common, long-dead English. Loy, whose vocal organs were not human, would have had great difficulty speaking English words, anyway. Ned's dark hair was wildly awry. His gaunt, young face held befuddled terror. He gasped in the thin atmosphere. "I've gone nuts," he pronounced with a curious calm. "Stark—starin'—nuts...." Loy's box, with its recorded English words and its sonic detectors, could translate for its master, too. As the man spoke, Loy read the illuminated symbols in his own language, flashed on a frosted crystal plate before him. Thus he knew what Ned Vince was saying. Loy Chuk pressed more keys, and the box reproduced his answer: "No, Ned, not nuts. Not a bit of it! There are just a lot of things that you've got to get used to, that's all. You drowned about a million years ago. I discovered your body. I brought you back to life. We have science that can do that. I'm Loy Chuk...." It took only a moment for the box to tell the full story in clear, bold, friendly terms. Thus Loy sought, with calm, human logic, to make his charge feel at home. Probably, though, he was a fool, to suppose that he could succeed, thus. Vince started to mutter, struggling desperately to reason it out. "A prairie dog," he said. "Speaking to me. One million years. Evolution. The scientists say that people grew up from fishes in the sea. Prairie dogs are smart. So maybe super-prairie-dogs could come from them. A lot easier than men from fish...." It was all sound logic. Even Ned Vince knew that. Still, his mind, tuned to ordinary, simple things, couldn't quite realize all the vast things that had happened to himself, and to the world. The scope of it all was too staggeringly big. One million years. God!... Ned Vince made a last effort to control himself. His knuckles tightened on the edge of the vat. "I don't know what you've been talking about," he grated wildly. "But I want to get out of here! I want to go back where I came from! Do you understand—whoever, or whatever you are?" Loy Chuk pressed more keys. "But you can't go back to the Twentieth Century," said the box. "Nor is there any better place for you to be now, than Kar-Rah. You are the only man left on Earth. Those men that exist in other star systems are not really your kind anymore, though their forefathers originated on this planet. They have gone far beyond you in evolution. To them you would be only a senseless curiosity. You are much better off with my people—our minds are much more like yours. We will take care of you, and make you comfortable...." But Ned Vince wasn't listening, now. "You are the only man left on Earth." That had been enough for him to hear. He didn't more than half believe it. His mind was too confused for conviction about anything. Everything he saw and felt and heard might be some kind of nightmare. But then it might all be real instead, and that was abysmal horror. Ned was no coward—death and danger of any ordinary Earthly kind, he could have faced bravely. But the loneliness here, and the utter strangeness, were hideous like being stranded alone on another world! His heart was pounding heavily, and his eyes were wide. He looked across this eerie room. There was a ramp there at the other side, leading upward instead of a stairway. Fierce impulse to escape this nameless lair, to try to learn the facts for himself, possessed him. He bounded out of the vat, and with head down, dashed for the ramp. He had to go most of the way on his hands and knees, for the up-slanting passage was low. Excited animal chucklings around him, and the occasional touch of a furry body, hurried his feverish scrambling. But he emerged at last at the surface. He stood there panting in that frigid, rarefied air. It was night. The Moon was a gigantic, pock-marked bulk. The constellations were unrecognizable. The rodent city was a glowing expanse of shallow, crystalline domes, set among odd, scrub trees and bushes. The crags loomed on all sides, all their jaggedness lost after a million years of erosion under an ocean that was gone. In that ghastly moonlight, the ground glistened with dry salt. "Well, I guess it's all true, huh?" Ned Vince muttered in a flat tone. Behind him he heard an excited, squeaky chattering. Rodents in pursuit. Looking back, he saw the pinpoint gleams of countless little eyes. Yes, he might as well be an exile on another planet—so changed had the Earth become. A wave of intolerable homesickness came over him as he sensed the distances of time that had passed—those inconceivable eons, separating himself from his friends, from Betty, from almost everything that was familiar. He started to run, away from those glittering rodent eyes. He sensed death in that cold sea-bottom, but what of it? What reason did he have left to live? He'd be only a museum piece here, a thing to be caged and studied.... Prison or a madhouse would be far better. He tried to get hold of his courage. But what was there to inspire it? Nothing! He laughed harshly as he ran, welcoming that bitter, killing cold. Nostalgia had him in its clutch, and there was no answer in his hell-world, lost beyond the barrier of the years.... Loy Chuk and his followers presently came upon Ned Vince's unconscious form, a mile from the city of Kar-Rah. In a flying machine they took him back, and applied stimulants. He came to, in the same laboratory room as before. But he was firmly strapped to a low platform this time, so that he could not escape again. There he lay, helpless, until presently an idea occurred to him. It gave him a few crumbs of hope. "Hey, somebody!" he called. "You'd better get some rest, Ned Vince," came the answer from the black box. It was Loy Chuk speaking again. "But listen!" Ned protested. "You know a lot more than we did in the Twentieth Century. And—well—there's that thing called time-travel, that I used to read about. Maybe you know how to make it work! Maybe you could send me back to my own time after all!" Little Loy Chuk was in a black, discouraged mood, himself. He could understand the utter, sick dejection of this giant from the past, lost from his own kind. Probably insanity looming. In far less extreme circumstances than this, death from homesickness had come. Loy Chuk was a scientist. In common with all real scientists, regardless of the species from which they spring, he loved the subjects of his researches. He wanted this ancient man to live and to be happy. Or this creature would be of scant value for study. So Loy considered carefully what Ned Vince had suggested. Time-travel. Almost a legend. An assault upon an intangible wall that had baffled far keener wits than Loy's. But he was bent, now, on the well-being of this anachronism he had so miraculously resurrected—this human, this Kaalleee.... Loy jabbed buttons on the black box. "Yes, Ned Vince," said the sonic apparatus. "Time-travel. Perhaps that is the only thing to do—to send you back to your own period of history. For I see that you will never be yourself, here. It will be hard to accomplish, but we'll try. Now I shall put you under an anesthetic...." Ned felt better immediately, for there was real hope now, where there had been none before. Maybe he'd be back in his home-town of Harwich again. Maybe he'd see the old machine-shop, there. And the trees greening out in Spring. Maybe he'd be seeing Betty Moore in Hurley, soon.... Ned relaxed, as a tiny hypo-needle bit into his arm.... As soon as Ned Vince passed into unconsciousness, Loy Chuk went to work once more, using that pair of brain-helmets again, exploring carefully the man's mind. After hours of research, he proceeded to prepare his plans. The government of Kar-Rah was a scientific oligarchy, of which Loy was a prime member. It would be easy to get the help he needed. A horde of small, grey-furred beings and their machines, toiled for many days. Ned Vince's mind swam gradually out of the blur that had enveloped it. He was wandering aimlessly about in a familiar room. The girders of the roof above were of red-painted steel. His tool-benches were there, greasy and littered with metal filings, just as they had always been. He had a tractor to repair, and a seed-drill. Outside of the machine-shop, the old, familiar yellow sun was shining. Across the street was the small brown house, where he lived. With a sudden startlement, he saw Betty Moore in the doorway. She wore a blue dress, and a mischievous smile curved her lips. As though she had succeeded in creeping up on him, for a surprise. "Why, Ned," she chuckled. "You look as though you've been dreaming, and just woke up!" He grimaced ruefully as she approached. With a kind of fierce gratitude, he took her in his arms. Yes, she was just like always. "I guess I was dreaming, Betty," he whispered, feeling that mighty sense of relief. "I must have fallen asleep at the bench, here, and had a nightmare. I thought I had an accident at Pit Bend—and that a lot of worse things happened.... But it wasn't true ..." Ned Vince's mind, over which there was still an elusive fog that he did not try to shake off, accepted apparent facts simply. He did not know anything about the invisible radiations beating down upon him, soothing and dimming his brain, so that it would never question or doubt, or observe too closely the incongruous circumstances that must often appear. The lack of traffic in the street without, for instance—and the lack of people besides himself and Betty. He didn't know that this machine-shop was built from his own memories of the original. He didn't know that this Betty was of the same origin—a miraculous fabrication of metal and energy-units and soft plastic. The trees outside were only lantern-slide illusions. It was all built inside a great, opaque dome. But there were hidden television systems, too. Thus Loy Chuk's kind could study this ancient man—this Kaalleee. Thus, their motives were mostly selfish. Loy, though, was not observing, now. He had wandered far out into cold, sad sea-bottom, to ponder. He squeaked and chatted to himself, contemplating the magnificent, inexorable march of the ages. He remembered the ancient ruins, left by the final supermen. "The Kaalleee believes himself home," Loy was thinking. "He will survive and be happy. But there was no other way. Time is an Eternal Wall. Our archeological researches among the cities of the supermen show the truth. Even they, who once ruled Earth, never escaped from the present by so much as an instant...." THE END PRINTED IN U. S. A. Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Amazing Stories April 1956 and was first published in Amazing Stories November 1942. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note.

Authority is more vested in the knowledge and expertise of technologists and researchers

The entire planet has adopted democracy as a means for ensuring liberty to all species

The Kar-Rah have combined the most humane principles from authoritarian regimes and constitutional democracies

Earth has eliminated all government in the name of autonomy and free will

27110_HKV3Z17H_5

What do the Kar-Rah have in common with 20th century humans?

THE ETERNAL WALL By RAYMOND Z. GALLUN A scream of brakes, the splash into icy waters, a long descent into alkaline depths ... it was death. But Ned Vince lived again—a million years later! "See you in half an hour, Betty," said Ned Vince over the party telephone. "We'll be out at the Silver Basket before ten-thirty...." Ned Vince was eager for the company of the girl he loved. That was why he was in a hurry to get to the neighboring town of Hurley, where she lived. His old car rattled and roared as he swung it recklessly around Pit Bend. There was where Death tapped him on the shoulder. Another car leaped suddenly into view, its lights glaring blindingly past a high, up-jutting mass of Jurassic rock at the turn of the road. Dazzled, and befuddled by his own rash speed, Ned Vince had only swift young reflexes to rely on to avoid a fearful, telescoping collision. He flicked his wheel smoothly to the right; but the County Highway Commission hadn't yet tarred the traffic-loosened gravel at the Bend. An incredible science, millions of years old, lay in the minds of these creatures. Ned could scarcely have chosen a worse place to start sliding and spinning. His car hit the white-painted wooden rail sideways, crashed through, tumbled down a steep slope, struck a huge boulder, bounced up a little, and arced outward, falling as gracefully as a swan-diver toward the inky waters of the Pit, fifty feet beneath.... Ned Vince was still dimly conscious when that black, quiet pool geysered around him in a mighty splash. He had only a dazing welt on his forehead, and a gag of terror in his throat. Movement was slower now, as he began to sink, trapped inside his wrecked car. Nothing that he could imagine could mean doom more certainly than this. The Pit was a tremendously deep pocket in the ground, spring-fed. The edges of that almost bottomless pool were caked with a rim of white—for the water, on which dead birds so often floated, was surcharged with alkali. As that heavy, natronous liquid rushed up through the openings and cracks beneath his feet, Ned Vince knew that his friends and his family would never see his body again, lost beyond recovery in this abyss. The car was deeply submerged. The light had blinked out on the dash-panel, leaving Ned in absolute darkness. A flood rushed in at the shattered window. He clawed at the door, trying to open it, but it was jammed in the crash-bent frame, and he couldn't fight against the force of that incoming water. The welt, left by the blow he had received on his forehead, put a thickening mist over his brain, so that he could not think clearly. Presently, when he could no longer hold his breath, bitter liquid was sucked into his lungs. His last thoughts were those of a drowning man. The machine-shop he and his dad had had in Harwich. Betty Moore, with the smiling Irish eyes—like in the song. Betty and he had planned to go to the State University this Fall. They'd planned to be married sometime.... Goodbye, Betty ... The ripples that had ruffled the surface waters in the Pit, quieted again to glassy smoothness. The eternal stars shone calmly. The geologic Dakota hills, which might have seen the dinosaurs, still bulked along the highway. Time, the Brother of Death, and the Father of Change, seemed to wait.... "Kaalleee! Tik!... Tik, tik, tik!... Kaalleee!..." The excited cry, which no human throat could quite have duplicated accurately, arose thinly from the depths of a powder-dry gulch, water-scarred from an inconceivable antiquity. The noon-day Sun was red and huge. The air was tenuous, dehydrated, chill. "Kaalleee!... Tik, tik, tik!..." At first there was only one voice uttering those weird, triumphant sounds. Then other vocal organs took up that trilling wail, and those short, sharp chuckles of eagerness. Other questioning, wondering notes mixed with the cadence. Lacking qualities identifiable as human, the disturbance was still like the babble of a group of workmen who have discovered something remarkable. The desolate expanse around the gulch, was all but without motion. The icy breeze tore tiny puffs of dust from grotesque, angling drifts of soil, nearly waterless for eons. Patches of drab lichen grew here and there on the up-jutting rocks, but in the desert itself, no other life was visible. Even the hills had sagged away, flattened by incalculable ages of erosion. At a mile distance, a crumbling heap of rubble arose. Once it had been a building. A gigantic, jagged mass of detritus slanted upward from its crest—red debris that had once been steel. A launching catapult for the last space ships built by the gods in exodus, perhaps it was—half a million years ago. Man was gone from the Earth. Glacial ages, war, decadence, disease, and a final scattering of those ultimate superhumans to newer worlds in other solar systems, had done that. "Kaalleee!... Tik, tik, tik!..." The sounds were not human. They were more like the chatter and wail of small desert animals. But there was a seeming paradox here in the depths of that gulch, too. The glint of metal, sharp and burnished. The flat, streamlined bulk of a flying machine, shiny and new. The bell-like muzzle of a strange excavator-apparatus, which seemed to depend on a blast of atoms to clear away rock and soil. Thus the gulch had been cleared of the accumulated rubbish of antiquity. Man, it seemed, had a successor, as ruler of the Earth. Loy Chuk had flown his geological expedition out from the far lowlands to the east, out from the city of Kar-Rah. And he was very happy now—flushed with a vast and unlooked-for success. He crouched there on his haunches, at the dry bottom of the Pit. The breeze rumpled his long, brown fur. He wasn't very different in appearance from his ancestors. A foot tall, perhaps, as he squatted there in that antique stance of his kind. His tail was short and furred, his undersides creamy. White whiskers spread around his inquisitive, pink-tipped snout. But his cranium bulged up and forward between shrewd, beady eyes, betraying the slow heritage of time, of survival of the fittest, of evolution. He could think and dream and invent, and the civilization of his kind was already far beyond that of the ancient Twentieth Century. Loy Chuk and his fellow workers were gathered, tense and gleeful, around the things their digging had exposed to the daylight. There was a gob of junk—scarcely more than an irregular formation of flaky rust. But imbedded in it was a huddled form, brown and hard as old wood. The dry mud that had encased it like an airtight coffin, had by now been chipped away by the tiny investigators; but soiled clothing still clung to it, after perhaps a million years. Metal had gone into decay—yes. But not this body. The answer to this was simple—alkali. A mineral saturation that had held time and change in stasis. A perfect preservative for organic tissue, aided probably during most of those passing eras by desert dryness. The Dakotas had turned arid very swiftly. This body was not a mere fossil. It was a mummy. "Kaalleee!" Man, that meant. Not the star-conquering demi-gods, but the ancestral stock that had built the first machines on Earth, and in the early Twenty-first Century, the first interplanetary rockets. No wonder Loy Chuk and his co-workers were happy in their paleontological enthusiasm! A strange accident, happening in a legendary antiquity, had aided them in their quest for knowledge. At last Loy Chuk gave a soft, chirping signal. The chant of triumph ended, while instruments flicked in his tiny hands. The final instrument he used to test the mummy, looked like a miniature stereoscope, with complicated details. He held it over his eyes. On the tiny screen within, through the agency of focused X-rays, he saw magnified images of the internal organs of this ancient human corpse. What his probing gaze revealed to him, made his pleasure even greater than before. In twittering, chattering sounds, he communicated his further knowledge to his henchmen. Though devoid of moisture, the mummy was perfectly preserved, even to its brain cells! Medical and biological sciences were far advanced among Loy Chuk's kind. Perhaps, by the application of principles long known to them, this long-dead body could be made to live again! It might move, speak, remember its past! What a marvelous subject for study it would make, back there in the museums of Kar-Rah! "Tik, tik, tik!..." But Loy silenced this fresh, eager chattering with a command. Work was always more substantial than cheering. With infinite care—small, sharp hand-tools were used, now—the mummy of Ned Vince was disengaged from the worthless rust of his primitive automobile. With infinite care it was crated in a metal case, and hauled into the flying machine. Flashing flame, the latter arose, bearing the entire hundred members of the expedition. The craft shot eastward at bullet-like speed. The spreading continental plateau of North America seemed to crawl backward, beneath. A tremendous sand desert, marked with low, washed-down mountains, and the vague, angular, geometric mounds of human cities that were gone forever. Beyond the eastern rim of the continent, the plain dipped downward steeply. The white of dried salt was on the hills, but there was a little green growth here, too. The dead sea-bottom of the vanished Atlantic was not as dead as the highlands. Far out in a deep valley, Kar-Rah, the city of the rodents, came into view—a crystalline maze of low, bubble-like structures, glinting in the red sunshine. But this was only its surface aspect. Loy Chuk's people had built their homes mostly underground, since the beginning of their foggy evolution. Besides, in this latter day, the nights were very cold, the shelter of subterranean passages and rooms was welcome. The mummy was taken to Loy Chuk's laboratory, a short distance below the surface. Here at once, the scientist began his work. The body of the ancient man was put in a large vat. Fluids submerged it, slowly soaking from that hardened flesh the alkali that had preserved it for so long. The fluid was changed often, until woody muscles and other tissues became pliable once more. Then the more delicate processes began. Still submerged in liquid, the corpse was submitted to a flow of restorative energy, passing between complicated electrodes. The cells of antique flesh and brain gradually took on a chemical composition nearer to that of the life that they had once known. At last the final liquid was drained away, and the mummy lay there, a mummy no more, but a pale, silent figure in its tatters of clothing. Loy Chuk put an odd, metal-fabric helmet on its head, and a second, much smaller helmet on his own. Connected with this arrangement, was a black box of many uses. For hours he worked with his apparatus, studying, and guiding the recording instruments. The time passed swiftly. At last, eager and ready for whatever might happen now, Loy Chuk pushed another switch. With a cold, rosy flare, energy blazed around that moveless form. For Ned Vince, timeless eternity ended like a gradual fading mist. When he could see clearly again, he experienced that inevitable shock of vast change around him. Though it had been dehydrated, his brain had been kept perfectly intact through the ages, and now it was restored. So his memories were as vivid as yesterday. Yet, through that crystalline vat in which he lay, he could see a broad, low room, in which he could barely have stood erect. He saw instruments and equipment whose weird shapes suggested alienness, and knowledge beyond the era he had known! The walls were lavender and phosphorescent. Fossil bone-fragments were mounted in shallow cases. Dinosaur bones, some of them seemed, from their size. But there was a complete skeleton of a dog, too, and the skeleton of a man, and a second man-skeleton that was not quite human. Its neck-vertebrae were very thick and solid, its shoulders were wide, and its skull was gigantic. All this weirdness had a violent effect on Ned Vince—a sudden, nostalgic panic. Something was fearfully wrong! The nervous terror of the unknown was on him. Feeble and dizzy after his weird resurrection, which he could not understand, remembering as he did that moment of sinking to certain death in the pool at Pit Bend, he caught the edge of the transparent vat, and pulled himself to a sitting posture. There was a muffled murmur around him, as of some vast, un-Earthly metropolis. "Take it easy, Ned Vince...." The words themselves, and the way they were assembled, were old, familiar friends. But the tone was wrong. It was high, shrill, parrot-like, and mechanical. Ned's gaze searched for the source of the voice—located the black box just outside of his crystal vat. From that box the voice seemed to have originated. Before it crouched a small, brownish animal with a bulging head. The animal's tiny-fingered paws—hands they were, really—were touching rows of keys. To Ned Vince, it was all utterly insane and incomprehensible. A rodent, looking like a prairie dog, a little; but plainly possessing a high order of intelligence. And a voice whose soothingly familiar words were more repugnant somehow, simply because they could never belong in a place as eerie as this. Ned Vince did not know how Loy Chuk had probed his brain, with the aid of a pair of helmets, and the black box apparatus. He did not know that in the latter, his language, taken from his own revitalized mind, was recorded, and that Loy Chuk had only to press certain buttons to make the instrument express his thoughts in common, long-dead English. Loy, whose vocal organs were not human, would have had great difficulty speaking English words, anyway. Ned's dark hair was wildly awry. His gaunt, young face held befuddled terror. He gasped in the thin atmosphere. "I've gone nuts," he pronounced with a curious calm. "Stark—starin'—nuts...." Loy's box, with its recorded English words and its sonic detectors, could translate for its master, too. As the man spoke, Loy read the illuminated symbols in his own language, flashed on a frosted crystal plate before him. Thus he knew what Ned Vince was saying. Loy Chuk pressed more keys, and the box reproduced his answer: "No, Ned, not nuts. Not a bit of it! There are just a lot of things that you've got to get used to, that's all. You drowned about a million years ago. I discovered your body. I brought you back to life. We have science that can do that. I'm Loy Chuk...." It took only a moment for the box to tell the full story in clear, bold, friendly terms. Thus Loy sought, with calm, human logic, to make his charge feel at home. Probably, though, he was a fool, to suppose that he could succeed, thus. Vince started to mutter, struggling desperately to reason it out. "A prairie dog," he said. "Speaking to me. One million years. Evolution. The scientists say that people grew up from fishes in the sea. Prairie dogs are smart. So maybe super-prairie-dogs could come from them. A lot easier than men from fish...." It was all sound logic. Even Ned Vince knew that. Still, his mind, tuned to ordinary, simple things, couldn't quite realize all the vast things that had happened to himself, and to the world. The scope of it all was too staggeringly big. One million years. God!... Ned Vince made a last effort to control himself. His knuckles tightened on the edge of the vat. "I don't know what you've been talking about," he grated wildly. "But I want to get out of here! I want to go back where I came from! Do you understand—whoever, or whatever you are?" Loy Chuk pressed more keys. "But you can't go back to the Twentieth Century," said the box. "Nor is there any better place for you to be now, than Kar-Rah. You are the only man left on Earth. Those men that exist in other star systems are not really your kind anymore, though their forefathers originated on this planet. They have gone far beyond you in evolution. To them you would be only a senseless curiosity. You are much better off with my people—our minds are much more like yours. We will take care of you, and make you comfortable...." But Ned Vince wasn't listening, now. "You are the only man left on Earth." That had been enough for him to hear. He didn't more than half believe it. His mind was too confused for conviction about anything. Everything he saw and felt and heard might be some kind of nightmare. But then it might all be real instead, and that was abysmal horror. Ned was no coward—death and danger of any ordinary Earthly kind, he could have faced bravely. But the loneliness here, and the utter strangeness, were hideous like being stranded alone on another world! His heart was pounding heavily, and his eyes were wide. He looked across this eerie room. There was a ramp there at the other side, leading upward instead of a stairway. Fierce impulse to escape this nameless lair, to try to learn the facts for himself, possessed him. He bounded out of the vat, and with head down, dashed for the ramp. He had to go most of the way on his hands and knees, for the up-slanting passage was low. Excited animal chucklings around him, and the occasional touch of a furry body, hurried his feverish scrambling. But he emerged at last at the surface. He stood there panting in that frigid, rarefied air. It was night. The Moon was a gigantic, pock-marked bulk. The constellations were unrecognizable. The rodent city was a glowing expanse of shallow, crystalline domes, set among odd, scrub trees and bushes. The crags loomed on all sides, all their jaggedness lost after a million years of erosion under an ocean that was gone. In that ghastly moonlight, the ground glistened with dry salt. "Well, I guess it's all true, huh?" Ned Vince muttered in a flat tone. Behind him he heard an excited, squeaky chattering. Rodents in pursuit. Looking back, he saw the pinpoint gleams of countless little eyes. Yes, he might as well be an exile on another planet—so changed had the Earth become. A wave of intolerable homesickness came over him as he sensed the distances of time that had passed—those inconceivable eons, separating himself from his friends, from Betty, from almost everything that was familiar. He started to run, away from those glittering rodent eyes. He sensed death in that cold sea-bottom, but what of it? What reason did he have left to live? He'd be only a museum piece here, a thing to be caged and studied.... Prison or a madhouse would be far better. He tried to get hold of his courage. But what was there to inspire it? Nothing! He laughed harshly as he ran, welcoming that bitter, killing cold. Nostalgia had him in its clutch, and there was no answer in his hell-world, lost beyond the barrier of the years.... Loy Chuk and his followers presently came upon Ned Vince's unconscious form, a mile from the city of Kar-Rah. In a flying machine they took him back, and applied stimulants. He came to, in the same laboratory room as before. But he was firmly strapped to a low platform this time, so that he could not escape again. There he lay, helpless, until presently an idea occurred to him. It gave him a few crumbs of hope. "Hey, somebody!" he called. "You'd better get some rest, Ned Vince," came the answer from the black box. It was Loy Chuk speaking again. "But listen!" Ned protested. "You know a lot more than we did in the Twentieth Century. And—well—there's that thing called time-travel, that I used to read about. Maybe you know how to make it work! Maybe you could send me back to my own time after all!" Little Loy Chuk was in a black, discouraged mood, himself. He could understand the utter, sick dejection of this giant from the past, lost from his own kind. Probably insanity looming. In far less extreme circumstances than this, death from homesickness had come. Loy Chuk was a scientist. In common with all real scientists, regardless of the species from which they spring, he loved the subjects of his researches. He wanted this ancient man to live and to be happy. Or this creature would be of scant value for study. So Loy considered carefully what Ned Vince had suggested. Time-travel. Almost a legend. An assault upon an intangible wall that had baffled far keener wits than Loy's. But he was bent, now, on the well-being of this anachronism he had so miraculously resurrected—this human, this Kaalleee.... Loy jabbed buttons on the black box. "Yes, Ned Vince," said the sonic apparatus. "Time-travel. Perhaps that is the only thing to do—to send you back to your own period of history. For I see that you will never be yourself, here. It will be hard to accomplish, but we'll try. Now I shall put you under an anesthetic...." Ned felt better immediately, for there was real hope now, where there had been none before. Maybe he'd be back in his home-town of Harwich again. Maybe he'd see the old machine-shop, there. And the trees greening out in Spring. Maybe he'd be seeing Betty Moore in Hurley, soon.... Ned relaxed, as a tiny hypo-needle bit into his arm.... As soon as Ned Vince passed into unconsciousness, Loy Chuk went to work once more, using that pair of brain-helmets again, exploring carefully the man's mind. After hours of research, he proceeded to prepare his plans. The government of Kar-Rah was a scientific oligarchy, of which Loy was a prime member. It would be easy to get the help he needed. A horde of small, grey-furred beings and their machines, toiled for many days. Ned Vince's mind swam gradually out of the blur that had enveloped it. He was wandering aimlessly about in a familiar room. The girders of the roof above were of red-painted steel. His tool-benches were there, greasy and littered with metal filings, just as they had always been. He had a tractor to repair, and a seed-drill. Outside of the machine-shop, the old, familiar yellow sun was shining. Across the street was the small brown house, where he lived. With a sudden startlement, he saw Betty Moore in the doorway. She wore a blue dress, and a mischievous smile curved her lips. As though she had succeeded in creeping up on him, for a surprise. "Why, Ned," she chuckled. "You look as though you've been dreaming, and just woke up!" He grimaced ruefully as she approached. With a kind of fierce gratitude, he took her in his arms. Yes, she was just like always. "I guess I was dreaming, Betty," he whispered, feeling that mighty sense of relief. "I must have fallen asleep at the bench, here, and had a nightmare. I thought I had an accident at Pit Bend—and that a lot of worse things happened.... But it wasn't true ..." Ned Vince's mind, over which there was still an elusive fog that he did not try to shake off, accepted apparent facts simply. He did not know anything about the invisible radiations beating down upon him, soothing and dimming his brain, so that it would never question or doubt, or observe too closely the incongruous circumstances that must often appear. The lack of traffic in the street without, for instance—and the lack of people besides himself and Betty. He didn't know that this machine-shop was built from his own memories of the original. He didn't know that this Betty was of the same origin—a miraculous fabrication of metal and energy-units and soft plastic. The trees outside were only lantern-slide illusions. It was all built inside a great, opaque dome. But there were hidden television systems, too. Thus Loy Chuk's kind could study this ancient man—this Kaalleee. Thus, their motives were mostly selfish. Loy, though, was not observing, now. He had wandered far out into cold, sad sea-bottom, to ponder. He squeaked and chatted to himself, contemplating the magnificent, inexorable march of the ages. He remembered the ancient ruins, left by the final supermen. "The Kaalleee believes himself home," Loy was thinking. "He will survive and be happy. But there was no other way. Time is an Eternal Wall. Our archeological researches among the cities of the supermen show the truth. Even they, who once ruled Earth, never escaped from the present by so much as an instant...." THE END PRINTED IN U. S. A. Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Amazing Stories April 1956 and was first published in Amazing Stories November 1942. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note.

An erect posture

General height

Language

Large crania

27110_HKV3Z17H_6

How have scientists' positionality toward their research subjects changed since the 20th century?

THE ETERNAL WALL By RAYMOND Z. GALLUN A scream of brakes, the splash into icy waters, a long descent into alkaline depths ... it was death. But Ned Vince lived again—a million years later! "See you in half an hour, Betty," said Ned Vince over the party telephone. "We'll be out at the Silver Basket before ten-thirty...." Ned Vince was eager for the company of the girl he loved. That was why he was in a hurry to get to the neighboring town of Hurley, where she lived. His old car rattled and roared as he swung it recklessly around Pit Bend. There was where Death tapped him on the shoulder. Another car leaped suddenly into view, its lights glaring blindingly past a high, up-jutting mass of Jurassic rock at the turn of the road. Dazzled, and befuddled by his own rash speed, Ned Vince had only swift young reflexes to rely on to avoid a fearful, telescoping collision. He flicked his wheel smoothly to the right; but the County Highway Commission hadn't yet tarred the traffic-loosened gravel at the Bend. An incredible science, millions of years old, lay in the minds of these creatures. Ned could scarcely have chosen a worse place to start sliding and spinning. His car hit the white-painted wooden rail sideways, crashed through, tumbled down a steep slope, struck a huge boulder, bounced up a little, and arced outward, falling as gracefully as a swan-diver toward the inky waters of the Pit, fifty feet beneath.... Ned Vince was still dimly conscious when that black, quiet pool geysered around him in a mighty splash. He had only a dazing welt on his forehead, and a gag of terror in his throat. Movement was slower now, as he began to sink, trapped inside his wrecked car. Nothing that he could imagine could mean doom more certainly than this. The Pit was a tremendously deep pocket in the ground, spring-fed. The edges of that almost bottomless pool were caked with a rim of white—for the water, on which dead birds so often floated, was surcharged with alkali. As that heavy, natronous liquid rushed up through the openings and cracks beneath his feet, Ned Vince knew that his friends and his family would never see his body again, lost beyond recovery in this abyss. The car was deeply submerged. The light had blinked out on the dash-panel, leaving Ned in absolute darkness. A flood rushed in at the shattered window. He clawed at the door, trying to open it, but it was jammed in the crash-bent frame, and he couldn't fight against the force of that incoming water. The welt, left by the blow he had received on his forehead, put a thickening mist over his brain, so that he could not think clearly. Presently, when he could no longer hold his breath, bitter liquid was sucked into his lungs. His last thoughts were those of a drowning man. The machine-shop he and his dad had had in Harwich. Betty Moore, with the smiling Irish eyes—like in the song. Betty and he had planned to go to the State University this Fall. They'd planned to be married sometime.... Goodbye, Betty ... The ripples that had ruffled the surface waters in the Pit, quieted again to glassy smoothness. The eternal stars shone calmly. The geologic Dakota hills, which might have seen the dinosaurs, still bulked along the highway. Time, the Brother of Death, and the Father of Change, seemed to wait.... "Kaalleee! Tik!... Tik, tik, tik!... Kaalleee!..." The excited cry, which no human throat could quite have duplicated accurately, arose thinly from the depths of a powder-dry gulch, water-scarred from an inconceivable antiquity. The noon-day Sun was red and huge. The air was tenuous, dehydrated, chill. "Kaalleee!... Tik, tik, tik!..." At first there was only one voice uttering those weird, triumphant sounds. Then other vocal organs took up that trilling wail, and those short, sharp chuckles of eagerness. Other questioning, wondering notes mixed with the cadence. Lacking qualities identifiable as human, the disturbance was still like the babble of a group of workmen who have discovered something remarkable. The desolate expanse around the gulch, was all but without motion. The icy breeze tore tiny puffs of dust from grotesque, angling drifts of soil, nearly waterless for eons. Patches of drab lichen grew here and there on the up-jutting rocks, but in the desert itself, no other life was visible. Even the hills had sagged away, flattened by incalculable ages of erosion. At a mile distance, a crumbling heap of rubble arose. Once it had been a building. A gigantic, jagged mass of detritus slanted upward from its crest—red debris that had once been steel. A launching catapult for the last space ships built by the gods in exodus, perhaps it was—half a million years ago. Man was gone from the Earth. Glacial ages, war, decadence, disease, and a final scattering of those ultimate superhumans to newer worlds in other solar systems, had done that. "Kaalleee!... Tik, tik, tik!..." The sounds were not human. They were more like the chatter and wail of small desert animals. But there was a seeming paradox here in the depths of that gulch, too. The glint of metal, sharp and burnished. The flat, streamlined bulk of a flying machine, shiny and new. The bell-like muzzle of a strange excavator-apparatus, which seemed to depend on a blast of atoms to clear away rock and soil. Thus the gulch had been cleared of the accumulated rubbish of antiquity. Man, it seemed, had a successor, as ruler of the Earth. Loy Chuk had flown his geological expedition out from the far lowlands to the east, out from the city of Kar-Rah. And he was very happy now—flushed with a vast and unlooked-for success. He crouched there on his haunches, at the dry bottom of the Pit. The breeze rumpled his long, brown fur. He wasn't very different in appearance from his ancestors. A foot tall, perhaps, as he squatted there in that antique stance of his kind. His tail was short and furred, his undersides creamy. White whiskers spread around his inquisitive, pink-tipped snout. But his cranium bulged up and forward between shrewd, beady eyes, betraying the slow heritage of time, of survival of the fittest, of evolution. He could think and dream and invent, and the civilization of his kind was already far beyond that of the ancient Twentieth Century. Loy Chuk and his fellow workers were gathered, tense and gleeful, around the things their digging had exposed to the daylight. There was a gob of junk—scarcely more than an irregular formation of flaky rust. But imbedded in it was a huddled form, brown and hard as old wood. The dry mud that had encased it like an airtight coffin, had by now been chipped away by the tiny investigators; but soiled clothing still clung to it, after perhaps a million years. Metal had gone into decay—yes. But not this body. The answer to this was simple—alkali. A mineral saturation that had held time and change in stasis. A perfect preservative for organic tissue, aided probably during most of those passing eras by desert dryness. The Dakotas had turned arid very swiftly. This body was not a mere fossil. It was a mummy. "Kaalleee!" Man, that meant. Not the star-conquering demi-gods, but the ancestral stock that had built the first machines on Earth, and in the early Twenty-first Century, the first interplanetary rockets. No wonder Loy Chuk and his co-workers were happy in their paleontological enthusiasm! A strange accident, happening in a legendary antiquity, had aided them in their quest for knowledge. At last Loy Chuk gave a soft, chirping signal. The chant of triumph ended, while instruments flicked in his tiny hands. The final instrument he used to test the mummy, looked like a miniature stereoscope, with complicated details. He held it over his eyes. On the tiny screen within, through the agency of focused X-rays, he saw magnified images of the internal organs of this ancient human corpse. What his probing gaze revealed to him, made his pleasure even greater than before. In twittering, chattering sounds, he communicated his further knowledge to his henchmen. Though devoid of moisture, the mummy was perfectly preserved, even to its brain cells! Medical and biological sciences were far advanced among Loy Chuk's kind. Perhaps, by the application of principles long known to them, this long-dead body could be made to live again! It might move, speak, remember its past! What a marvelous subject for study it would make, back there in the museums of Kar-Rah! "Tik, tik, tik!..." But Loy silenced this fresh, eager chattering with a command. Work was always more substantial than cheering. With infinite care—small, sharp hand-tools were used, now—the mummy of Ned Vince was disengaged from the worthless rust of his primitive automobile. With infinite care it was crated in a metal case, and hauled into the flying machine. Flashing flame, the latter arose, bearing the entire hundred members of the expedition. The craft shot eastward at bullet-like speed. The spreading continental plateau of North America seemed to crawl backward, beneath. A tremendous sand desert, marked with low, washed-down mountains, and the vague, angular, geometric mounds of human cities that were gone forever. Beyond the eastern rim of the continent, the plain dipped downward steeply. The white of dried salt was on the hills, but there was a little green growth here, too. The dead sea-bottom of the vanished Atlantic was not as dead as the highlands. Far out in a deep valley, Kar-Rah, the city of the rodents, came into view—a crystalline maze of low, bubble-like structures, glinting in the red sunshine. But this was only its surface aspect. Loy Chuk's people had built their homes mostly underground, since the beginning of their foggy evolution. Besides, in this latter day, the nights were very cold, the shelter of subterranean passages and rooms was welcome. The mummy was taken to Loy Chuk's laboratory, a short distance below the surface. Here at once, the scientist began his work. The body of the ancient man was put in a large vat. Fluids submerged it, slowly soaking from that hardened flesh the alkali that had preserved it for so long. The fluid was changed often, until woody muscles and other tissues became pliable once more. Then the more delicate processes began. Still submerged in liquid, the corpse was submitted to a flow of restorative energy, passing between complicated electrodes. The cells of antique flesh and brain gradually took on a chemical composition nearer to that of the life that they had once known. At last the final liquid was drained away, and the mummy lay there, a mummy no more, but a pale, silent figure in its tatters of clothing. Loy Chuk put an odd, metal-fabric helmet on its head, and a second, much smaller helmet on his own. Connected with this arrangement, was a black box of many uses. For hours he worked with his apparatus, studying, and guiding the recording instruments. The time passed swiftly. At last, eager and ready for whatever might happen now, Loy Chuk pushed another switch. With a cold, rosy flare, energy blazed around that moveless form. For Ned Vince, timeless eternity ended like a gradual fading mist. When he could see clearly again, he experienced that inevitable shock of vast change around him. Though it had been dehydrated, his brain had been kept perfectly intact through the ages, and now it was restored. So his memories were as vivid as yesterday. Yet, through that crystalline vat in which he lay, he could see a broad, low room, in which he could barely have stood erect. He saw instruments and equipment whose weird shapes suggested alienness, and knowledge beyond the era he had known! The walls were lavender and phosphorescent. Fossil bone-fragments were mounted in shallow cases. Dinosaur bones, some of them seemed, from their size. But there was a complete skeleton of a dog, too, and the skeleton of a man, and a second man-skeleton that was not quite human. Its neck-vertebrae were very thick and solid, its shoulders were wide, and its skull was gigantic. All this weirdness had a violent effect on Ned Vince—a sudden, nostalgic panic. Something was fearfully wrong! The nervous terror of the unknown was on him. Feeble and dizzy after his weird resurrection, which he could not understand, remembering as he did that moment of sinking to certain death in the pool at Pit Bend, he caught the edge of the transparent vat, and pulled himself to a sitting posture. There was a muffled murmur around him, as of some vast, un-Earthly metropolis. "Take it easy, Ned Vince...." The words themselves, and the way they were assembled, were old, familiar friends. But the tone was wrong. It was high, shrill, parrot-like, and mechanical. Ned's gaze searched for the source of the voice—located the black box just outside of his crystal vat. From that box the voice seemed to have originated. Before it crouched a small, brownish animal with a bulging head. The animal's tiny-fingered paws—hands they were, really—were touching rows of keys. To Ned Vince, it was all utterly insane and incomprehensible. A rodent, looking like a prairie dog, a little; but plainly possessing a high order of intelligence. And a voice whose soothingly familiar words were more repugnant somehow, simply because they could never belong in a place as eerie as this. Ned Vince did not know how Loy Chuk had probed his brain, with the aid of a pair of helmets, and the black box apparatus. He did not know that in the latter, his language, taken from his own revitalized mind, was recorded, and that Loy Chuk had only to press certain buttons to make the instrument express his thoughts in common, long-dead English. Loy, whose vocal organs were not human, would have had great difficulty speaking English words, anyway. Ned's dark hair was wildly awry. His gaunt, young face held befuddled terror. He gasped in the thin atmosphere. "I've gone nuts," he pronounced with a curious calm. "Stark—starin'—nuts...." Loy's box, with its recorded English words and its sonic detectors, could translate for its master, too. As the man spoke, Loy read the illuminated symbols in his own language, flashed on a frosted crystal plate before him. Thus he knew what Ned Vince was saying. Loy Chuk pressed more keys, and the box reproduced his answer: "No, Ned, not nuts. Not a bit of it! There are just a lot of things that you've got to get used to, that's all. You drowned about a million years ago. I discovered your body. I brought you back to life. We have science that can do that. I'm Loy Chuk...." It took only a moment for the box to tell the full story in clear, bold, friendly terms. Thus Loy sought, with calm, human logic, to make his charge feel at home. Probably, though, he was a fool, to suppose that he could succeed, thus. Vince started to mutter, struggling desperately to reason it out. "A prairie dog," he said. "Speaking to me. One million years. Evolution. The scientists say that people grew up from fishes in the sea. Prairie dogs are smart. So maybe super-prairie-dogs could come from them. A lot easier than men from fish...." It was all sound logic. Even Ned Vince knew that. Still, his mind, tuned to ordinary, simple things, couldn't quite realize all the vast things that had happened to himself, and to the world. The scope of it all was too staggeringly big. One million years. God!... Ned Vince made a last effort to control himself. His knuckles tightened on the edge of the vat. "I don't know what you've been talking about," he grated wildly. "But I want to get out of here! I want to go back where I came from! Do you understand—whoever, or whatever you are?" Loy Chuk pressed more keys. "But you can't go back to the Twentieth Century," said the box. "Nor is there any better place for you to be now, than Kar-Rah. You are the only man left on Earth. Those men that exist in other star systems are not really your kind anymore, though their forefathers originated on this planet. They have gone far beyond you in evolution. To them you would be only a senseless curiosity. You are much better off with my people—our minds are much more like yours. We will take care of you, and make you comfortable...." But Ned Vince wasn't listening, now. "You are the only man left on Earth." That had been enough for him to hear. He didn't more than half believe it. His mind was too confused for conviction about anything. Everything he saw and felt and heard might be some kind of nightmare. But then it might all be real instead, and that was abysmal horror. Ned was no coward—death and danger of any ordinary Earthly kind, he could have faced bravely. But the loneliness here, and the utter strangeness, were hideous like being stranded alone on another world! His heart was pounding heavily, and his eyes were wide. He looked across this eerie room. There was a ramp there at the other side, leading upward instead of a stairway. Fierce impulse to escape this nameless lair, to try to learn the facts for himself, possessed him. He bounded out of the vat, and with head down, dashed for the ramp. He had to go most of the way on his hands and knees, for the up-slanting passage was low. Excited animal chucklings around him, and the occasional touch of a furry body, hurried his feverish scrambling. But he emerged at last at the surface. He stood there panting in that frigid, rarefied air. It was night. The Moon was a gigantic, pock-marked bulk. The constellations were unrecognizable. The rodent city was a glowing expanse of shallow, crystalline domes, set among odd, scrub trees and bushes. The crags loomed on all sides, all their jaggedness lost after a million years of erosion under an ocean that was gone. In that ghastly moonlight, the ground glistened with dry salt. "Well, I guess it's all true, huh?" Ned Vince muttered in a flat tone. Behind him he heard an excited, squeaky chattering. Rodents in pursuit. Looking back, he saw the pinpoint gleams of countless little eyes. Yes, he might as well be an exile on another planet—so changed had the Earth become. A wave of intolerable homesickness came over him as he sensed the distances of time that had passed—those inconceivable eons, separating himself from his friends, from Betty, from almost everything that was familiar. He started to run, away from those glittering rodent eyes. He sensed death in that cold sea-bottom, but what of it? What reason did he have left to live? He'd be only a museum piece here, a thing to be caged and studied.... Prison or a madhouse would be far better. He tried to get hold of his courage. But what was there to inspire it? Nothing! He laughed harshly as he ran, welcoming that bitter, killing cold. Nostalgia had him in its clutch, and there was no answer in his hell-world, lost beyond the barrier of the years.... Loy Chuk and his followers presently came upon Ned Vince's unconscious form, a mile from the city of Kar-Rah. In a flying machine they took him back, and applied stimulants. He came to, in the same laboratory room as before. But he was firmly strapped to a low platform this time, so that he could not escape again. There he lay, helpless, until presently an idea occurred to him. It gave him a few crumbs of hope. "Hey, somebody!" he called. "You'd better get some rest, Ned Vince," came the answer from the black box. It was Loy Chuk speaking again. "But listen!" Ned protested. "You know a lot more than we did in the Twentieth Century. And—well—there's that thing called time-travel, that I used to read about. Maybe you know how to make it work! Maybe you could send me back to my own time after all!" Little Loy Chuk was in a black, discouraged mood, himself. He could understand the utter, sick dejection of this giant from the past, lost from his own kind. Probably insanity looming. In far less extreme circumstances than this, death from homesickness had come. Loy Chuk was a scientist. In common with all real scientists, regardless of the species from which they spring, he loved the subjects of his researches. He wanted this ancient man to live and to be happy. Or this creature would be of scant value for study. So Loy considered carefully what Ned Vince had suggested. Time-travel. Almost a legend. An assault upon an intangible wall that had baffled far keener wits than Loy's. But he was bent, now, on the well-being of this anachronism he had so miraculously resurrected—this human, this Kaalleee.... Loy jabbed buttons on the black box. "Yes, Ned Vince," said the sonic apparatus. "Time-travel. Perhaps that is the only thing to do—to send you back to your own period of history. For I see that you will never be yourself, here. It will be hard to accomplish, but we'll try. Now I shall put you under an anesthetic...." Ned felt better immediately, for there was real hope now, where there had been none before. Maybe he'd be back in his home-town of Harwich again. Maybe he'd see the old machine-shop, there. And the trees greening out in Spring. Maybe he'd be seeing Betty Moore in Hurley, soon.... Ned relaxed, as a tiny hypo-needle bit into his arm.... As soon as Ned Vince passed into unconsciousness, Loy Chuk went to work once more, using that pair of brain-helmets again, exploring carefully the man's mind. After hours of research, he proceeded to prepare his plans. The government of Kar-Rah was a scientific oligarchy, of which Loy was a prime member. It would be easy to get the help he needed. A horde of small, grey-furred beings and their machines, toiled for many days. Ned Vince's mind swam gradually out of the blur that had enveloped it. He was wandering aimlessly about in a familiar room. The girders of the roof above were of red-painted steel. His tool-benches were there, greasy and littered with metal filings, just as they had always been. He had a tractor to repair, and a seed-drill. Outside of the machine-shop, the old, familiar yellow sun was shining. Across the street was the small brown house, where he lived. With a sudden startlement, he saw Betty Moore in the doorway. She wore a blue dress, and a mischievous smile curved her lips. As though she had succeeded in creeping up on him, for a surprise. "Why, Ned," she chuckled. "You look as though you've been dreaming, and just woke up!" He grimaced ruefully as she approached. With a kind of fierce gratitude, he took her in his arms. Yes, she was just like always. "I guess I was dreaming, Betty," he whispered, feeling that mighty sense of relief. "I must have fallen asleep at the bench, here, and had a nightmare. I thought I had an accident at Pit Bend—and that a lot of worse things happened.... But it wasn't true ..." Ned Vince's mind, over which there was still an elusive fog that he did not try to shake off, accepted apparent facts simply. He did not know anything about the invisible radiations beating down upon him, soothing and dimming his brain, so that it would never question or doubt, or observe too closely the incongruous circumstances that must often appear. The lack of traffic in the street without, for instance—and the lack of people besides himself and Betty. He didn't know that this machine-shop was built from his own memories of the original. He didn't know that this Betty was of the same origin—a miraculous fabrication of metal and energy-units and soft plastic. The trees outside were only lantern-slide illusions. It was all built inside a great, opaque dome. But there were hidden television systems, too. Thus Loy Chuk's kind could study this ancient man—this Kaalleee. Thus, their motives were mostly selfish. Loy, though, was not observing, now. He had wandered far out into cold, sad sea-bottom, to ponder. He squeaked and chatted to himself, contemplating the magnificent, inexorable march of the ages. He remembered the ancient ruins, left by the final supermen. "The Kaalleee believes himself home," Loy was thinking. "He will survive and be happy. But there was no other way. Time is an Eternal Wall. Our archeological researches among the cities of the supermen show the truth. Even they, who once ruled Earth, never escaped from the present by so much as an instant...." THE END PRINTED IN U. S. A. Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Amazing Stories April 1956 and was first published in Amazing Stories November 1942. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note.

They are more prejudiced and scrutinizing toward them

They are more neutral and ambivalent toward them

They are more inclusive and considerate toward them

They are more empathetic and compassionate toward them

27110_HKV3Z17H_7

What enabled Ned to survive one million years after his car accident?

THE ETERNAL WALL By RAYMOND Z. GALLUN A scream of brakes, the splash into icy waters, a long descent into alkaline depths ... it was death. But Ned Vince lived again—a million years later! "See you in half an hour, Betty," said Ned Vince over the party telephone. "We'll be out at the Silver Basket before ten-thirty...." Ned Vince was eager for the company of the girl he loved. That was why he was in a hurry to get to the neighboring town of Hurley, where she lived. His old car rattled and roared as he swung it recklessly around Pit Bend. There was where Death tapped him on the shoulder. Another car leaped suddenly into view, its lights glaring blindingly past a high, up-jutting mass of Jurassic rock at the turn of the road. Dazzled, and befuddled by his own rash speed, Ned Vince had only swift young reflexes to rely on to avoid a fearful, telescoping collision. He flicked his wheel smoothly to the right; but the County Highway Commission hadn't yet tarred the traffic-loosened gravel at the Bend. An incredible science, millions of years old, lay in the minds of these creatures. Ned could scarcely have chosen a worse place to start sliding and spinning. His car hit the white-painted wooden rail sideways, crashed through, tumbled down a steep slope, struck a huge boulder, bounced up a little, and arced outward, falling as gracefully as a swan-diver toward the inky waters of the Pit, fifty feet beneath.... Ned Vince was still dimly conscious when that black, quiet pool geysered around him in a mighty splash. He had only a dazing welt on his forehead, and a gag of terror in his throat. Movement was slower now, as he began to sink, trapped inside his wrecked car. Nothing that he could imagine could mean doom more certainly than this. The Pit was a tremendously deep pocket in the ground, spring-fed. The edges of that almost bottomless pool were caked with a rim of white—for the water, on which dead birds so often floated, was surcharged with alkali. As that heavy, natronous liquid rushed up through the openings and cracks beneath his feet, Ned Vince knew that his friends and his family would never see his body again, lost beyond recovery in this abyss. The car was deeply submerged. The light had blinked out on the dash-panel, leaving Ned in absolute darkness. A flood rushed in at the shattered window. He clawed at the door, trying to open it, but it was jammed in the crash-bent frame, and he couldn't fight against the force of that incoming water. The welt, left by the blow he had received on his forehead, put a thickening mist over his brain, so that he could not think clearly. Presently, when he could no longer hold his breath, bitter liquid was sucked into his lungs. His last thoughts were those of a drowning man. The machine-shop he and his dad had had in Harwich. Betty Moore, with the smiling Irish eyes—like in the song. Betty and he had planned to go to the State University this Fall. They'd planned to be married sometime.... Goodbye, Betty ... The ripples that had ruffled the surface waters in the Pit, quieted again to glassy smoothness. The eternal stars shone calmly. The geologic Dakota hills, which might have seen the dinosaurs, still bulked along the highway. Time, the Brother of Death, and the Father of Change, seemed to wait.... "Kaalleee! Tik!... Tik, tik, tik!... Kaalleee!..." The excited cry, which no human throat could quite have duplicated accurately, arose thinly from the depths of a powder-dry gulch, water-scarred from an inconceivable antiquity. The noon-day Sun was red and huge. The air was tenuous, dehydrated, chill. "Kaalleee!... Tik, tik, tik!..." At first there was only one voice uttering those weird, triumphant sounds. Then other vocal organs took up that trilling wail, and those short, sharp chuckles of eagerness. Other questioning, wondering notes mixed with the cadence. Lacking qualities identifiable as human, the disturbance was still like the babble of a group of workmen who have discovered something remarkable. The desolate expanse around the gulch, was all but without motion. The icy breeze tore tiny puffs of dust from grotesque, angling drifts of soil, nearly waterless for eons. Patches of drab lichen grew here and there on the up-jutting rocks, but in the desert itself, no other life was visible. Even the hills had sagged away, flattened by incalculable ages of erosion. At a mile distance, a crumbling heap of rubble arose. Once it had been a building. A gigantic, jagged mass of detritus slanted upward from its crest—red debris that had once been steel. A launching catapult for the last space ships built by the gods in exodus, perhaps it was—half a million years ago. Man was gone from the Earth. Glacial ages, war, decadence, disease, and a final scattering of those ultimate superhumans to newer worlds in other solar systems, had done that. "Kaalleee!... Tik, tik, tik!..." The sounds were not human. They were more like the chatter and wail of small desert animals. But there was a seeming paradox here in the depths of that gulch, too. The glint of metal, sharp and burnished. The flat, streamlined bulk of a flying machine, shiny and new. The bell-like muzzle of a strange excavator-apparatus, which seemed to depend on a blast of atoms to clear away rock and soil. Thus the gulch had been cleared of the accumulated rubbish of antiquity. Man, it seemed, had a successor, as ruler of the Earth. Loy Chuk had flown his geological expedition out from the far lowlands to the east, out from the city of Kar-Rah. And he was very happy now—flushed with a vast and unlooked-for success. He crouched there on his haunches, at the dry bottom of the Pit. The breeze rumpled his long, brown fur. He wasn't very different in appearance from his ancestors. A foot tall, perhaps, as he squatted there in that antique stance of his kind. His tail was short and furred, his undersides creamy. White whiskers spread around his inquisitive, pink-tipped snout. But his cranium bulged up and forward between shrewd, beady eyes, betraying the slow heritage of time, of survival of the fittest, of evolution. He could think and dream and invent, and the civilization of his kind was already far beyond that of the ancient Twentieth Century. Loy Chuk and his fellow workers were gathered, tense and gleeful, around the things their digging had exposed to the daylight. There was a gob of junk—scarcely more than an irregular formation of flaky rust. But imbedded in it was a huddled form, brown and hard as old wood. The dry mud that had encased it like an airtight coffin, had by now been chipped away by the tiny investigators; but soiled clothing still clung to it, after perhaps a million years. Metal had gone into decay—yes. But not this body. The answer to this was simple—alkali. A mineral saturation that had held time and change in stasis. A perfect preservative for organic tissue, aided probably during most of those passing eras by desert dryness. The Dakotas had turned arid very swiftly. This body was not a mere fossil. It was a mummy. "Kaalleee!" Man, that meant. Not the star-conquering demi-gods, but the ancestral stock that had built the first machines on Earth, and in the early Twenty-first Century, the first interplanetary rockets. No wonder Loy Chuk and his co-workers were happy in their paleontological enthusiasm! A strange accident, happening in a legendary antiquity, had aided them in their quest for knowledge. At last Loy Chuk gave a soft, chirping signal. The chant of triumph ended, while instruments flicked in his tiny hands. The final instrument he used to test the mummy, looked like a miniature stereoscope, with complicated details. He held it over his eyes. On the tiny screen within, through the agency of focused X-rays, he saw magnified images of the internal organs of this ancient human corpse. What his probing gaze revealed to him, made his pleasure even greater than before. In twittering, chattering sounds, he communicated his further knowledge to his henchmen. Though devoid of moisture, the mummy was perfectly preserved, even to its brain cells! Medical and biological sciences were far advanced among Loy Chuk's kind. Perhaps, by the application of principles long known to them, this long-dead body could be made to live again! It might move, speak, remember its past! What a marvelous subject for study it would make, back there in the museums of Kar-Rah! "Tik, tik, tik!..." But Loy silenced this fresh, eager chattering with a command. Work was always more substantial than cheering. With infinite care—small, sharp hand-tools were used, now—the mummy of Ned Vince was disengaged from the worthless rust of his primitive automobile. With infinite care it was crated in a metal case, and hauled into the flying machine. Flashing flame, the latter arose, bearing the entire hundred members of the expedition. The craft shot eastward at bullet-like speed. The spreading continental plateau of North America seemed to crawl backward, beneath. A tremendous sand desert, marked with low, washed-down mountains, and the vague, angular, geometric mounds of human cities that were gone forever. Beyond the eastern rim of the continent, the plain dipped downward steeply. The white of dried salt was on the hills, but there was a little green growth here, too. The dead sea-bottom of the vanished Atlantic was not as dead as the highlands. Far out in a deep valley, Kar-Rah, the city of the rodents, came into view—a crystalline maze of low, bubble-like structures, glinting in the red sunshine. But this was only its surface aspect. Loy Chuk's people had built their homes mostly underground, since the beginning of their foggy evolution. Besides, in this latter day, the nights were very cold, the shelter of subterranean passages and rooms was welcome. The mummy was taken to Loy Chuk's laboratory, a short distance below the surface. Here at once, the scientist began his work. The body of the ancient man was put in a large vat. Fluids submerged it, slowly soaking from that hardened flesh the alkali that had preserved it for so long. The fluid was changed often, until woody muscles and other tissues became pliable once more. Then the more delicate processes began. Still submerged in liquid, the corpse was submitted to a flow of restorative energy, passing between complicated electrodes. The cells of antique flesh and brain gradually took on a chemical composition nearer to that of the life that they had once known. At last the final liquid was drained away, and the mummy lay there, a mummy no more, but a pale, silent figure in its tatters of clothing. Loy Chuk put an odd, metal-fabric helmet on its head, and a second, much smaller helmet on his own. Connected with this arrangement, was a black box of many uses. For hours he worked with his apparatus, studying, and guiding the recording instruments. The time passed swiftly. At last, eager and ready for whatever might happen now, Loy Chuk pushed another switch. With a cold, rosy flare, energy blazed around that moveless form. For Ned Vince, timeless eternity ended like a gradual fading mist. When he could see clearly again, he experienced that inevitable shock of vast change around him. Though it had been dehydrated, his brain had been kept perfectly intact through the ages, and now it was restored. So his memories were as vivid as yesterday. Yet, through that crystalline vat in which he lay, he could see a broad, low room, in which he could barely have stood erect. He saw instruments and equipment whose weird shapes suggested alienness, and knowledge beyond the era he had known! The walls were lavender and phosphorescent. Fossil bone-fragments were mounted in shallow cases. Dinosaur bones, some of them seemed, from their size. But there was a complete skeleton of a dog, too, and the skeleton of a man, and a second man-skeleton that was not quite human. Its neck-vertebrae were very thick and solid, its shoulders were wide, and its skull was gigantic. All this weirdness had a violent effect on Ned Vince—a sudden, nostalgic panic. Something was fearfully wrong! The nervous terror of the unknown was on him. Feeble and dizzy after his weird resurrection, which he could not understand, remembering as he did that moment of sinking to certain death in the pool at Pit Bend, he caught the edge of the transparent vat, and pulled himself to a sitting posture. There was a muffled murmur around him, as of some vast, un-Earthly metropolis. "Take it easy, Ned Vince...." The words themselves, and the way they were assembled, were old, familiar friends. But the tone was wrong. It was high, shrill, parrot-like, and mechanical. Ned's gaze searched for the source of the voice—located the black box just outside of his crystal vat. From that box the voice seemed to have originated. Before it crouched a small, brownish animal with a bulging head. The animal's tiny-fingered paws—hands they were, really—were touching rows of keys. To Ned Vince, it was all utterly insane and incomprehensible. A rodent, looking like a prairie dog, a little; but plainly possessing a high order of intelligence. And a voice whose soothingly familiar words were more repugnant somehow, simply because they could never belong in a place as eerie as this. Ned Vince did not know how Loy Chuk had probed his brain, with the aid of a pair of helmets, and the black box apparatus. He did not know that in the latter, his language, taken from his own revitalized mind, was recorded, and that Loy Chuk had only to press certain buttons to make the instrument express his thoughts in common, long-dead English. Loy, whose vocal organs were not human, would have had great difficulty speaking English words, anyway. Ned's dark hair was wildly awry. His gaunt, young face held befuddled terror. He gasped in the thin atmosphere. "I've gone nuts," he pronounced with a curious calm. "Stark—starin'—nuts...." Loy's box, with its recorded English words and its sonic detectors, could translate for its master, too. As the man spoke, Loy read the illuminated symbols in his own language, flashed on a frosted crystal plate before him. Thus he knew what Ned Vince was saying. Loy Chuk pressed more keys, and the box reproduced his answer: "No, Ned, not nuts. Not a bit of it! There are just a lot of things that you've got to get used to, that's all. You drowned about a million years ago. I discovered your body. I brought you back to life. We have science that can do that. I'm Loy Chuk...." It took only a moment for the box to tell the full story in clear, bold, friendly terms. Thus Loy sought, with calm, human logic, to make his charge feel at home. Probably, though, he was a fool, to suppose that he could succeed, thus. Vince started to mutter, struggling desperately to reason it out. "A prairie dog," he said. "Speaking to me. One million years. Evolution. The scientists say that people grew up from fishes in the sea. Prairie dogs are smart. So maybe super-prairie-dogs could come from them. A lot easier than men from fish...." It was all sound logic. Even Ned Vince knew that. Still, his mind, tuned to ordinary, simple things, couldn't quite realize all the vast things that had happened to himself, and to the world. The scope of it all was too staggeringly big. One million years. God!... Ned Vince made a last effort to control himself. His knuckles tightened on the edge of the vat. "I don't know what you've been talking about," he grated wildly. "But I want to get out of here! I want to go back where I came from! Do you understand—whoever, or whatever you are?" Loy Chuk pressed more keys. "But you can't go back to the Twentieth Century," said the box. "Nor is there any better place for you to be now, than Kar-Rah. You are the only man left on Earth. Those men that exist in other star systems are not really your kind anymore, though their forefathers originated on this planet. They have gone far beyond you in evolution. To them you would be only a senseless curiosity. You are much better off with my people—our minds are much more like yours. We will take care of you, and make you comfortable...." But Ned Vince wasn't listening, now. "You are the only man left on Earth." That had been enough for him to hear. He didn't more than half believe it. His mind was too confused for conviction about anything. Everything he saw and felt and heard might be some kind of nightmare. But then it might all be real instead, and that was abysmal horror. Ned was no coward—death and danger of any ordinary Earthly kind, he could have faced bravely. But the loneliness here, and the utter strangeness, were hideous like being stranded alone on another world! His heart was pounding heavily, and his eyes were wide. He looked across this eerie room. There was a ramp there at the other side, leading upward instead of a stairway. Fierce impulse to escape this nameless lair, to try to learn the facts for himself, possessed him. He bounded out of the vat, and with head down, dashed for the ramp. He had to go most of the way on his hands and knees, for the up-slanting passage was low. Excited animal chucklings around him, and the occasional touch of a furry body, hurried his feverish scrambling. But he emerged at last at the surface. He stood there panting in that frigid, rarefied air. It was night. The Moon was a gigantic, pock-marked bulk. The constellations were unrecognizable. The rodent city was a glowing expanse of shallow, crystalline domes, set among odd, scrub trees and bushes. The crags loomed on all sides, all their jaggedness lost after a million years of erosion under an ocean that was gone. In that ghastly moonlight, the ground glistened with dry salt. "Well, I guess it's all true, huh?" Ned Vince muttered in a flat tone. Behind him he heard an excited, squeaky chattering. Rodents in pursuit. Looking back, he saw the pinpoint gleams of countless little eyes. Yes, he might as well be an exile on another planet—so changed had the Earth become. A wave of intolerable homesickness came over him as he sensed the distances of time that had passed—those inconceivable eons, separating himself from his friends, from Betty, from almost everything that was familiar. He started to run, away from those glittering rodent eyes. He sensed death in that cold sea-bottom, but what of it? What reason did he have left to live? He'd be only a museum piece here, a thing to be caged and studied.... Prison or a madhouse would be far better. He tried to get hold of his courage. But what was there to inspire it? Nothing! He laughed harshly as he ran, welcoming that bitter, killing cold. Nostalgia had him in its clutch, and there was no answer in his hell-world, lost beyond the barrier of the years.... Loy Chuk and his followers presently came upon Ned Vince's unconscious form, a mile from the city of Kar-Rah. In a flying machine they took him back, and applied stimulants. He came to, in the same laboratory room as before. But he was firmly strapped to a low platform this time, so that he could not escape again. There he lay, helpless, until presently an idea occurred to him. It gave him a few crumbs of hope. "Hey, somebody!" he called. "You'd better get some rest, Ned Vince," came the answer from the black box. It was Loy Chuk speaking again. "But listen!" Ned protested. "You know a lot more than we did in the Twentieth Century. And—well—there's that thing called time-travel, that I used to read about. Maybe you know how to make it work! Maybe you could send me back to my own time after all!" Little Loy Chuk was in a black, discouraged mood, himself. He could understand the utter, sick dejection of this giant from the past, lost from his own kind. Probably insanity looming. In far less extreme circumstances than this, death from homesickness had come. Loy Chuk was a scientist. In common with all real scientists, regardless of the species from which they spring, he loved the subjects of his researches. He wanted this ancient man to live and to be happy. Or this creature would be of scant value for study. So Loy considered carefully what Ned Vince had suggested. Time-travel. Almost a legend. An assault upon an intangible wall that had baffled far keener wits than Loy's. But he was bent, now, on the well-being of this anachronism he had so miraculously resurrected—this human, this Kaalleee.... Loy jabbed buttons on the black box. "Yes, Ned Vince," said the sonic apparatus. "Time-travel. Perhaps that is the only thing to do—to send you back to your own period of history. For I see that you will never be yourself, here. It will be hard to accomplish, but we'll try. Now I shall put you under an anesthetic...." Ned felt better immediately, for there was real hope now, where there had been none before. Maybe he'd be back in his home-town of Harwich again. Maybe he'd see the old machine-shop, there. And the trees greening out in Spring. Maybe he'd be seeing Betty Moore in Hurley, soon.... Ned relaxed, as a tiny hypo-needle bit into his arm.... As soon as Ned Vince passed into unconsciousness, Loy Chuk went to work once more, using that pair of brain-helmets again, exploring carefully the man's mind. After hours of research, he proceeded to prepare his plans. The government of Kar-Rah was a scientific oligarchy, of which Loy was a prime member. It would be easy to get the help he needed. A horde of small, grey-furred beings and their machines, toiled for many days. Ned Vince's mind swam gradually out of the blur that had enveloped it. He was wandering aimlessly about in a familiar room. The girders of the roof above were of red-painted steel. His tool-benches were there, greasy and littered with metal filings, just as they had always been. He had a tractor to repair, and a seed-drill. Outside of the machine-shop, the old, familiar yellow sun was shining. Across the street was the small brown house, where he lived. With a sudden startlement, he saw Betty Moore in the doorway. She wore a blue dress, and a mischievous smile curved her lips. As though she had succeeded in creeping up on him, for a surprise. "Why, Ned," she chuckled. "You look as though you've been dreaming, and just woke up!" He grimaced ruefully as she approached. With a kind of fierce gratitude, he took her in his arms. Yes, she was just like always. "I guess I was dreaming, Betty," he whispered, feeling that mighty sense of relief. "I must have fallen asleep at the bench, here, and had a nightmare. I thought I had an accident at Pit Bend—and that a lot of worse things happened.... But it wasn't true ..." Ned Vince's mind, over which there was still an elusive fog that he did not try to shake off, accepted apparent facts simply. He did not know anything about the invisible radiations beating down upon him, soothing and dimming his brain, so that it would never question or doubt, or observe too closely the incongruous circumstances that must often appear. The lack of traffic in the street without, for instance—and the lack of people besides himself and Betty. He didn't know that this machine-shop was built from his own memories of the original. He didn't know that this Betty was of the same origin—a miraculous fabrication of metal and energy-units and soft plastic. The trees outside were only lantern-slide illusions. It was all built inside a great, opaque dome. But there were hidden television systems, too. Thus Loy Chuk's kind could study this ancient man—this Kaalleee. Thus, their motives were mostly selfish. Loy, though, was not observing, now. He had wandered far out into cold, sad sea-bottom, to ponder. He squeaked and chatted to himself, contemplating the magnificent, inexorable march of the ages. He remembered the ancient ruins, left by the final supermen. "The Kaalleee believes himself home," Loy was thinking. "He will survive and be happy. But there was no other way. Time is an Eternal Wall. Our archeological researches among the cities of the supermen show the truth. Even they, who once ruled Earth, never escaped from the present by so much as an instant...." THE END PRINTED IN U. S. A. Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Amazing Stories April 1956 and was first published in Amazing Stories November 1942. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note.

The alkaline water in the pit

The arid desert climate

The black box technology

The Kar-Rah simulation technology

27110_HKV3Z17H_8

Why are the Kar-Rah shouting "Kaalleee tik tik tik!"?

THE ETERNAL WALL By RAYMOND Z. GALLUN A scream of brakes, the splash into icy waters, a long descent into alkaline depths ... it was death. But Ned Vince lived again—a million years later! "See you in half an hour, Betty," said Ned Vince over the party telephone. "We'll be out at the Silver Basket before ten-thirty...." Ned Vince was eager for the company of the girl he loved. That was why he was in a hurry to get to the neighboring town of Hurley, where she lived. His old car rattled and roared as he swung it recklessly around Pit Bend. There was where Death tapped him on the shoulder. Another car leaped suddenly into view, its lights glaring blindingly past a high, up-jutting mass of Jurassic rock at the turn of the road. Dazzled, and befuddled by his own rash speed, Ned Vince had only swift young reflexes to rely on to avoid a fearful, telescoping collision. He flicked his wheel smoothly to the right; but the County Highway Commission hadn't yet tarred the traffic-loosened gravel at the Bend. An incredible science, millions of years old, lay in the minds of these creatures. Ned could scarcely have chosen a worse place to start sliding and spinning. His car hit the white-painted wooden rail sideways, crashed through, tumbled down a steep slope, struck a huge boulder, bounced up a little, and arced outward, falling as gracefully as a swan-diver toward the inky waters of the Pit, fifty feet beneath.... Ned Vince was still dimly conscious when that black, quiet pool geysered around him in a mighty splash. He had only a dazing welt on his forehead, and a gag of terror in his throat. Movement was slower now, as he began to sink, trapped inside his wrecked car. Nothing that he could imagine could mean doom more certainly than this. The Pit was a tremendously deep pocket in the ground, spring-fed. The edges of that almost bottomless pool were caked with a rim of white—for the water, on which dead birds so often floated, was surcharged with alkali. As that heavy, natronous liquid rushed up through the openings and cracks beneath his feet, Ned Vince knew that his friends and his family would never see his body again, lost beyond recovery in this abyss. The car was deeply submerged. The light had blinked out on the dash-panel, leaving Ned in absolute darkness. A flood rushed in at the shattered window. He clawed at the door, trying to open it, but it was jammed in the crash-bent frame, and he couldn't fight against the force of that incoming water. The welt, left by the blow he had received on his forehead, put a thickening mist over his brain, so that he could not think clearly. Presently, when he could no longer hold his breath, bitter liquid was sucked into his lungs. His last thoughts were those of a drowning man. The machine-shop he and his dad had had in Harwich. Betty Moore, with the smiling Irish eyes—like in the song. Betty and he had planned to go to the State University this Fall. They'd planned to be married sometime.... Goodbye, Betty ... The ripples that had ruffled the surface waters in the Pit, quieted again to glassy smoothness. The eternal stars shone calmly. The geologic Dakota hills, which might have seen the dinosaurs, still bulked along the highway. Time, the Brother of Death, and the Father of Change, seemed to wait.... "Kaalleee! Tik!... Tik, tik, tik!... Kaalleee!..." The excited cry, which no human throat could quite have duplicated accurately, arose thinly from the depths of a powder-dry gulch, water-scarred from an inconceivable antiquity. The noon-day Sun was red and huge. The air was tenuous, dehydrated, chill. "Kaalleee!... Tik, tik, tik!..." At first there was only one voice uttering those weird, triumphant sounds. Then other vocal organs took up that trilling wail, and those short, sharp chuckles of eagerness. Other questioning, wondering notes mixed with the cadence. Lacking qualities identifiable as human, the disturbance was still like the babble of a group of workmen who have discovered something remarkable. The desolate expanse around the gulch, was all but without motion. The icy breeze tore tiny puffs of dust from grotesque, angling drifts of soil, nearly waterless for eons. Patches of drab lichen grew here and there on the up-jutting rocks, but in the desert itself, no other life was visible. Even the hills had sagged away, flattened by incalculable ages of erosion. At a mile distance, a crumbling heap of rubble arose. Once it had been a building. A gigantic, jagged mass of detritus slanted upward from its crest—red debris that had once been steel. A launching catapult for the last space ships built by the gods in exodus, perhaps it was—half a million years ago. Man was gone from the Earth. Glacial ages, war, decadence, disease, and a final scattering of those ultimate superhumans to newer worlds in other solar systems, had done that. "Kaalleee!... Tik, tik, tik!..." The sounds were not human. They were more like the chatter and wail of small desert animals. But there was a seeming paradox here in the depths of that gulch, too. The glint of metal, sharp and burnished. The flat, streamlined bulk of a flying machine, shiny and new. The bell-like muzzle of a strange excavator-apparatus, which seemed to depend on a blast of atoms to clear away rock and soil. Thus the gulch had been cleared of the accumulated rubbish of antiquity. Man, it seemed, had a successor, as ruler of the Earth. Loy Chuk had flown his geological expedition out from the far lowlands to the east, out from the city of Kar-Rah. And he was very happy now—flushed with a vast and unlooked-for success. He crouched there on his haunches, at the dry bottom of the Pit. The breeze rumpled his long, brown fur. He wasn't very different in appearance from his ancestors. A foot tall, perhaps, as he squatted there in that antique stance of his kind. His tail was short and furred, his undersides creamy. White whiskers spread around his inquisitive, pink-tipped snout. But his cranium bulged up and forward between shrewd, beady eyes, betraying the slow heritage of time, of survival of the fittest, of evolution. He could think and dream and invent, and the civilization of his kind was already far beyond that of the ancient Twentieth Century. Loy Chuk and his fellow workers were gathered, tense and gleeful, around the things their digging had exposed to the daylight. There was a gob of junk—scarcely more than an irregular formation of flaky rust. But imbedded in it was a huddled form, brown and hard as old wood. The dry mud that had encased it like an airtight coffin, had by now been chipped away by the tiny investigators; but soiled clothing still clung to it, after perhaps a million years. Metal had gone into decay—yes. But not this body. The answer to this was simple—alkali. A mineral saturation that had held time and change in stasis. A perfect preservative for organic tissue, aided probably during most of those passing eras by desert dryness. The Dakotas had turned arid very swiftly. This body was not a mere fossil. It was a mummy. "Kaalleee!" Man, that meant. Not the star-conquering demi-gods, but the ancestral stock that had built the first machines on Earth, and in the early Twenty-first Century, the first interplanetary rockets. No wonder Loy Chuk and his co-workers were happy in their paleontological enthusiasm! A strange accident, happening in a legendary antiquity, had aided them in their quest for knowledge. At last Loy Chuk gave a soft, chirping signal. The chant of triumph ended, while instruments flicked in his tiny hands. The final instrument he used to test the mummy, looked like a miniature stereoscope, with complicated details. He held it over his eyes. On the tiny screen within, through the agency of focused X-rays, he saw magnified images of the internal organs of this ancient human corpse. What his probing gaze revealed to him, made his pleasure even greater than before. In twittering, chattering sounds, he communicated his further knowledge to his henchmen. Though devoid of moisture, the mummy was perfectly preserved, even to its brain cells! Medical and biological sciences were far advanced among Loy Chuk's kind. Perhaps, by the application of principles long known to them, this long-dead body could be made to live again! It might move, speak, remember its past! What a marvelous subject for study it would make, back there in the museums of Kar-Rah! "Tik, tik, tik!..." But Loy silenced this fresh, eager chattering with a command. Work was always more substantial than cheering. With infinite care—small, sharp hand-tools were used, now—the mummy of Ned Vince was disengaged from the worthless rust of his primitive automobile. With infinite care it was crated in a metal case, and hauled into the flying machine. Flashing flame, the latter arose, bearing the entire hundred members of the expedition. The craft shot eastward at bullet-like speed. The spreading continental plateau of North America seemed to crawl backward, beneath. A tremendous sand desert, marked with low, washed-down mountains, and the vague, angular, geometric mounds of human cities that were gone forever. Beyond the eastern rim of the continent, the plain dipped downward steeply. The white of dried salt was on the hills, but there was a little green growth here, too. The dead sea-bottom of the vanished Atlantic was not as dead as the highlands. Far out in a deep valley, Kar-Rah, the city of the rodents, came into view—a crystalline maze of low, bubble-like structures, glinting in the red sunshine. But this was only its surface aspect. Loy Chuk's people had built their homes mostly underground, since the beginning of their foggy evolution. Besides, in this latter day, the nights were very cold, the shelter of subterranean passages and rooms was welcome. The mummy was taken to Loy Chuk's laboratory, a short distance below the surface. Here at once, the scientist began his work. The body of the ancient man was put in a large vat. Fluids submerged it, slowly soaking from that hardened flesh the alkali that had preserved it for so long. The fluid was changed often, until woody muscles and other tissues became pliable once more. Then the more delicate processes began. Still submerged in liquid, the corpse was submitted to a flow of restorative energy, passing between complicated electrodes. The cells of antique flesh and brain gradually took on a chemical composition nearer to that of the life that they had once known. At last the final liquid was drained away, and the mummy lay there, a mummy no more, but a pale, silent figure in its tatters of clothing. Loy Chuk put an odd, metal-fabric helmet on its head, and a second, much smaller helmet on his own. Connected with this arrangement, was a black box of many uses. For hours he worked with his apparatus, studying, and guiding the recording instruments. The time passed swiftly. At last, eager and ready for whatever might happen now, Loy Chuk pushed another switch. With a cold, rosy flare, energy blazed around that moveless form. For Ned Vince, timeless eternity ended like a gradual fading mist. When he could see clearly again, he experienced that inevitable shock of vast change around him. Though it had been dehydrated, his brain had been kept perfectly intact through the ages, and now it was restored. So his memories were as vivid as yesterday. Yet, through that crystalline vat in which he lay, he could see a broad, low room, in which he could barely have stood erect. He saw instruments and equipment whose weird shapes suggested alienness, and knowledge beyond the era he had known! The walls were lavender and phosphorescent. Fossil bone-fragments were mounted in shallow cases. Dinosaur bones, some of them seemed, from their size. But there was a complete skeleton of a dog, too, and the skeleton of a man, and a second man-skeleton that was not quite human. Its neck-vertebrae were very thick and solid, its shoulders were wide, and its skull was gigantic. All this weirdness had a violent effect on Ned Vince—a sudden, nostalgic panic. Something was fearfully wrong! The nervous terror of the unknown was on him. Feeble and dizzy after his weird resurrection, which he could not understand, remembering as he did that moment of sinking to certain death in the pool at Pit Bend, he caught the edge of the transparent vat, and pulled himself to a sitting posture. There was a muffled murmur around him, as of some vast, un-Earthly metropolis. "Take it easy, Ned Vince...." The words themselves, and the way they were assembled, were old, familiar friends. But the tone was wrong. It was high, shrill, parrot-like, and mechanical. Ned's gaze searched for the source of the voice—located the black box just outside of his crystal vat. From that box the voice seemed to have originated. Before it crouched a small, brownish animal with a bulging head. The animal's tiny-fingered paws—hands they were, really—were touching rows of keys. To Ned Vince, it was all utterly insane and incomprehensible. A rodent, looking like a prairie dog, a little; but plainly possessing a high order of intelligence. And a voice whose soothingly familiar words were more repugnant somehow, simply because they could never belong in a place as eerie as this. Ned Vince did not know how Loy Chuk had probed his brain, with the aid of a pair of helmets, and the black box apparatus. He did not know that in the latter, his language, taken from his own revitalized mind, was recorded, and that Loy Chuk had only to press certain buttons to make the instrument express his thoughts in common, long-dead English. Loy, whose vocal organs were not human, would have had great difficulty speaking English words, anyway. Ned's dark hair was wildly awry. His gaunt, young face held befuddled terror. He gasped in the thin atmosphere. "I've gone nuts," he pronounced with a curious calm. "Stark—starin'—nuts...." Loy's box, with its recorded English words and its sonic detectors, could translate for its master, too. As the man spoke, Loy read the illuminated symbols in his own language, flashed on a frosted crystal plate before him. Thus he knew what Ned Vince was saying. Loy Chuk pressed more keys, and the box reproduced his answer: "No, Ned, not nuts. Not a bit of it! There are just a lot of things that you've got to get used to, that's all. You drowned about a million years ago. I discovered your body. I brought you back to life. We have science that can do that. I'm Loy Chuk...." It took only a moment for the box to tell the full story in clear, bold, friendly terms. Thus Loy sought, with calm, human logic, to make his charge feel at home. Probably, though, he was a fool, to suppose that he could succeed, thus. Vince started to mutter, struggling desperately to reason it out. "A prairie dog," he said. "Speaking to me. One million years. Evolution. The scientists say that people grew up from fishes in the sea. Prairie dogs are smart. So maybe super-prairie-dogs could come from them. A lot easier than men from fish...." It was all sound logic. Even Ned Vince knew that. Still, his mind, tuned to ordinary, simple things, couldn't quite realize all the vast things that had happened to himself, and to the world. The scope of it all was too staggeringly big. One million years. God!... Ned Vince made a last effort to control himself. His knuckles tightened on the edge of the vat. "I don't know what you've been talking about," he grated wildly. "But I want to get out of here! I want to go back where I came from! Do you understand—whoever, or whatever you are?" Loy Chuk pressed more keys. "But you can't go back to the Twentieth Century," said the box. "Nor is there any better place for you to be now, than Kar-Rah. You are the only man left on Earth. Those men that exist in other star systems are not really your kind anymore, though their forefathers originated on this planet. They have gone far beyond you in evolution. To them you would be only a senseless curiosity. You are much better off with my people—our minds are much more like yours. We will take care of you, and make you comfortable...." But Ned Vince wasn't listening, now. "You are the only man left on Earth." That had been enough for him to hear. He didn't more than half believe it. His mind was too confused for conviction about anything. Everything he saw and felt and heard might be some kind of nightmare. But then it might all be real instead, and that was abysmal horror. Ned was no coward—death and danger of any ordinary Earthly kind, he could have faced bravely. But the loneliness here, and the utter strangeness, were hideous like being stranded alone on another world! His heart was pounding heavily, and his eyes were wide. He looked across this eerie room. There was a ramp there at the other side, leading upward instead of a stairway. Fierce impulse to escape this nameless lair, to try to learn the facts for himself, possessed him. He bounded out of the vat, and with head down, dashed for the ramp. He had to go most of the way on his hands and knees, for the up-slanting passage was low. Excited animal chucklings around him, and the occasional touch of a furry body, hurried his feverish scrambling. But he emerged at last at the surface. He stood there panting in that frigid, rarefied air. It was night. The Moon was a gigantic, pock-marked bulk. The constellations were unrecognizable. The rodent city was a glowing expanse of shallow, crystalline domes, set among odd, scrub trees and bushes. The crags loomed on all sides, all their jaggedness lost after a million years of erosion under an ocean that was gone. In that ghastly moonlight, the ground glistened with dry salt. "Well, I guess it's all true, huh?" Ned Vince muttered in a flat tone. Behind him he heard an excited, squeaky chattering. Rodents in pursuit. Looking back, he saw the pinpoint gleams of countless little eyes. Yes, he might as well be an exile on another planet—so changed had the Earth become. A wave of intolerable homesickness came over him as he sensed the distances of time that had passed—those inconceivable eons, separating himself from his friends, from Betty, from almost everything that was familiar. He started to run, away from those glittering rodent eyes. He sensed death in that cold sea-bottom, but what of it? What reason did he have left to live? He'd be only a museum piece here, a thing to be caged and studied.... Prison or a madhouse would be far better. He tried to get hold of his courage. But what was there to inspire it? Nothing! He laughed harshly as he ran, welcoming that bitter, killing cold. Nostalgia had him in its clutch, and there was no answer in his hell-world, lost beyond the barrier of the years.... Loy Chuk and his followers presently came upon Ned Vince's unconscious form, a mile from the city of Kar-Rah. In a flying machine they took him back, and applied stimulants. He came to, in the same laboratory room as before. But he was firmly strapped to a low platform this time, so that he could not escape again. There he lay, helpless, until presently an idea occurred to him. It gave him a few crumbs of hope. "Hey, somebody!" he called. "You'd better get some rest, Ned Vince," came the answer from the black box. It was Loy Chuk speaking again. "But listen!" Ned protested. "You know a lot more than we did in the Twentieth Century. And—well—there's that thing called time-travel, that I used to read about. Maybe you know how to make it work! Maybe you could send me back to my own time after all!" Little Loy Chuk was in a black, discouraged mood, himself. He could understand the utter, sick dejection of this giant from the past, lost from his own kind. Probably insanity looming. In far less extreme circumstances than this, death from homesickness had come. Loy Chuk was a scientist. In common with all real scientists, regardless of the species from which they spring, he loved the subjects of his researches. He wanted this ancient man to live and to be happy. Or this creature would be of scant value for study. So Loy considered carefully what Ned Vince had suggested. Time-travel. Almost a legend. An assault upon an intangible wall that had baffled far keener wits than Loy's. But he was bent, now, on the well-being of this anachronism he had so miraculously resurrected—this human, this Kaalleee.... Loy jabbed buttons on the black box. "Yes, Ned Vince," said the sonic apparatus. "Time-travel. Perhaps that is the only thing to do—to send you back to your own period of history. For I see that you will never be yourself, here. It will be hard to accomplish, but we'll try. Now I shall put you under an anesthetic...." Ned felt better immediately, for there was real hope now, where there had been none before. Maybe he'd be back in his home-town of Harwich again. Maybe he'd see the old machine-shop, there. And the trees greening out in Spring. Maybe he'd be seeing Betty Moore in Hurley, soon.... Ned relaxed, as a tiny hypo-needle bit into his arm.... As soon as Ned Vince passed into unconsciousness, Loy Chuk went to work once more, using that pair of brain-helmets again, exploring carefully the man's mind. After hours of research, he proceeded to prepare his plans. The government of Kar-Rah was a scientific oligarchy, of which Loy was a prime member. It would be easy to get the help he needed. A horde of small, grey-furred beings and their machines, toiled for many days. Ned Vince's mind swam gradually out of the blur that had enveloped it. He was wandering aimlessly about in a familiar room. The girders of the roof above were of red-painted steel. His tool-benches were there, greasy and littered with metal filings, just as they had always been. He had a tractor to repair, and a seed-drill. Outside of the machine-shop, the old, familiar yellow sun was shining. Across the street was the small brown house, where he lived. With a sudden startlement, he saw Betty Moore in the doorway. She wore a blue dress, and a mischievous smile curved her lips. As though she had succeeded in creeping up on him, for a surprise. "Why, Ned," she chuckled. "You look as though you've been dreaming, and just woke up!" He grimaced ruefully as she approached. With a kind of fierce gratitude, he took her in his arms. Yes, she was just like always. "I guess I was dreaming, Betty," he whispered, feeling that mighty sense of relief. "I must have fallen asleep at the bench, here, and had a nightmare. I thought I had an accident at Pit Bend—and that a lot of worse things happened.... But it wasn't true ..." Ned Vince's mind, over which there was still an elusive fog that he did not try to shake off, accepted apparent facts simply. He did not know anything about the invisible radiations beating down upon him, soothing and dimming his brain, so that it would never question or doubt, or observe too closely the incongruous circumstances that must often appear. The lack of traffic in the street without, for instance—and the lack of people besides himself and Betty. He didn't know that this machine-shop was built from his own memories of the original. He didn't know that this Betty was of the same origin—a miraculous fabrication of metal and energy-units and soft plastic. The trees outside were only lantern-slide illusions. It was all built inside a great, opaque dome. But there were hidden television systems, too. Thus Loy Chuk's kind could study this ancient man—this Kaalleee. Thus, their motives were mostly selfish. Loy, though, was not observing, now. He had wandered far out into cold, sad sea-bottom, to ponder. He squeaked and chatted to himself, contemplating the magnificent, inexorable march of the ages. He remembered the ancient ruins, left by the final supermen. "The Kaalleee believes himself home," Loy was thinking. "He will survive and be happy. But there was no other way. Time is an Eternal Wall. Our archeological researches among the cities of the supermen show the truth. Even they, who once ruled Earth, never escaped from the present by so much as an instant...." THE END PRINTED IN U. S. A. Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Amazing Stories April 1956 and was first published in Amazing Stories November 1942. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note.

They are warning each other of a potential predator

They are praising Loy Chuk for his accomplishment

They are attempting to reconvene after being separated

They are exuberating in their discovery of a human

27110_HKV3Z17H_9

From the 20th century to the age of the Kar-Rah, the planet's landscape as changed in all of the following ways EXCEPT:

THE ETERNAL WALL By RAYMOND Z. GALLUN A scream of brakes, the splash into icy waters, a long descent into alkaline depths ... it was death. But Ned Vince lived again—a million years later! "See you in half an hour, Betty," said Ned Vince over the party telephone. "We'll be out at the Silver Basket before ten-thirty...." Ned Vince was eager for the company of the girl he loved. That was why he was in a hurry to get to the neighboring town of Hurley, where she lived. His old car rattled and roared as he swung it recklessly around Pit Bend. There was where Death tapped him on the shoulder. Another car leaped suddenly into view, its lights glaring blindingly past a high, up-jutting mass of Jurassic rock at the turn of the road. Dazzled, and befuddled by his own rash speed, Ned Vince had only swift young reflexes to rely on to avoid a fearful, telescoping collision. He flicked his wheel smoothly to the right; but the County Highway Commission hadn't yet tarred the traffic-loosened gravel at the Bend. An incredible science, millions of years old, lay in the minds of these creatures. Ned could scarcely have chosen a worse place to start sliding and spinning. His car hit the white-painted wooden rail sideways, crashed through, tumbled down a steep slope, struck a huge boulder, bounced up a little, and arced outward, falling as gracefully as a swan-diver toward the inky waters of the Pit, fifty feet beneath.... Ned Vince was still dimly conscious when that black, quiet pool geysered around him in a mighty splash. He had only a dazing welt on his forehead, and a gag of terror in his throat. Movement was slower now, as he began to sink, trapped inside his wrecked car. Nothing that he could imagine could mean doom more certainly than this. The Pit was a tremendously deep pocket in the ground, spring-fed. The edges of that almost bottomless pool were caked with a rim of white—for the water, on which dead birds so often floated, was surcharged with alkali. As that heavy, natronous liquid rushed up through the openings and cracks beneath his feet, Ned Vince knew that his friends and his family would never see his body again, lost beyond recovery in this abyss. The car was deeply submerged. The light had blinked out on the dash-panel, leaving Ned in absolute darkness. A flood rushed in at the shattered window. He clawed at the door, trying to open it, but it was jammed in the crash-bent frame, and he couldn't fight against the force of that incoming water. The welt, left by the blow he had received on his forehead, put a thickening mist over his brain, so that he could not think clearly. Presently, when he could no longer hold his breath, bitter liquid was sucked into his lungs. His last thoughts were those of a drowning man. The machine-shop he and his dad had had in Harwich. Betty Moore, with the smiling Irish eyes—like in the song. Betty and he had planned to go to the State University this Fall. They'd planned to be married sometime.... Goodbye, Betty ... The ripples that had ruffled the surface waters in the Pit, quieted again to glassy smoothness. The eternal stars shone calmly. The geologic Dakota hills, which might have seen the dinosaurs, still bulked along the highway. Time, the Brother of Death, and the Father of Change, seemed to wait.... "Kaalleee! Tik!... Tik, tik, tik!... Kaalleee!..." The excited cry, which no human throat could quite have duplicated accurately, arose thinly from the depths of a powder-dry gulch, water-scarred from an inconceivable antiquity. The noon-day Sun was red and huge. The air was tenuous, dehydrated, chill. "Kaalleee!... Tik, tik, tik!..." At first there was only one voice uttering those weird, triumphant sounds. Then other vocal organs took up that trilling wail, and those short, sharp chuckles of eagerness. Other questioning, wondering notes mixed with the cadence. Lacking qualities identifiable as human, the disturbance was still like the babble of a group of workmen who have discovered something remarkable. The desolate expanse around the gulch, was all but without motion. The icy breeze tore tiny puffs of dust from grotesque, angling drifts of soil, nearly waterless for eons. Patches of drab lichen grew here and there on the up-jutting rocks, but in the desert itself, no other life was visible. Even the hills had sagged away, flattened by incalculable ages of erosion. At a mile distance, a crumbling heap of rubble arose. Once it had been a building. A gigantic, jagged mass of detritus slanted upward from its crest—red debris that had once been steel. A launching catapult for the last space ships built by the gods in exodus, perhaps it was—half a million years ago. Man was gone from the Earth. Glacial ages, war, decadence, disease, and a final scattering of those ultimate superhumans to newer worlds in other solar systems, had done that. "Kaalleee!... Tik, tik, tik!..." The sounds were not human. They were more like the chatter and wail of small desert animals. But there was a seeming paradox here in the depths of that gulch, too. The glint of metal, sharp and burnished. The flat, streamlined bulk of a flying machine, shiny and new. The bell-like muzzle of a strange excavator-apparatus, which seemed to depend on a blast of atoms to clear away rock and soil. Thus the gulch had been cleared of the accumulated rubbish of antiquity. Man, it seemed, had a successor, as ruler of the Earth. Loy Chuk had flown his geological expedition out from the far lowlands to the east, out from the city of Kar-Rah. And he was very happy now—flushed with a vast and unlooked-for success. He crouched there on his haunches, at the dry bottom of the Pit. The breeze rumpled his long, brown fur. He wasn't very different in appearance from his ancestors. A foot tall, perhaps, as he squatted there in that antique stance of his kind. His tail was short and furred, his undersides creamy. White whiskers spread around his inquisitive, pink-tipped snout. But his cranium bulged up and forward between shrewd, beady eyes, betraying the slow heritage of time, of survival of the fittest, of evolution. He could think and dream and invent, and the civilization of his kind was already far beyond that of the ancient Twentieth Century. Loy Chuk and his fellow workers were gathered, tense and gleeful, around the things their digging had exposed to the daylight. There was a gob of junk—scarcely more than an irregular formation of flaky rust. But imbedded in it was a huddled form, brown and hard as old wood. The dry mud that had encased it like an airtight coffin, had by now been chipped away by the tiny investigators; but soiled clothing still clung to it, after perhaps a million years. Metal had gone into decay—yes. But not this body. The answer to this was simple—alkali. A mineral saturation that had held time and change in stasis. A perfect preservative for organic tissue, aided probably during most of those passing eras by desert dryness. The Dakotas had turned arid very swiftly. This body was not a mere fossil. It was a mummy. "Kaalleee!" Man, that meant. Not the star-conquering demi-gods, but the ancestral stock that had built the first machines on Earth, and in the early Twenty-first Century, the first interplanetary rockets. No wonder Loy Chuk and his co-workers were happy in their paleontological enthusiasm! A strange accident, happening in a legendary antiquity, had aided them in their quest for knowledge. At last Loy Chuk gave a soft, chirping signal. The chant of triumph ended, while instruments flicked in his tiny hands. The final instrument he used to test the mummy, looked like a miniature stereoscope, with complicated details. He held it over his eyes. On the tiny screen within, through the agency of focused X-rays, he saw magnified images of the internal organs of this ancient human corpse. What his probing gaze revealed to him, made his pleasure even greater than before. In twittering, chattering sounds, he communicated his further knowledge to his henchmen. Though devoid of moisture, the mummy was perfectly preserved, even to its brain cells! Medical and biological sciences were far advanced among Loy Chuk's kind. Perhaps, by the application of principles long known to them, this long-dead body could be made to live again! It might move, speak, remember its past! What a marvelous subject for study it would make, back there in the museums of Kar-Rah! "Tik, tik, tik!..." But Loy silenced this fresh, eager chattering with a command. Work was always more substantial than cheering. With infinite care—small, sharp hand-tools were used, now—the mummy of Ned Vince was disengaged from the worthless rust of his primitive automobile. With infinite care it was crated in a metal case, and hauled into the flying machine. Flashing flame, the latter arose, bearing the entire hundred members of the expedition. The craft shot eastward at bullet-like speed. The spreading continental plateau of North America seemed to crawl backward, beneath. A tremendous sand desert, marked with low, washed-down mountains, and the vague, angular, geometric mounds of human cities that were gone forever. Beyond the eastern rim of the continent, the plain dipped downward steeply. The white of dried salt was on the hills, but there was a little green growth here, too. The dead sea-bottom of the vanished Atlantic was not as dead as the highlands. Far out in a deep valley, Kar-Rah, the city of the rodents, came into view—a crystalline maze of low, bubble-like structures, glinting in the red sunshine. But this was only its surface aspect. Loy Chuk's people had built their homes mostly underground, since the beginning of their foggy evolution. Besides, in this latter day, the nights were very cold, the shelter of subterranean passages and rooms was welcome. The mummy was taken to Loy Chuk's laboratory, a short distance below the surface. Here at once, the scientist began his work. The body of the ancient man was put in a large vat. Fluids submerged it, slowly soaking from that hardened flesh the alkali that had preserved it for so long. The fluid was changed often, until woody muscles and other tissues became pliable once more. Then the more delicate processes began. Still submerged in liquid, the corpse was submitted to a flow of restorative energy, passing between complicated electrodes. The cells of antique flesh and brain gradually took on a chemical composition nearer to that of the life that they had once known. At last the final liquid was drained away, and the mummy lay there, a mummy no more, but a pale, silent figure in its tatters of clothing. Loy Chuk put an odd, metal-fabric helmet on its head, and a second, much smaller helmet on his own. Connected with this arrangement, was a black box of many uses. For hours he worked with his apparatus, studying, and guiding the recording instruments. The time passed swiftly. At last, eager and ready for whatever might happen now, Loy Chuk pushed another switch. With a cold, rosy flare, energy blazed around that moveless form. For Ned Vince, timeless eternity ended like a gradual fading mist. When he could see clearly again, he experienced that inevitable shock of vast change around him. Though it had been dehydrated, his brain had been kept perfectly intact through the ages, and now it was restored. So his memories were as vivid as yesterday. Yet, through that crystalline vat in which he lay, he could see a broad, low room, in which he could barely have stood erect. He saw instruments and equipment whose weird shapes suggested alienness, and knowledge beyond the era he had known! The walls were lavender and phosphorescent. Fossil bone-fragments were mounted in shallow cases. Dinosaur bones, some of them seemed, from their size. But there was a complete skeleton of a dog, too, and the skeleton of a man, and a second man-skeleton that was not quite human. Its neck-vertebrae were very thick and solid, its shoulders were wide, and its skull was gigantic. All this weirdness had a violent effect on Ned Vince—a sudden, nostalgic panic. Something was fearfully wrong! The nervous terror of the unknown was on him. Feeble and dizzy after his weird resurrection, which he could not understand, remembering as he did that moment of sinking to certain death in the pool at Pit Bend, he caught the edge of the transparent vat, and pulled himself to a sitting posture. There was a muffled murmur around him, as of some vast, un-Earthly metropolis. "Take it easy, Ned Vince...." The words themselves, and the way they were assembled, were old, familiar friends. But the tone was wrong. It was high, shrill, parrot-like, and mechanical. Ned's gaze searched for the source of the voice—located the black box just outside of his crystal vat. From that box the voice seemed to have originated. Before it crouched a small, brownish animal with a bulging head. The animal's tiny-fingered paws—hands they were, really—were touching rows of keys. To Ned Vince, it was all utterly insane and incomprehensible. A rodent, looking like a prairie dog, a little; but plainly possessing a high order of intelligence. And a voice whose soothingly familiar words were more repugnant somehow, simply because they could never belong in a place as eerie as this. Ned Vince did not know how Loy Chuk had probed his brain, with the aid of a pair of helmets, and the black box apparatus. He did not know that in the latter, his language, taken from his own revitalized mind, was recorded, and that Loy Chuk had only to press certain buttons to make the instrument express his thoughts in common, long-dead English. Loy, whose vocal organs were not human, would have had great difficulty speaking English words, anyway. Ned's dark hair was wildly awry. His gaunt, young face held befuddled terror. He gasped in the thin atmosphere. "I've gone nuts," he pronounced with a curious calm. "Stark—starin'—nuts...." Loy's box, with its recorded English words and its sonic detectors, could translate for its master, too. As the man spoke, Loy read the illuminated symbols in his own language, flashed on a frosted crystal plate before him. Thus he knew what Ned Vince was saying. Loy Chuk pressed more keys, and the box reproduced his answer: "No, Ned, not nuts. Not a bit of it! There are just a lot of things that you've got to get used to, that's all. You drowned about a million years ago. I discovered your body. I brought you back to life. We have science that can do that. I'm Loy Chuk...." It took only a moment for the box to tell the full story in clear, bold, friendly terms. Thus Loy sought, with calm, human logic, to make his charge feel at home. Probably, though, he was a fool, to suppose that he could succeed, thus. Vince started to mutter, struggling desperately to reason it out. "A prairie dog," he said. "Speaking to me. One million years. Evolution. The scientists say that people grew up from fishes in the sea. Prairie dogs are smart. So maybe super-prairie-dogs could come from them. A lot easier than men from fish...." It was all sound logic. Even Ned Vince knew that. Still, his mind, tuned to ordinary, simple things, couldn't quite realize all the vast things that had happened to himself, and to the world. The scope of it all was too staggeringly big. One million years. God!... Ned Vince made a last effort to control himself. His knuckles tightened on the edge of the vat. "I don't know what you've been talking about," he grated wildly. "But I want to get out of here! I want to go back where I came from! Do you understand—whoever, or whatever you are?" Loy Chuk pressed more keys. "But you can't go back to the Twentieth Century," said the box. "Nor is there any better place for you to be now, than Kar-Rah. You are the only man left on Earth. Those men that exist in other star systems are not really your kind anymore, though their forefathers originated on this planet. They have gone far beyond you in evolution. To them you would be only a senseless curiosity. You are much better off with my people—our minds are much more like yours. We will take care of you, and make you comfortable...." But Ned Vince wasn't listening, now. "You are the only man left on Earth." That had been enough for him to hear. He didn't more than half believe it. His mind was too confused for conviction about anything. Everything he saw and felt and heard might be some kind of nightmare. But then it might all be real instead, and that was abysmal horror. Ned was no coward—death and danger of any ordinary Earthly kind, he could have faced bravely. But the loneliness here, and the utter strangeness, were hideous like being stranded alone on another world! His heart was pounding heavily, and his eyes were wide. He looked across this eerie room. There was a ramp there at the other side, leading upward instead of a stairway. Fierce impulse to escape this nameless lair, to try to learn the facts for himself, possessed him. He bounded out of the vat, and with head down, dashed for the ramp. He had to go most of the way on his hands and knees, for the up-slanting passage was low. Excited animal chucklings around him, and the occasional touch of a furry body, hurried his feverish scrambling. But he emerged at last at the surface. He stood there panting in that frigid, rarefied air. It was night. The Moon was a gigantic, pock-marked bulk. The constellations were unrecognizable. The rodent city was a glowing expanse of shallow, crystalline domes, set among odd, scrub trees and bushes. The crags loomed on all sides, all their jaggedness lost after a million years of erosion under an ocean that was gone. In that ghastly moonlight, the ground glistened with dry salt. "Well, I guess it's all true, huh?" Ned Vince muttered in a flat tone. Behind him he heard an excited, squeaky chattering. Rodents in pursuit. Looking back, he saw the pinpoint gleams of countless little eyes. Yes, he might as well be an exile on another planet—so changed had the Earth become. A wave of intolerable homesickness came over him as he sensed the distances of time that had passed—those inconceivable eons, separating himself from his friends, from Betty, from almost everything that was familiar. He started to run, away from those glittering rodent eyes. He sensed death in that cold sea-bottom, but what of it? What reason did he have left to live? He'd be only a museum piece here, a thing to be caged and studied.... Prison or a madhouse would be far better. He tried to get hold of his courage. But what was there to inspire it? Nothing! He laughed harshly as he ran, welcoming that bitter, killing cold. Nostalgia had him in its clutch, and there was no answer in his hell-world, lost beyond the barrier of the years.... Loy Chuk and his followers presently came upon Ned Vince's unconscious form, a mile from the city of Kar-Rah. In a flying machine they took him back, and applied stimulants. He came to, in the same laboratory room as before. But he was firmly strapped to a low platform this time, so that he could not escape again. There he lay, helpless, until presently an idea occurred to him. It gave him a few crumbs of hope. "Hey, somebody!" he called. "You'd better get some rest, Ned Vince," came the answer from the black box. It was Loy Chuk speaking again. "But listen!" Ned protested. "You know a lot more than we did in the Twentieth Century. And—well—there's that thing called time-travel, that I used to read about. Maybe you know how to make it work! Maybe you could send me back to my own time after all!" Little Loy Chuk was in a black, discouraged mood, himself. He could understand the utter, sick dejection of this giant from the past, lost from his own kind. Probably insanity looming. In far less extreme circumstances than this, death from homesickness had come. Loy Chuk was a scientist. In common with all real scientists, regardless of the species from which they spring, he loved the subjects of his researches. He wanted this ancient man to live and to be happy. Or this creature would be of scant value for study. So Loy considered carefully what Ned Vince had suggested. Time-travel. Almost a legend. An assault upon an intangible wall that had baffled far keener wits than Loy's. But he was bent, now, on the well-being of this anachronism he had so miraculously resurrected—this human, this Kaalleee.... Loy jabbed buttons on the black box. "Yes, Ned Vince," said the sonic apparatus. "Time-travel. Perhaps that is the only thing to do—to send you back to your own period of history. For I see that you will never be yourself, here. It will be hard to accomplish, but we'll try. Now I shall put you under an anesthetic...." Ned felt better immediately, for there was real hope now, where there had been none before. Maybe he'd be back in his home-town of Harwich again. Maybe he'd see the old machine-shop, there. And the trees greening out in Spring. Maybe he'd be seeing Betty Moore in Hurley, soon.... Ned relaxed, as a tiny hypo-needle bit into his arm.... As soon as Ned Vince passed into unconsciousness, Loy Chuk went to work once more, using that pair of brain-helmets again, exploring carefully the man's mind. After hours of research, he proceeded to prepare his plans. The government of Kar-Rah was a scientific oligarchy, of which Loy was a prime member. It would be easy to get the help he needed. A horde of small, grey-furred beings and their machines, toiled for many days. Ned Vince's mind swam gradually out of the blur that had enveloped it. He was wandering aimlessly about in a familiar room. The girders of the roof above were of red-painted steel. His tool-benches were there, greasy and littered with metal filings, just as they had always been. He had a tractor to repair, and a seed-drill. Outside of the machine-shop, the old, familiar yellow sun was shining. Across the street was the small brown house, where he lived. With a sudden startlement, he saw Betty Moore in the doorway. She wore a blue dress, and a mischievous smile curved her lips. As though she had succeeded in creeping up on him, for a surprise. "Why, Ned," she chuckled. "You look as though you've been dreaming, and just woke up!" He grimaced ruefully as she approached. With a kind of fierce gratitude, he took her in his arms. Yes, she was just like always. "I guess I was dreaming, Betty," he whispered, feeling that mighty sense of relief. "I must have fallen asleep at the bench, here, and had a nightmare. I thought I had an accident at Pit Bend—and that a lot of worse things happened.... But it wasn't true ..." Ned Vince's mind, over which there was still an elusive fog that he did not try to shake off, accepted apparent facts simply. He did not know anything about the invisible radiations beating down upon him, soothing and dimming his brain, so that it would never question or doubt, or observe too closely the incongruous circumstances that must often appear. The lack of traffic in the street without, for instance—and the lack of people besides himself and Betty. He didn't know that this machine-shop was built from his own memories of the original. He didn't know that this Betty was of the same origin—a miraculous fabrication of metal and energy-units and soft plastic. The trees outside were only lantern-slide illusions. It was all built inside a great, opaque dome. But there were hidden television systems, too. Thus Loy Chuk's kind could study this ancient man—this Kaalleee. Thus, their motives were mostly selfish. Loy, though, was not observing, now. He had wandered far out into cold, sad sea-bottom, to ponder. He squeaked and chatted to himself, contemplating the magnificent, inexorable march of the ages. He remembered the ancient ruins, left by the final supermen. "The Kaalleee believes himself home," Loy was thinking. "He will survive and be happy. But there was no other way. Time is an Eternal Wall. Our archeological researches among the cities of the supermen show the truth. Even they, who once ruled Earth, never escaped from the present by so much as an instant...." THE END PRINTED IN U. S. A. Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Amazing Stories April 1956 and was first published in Amazing Stories November 1942. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note.

Vegetation can only be harvested inside glass domes

North America is an expansive desert continent

Cities are gone and species have moved underground

The Atlantic Ocean has disappeared

27110_HKV3Z17H_10

What is the purpose of the metal fabric helmets? probing the brain which has also recorded his language and speak for Loy read thoughts

THE ETERNAL WALL By RAYMOND Z. GALLUN A scream of brakes, the splash into icy waters, a long descent into alkaline depths ... it was death. But Ned Vince lived again—a million years later! "See you in half an hour, Betty," said Ned Vince over the party telephone. "We'll be out at the Silver Basket before ten-thirty...." Ned Vince was eager for the company of the girl he loved. That was why he was in a hurry to get to the neighboring town of Hurley, where she lived. His old car rattled and roared as he swung it recklessly around Pit Bend. There was where Death tapped him on the shoulder. Another car leaped suddenly into view, its lights glaring blindingly past a high, up-jutting mass of Jurassic rock at the turn of the road. Dazzled, and befuddled by his own rash speed, Ned Vince had only swift young reflexes to rely on to avoid a fearful, telescoping collision. He flicked his wheel smoothly to the right; but the County Highway Commission hadn't yet tarred the traffic-loosened gravel at the Bend. An incredible science, millions of years old, lay in the minds of these creatures. Ned could scarcely have chosen a worse place to start sliding and spinning. His car hit the white-painted wooden rail sideways, crashed through, tumbled down a steep slope, struck a huge boulder, bounced up a little, and arced outward, falling as gracefully as a swan-diver toward the inky waters of the Pit, fifty feet beneath.... Ned Vince was still dimly conscious when that black, quiet pool geysered around him in a mighty splash. He had only a dazing welt on his forehead, and a gag of terror in his throat. Movement was slower now, as he began to sink, trapped inside his wrecked car. Nothing that he could imagine could mean doom more certainly than this. The Pit was a tremendously deep pocket in the ground, spring-fed. The edges of that almost bottomless pool were caked with a rim of white—for the water, on which dead birds so often floated, was surcharged with alkali. As that heavy, natronous liquid rushed up through the openings and cracks beneath his feet, Ned Vince knew that his friends and his family would never see his body again, lost beyond recovery in this abyss. The car was deeply submerged. The light had blinked out on the dash-panel, leaving Ned in absolute darkness. A flood rushed in at the shattered window. He clawed at the door, trying to open it, but it was jammed in the crash-bent frame, and he couldn't fight against the force of that incoming water. The welt, left by the blow he had received on his forehead, put a thickening mist over his brain, so that he could not think clearly. Presently, when he could no longer hold his breath, bitter liquid was sucked into his lungs. His last thoughts were those of a drowning man. The machine-shop he and his dad had had in Harwich. Betty Moore, with the smiling Irish eyes—like in the song. Betty and he had planned to go to the State University this Fall. They'd planned to be married sometime.... Goodbye, Betty ... The ripples that had ruffled the surface waters in the Pit, quieted again to glassy smoothness. The eternal stars shone calmly. The geologic Dakota hills, which might have seen the dinosaurs, still bulked along the highway. Time, the Brother of Death, and the Father of Change, seemed to wait.... "Kaalleee! Tik!... Tik, tik, tik!... Kaalleee!..." The excited cry, which no human throat could quite have duplicated accurately, arose thinly from the depths of a powder-dry gulch, water-scarred from an inconceivable antiquity. The noon-day Sun was red and huge. The air was tenuous, dehydrated, chill. "Kaalleee!... Tik, tik, tik!..." At first there was only one voice uttering those weird, triumphant sounds. Then other vocal organs took up that trilling wail, and those short, sharp chuckles of eagerness. Other questioning, wondering notes mixed with the cadence. Lacking qualities identifiable as human, the disturbance was still like the babble of a group of workmen who have discovered something remarkable. The desolate expanse around the gulch, was all but without motion. The icy breeze tore tiny puffs of dust from grotesque, angling drifts of soil, nearly waterless for eons. Patches of drab lichen grew here and there on the up-jutting rocks, but in the desert itself, no other life was visible. Even the hills had sagged away, flattened by incalculable ages of erosion. At a mile distance, a crumbling heap of rubble arose. Once it had been a building. A gigantic, jagged mass of detritus slanted upward from its crest—red debris that had once been steel. A launching catapult for the last space ships built by the gods in exodus, perhaps it was—half a million years ago. Man was gone from the Earth. Glacial ages, war, decadence, disease, and a final scattering of those ultimate superhumans to newer worlds in other solar systems, had done that. "Kaalleee!... Tik, tik, tik!..." The sounds were not human. They were more like the chatter and wail of small desert animals. But there was a seeming paradox here in the depths of that gulch, too. The glint of metal, sharp and burnished. The flat, streamlined bulk of a flying machine, shiny and new. The bell-like muzzle of a strange excavator-apparatus, which seemed to depend on a blast of atoms to clear away rock and soil. Thus the gulch had been cleared of the accumulated rubbish of antiquity. Man, it seemed, had a successor, as ruler of the Earth. Loy Chuk had flown his geological expedition out from the far lowlands to the east, out from the city of Kar-Rah. And he was very happy now—flushed with a vast and unlooked-for success. He crouched there on his haunches, at the dry bottom of the Pit. The breeze rumpled his long, brown fur. He wasn't very different in appearance from his ancestors. A foot tall, perhaps, as he squatted there in that antique stance of his kind. His tail was short and furred, his undersides creamy. White whiskers spread around his inquisitive, pink-tipped snout. But his cranium bulged up and forward between shrewd, beady eyes, betraying the slow heritage of time, of survival of the fittest, of evolution. He could think and dream and invent, and the civilization of his kind was already far beyond that of the ancient Twentieth Century. Loy Chuk and his fellow workers were gathered, tense and gleeful, around the things their digging had exposed to the daylight. There was a gob of junk—scarcely more than an irregular formation of flaky rust. But imbedded in it was a huddled form, brown and hard as old wood. The dry mud that had encased it like an airtight coffin, had by now been chipped away by the tiny investigators; but soiled clothing still clung to it, after perhaps a million years. Metal had gone into decay—yes. But not this body. The answer to this was simple—alkali. A mineral saturation that had held time and change in stasis. A perfect preservative for organic tissue, aided probably during most of those passing eras by desert dryness. The Dakotas had turned arid very swiftly. This body was not a mere fossil. It was a mummy. "Kaalleee!" Man, that meant. Not the star-conquering demi-gods, but the ancestral stock that had built the first machines on Earth, and in the early Twenty-first Century, the first interplanetary rockets. No wonder Loy Chuk and his co-workers were happy in their paleontological enthusiasm! A strange accident, happening in a legendary antiquity, had aided them in their quest for knowledge. At last Loy Chuk gave a soft, chirping signal. The chant of triumph ended, while instruments flicked in his tiny hands. The final instrument he used to test the mummy, looked like a miniature stereoscope, with complicated details. He held it over his eyes. On the tiny screen within, through the agency of focused X-rays, he saw magnified images of the internal organs of this ancient human corpse. What his probing gaze revealed to him, made his pleasure even greater than before. In twittering, chattering sounds, he communicated his further knowledge to his henchmen. Though devoid of moisture, the mummy was perfectly preserved, even to its brain cells! Medical and biological sciences were far advanced among Loy Chuk's kind. Perhaps, by the application of principles long known to them, this long-dead body could be made to live again! It might move, speak, remember its past! What a marvelous subject for study it would make, back there in the museums of Kar-Rah! "Tik, tik, tik!..." But Loy silenced this fresh, eager chattering with a command. Work was always more substantial than cheering. With infinite care—small, sharp hand-tools were used, now—the mummy of Ned Vince was disengaged from the worthless rust of his primitive automobile. With infinite care it was crated in a metal case, and hauled into the flying machine. Flashing flame, the latter arose, bearing the entire hundred members of the expedition. The craft shot eastward at bullet-like speed. The spreading continental plateau of North America seemed to crawl backward, beneath. A tremendous sand desert, marked with low, washed-down mountains, and the vague, angular, geometric mounds of human cities that were gone forever. Beyond the eastern rim of the continent, the plain dipped downward steeply. The white of dried salt was on the hills, but there was a little green growth here, too. The dead sea-bottom of the vanished Atlantic was not as dead as the highlands. Far out in a deep valley, Kar-Rah, the city of the rodents, came into view—a crystalline maze of low, bubble-like structures, glinting in the red sunshine. But this was only its surface aspect. Loy Chuk's people had built their homes mostly underground, since the beginning of their foggy evolution. Besides, in this latter day, the nights were very cold, the shelter of subterranean passages and rooms was welcome. The mummy was taken to Loy Chuk's laboratory, a short distance below the surface. Here at once, the scientist began his work. The body of the ancient man was put in a large vat. Fluids submerged it, slowly soaking from that hardened flesh the alkali that had preserved it for so long. The fluid was changed often, until woody muscles and other tissues became pliable once more. Then the more delicate processes began. Still submerged in liquid, the corpse was submitted to a flow of restorative energy, passing between complicated electrodes. The cells of antique flesh and brain gradually took on a chemical composition nearer to that of the life that they had once known. At last the final liquid was drained away, and the mummy lay there, a mummy no more, but a pale, silent figure in its tatters of clothing. Loy Chuk put an odd, metal-fabric helmet on its head, and a second, much smaller helmet on his own. Connected with this arrangement, was a black box of many uses. For hours he worked with his apparatus, studying, and guiding the recording instruments. The time passed swiftly. At last, eager and ready for whatever might happen now, Loy Chuk pushed another switch. With a cold, rosy flare, energy blazed around that moveless form. For Ned Vince, timeless eternity ended like a gradual fading mist. When he could see clearly again, he experienced that inevitable shock of vast change around him. Though it had been dehydrated, his brain had been kept perfectly intact through the ages, and now it was restored. So his memories were as vivid as yesterday. Yet, through that crystalline vat in which he lay, he could see a broad, low room, in which he could barely have stood erect. He saw instruments and equipment whose weird shapes suggested alienness, and knowledge beyond the era he had known! The walls were lavender and phosphorescent. Fossil bone-fragments were mounted in shallow cases. Dinosaur bones, some of them seemed, from their size. But there was a complete skeleton of a dog, too, and the skeleton of a man, and a second man-skeleton that was not quite human. Its neck-vertebrae were very thick and solid, its shoulders were wide, and its skull was gigantic. All this weirdness had a violent effect on Ned Vince—a sudden, nostalgic panic. Something was fearfully wrong! The nervous terror of the unknown was on him. Feeble and dizzy after his weird resurrection, which he could not understand, remembering as he did that moment of sinking to certain death in the pool at Pit Bend, he caught the edge of the transparent vat, and pulled himself to a sitting posture. There was a muffled murmur around him, as of some vast, un-Earthly metropolis. "Take it easy, Ned Vince...." The words themselves, and the way they were assembled, were old, familiar friends. But the tone was wrong. It was high, shrill, parrot-like, and mechanical. Ned's gaze searched for the source of the voice—located the black box just outside of his crystal vat. From that box the voice seemed to have originated. Before it crouched a small, brownish animal with a bulging head. The animal's tiny-fingered paws—hands they were, really—were touching rows of keys. To Ned Vince, it was all utterly insane and incomprehensible. A rodent, looking like a prairie dog, a little; but plainly possessing a high order of intelligence. And a voice whose soothingly familiar words were more repugnant somehow, simply because they could never belong in a place as eerie as this. Ned Vince did not know how Loy Chuk had probed his brain, with the aid of a pair of helmets, and the black box apparatus. He did not know that in the latter, his language, taken from his own revitalized mind, was recorded, and that Loy Chuk had only to press certain buttons to make the instrument express his thoughts in common, long-dead English. Loy, whose vocal organs were not human, would have had great difficulty speaking English words, anyway. Ned's dark hair was wildly awry. His gaunt, young face held befuddled terror. He gasped in the thin atmosphere. "I've gone nuts," he pronounced with a curious calm. "Stark—starin'—nuts...." Loy's box, with its recorded English words and its sonic detectors, could translate for its master, too. As the man spoke, Loy read the illuminated symbols in his own language, flashed on a frosted crystal plate before him. Thus he knew what Ned Vince was saying. Loy Chuk pressed more keys, and the box reproduced his answer: "No, Ned, not nuts. Not a bit of it! There are just a lot of things that you've got to get used to, that's all. You drowned about a million years ago. I discovered your body. I brought you back to life. We have science that can do that. I'm Loy Chuk...." It took only a moment for the box to tell the full story in clear, bold, friendly terms. Thus Loy sought, with calm, human logic, to make his charge feel at home. Probably, though, he was a fool, to suppose that he could succeed, thus. Vince started to mutter, struggling desperately to reason it out. "A prairie dog," he said. "Speaking to me. One million years. Evolution. The scientists say that people grew up from fishes in the sea. Prairie dogs are smart. So maybe super-prairie-dogs could come from them. A lot easier than men from fish...." It was all sound logic. Even Ned Vince knew that. Still, his mind, tuned to ordinary, simple things, couldn't quite realize all the vast things that had happened to himself, and to the world. The scope of it all was too staggeringly big. One million years. God!... Ned Vince made a last effort to control himself. His knuckles tightened on the edge of the vat. "I don't know what you've been talking about," he grated wildly. "But I want to get out of here! I want to go back where I came from! Do you understand—whoever, or whatever you are?" Loy Chuk pressed more keys. "But you can't go back to the Twentieth Century," said the box. "Nor is there any better place for you to be now, than Kar-Rah. You are the only man left on Earth. Those men that exist in other star systems are not really your kind anymore, though their forefathers originated on this planet. They have gone far beyond you in evolution. To them you would be only a senseless curiosity. You are much better off with my people—our minds are much more like yours. We will take care of you, and make you comfortable...." But Ned Vince wasn't listening, now. "You are the only man left on Earth." That had been enough for him to hear. He didn't more than half believe it. His mind was too confused for conviction about anything. Everything he saw and felt and heard might be some kind of nightmare. But then it might all be real instead, and that was abysmal horror. Ned was no coward—death and danger of any ordinary Earthly kind, he could have faced bravely. But the loneliness here, and the utter strangeness, were hideous like being stranded alone on another world! His heart was pounding heavily, and his eyes were wide. He looked across this eerie room. There was a ramp there at the other side, leading upward instead of a stairway. Fierce impulse to escape this nameless lair, to try to learn the facts for himself, possessed him. He bounded out of the vat, and with head down, dashed for the ramp. He had to go most of the way on his hands and knees, for the up-slanting passage was low. Excited animal chucklings around him, and the occasional touch of a furry body, hurried his feverish scrambling. But he emerged at last at the surface. He stood there panting in that frigid, rarefied air. It was night. The Moon was a gigantic, pock-marked bulk. The constellations were unrecognizable. The rodent city was a glowing expanse of shallow, crystalline domes, set among odd, scrub trees and bushes. The crags loomed on all sides, all their jaggedness lost after a million years of erosion under an ocean that was gone. In that ghastly moonlight, the ground glistened with dry salt. "Well, I guess it's all true, huh?" Ned Vince muttered in a flat tone. Behind him he heard an excited, squeaky chattering. Rodents in pursuit. Looking back, he saw the pinpoint gleams of countless little eyes. Yes, he might as well be an exile on another planet—so changed had the Earth become. A wave of intolerable homesickness came over him as he sensed the distances of time that had passed—those inconceivable eons, separating himself from his friends, from Betty, from almost everything that was familiar. He started to run, away from those glittering rodent eyes. He sensed death in that cold sea-bottom, but what of it? What reason did he have left to live? He'd be only a museum piece here, a thing to be caged and studied.... Prison or a madhouse would be far better. He tried to get hold of his courage. But what was there to inspire it? Nothing! He laughed harshly as he ran, welcoming that bitter, killing cold. Nostalgia had him in its clutch, and there was no answer in his hell-world, lost beyond the barrier of the years.... Loy Chuk and his followers presently came upon Ned Vince's unconscious form, a mile from the city of Kar-Rah. In a flying machine they took him back, and applied stimulants. He came to, in the same laboratory room as before. But he was firmly strapped to a low platform this time, so that he could not escape again. There he lay, helpless, until presently an idea occurred to him. It gave him a few crumbs of hope. "Hey, somebody!" he called. "You'd better get some rest, Ned Vince," came the answer from the black box. It was Loy Chuk speaking again. "But listen!" Ned protested. "You know a lot more than we did in the Twentieth Century. And—well—there's that thing called time-travel, that I used to read about. Maybe you know how to make it work! Maybe you could send me back to my own time after all!" Little Loy Chuk was in a black, discouraged mood, himself. He could understand the utter, sick dejection of this giant from the past, lost from his own kind. Probably insanity looming. In far less extreme circumstances than this, death from homesickness had come. Loy Chuk was a scientist. In common with all real scientists, regardless of the species from which they spring, he loved the subjects of his researches. He wanted this ancient man to live and to be happy. Or this creature would be of scant value for study. So Loy considered carefully what Ned Vince had suggested. Time-travel. Almost a legend. An assault upon an intangible wall that had baffled far keener wits than Loy's. But he was bent, now, on the well-being of this anachronism he had so miraculously resurrected—this human, this Kaalleee.... Loy jabbed buttons on the black box. "Yes, Ned Vince," said the sonic apparatus. "Time-travel. Perhaps that is the only thing to do—to send you back to your own period of history. For I see that you will never be yourself, here. It will be hard to accomplish, but we'll try. Now I shall put you under an anesthetic...." Ned felt better immediately, for there was real hope now, where there had been none before. Maybe he'd be back in his home-town of Harwich again. Maybe he'd see the old machine-shop, there. And the trees greening out in Spring. Maybe he'd be seeing Betty Moore in Hurley, soon.... Ned relaxed, as a tiny hypo-needle bit into his arm.... As soon as Ned Vince passed into unconsciousness, Loy Chuk went to work once more, using that pair of brain-helmets again, exploring carefully the man's mind. After hours of research, he proceeded to prepare his plans. The government of Kar-Rah was a scientific oligarchy, of which Loy was a prime member. It would be easy to get the help he needed. A horde of small, grey-furred beings and their machines, toiled for many days. Ned Vince's mind swam gradually out of the blur that had enveloped it. He was wandering aimlessly about in a familiar room. The girders of the roof above were of red-painted steel. His tool-benches were there, greasy and littered with metal filings, just as they had always been. He had a tractor to repair, and a seed-drill. Outside of the machine-shop, the old, familiar yellow sun was shining. Across the street was the small brown house, where he lived. With a sudden startlement, he saw Betty Moore in the doorway. She wore a blue dress, and a mischievous smile curved her lips. As though she had succeeded in creeping up on him, for a surprise. "Why, Ned," she chuckled. "You look as though you've been dreaming, and just woke up!" He grimaced ruefully as she approached. With a kind of fierce gratitude, he took her in his arms. Yes, she was just like always. "I guess I was dreaming, Betty," he whispered, feeling that mighty sense of relief. "I must have fallen asleep at the bench, here, and had a nightmare. I thought I had an accident at Pit Bend—and that a lot of worse things happened.... But it wasn't true ..." Ned Vince's mind, over which there was still an elusive fog that he did not try to shake off, accepted apparent facts simply. He did not know anything about the invisible radiations beating down upon him, soothing and dimming his brain, so that it would never question or doubt, or observe too closely the incongruous circumstances that must often appear. The lack of traffic in the street without, for instance—and the lack of people besides himself and Betty. He didn't know that this machine-shop was built from his own memories of the original. He didn't know that this Betty was of the same origin—a miraculous fabrication of metal and energy-units and soft plastic. The trees outside were only lantern-slide illusions. It was all built inside a great, opaque dome. But there were hidden television systems, too. Thus Loy Chuk's kind could study this ancient man—this Kaalleee. Thus, their motives were mostly selfish. Loy, though, was not observing, now. He had wandered far out into cold, sad sea-bottom, to ponder. He squeaked and chatted to himself, contemplating the magnificent, inexorable march of the ages. He remembered the ancient ruins, left by the final supermen. "The Kaalleee believes himself home," Loy was thinking. "He will survive and be happy. But there was no other way. Time is an Eternal Wall. Our archeological researches among the cities of the supermen show the truth. Even they, who once ruled Earth, never escaped from the present by so much as an instant...." THE END PRINTED IN U. S. A. Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Amazing Stories April 1956 and was first published in Amazing Stories November 1942. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note.

Brain transplantation

Brain examination

Brain manipulation

Brain protection

27588_1RSI6ZBB_1

Why is Trella being attacked?

Transcriber's Note: Every effort has been made to replicate this text as faithfully as possible; changes (corrections of spelling and punctuation) made to the original text are marked like this . The original text appears when hovering the cursor over the marked text. This e-text was produced from Amazing Science Fiction Stories March 1959. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U. S. copyright on this publication was renewed. 50 THE JUPITER WEAPON By CHARLES L. FONTENAY He was a living weapon of destruction— immeasurably powerful, utterly invulnerable. There was only one question: Was he human? Trella feared she was in for trouble even before Motwick's head dropped forward on his arms in a drunken stupor. The two evil-looking men at the table nearby had been watching her surreptitiously, and now they shifted restlessly in their chairs. Trella had not wanted to come to the Golden Satellite. It was a squalid saloon in the rougher section of Jupiter's View, the terrestrial dome-colony on Ganymede. Motwick, already drunk, had insisted. A woman could not possibly make her way through these streets alone to the better section of town, especially one clad in a silvery evening dress. Her only hope was that this place had a telephone. Perhaps she could call one of Motwick's friends; she had no one on Ganymede she could call a real friend herself. Tentatively, she pushed her chair back from the table and arose. She had to brush close by the other table to get to the bar. As she did, the dark, slick-haired man reached out and grabbed her around the waist with a steely arm. Trella swung with her whole body, and slapped him so hard he nearly fell from his chair. As she walked swiftly toward the bar, he leaped up to follow her. There were only two other people in the Golden Satellite: the fat, mustached bartender and a short, square-built man at the bar. The latter swung around at the pistol-like report of her slap, and she saw that, though no more than four and a half feet tall, he was as heavily muscled as a lion. 51 His face was clean and open, with close-cropped blond hair and honest blue eyes. She ran to him. “Help me!” she cried. “Please help me!” He began to back away from her. “I can't,” he muttered in a deep voice. “I can't help you. I can't do anything.” The dark man was at her heels. In desperation, she dodged around the short man and took refuge behind him. Her protector was obviously unwilling, but the dark man, faced with his massiveness, took no chances. He stopped and shouted: “Kregg!” The other man at the table arose, ponderously, and lumbered toward them. He was immense, at least six and a half feet tall, with a brutal, vacant face. Evading her attempts to stay behind him, the squat man began to move down the bar away from the approaching Kregg. The dark man moved in on Trella again as Kregg overtook his quarry and swung a huge fist like a sledgehammer. Exactly what happened, Trella wasn't sure. She had the impression that Kregg's fist connected squarely with the short man's chin before he dodged to one side in a movement so fast it was a blur. But that couldn't have been, because the short man wasn't moved by that blow that would have felled a steer, and Kregg roared in pain, grabbing his injured fist. “The bar!” yelled Kregg. “I hit the damn bar!” At this juncture, the bartender took a hand. Leaning far over the bar, he swung a full bottle in a complete arc. It smashed on Kregg's head, splashing the floor with liquor, and Kregg sank stunned to his knees. The dark man, who had grabbed Trella's arm, released her and ran for the door. Moving agilely around the end of the bar, the bartender stood over Kregg, holding the jagged-edged bottleneck in his hand menacingly. “Get out!” rumbled the bartender. “I'll have no coppers raiding my place for the likes of you!” Kregg stumbled to his feet and staggered out. Trella ran to the unconscious Motwick's side. “That means you, too, lady,” said the bartender beside her. “You and your boy friend get out of here. You oughtn't to have come here in the first place.” “May I help you, Miss?” asked a deep, resonant voice behind her. She straightened from her anxious examination of Motwick. The squat man was standing there, an apologetic look on his face. She looked contemptuously at the massive muscles whose help had been denied her. Her arm ached where the dark man had grasped it. The broad face before 52 her was not unhandsome, and the blue eyes were disconcertingly direct, but she despised him for a coward. “I'm sorry I couldn't fight those men for you, Miss, but I just couldn't,” he said miserably, as though reading her thoughts. “But no one will bother you on the street if I'm with you.” “A lot of protection you'd be if they did!” she snapped. “But I'm desperate. You can carry him to the Stellar Hotel for me.” The gravity of Ganymede was hardly more than that of Earth's moon, but the way the man picked up the limp Motwick with one hand and tossed him over a shoulder was startling: as though he lifted a feather pillow. He followed Trella out the door of the Golden Satellite and fell in step beside her. Immediately she was grateful for his presence. The dimly lighted street was not crowded, but she didn't like the looks of the men she saw. The transparent dome of Jupiter's View was faintly visible in the reflected night lights of the colonial city, but the lights were overwhelmed by the giant, vari-colored disc of Jupiter itself, riding high in the sky. “I'm Quest Mansard, Miss,” said her companion. “I'm just in from Jupiter.” “I'm Trella Nuspar,” she said, favoring him with a green-eyed glance. “You mean Io, don't you—or Moon Five?” “No,” he said, grinning at her. He had an engaging grin, with even white teeth. “I meant Jupiter.” “You're lying,” she said flatly. “No one has ever landed on Jupiter. It would be impossible to blast off again.” “My parents landed on Jupiter, and I blasted off from it,” he said soberly. “I was born there. Have you ever heard of Dr. Eriklund Mansard?” “I certainly have,” she said, her interest taking a sudden upward turn. “He developed the surgiscope, didn't he? But his ship was drawn into Jupiter and lost.” “It was drawn into Jupiter, but he landed it successfully,” said Quest. “He and my mother lived on Jupiter until the oxygen equipment wore out at last. I was born and brought up there, and I was finally able to build a small rocket with a powerful enough drive to clear the planet.” She looked at him. He was short, half a head shorter than she, but broad and powerful as a man might be who had grown up in heavy gravity. He trod the street with a light, controlled step, seeming to deliberately hold himself down. “If Dr. Mansard succeeded in landing on Jupiter, why didn't anyone ever hear from him again?” she demanded. “Because,” said Quest, “his radio was sabotaged, just as his ship's drive was.” “Jupiter strength,” she murmured, looking him over coolly. 53 “You wear Motwick on your shoulder like a scarf. But you couldn't bring yourself to help a woman against two thugs.” He flushed. “I'm sorry,” he said. “That's something I couldn't help.” “Why not?” “I don't know. It's not that I'm afraid, but there's something in me that makes me back away from the prospect of fighting anyone.” Trella sighed. Cowardice was a state of mind. It was peculiarly inappropriate, but not unbelievable, that the strongest and most agile man on Ganymede should be a coward. Well, she thought with a rush of sympathy, he couldn't help being what he was. They had reached the more brightly lighted section of the city now. Trella could get a cab from here, but the Stellar Hotel wasn't far. They walked on. Trella had the desk clerk call a cab to deliver the unconscious Motwick to his home. She and Quest had a late sandwich in the coffee shop. “I landed here only a week ago,” he told her, his eyes frankly admiring her honey-colored hair and comely face. “I'm heading for Earth on the next spaceship.” “We'll be traveling companions, then,” she said. “I'm going back on that ship, too.” For some reason she decided against telling him that the assignment on which she had come to the Jupiter system was to gather his own father's notebooks and take them back to Earth. Motwick was an irresponsible playboy whom Trella had known briefly on Earth, and Trella was glad to dispense with his company for the remaining three weeks before the spaceship blasted off. She found herself enjoying the steadier companionship of Quest. As a matter of fact, she found herself enjoying his companionship more than she intended to. She found herself falling in love with him. Now this did not suit her at all. Trella had always liked her men tall and dark. She had determined that when she married it would be to a curly-haired six-footer. She was not at all happy about being so strongly attracted to a man several inches shorter than she. She was particularly unhappy about feeling drawn to a man who was a coward. The ship that they boarded on Moon Nine was one of the newer ships that could attain a hundred-mile-per-second velocity and take a hyperbolic path to Earth, but it would still require fifty-four days to make the trip. So Trella was delighted to find that the ship was the Cometfire and its skipper was her old friend, dark-eyed, curly-haired Jakdane Gille. “Jakdane,” she said, flirting with him with her eyes as in 54 days gone by, “I need a chaperon this trip, and you're ideal for the job.” “I never thought of myself in quite that light, but maybe I'm getting old,” he answered, laughing. “What's your trouble, Trella?” “I'm in love with that huge chunk of man who came aboard with me, and I'm not sure I ought to be,” she confessed. “I may need protection against myself till we get to Earth.” “If it's to keep you out of another fellow's clutches, I'm your man,” agreed Jakdane heartily. “I always had a mind to save you for myself. I'll guarantee you won't have a moment alone with him the whole trip.” “You don't have to be that thorough about it,” she protested hastily. “I want to get a little enjoyment out of being in love. But if I feel myself weakening too much, I'll holler for help.” The Cometfire swung around great Jupiter in an opening arc and plummeted ever more swiftly toward the tight circles of the inner planets. There were four crew members and three passengers aboard the ship's tiny personnel sphere, and Trella was thrown with Quest almost constantly. She enjoyed every minute of it. She told him only that she was a messenger, sent out to Ganymede to pick up some important papers and take them back to Earth. She was tempted to tell him what the papers were. Her employer had impressed upon her that her mission was confidential, but surely Dom Blessing could not object to Dr. Mansard's son knowing about it. All these things had happened before she was born, and she did not know what Dom Blessing's relation to Dr. Mansard had been, but it must have been very close. She knew that Dr. Mansard had invented the surgiscope. This was an instrument with a three-dimensional screen as its heart. The screen was a cubical frame in which an apparently solid image was built up of an object under an electron microscope. The actual cutting instrument of the surgiscope was an ion stream. By operating a tool in the three-dimensional screen, corresponding movements were made by the ion stream on the object under the microscope. The principle was the same as that used in operation of remote control “hands” in atomic laboratories to handle hot material, and with the surgiscope very delicate operations could be performed at the cellular level. Dr. Mansard and his wife had disappeared into the turbulent atmosphere of Jupiter just after his invention of the surgiscope, and it had been developed by Dom Blessing. Its success had built Spaceway Instruments, Incorporated, which Blessing headed. Through all these years since Dr. Mansard's disappearance, 55 Blessing had been searching the Jovian moons for a second, hidden laboratory of Dr. Mansard. When it was found at last, he sent Trella, his most trusted secretary, to Ganymede to bring back to him the notebooks found there. Blessing would, of course, be happy to learn that a son of Dr. Mansard lived, and would see that he received his rightful share of the inheritance. Because of this, Trella was tempted to tell Quest the good news herself; but she decided against it. It was Blessing's privilege to do this his own way, and he might not appreciate her meddling. At midtrip, Trella made a rueful confession to Jakdane. “It seems I was taking unnecessary precautions when I asked you to be a chaperon,” she said. “I kept waiting for Quest to do something, and when he didn't I told him I loved him.” “What did he say?” “It's very peculiar,” she said unhappily. “He said he can't love me. He said he wants to love me and he feels that he should, but there's something in him that refuses to permit it.” She expected Jakdane to salve her wounded feelings with a sympathetic pleasantry, but he did not. Instead, he just looked at her very thoughtfully and said no more about the matter. He explained his attitude after Asrange ran amuck. Asrange was the third passenger. He was a lean, saturnine individual who said little and kept to himself as much as possible. He was distantly polite in his relations with both crew and other passengers, and never showed the slightest spark of emotion … until the day Quest squirted coffee on him. It was one of those accidents that can occur easily in space. The passengers and the two crewmen on that particular waking shift (including Jakdane) were eating lunch on the center-deck. Quest picked up his bulb of coffee, but inadvertently pressed it before he got it to his lips. The coffee squirted all over the front of Asrange's clean white tunic. “I'm sorry!” exclaimed Quest in distress. The man's eyes went wide and he snarled. So quickly it seemed impossible, he had unbuckled himself from his seat and hurled himself backward from the table with an incoherent cry. He seized the first object his hand touched—it happened to be a heavy wooden cane leaning against Jakdane's bunk—propelled himself like a projectile at Quest. Quest rose from the table in a sudden uncoiling of movement. He did not unbuckle his safety belt—he rose and it snapped like a string. For a moment Trella thought he was going to meet Asrange's assault. But he fled in a long leap toward the companionway leading to the astrogation deck 56 above. Landing feet-first in the middle of the table and rebounding, Asrange pursued with the stick upraised. In his haste, Quest missed the companionway in his leap and was cornered against one of the bunks. Asrange descended on him like an avenging angel and, holding onto the bunk with one hand, rained savage blows on his head and shoulders with the heavy stick. Quest made no effort to retaliate. He cowered under the attack, holding his hands in front of him as if to ward it off. In a moment, Jakdane and the other crewman had reached Asrange and pulled him off. When they had Asrange in irons, Jakdane turned to Quest, who was now sitting unhappily at the table. “Take it easy,” he advised. “I'll wake the psychosurgeon and have him look you over. Just stay there.” Quest shook his head. “Don't bother him,” he said. “It's nothing but a few bruises.” “Bruises? Man, that club could have broken your skull! Or a couple of ribs, at the very least.” “I'm all right,” insisted Quest; and when the skeptical Jakdane insisted on examining him carefully, he had to admit it. There was hardly a mark on him from the blows. “If it didn't hurt you any more than that, why didn't you take that stick away from him?” demanded Jakdane. “You could have, easily.” “I couldn't,” said Quest miserably, and turned his face away. Later, alone with Trella on the control deck, Jakdane gave her some sober advice. “If you think you're in love with Quest, forget it,” he said. “Why? Because he's a coward? I know that ought to make me despise him, but it doesn't any more.” “Not because he's a coward. Because he's an android!” “What? Jakdane, you can't be serious!” “I am. I say he's an android, an artificial imitation of a man. It all figures. “Look, Trella, he said he was born on Jupiter. A human could stand the gravity of Jupiter, inside a dome or a ship, but what human could stand the rocket acceleration necessary to break free of Jupiter? Here's a man strong enough to break a spaceship safety belt just by getting up out of his chair against it, tough enough to take a beating with a heavy stick without being injured. How can you believe he's really human?” Trella remembered the thug Kregg striking Quest in the face and then crying that he had injured his hand on the bar. “But he said Dr. Mansard was his father,” protested Trella. “Robots and androids frequently look on their makers as their parents,” said Jakdane. “Quest may not even know he's 57 artificial. Do you know how Mansard died?” “The oxygen equipment failed, Quest said.” “Yes. Do you know when?” “No. Quest never did tell me, that I remember.” “He told me: a year before Quest made his rocket flight to Ganymede! If the oxygen equipment failed, how do you think Quest lived in the poisonous atmosphere of Jupiter, if he's human?” Trella was silent. “For the protection of humans, there are two psychological traits built into every robot and android,” said Jakdane gently. “The first is that they can never, under any circumstances, attack a human being, even in self defense. The second is that, while they may understand sexual desire objectively, they can never experience it themselves. “Those characteristics fit your man Quest to a T, Trella. There is no other explanation for him: he must be an android.” Trella did not want to believe Jakdane was right, but his reasoning was unassailable. Looking upon Quest as an android, many things were explained: his great strength, his short, broad build, his immunity to injury, his refusal to defend himself against a human, his inability to return Trella's love for him. It was not inconceivable that she should have unknowingly fallen in love with an android. Humans could love androids, with real affection, even knowing that they were artificial. There were instances of android nursemaids who were virtually members of the families owning them. She was glad now that she had not told Quest of her mission to Ganymede. He thought he was Dr. Mansard's son, but an android had no legal right of inheritance from his owner. She would leave it to Dom Blessing to decide what to do about Quest. Thus she did not, as she had intended originally, speak to Quest about seeing him again after she had completed her assignment. Even if Jakdane was wrong and Quest was human—as now seemed unlikely—Quest had told her he could not love her. Her best course was to try to forget him. Nor did Quest try to arrange with her for a later meeting. “It has been pleasant knowing you, Trella,” he said when they left the G-boat at White Sands. A faraway look came into his blue eyes, and he added: “I'm sorry things couldn't have been different, somehow.” “Let's don't be sorry for what we can't help,” she said gently, taking his hand in farewell. Trella took a fast plane from White Sands, and twenty-four hours later walked up the front steps of the familiar brownstone house on the outskirts of Washington. Dom Blessing himself met her at the door, a stooped, graying 58 man who peered at her over his spectacles. “You have the papers, eh?” he said, spying the brief case. “Good, good. Come in and we'll see what we have, eh?” She accompanied him through the bare, windowless anteroom which had always seemed to her such a strange feature of this luxurious house, and they entered the big living room. They sat before a fire in the old-fashioned fireplace and Blessing opened the brief case with trembling hands. “There are things here,” he said, his eyes sparkling as he glanced through the notebooks. “Yes, there are things here. We shall make something of these, Miss Trella, eh?” “I'm glad they're something you can use, Mr. Blessing,” she said. “There's something else I found on my trip, that I think I should tell you about.” She told him about Quest. “He thinks he's the son of Dr. Mansard,” she finished, “but apparently he is, without knowing it, an android Dr. Mansard built on Jupiter.” “He came back to Earth with you, eh?” asked Blessing intently. “Yes. I'm afraid it's your decision whether to let him go on living as a man or to tell him he's an android and claim ownership as Dr. Mansard's heir.” Trella planned to spend a few days resting in her employer's spacious home, and then to take a short vacation before resuming her duties as his confidential secretary. The next morning when she came down from her room, a change had been made. Two armed men were with Dom Blessing at breakfast and accompanied him wherever he went. She discovered that two more men with guns were stationed in the bare anteroom and a guard was stationed at every entrance to the house. “Why all the protection?” she asked Blessing. “A wealthy man must be careful,” said Blessing cheerfully. “When we don't understand all the implications of new circumstances, we must be prepared for anything, eh?” There was only one new circumstance Trella could think of. Without actually intending to, she exclaimed: “You aren't afraid of Quest? Why, an android can't hurt a human!” Blessing peered at her over his spectacles. “And what if he isn't an android, eh? And if he is—what if old Mansard didn't build in the prohibition against harming humans that's required by law? What about that, eh?” Trella was silent, shocked. There was something here she hadn't known about, hadn't even suspected. For some reason, Dom Blessing feared Dr. Eriklund Mansard … or his heir … or his mechanical servant. She was sure that Blessing was wrong, that Quest, whether man or android, intended no 59 harm to him. Surely, Quest would have said something of such bitterness during their long time together on Ganymede and aspace, since he did not know of Trella's connection with Blessing. But, since this was to be the atmosphere of Blessing's house, she was glad that he decided to assign her to take the Mansard papers to the New York laboratory. Quest came the day before she was scheduled to leave. Trella was in the living room with Blessing, discussing the instructions she was to give to the laboratory officials in New York. The two bodyguards were with them. The other guards were at their posts. Trella heard the doorbell ring. The heavy oaken front door was kept locked now, and the guards in the anteroom examined callers through a tiny window. Suddenly alarm bells rang all over the house. There was a terrific crash outside the room as the front door splintered. There were shouts and the sound of a shot. “The steel doors!” cried Blessing, turning white. “Let's get out of here.” He and his bodyguards ran through the back of the house out of the garage. Blessing, ahead of the rest, leaped into one of the cars and started the engine. The door from the house shattered and Quest burst through. The two guards turned and fired together. He could be hurt by bullets. He was staggered momentarily. Then, in a blur of motion, he sprang forward and swept the guards aside with one hand with such force that they skidded across the floor and lay in an unconscious heap against the rear of the garage. Trella had opened the door of the car, but it was wrenched from her hand as Blessing stepped on the accelerator and it leaped into the driveway with spinning wheels. Quest was after it, like a chunky deer, running faster than Trella had ever seen a man run before. Blessing slowed for the turn at the end of the driveway and glanced back over his shoulder. Seeing Quest almost upon him, he slammed down the accelerator and twisted the wheel hard. The car whipped into the street, careened, and rolled over and over, bringing up against a tree on the other side in a twisted tangle of wreckage. With a horrified gasp, Trella ran down the driveway toward the smoking heap of metal. Quest was already beside it, probing it. As she reached his side, he lifted the torn body of Dom Blessing. Blessing was dead. “I'm lucky,” said Quest soberly. “I would have murdered him.” “But why, Quest? I knew he was afraid of you, but he didn't tell me why.” “It was conditioned into me,” answered Quest “I didn't know 60 it until just now, when it ended, but my father conditioned me psychologically from my birth to the task of hunting down Dom Blessing and killing him. It was an unconscious drive in me that wouldn't release me until the task was finished. “You see, Blessing was my father's assistant on Ganymede. Right after my father completed development of the surgiscope, he and my mother blasted off for Io. Blessing wanted the valuable rights to the surgiscope, and he sabotaged the ship's drive so it would fall into Jupiter. “But my father was able to control it in the heavy atmosphere of Jupiter, and landed it successfully. I was born there, and he conditioned me to come to Earth and track down Blessing. I know now that it was part of the conditioning that I was unable to fight any other man until my task was finished: it might have gotten me in trouble and diverted me from that purpose.” More gently than Trella would have believed possible for his Jupiter-strong muscles, Quest took her in his arms. “Now I can say I love you,” he said. “That was part of the conditioning too: I couldn't love any woman until my job was done.” Trella disengaged herself. “I'm sorry,” she said. “Don't you know this, too, now: that you're not a man, but an android?” He looked at her in astonishment, stunned by her words. “What in space makes you think that?” he demanded. “Why, Quest, it's obvious,” she cried, tears in her eyes. “Everything about you … your build, suited for Jupiter's gravity … your strength … the fact that you were able to live in Jupiter's atmosphere after the oxygen equipment failed. I know you think Dr. Mansard was your father, but androids often believe that.” He grinned at her. “I'm no android,” he said confidently. “Do you forget my father was inventor of the surgiscope? He knew I'd have to grow up on Jupiter, and he operated on the genes before I was born. He altered my inherited characteristics to adapt me to the climate of Jupiter … even to being able to breathe a chlorine atmosphere as well as an oxygen atmosphere.” Trella looked at him. He was not badly hurt, any more than an elephant would have been, but his tunic was stained with red blood where the bullets had struck him. Normal android blood was green. “How can you be sure?” she asked doubtfully. “Androids are made,” he answered with a laugh. “They don't grow up. And I remember my boyhood on Jupiter very well.” He took her in his arms again, and this time she did not resist. His lips were very human. THE END

The author does not give a clear reason for the attackers' motivations

The attackers wish to steal Trella's documents

The attackers wish to violate Trella

The attackers are sent from Dr. Blessing to test Trella's loyalty

27588_1RSI6ZBB_2

Why can't the square-built man defend Trella against the men attacking her?

Transcriber's Note: Every effort has been made to replicate this text as faithfully as possible; changes (corrections of spelling and punctuation) made to the original text are marked like this . The original text appears when hovering the cursor over the marked text. This e-text was produced from Amazing Science Fiction Stories March 1959. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U. S. copyright on this publication was renewed. 50 THE JUPITER WEAPON By CHARLES L. FONTENAY He was a living weapon of destruction— immeasurably powerful, utterly invulnerable. There was only one question: Was he human? Trella feared she was in for trouble even before Motwick's head dropped forward on his arms in a drunken stupor. The two evil-looking men at the table nearby had been watching her surreptitiously, and now they shifted restlessly in their chairs. Trella had not wanted to come to the Golden Satellite. It was a squalid saloon in the rougher section of Jupiter's View, the terrestrial dome-colony on Ganymede. Motwick, already drunk, had insisted. A woman could not possibly make her way through these streets alone to the better section of town, especially one clad in a silvery evening dress. Her only hope was that this place had a telephone. Perhaps she could call one of Motwick's friends; she had no one on Ganymede she could call a real friend herself. Tentatively, she pushed her chair back from the table and arose. She had to brush close by the other table to get to the bar. As she did, the dark, slick-haired man reached out and grabbed her around the waist with a steely arm. Trella swung with her whole body, and slapped him so hard he nearly fell from his chair. As she walked swiftly toward the bar, he leaped up to follow her. There were only two other people in the Golden Satellite: the fat, mustached bartender and a short, square-built man at the bar. The latter swung around at the pistol-like report of her slap, and she saw that, though no more than four and a half feet tall, he was as heavily muscled as a lion. 51 His face was clean and open, with close-cropped blond hair and honest blue eyes. She ran to him. “Help me!” she cried. “Please help me!” He began to back away from her. “I can't,” he muttered in a deep voice. “I can't help you. I can't do anything.” The dark man was at her heels. In desperation, she dodged around the short man and took refuge behind him. Her protector was obviously unwilling, but the dark man, faced with his massiveness, took no chances. He stopped and shouted: “Kregg!” The other man at the table arose, ponderously, and lumbered toward them. He was immense, at least six and a half feet tall, with a brutal, vacant face. Evading her attempts to stay behind him, the squat man began to move down the bar away from the approaching Kregg. The dark man moved in on Trella again as Kregg overtook his quarry and swung a huge fist like a sledgehammer. Exactly what happened, Trella wasn't sure. She had the impression that Kregg's fist connected squarely with the short man's chin before he dodged to one side in a movement so fast it was a blur. But that couldn't have been, because the short man wasn't moved by that blow that would have felled a steer, and Kregg roared in pain, grabbing his injured fist. “The bar!” yelled Kregg. “I hit the damn bar!” At this juncture, the bartender took a hand. Leaning far over the bar, he swung a full bottle in a complete arc. It smashed on Kregg's head, splashing the floor with liquor, and Kregg sank stunned to his knees. The dark man, who had grabbed Trella's arm, released her and ran for the door. Moving agilely around the end of the bar, the bartender stood over Kregg, holding the jagged-edged bottleneck in his hand menacingly. “Get out!” rumbled the bartender. “I'll have no coppers raiding my place for the likes of you!” Kregg stumbled to his feet and staggered out. Trella ran to the unconscious Motwick's side. “That means you, too, lady,” said the bartender beside her. “You and your boy friend get out of here. You oughtn't to have come here in the first place.” “May I help you, Miss?” asked a deep, resonant voice behind her. She straightened from her anxious examination of Motwick. The squat man was standing there, an apologetic look on his face. She looked contemptuously at the massive muscles whose help had been denied her. Her arm ached where the dark man had grasped it. The broad face before 52 her was not unhandsome, and the blue eyes were disconcertingly direct, but she despised him for a coward. “I'm sorry I couldn't fight those men for you, Miss, but I just couldn't,” he said miserably, as though reading her thoughts. “But no one will bother you on the street if I'm with you.” “A lot of protection you'd be if they did!” she snapped. “But I'm desperate. You can carry him to the Stellar Hotel for me.” The gravity of Ganymede was hardly more than that of Earth's moon, but the way the man picked up the limp Motwick with one hand and tossed him over a shoulder was startling: as though he lifted a feather pillow. He followed Trella out the door of the Golden Satellite and fell in step beside her. Immediately she was grateful for his presence. The dimly lighted street was not crowded, but she didn't like the looks of the men she saw. The transparent dome of Jupiter's View was faintly visible in the reflected night lights of the colonial city, but the lights were overwhelmed by the giant, vari-colored disc of Jupiter itself, riding high in the sky. “I'm Quest Mansard, Miss,” said her companion. “I'm just in from Jupiter.” “I'm Trella Nuspar,” she said, favoring him with a green-eyed glance. “You mean Io, don't you—or Moon Five?” “No,” he said, grinning at her. He had an engaging grin, with even white teeth. “I meant Jupiter.” “You're lying,” she said flatly. “No one has ever landed on Jupiter. It would be impossible to blast off again.” “My parents landed on Jupiter, and I blasted off from it,” he said soberly. “I was born there. Have you ever heard of Dr. Eriklund Mansard?” “I certainly have,” she said, her interest taking a sudden upward turn. “He developed the surgiscope, didn't he? But his ship was drawn into Jupiter and lost.” “It was drawn into Jupiter, but he landed it successfully,” said Quest. “He and my mother lived on Jupiter until the oxygen equipment wore out at last. I was born and brought up there, and I was finally able to build a small rocket with a powerful enough drive to clear the planet.” She looked at him. He was short, half a head shorter than she, but broad and powerful as a man might be who had grown up in heavy gravity. He trod the street with a light, controlled step, seeming to deliberately hold himself down. “If Dr. Mansard succeeded in landing on Jupiter, why didn't anyone ever hear from him again?” she demanded. “Because,” said Quest, “his radio was sabotaged, just as his ship's drive was.” “Jupiter strength,” she murmured, looking him over coolly. 53 “You wear Motwick on your shoulder like a scarf. But you couldn't bring yourself to help a woman against two thugs.” He flushed. “I'm sorry,” he said. “That's something I couldn't help.” “Why not?” “I don't know. It's not that I'm afraid, but there's something in me that makes me back away from the prospect of fighting anyone.” Trella sighed. Cowardice was a state of mind. It was peculiarly inappropriate, but not unbelievable, that the strongest and most agile man on Ganymede should be a coward. Well, she thought with a rush of sympathy, he couldn't help being what he was. They had reached the more brightly lighted section of the city now. Trella could get a cab from here, but the Stellar Hotel wasn't far. They walked on. Trella had the desk clerk call a cab to deliver the unconscious Motwick to his home. She and Quest had a late sandwich in the coffee shop. “I landed here only a week ago,” he told her, his eyes frankly admiring her honey-colored hair and comely face. “I'm heading for Earth on the next spaceship.” “We'll be traveling companions, then,” she said. “I'm going back on that ship, too.” For some reason she decided against telling him that the assignment on which she had come to the Jupiter system was to gather his own father's notebooks and take them back to Earth. Motwick was an irresponsible playboy whom Trella had known briefly on Earth, and Trella was glad to dispense with his company for the remaining three weeks before the spaceship blasted off. She found herself enjoying the steadier companionship of Quest. As a matter of fact, she found herself enjoying his companionship more than she intended to. She found herself falling in love with him. Now this did not suit her at all. Trella had always liked her men tall and dark. She had determined that when she married it would be to a curly-haired six-footer. She was not at all happy about being so strongly attracted to a man several inches shorter than she. She was particularly unhappy about feeling drawn to a man who was a coward. The ship that they boarded on Moon Nine was one of the newer ships that could attain a hundred-mile-per-second velocity and take a hyperbolic path to Earth, but it would still require fifty-four days to make the trip. So Trella was delighted to find that the ship was the Cometfire and its skipper was her old friend, dark-eyed, curly-haired Jakdane Gille. “Jakdane,” she said, flirting with him with her eyes as in 54 days gone by, “I need a chaperon this trip, and you're ideal for the job.” “I never thought of myself in quite that light, but maybe I'm getting old,” he answered, laughing. “What's your trouble, Trella?” “I'm in love with that huge chunk of man who came aboard with me, and I'm not sure I ought to be,” she confessed. “I may need protection against myself till we get to Earth.” “If it's to keep you out of another fellow's clutches, I'm your man,” agreed Jakdane heartily. “I always had a mind to save you for myself. I'll guarantee you won't have a moment alone with him the whole trip.” “You don't have to be that thorough about it,” she protested hastily. “I want to get a little enjoyment out of being in love. But if I feel myself weakening too much, I'll holler for help.” The Cometfire swung around great Jupiter in an opening arc and plummeted ever more swiftly toward the tight circles of the inner planets. There were four crew members and three passengers aboard the ship's tiny personnel sphere, and Trella was thrown with Quest almost constantly. She enjoyed every minute of it. She told him only that she was a messenger, sent out to Ganymede to pick up some important papers and take them back to Earth. She was tempted to tell him what the papers were. Her employer had impressed upon her that her mission was confidential, but surely Dom Blessing could not object to Dr. Mansard's son knowing about it. All these things had happened before she was born, and she did not know what Dom Blessing's relation to Dr. Mansard had been, but it must have been very close. She knew that Dr. Mansard had invented the surgiscope. This was an instrument with a three-dimensional screen as its heart. The screen was a cubical frame in which an apparently solid image was built up of an object under an electron microscope. The actual cutting instrument of the surgiscope was an ion stream. By operating a tool in the three-dimensional screen, corresponding movements were made by the ion stream on the object under the microscope. The principle was the same as that used in operation of remote control “hands” in atomic laboratories to handle hot material, and with the surgiscope very delicate operations could be performed at the cellular level. Dr. Mansard and his wife had disappeared into the turbulent atmosphere of Jupiter just after his invention of the surgiscope, and it had been developed by Dom Blessing. Its success had built Spaceway Instruments, Incorporated, which Blessing headed. Through all these years since Dr. Mansard's disappearance, 55 Blessing had been searching the Jovian moons for a second, hidden laboratory of Dr. Mansard. When it was found at last, he sent Trella, his most trusted secretary, to Ganymede to bring back to him the notebooks found there. Blessing would, of course, be happy to learn that a son of Dr. Mansard lived, and would see that he received his rightful share of the inheritance. Because of this, Trella was tempted to tell Quest the good news herself; but she decided against it. It was Blessing's privilege to do this his own way, and he might not appreciate her meddling. At midtrip, Trella made a rueful confession to Jakdane. “It seems I was taking unnecessary precautions when I asked you to be a chaperon,” she said. “I kept waiting for Quest to do something, and when he didn't I told him I loved him.” “What did he say?” “It's very peculiar,” she said unhappily. “He said he can't love me. He said he wants to love me and he feels that he should, but there's something in him that refuses to permit it.” She expected Jakdane to salve her wounded feelings with a sympathetic pleasantry, but he did not. Instead, he just looked at her very thoughtfully and said no more about the matter. He explained his attitude after Asrange ran amuck. Asrange was the third passenger. He was a lean, saturnine individual who said little and kept to himself as much as possible. He was distantly polite in his relations with both crew and other passengers, and never showed the slightest spark of emotion … until the day Quest squirted coffee on him. It was one of those accidents that can occur easily in space. The passengers and the two crewmen on that particular waking shift (including Jakdane) were eating lunch on the center-deck. Quest picked up his bulb of coffee, but inadvertently pressed it before he got it to his lips. The coffee squirted all over the front of Asrange's clean white tunic. “I'm sorry!” exclaimed Quest in distress. The man's eyes went wide and he snarled. So quickly it seemed impossible, he had unbuckled himself from his seat and hurled himself backward from the table with an incoherent cry. He seized the first object his hand touched—it happened to be a heavy wooden cane leaning against Jakdane's bunk—propelled himself like a projectile at Quest. Quest rose from the table in a sudden uncoiling of movement. He did not unbuckle his safety belt—he rose and it snapped like a string. For a moment Trella thought he was going to meet Asrange's assault. But he fled in a long leap toward the companionway leading to the astrogation deck 56 above. Landing feet-first in the middle of the table and rebounding, Asrange pursued with the stick upraised. In his haste, Quest missed the companionway in his leap and was cornered against one of the bunks. Asrange descended on him like an avenging angel and, holding onto the bunk with one hand, rained savage blows on his head and shoulders with the heavy stick. Quest made no effort to retaliate. He cowered under the attack, holding his hands in front of him as if to ward it off. In a moment, Jakdane and the other crewman had reached Asrange and pulled him off. When they had Asrange in irons, Jakdane turned to Quest, who was now sitting unhappily at the table. “Take it easy,” he advised. “I'll wake the psychosurgeon and have him look you over. Just stay there.” Quest shook his head. “Don't bother him,” he said. “It's nothing but a few bruises.” “Bruises? Man, that club could have broken your skull! Or a couple of ribs, at the very least.” “I'm all right,” insisted Quest; and when the skeptical Jakdane insisted on examining him carefully, he had to admit it. There was hardly a mark on him from the blows. “If it didn't hurt you any more than that, why didn't you take that stick away from him?” demanded Jakdane. “You could have, easily.” “I couldn't,” said Quest miserably, and turned his face away. Later, alone with Trella on the control deck, Jakdane gave her some sober advice. “If you think you're in love with Quest, forget it,” he said. “Why? Because he's a coward? I know that ought to make me despise him, but it doesn't any more.” “Not because he's a coward. Because he's an android!” “What? Jakdane, you can't be serious!” “I am. I say he's an android, an artificial imitation of a man. It all figures. “Look, Trella, he said he was born on Jupiter. A human could stand the gravity of Jupiter, inside a dome or a ship, but what human could stand the rocket acceleration necessary to break free of Jupiter? Here's a man strong enough to break a spaceship safety belt just by getting up out of his chair against it, tough enough to take a beating with a heavy stick without being injured. How can you believe he's really human?” Trella remembered the thug Kregg striking Quest in the face and then crying that he had injured his hand on the bar. “But he said Dr. Mansard was his father,” protested Trella. “Robots and androids frequently look on their makers as their parents,” said Jakdane. “Quest may not even know he's 57 artificial. Do you know how Mansard died?” “The oxygen equipment failed, Quest said.” “Yes. Do you know when?” “No. Quest never did tell me, that I remember.” “He told me: a year before Quest made his rocket flight to Ganymede! If the oxygen equipment failed, how do you think Quest lived in the poisonous atmosphere of Jupiter, if he's human?” Trella was silent. “For the protection of humans, there are two psychological traits built into every robot and android,” said Jakdane gently. “The first is that they can never, under any circumstances, attack a human being, even in self defense. The second is that, while they may understand sexual desire objectively, they can never experience it themselves. “Those characteristics fit your man Quest to a T, Trella. There is no other explanation for him: he must be an android.” Trella did not want to believe Jakdane was right, but his reasoning was unassailable. Looking upon Quest as an android, many things were explained: his great strength, his short, broad build, his immunity to injury, his refusal to defend himself against a human, his inability to return Trella's love for him. It was not inconceivable that she should have unknowingly fallen in love with an android. Humans could love androids, with real affection, even knowing that they were artificial. There were instances of android nursemaids who were virtually members of the families owning them. She was glad now that she had not told Quest of her mission to Ganymede. He thought he was Dr. Mansard's son, but an android had no legal right of inheritance from his owner. She would leave it to Dom Blessing to decide what to do about Quest. Thus she did not, as she had intended originally, speak to Quest about seeing him again after she had completed her assignment. Even if Jakdane was wrong and Quest was human—as now seemed unlikely—Quest had told her he could not love her. Her best course was to try to forget him. Nor did Quest try to arrange with her for a later meeting. “It has been pleasant knowing you, Trella,” he said when they left the G-boat at White Sands. A faraway look came into his blue eyes, and he added: “I'm sorry things couldn't have been different, somehow.” “Let's don't be sorry for what we can't help,” she said gently, taking his hand in farewell. Trella took a fast plane from White Sands, and twenty-four hours later walked up the front steps of the familiar brownstone house on the outskirts of Washington. Dom Blessing himself met her at the door, a stooped, graying 58 man who peered at her over his spectacles. “You have the papers, eh?” he said, spying the brief case. “Good, good. Come in and we'll see what we have, eh?” She accompanied him through the bare, windowless anteroom which had always seemed to her such a strange feature of this luxurious house, and they entered the big living room. They sat before a fire in the old-fashioned fireplace and Blessing opened the brief case with trembling hands. “There are things here,” he said, his eyes sparkling as he glanced through the notebooks. “Yes, there are things here. We shall make something of these, Miss Trella, eh?” “I'm glad they're something you can use, Mr. Blessing,” she said. “There's something else I found on my trip, that I think I should tell you about.” She told him about Quest. “He thinks he's the son of Dr. Mansard,” she finished, “but apparently he is, without knowing it, an android Dr. Mansard built on Jupiter.” “He came back to Earth with you, eh?” asked Blessing intently. “Yes. I'm afraid it's your decision whether to let him go on living as a man or to tell him he's an android and claim ownership as Dr. Mansard's heir.” Trella planned to spend a few days resting in her employer's spacious home, and then to take a short vacation before resuming her duties as his confidential secretary. The next morning when she came down from her room, a change had been made. Two armed men were with Dom Blessing at breakfast and accompanied him wherever he went. She discovered that two more men with guns were stationed in the bare anteroom and a guard was stationed at every entrance to the house. “Why all the protection?” she asked Blessing. “A wealthy man must be careful,” said Blessing cheerfully. “When we don't understand all the implications of new circumstances, we must be prepared for anything, eh?” There was only one new circumstance Trella could think of. Without actually intending to, she exclaimed: “You aren't afraid of Quest? Why, an android can't hurt a human!” Blessing peered at her over his spectacles. “And what if he isn't an android, eh? And if he is—what if old Mansard didn't build in the prohibition against harming humans that's required by law? What about that, eh?” Trella was silent, shocked. There was something here she hadn't known about, hadn't even suspected. For some reason, Dom Blessing feared Dr. Eriklund Mansard … or his heir … or his mechanical servant. She was sure that Blessing was wrong, that Quest, whether man or android, intended no 59 harm to him. Surely, Quest would have said something of such bitterness during their long time together on Ganymede and aspace, since he did not know of Trella's connection with Blessing. But, since this was to be the atmosphere of Blessing's house, she was glad that he decided to assign her to take the Mansard papers to the New York laboratory. Quest came the day before she was scheduled to leave. Trella was in the living room with Blessing, discussing the instructions she was to give to the laboratory officials in New York. The two bodyguards were with them. The other guards were at their posts. Trella heard the doorbell ring. The heavy oaken front door was kept locked now, and the guards in the anteroom examined callers through a tiny window. Suddenly alarm bells rang all over the house. There was a terrific crash outside the room as the front door splintered. There were shouts and the sound of a shot. “The steel doors!” cried Blessing, turning white. “Let's get out of here.” He and his bodyguards ran through the back of the house out of the garage. Blessing, ahead of the rest, leaped into one of the cars and started the engine. The door from the house shattered and Quest burst through. The two guards turned and fired together. He could be hurt by bullets. He was staggered momentarily. Then, in a blur of motion, he sprang forward and swept the guards aside with one hand with such force that they skidded across the floor and lay in an unconscious heap against the rear of the garage. Trella had opened the door of the car, but it was wrenched from her hand as Blessing stepped on the accelerator and it leaped into the driveway with spinning wheels. Quest was after it, like a chunky deer, running faster than Trella had ever seen a man run before. Blessing slowed for the turn at the end of the driveway and glanced back over his shoulder. Seeing Quest almost upon him, he slammed down the accelerator and twisted the wheel hard. The car whipped into the street, careened, and rolled over and over, bringing up against a tree on the other side in a twisted tangle of wreckage. With a horrified gasp, Trella ran down the driveway toward the smoking heap of metal. Quest was already beside it, probing it. As she reached his side, he lifted the torn body of Dom Blessing. Blessing was dead. “I'm lucky,” said Quest soberly. “I would have murdered him.” “But why, Quest? I knew he was afraid of you, but he didn't tell me why.” “It was conditioned into me,” answered Quest “I didn't know 60 it until just now, when it ended, but my father conditioned me psychologically from my birth to the task of hunting down Dom Blessing and killing him. It was an unconscious drive in me that wouldn't release me until the task was finished. “You see, Blessing was my father's assistant on Ganymede. Right after my father completed development of the surgiscope, he and my mother blasted off for Io. Blessing wanted the valuable rights to the surgiscope, and he sabotaged the ship's drive so it would fall into Jupiter. “But my father was able to control it in the heavy atmosphere of Jupiter, and landed it successfully. I was born there, and he conditioned me to come to Earth and track down Blessing. I know now that it was part of the conditioning that I was unable to fight any other man until my task was finished: it might have gotten me in trouble and diverted me from that purpose.” More gently than Trella would have believed possible for his Jupiter-strong muscles, Quest took her in his arms. “Now I can say I love you,” he said. “That was part of the conditioning too: I couldn't love any woman until my job was done.” Trella disengaged herself. “I'm sorry,” she said. “Don't you know this, too, now: that you're not a man, but an android?” He looked at her in astonishment, stunned by her words. “What in space makes you think that?” he demanded. “Why, Quest, it's obvious,” she cried, tears in her eyes. “Everything about you … your build, suited for Jupiter's gravity … your strength … the fact that you were able to live in Jupiter's atmosphere after the oxygen equipment failed. I know you think Dr. Mansard was your father, but androids often believe that.” He grinned at her. “I'm no android,” he said confidently. “Do you forget my father was inventor of the surgiscope? He knew I'd have to grow up on Jupiter, and he operated on the genes before I was born. He altered my inherited characteristics to adapt me to the climate of Jupiter … even to being able to breathe a chlorine atmosphere as well as an oxygen atmosphere.” Trella looked at him. He was not badly hurt, any more than an elephant would have been, but his tunic was stained with red blood where the bullets had struck him. Normal android blood was green. “How can you be sure?” she asked doubtfully. “Androids are made,” he answered with a laugh. “They don't grow up. And I remember my boyhood on Jupiter very well.” He took her in his arms again, and this time she did not resist. His lips were very human. THE END

His programming does not allow it

He is a strict pacifist

He is full of cowardice

He is secretly collaborating with Trella's attackers

27588_1RSI6ZBB_3

Where does the beginning of the story take place?

Transcriber's Note: Every effort has been made to replicate this text as faithfully as possible; changes (corrections of spelling and punctuation) made to the original text are marked like this . The original text appears when hovering the cursor over the marked text. This e-text was produced from Amazing Science Fiction Stories March 1959. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U. S. copyright on this publication was renewed. 50 THE JUPITER WEAPON By CHARLES L. FONTENAY He was a living weapon of destruction— immeasurably powerful, utterly invulnerable. There was only one question: Was he human? Trella feared she was in for trouble even before Motwick's head dropped forward on his arms in a drunken stupor. The two evil-looking men at the table nearby had been watching her surreptitiously, and now they shifted restlessly in their chairs. Trella had not wanted to come to the Golden Satellite. It was a squalid saloon in the rougher section of Jupiter's View, the terrestrial dome-colony on Ganymede. Motwick, already drunk, had insisted. A woman could not possibly make her way through these streets alone to the better section of town, especially one clad in a silvery evening dress. Her only hope was that this place had a telephone. Perhaps she could call one of Motwick's friends; she had no one on Ganymede she could call a real friend herself. Tentatively, she pushed her chair back from the table and arose. She had to brush close by the other table to get to the bar. As she did, the dark, slick-haired man reached out and grabbed her around the waist with a steely arm. Trella swung with her whole body, and slapped him so hard he nearly fell from his chair. As she walked swiftly toward the bar, he leaped up to follow her. There were only two other people in the Golden Satellite: the fat, mustached bartender and a short, square-built man at the bar. The latter swung around at the pistol-like report of her slap, and she saw that, though no more than four and a half feet tall, he was as heavily muscled as a lion. 51 His face was clean and open, with close-cropped blond hair and honest blue eyes. She ran to him. “Help me!” she cried. “Please help me!” He began to back away from her. “I can't,” he muttered in a deep voice. “I can't help you. I can't do anything.” The dark man was at her heels. In desperation, she dodged around the short man and took refuge behind him. Her protector was obviously unwilling, but the dark man, faced with his massiveness, took no chances. He stopped and shouted: “Kregg!” The other man at the table arose, ponderously, and lumbered toward them. He was immense, at least six and a half feet tall, with a brutal, vacant face. Evading her attempts to stay behind him, the squat man began to move down the bar away from the approaching Kregg. The dark man moved in on Trella again as Kregg overtook his quarry and swung a huge fist like a sledgehammer. Exactly what happened, Trella wasn't sure. She had the impression that Kregg's fist connected squarely with the short man's chin before he dodged to one side in a movement so fast it was a blur. But that couldn't have been, because the short man wasn't moved by that blow that would have felled a steer, and Kregg roared in pain, grabbing his injured fist. “The bar!” yelled Kregg. “I hit the damn bar!” At this juncture, the bartender took a hand. Leaning far over the bar, he swung a full bottle in a complete arc. It smashed on Kregg's head, splashing the floor with liquor, and Kregg sank stunned to his knees. The dark man, who had grabbed Trella's arm, released her and ran for the door. Moving agilely around the end of the bar, the bartender stood over Kregg, holding the jagged-edged bottleneck in his hand menacingly. “Get out!” rumbled the bartender. “I'll have no coppers raiding my place for the likes of you!” Kregg stumbled to his feet and staggered out. Trella ran to the unconscious Motwick's side. “That means you, too, lady,” said the bartender beside her. “You and your boy friend get out of here. You oughtn't to have come here in the first place.” “May I help you, Miss?” asked a deep, resonant voice behind her. She straightened from her anxious examination of Motwick. The squat man was standing there, an apologetic look on his face. She looked contemptuously at the massive muscles whose help had been denied her. Her arm ached where the dark man had grasped it. The broad face before 52 her was not unhandsome, and the blue eyes were disconcertingly direct, but she despised him for a coward. “I'm sorry I couldn't fight those men for you, Miss, but I just couldn't,” he said miserably, as though reading her thoughts. “But no one will bother you on the street if I'm with you.” “A lot of protection you'd be if they did!” she snapped. “But I'm desperate. You can carry him to the Stellar Hotel for me.” The gravity of Ganymede was hardly more than that of Earth's moon, but the way the man picked up the limp Motwick with one hand and tossed him over a shoulder was startling: as though he lifted a feather pillow. He followed Trella out the door of the Golden Satellite and fell in step beside her. Immediately she was grateful for his presence. The dimly lighted street was not crowded, but she didn't like the looks of the men she saw. The transparent dome of Jupiter's View was faintly visible in the reflected night lights of the colonial city, but the lights were overwhelmed by the giant, vari-colored disc of Jupiter itself, riding high in the sky. “I'm Quest Mansard, Miss,” said her companion. “I'm just in from Jupiter.” “I'm Trella Nuspar,” she said, favoring him with a green-eyed glance. “You mean Io, don't you—or Moon Five?” “No,” he said, grinning at her. He had an engaging grin, with even white teeth. “I meant Jupiter.” “You're lying,” she said flatly. “No one has ever landed on Jupiter. It would be impossible to blast off again.” “My parents landed on Jupiter, and I blasted off from it,” he said soberly. “I was born there. Have you ever heard of Dr. Eriklund Mansard?” “I certainly have,” she said, her interest taking a sudden upward turn. “He developed the surgiscope, didn't he? But his ship was drawn into Jupiter and lost.” “It was drawn into Jupiter, but he landed it successfully,” said Quest. “He and my mother lived on Jupiter until the oxygen equipment wore out at last. I was born and brought up there, and I was finally able to build a small rocket with a powerful enough drive to clear the planet.” She looked at him. He was short, half a head shorter than she, but broad and powerful as a man might be who had grown up in heavy gravity. He trod the street with a light, controlled step, seeming to deliberately hold himself down. “If Dr. Mansard succeeded in landing on Jupiter, why didn't anyone ever hear from him again?” she demanded. “Because,” said Quest, “his radio was sabotaged, just as his ship's drive was.” “Jupiter strength,” she murmured, looking him over coolly. 53 “You wear Motwick on your shoulder like a scarf. But you couldn't bring yourself to help a woman against two thugs.” He flushed. “I'm sorry,” he said. “That's something I couldn't help.” “Why not?” “I don't know. It's not that I'm afraid, but there's something in me that makes me back away from the prospect of fighting anyone.” Trella sighed. Cowardice was a state of mind. It was peculiarly inappropriate, but not unbelievable, that the strongest and most agile man on Ganymede should be a coward. Well, she thought with a rush of sympathy, he couldn't help being what he was. They had reached the more brightly lighted section of the city now. Trella could get a cab from here, but the Stellar Hotel wasn't far. They walked on. Trella had the desk clerk call a cab to deliver the unconscious Motwick to his home. She and Quest had a late sandwich in the coffee shop. “I landed here only a week ago,” he told her, his eyes frankly admiring her honey-colored hair and comely face. “I'm heading for Earth on the next spaceship.” “We'll be traveling companions, then,” she said. “I'm going back on that ship, too.” For some reason she decided against telling him that the assignment on which she had come to the Jupiter system was to gather his own father's notebooks and take them back to Earth. Motwick was an irresponsible playboy whom Trella had known briefly on Earth, and Trella was glad to dispense with his company for the remaining three weeks before the spaceship blasted off. She found herself enjoying the steadier companionship of Quest. As a matter of fact, she found herself enjoying his companionship more than she intended to. She found herself falling in love with him. Now this did not suit her at all. Trella had always liked her men tall and dark. She had determined that when she married it would be to a curly-haired six-footer. She was not at all happy about being so strongly attracted to a man several inches shorter than she. She was particularly unhappy about feeling drawn to a man who was a coward. The ship that they boarded on Moon Nine was one of the newer ships that could attain a hundred-mile-per-second velocity and take a hyperbolic path to Earth, but it would still require fifty-four days to make the trip. So Trella was delighted to find that the ship was the Cometfire and its skipper was her old friend, dark-eyed, curly-haired Jakdane Gille. “Jakdane,” she said, flirting with him with her eyes as in 54 days gone by, “I need a chaperon this trip, and you're ideal for the job.” “I never thought of myself in quite that light, but maybe I'm getting old,” he answered, laughing. “What's your trouble, Trella?” “I'm in love with that huge chunk of man who came aboard with me, and I'm not sure I ought to be,” she confessed. “I may need protection against myself till we get to Earth.” “If it's to keep you out of another fellow's clutches, I'm your man,” agreed Jakdane heartily. “I always had a mind to save you for myself. I'll guarantee you won't have a moment alone with him the whole trip.” “You don't have to be that thorough about it,” she protested hastily. “I want to get a little enjoyment out of being in love. But if I feel myself weakening too much, I'll holler for help.” The Cometfire swung around great Jupiter in an opening arc and plummeted ever more swiftly toward the tight circles of the inner planets. There were four crew members and three passengers aboard the ship's tiny personnel sphere, and Trella was thrown with Quest almost constantly. She enjoyed every minute of it. She told him only that she was a messenger, sent out to Ganymede to pick up some important papers and take them back to Earth. She was tempted to tell him what the papers were. Her employer had impressed upon her that her mission was confidential, but surely Dom Blessing could not object to Dr. Mansard's son knowing about it. All these things had happened before she was born, and she did not know what Dom Blessing's relation to Dr. Mansard had been, but it must have been very close. She knew that Dr. Mansard had invented the surgiscope. This was an instrument with a three-dimensional screen as its heart. The screen was a cubical frame in which an apparently solid image was built up of an object under an electron microscope. The actual cutting instrument of the surgiscope was an ion stream. By operating a tool in the three-dimensional screen, corresponding movements were made by the ion stream on the object under the microscope. The principle was the same as that used in operation of remote control “hands” in atomic laboratories to handle hot material, and with the surgiscope very delicate operations could be performed at the cellular level. Dr. Mansard and his wife had disappeared into the turbulent atmosphere of Jupiter just after his invention of the surgiscope, and it had been developed by Dom Blessing. Its success had built Spaceway Instruments, Incorporated, which Blessing headed. Through all these years since Dr. Mansard's disappearance, 55 Blessing had been searching the Jovian moons for a second, hidden laboratory of Dr. Mansard. When it was found at last, he sent Trella, his most trusted secretary, to Ganymede to bring back to him the notebooks found there. Blessing would, of course, be happy to learn that a son of Dr. Mansard lived, and would see that he received his rightful share of the inheritance. Because of this, Trella was tempted to tell Quest the good news herself; but she decided against it. It was Blessing's privilege to do this his own way, and he might not appreciate her meddling. At midtrip, Trella made a rueful confession to Jakdane. “It seems I was taking unnecessary precautions when I asked you to be a chaperon,” she said. “I kept waiting for Quest to do something, and when he didn't I told him I loved him.” “What did he say?” “It's very peculiar,” she said unhappily. “He said he can't love me. He said he wants to love me and he feels that he should, but there's something in him that refuses to permit it.” She expected Jakdane to salve her wounded feelings with a sympathetic pleasantry, but he did not. Instead, he just looked at her very thoughtfully and said no more about the matter. He explained his attitude after Asrange ran amuck. Asrange was the third passenger. He was a lean, saturnine individual who said little and kept to himself as much as possible. He was distantly polite in his relations with both crew and other passengers, and never showed the slightest spark of emotion … until the day Quest squirted coffee on him. It was one of those accidents that can occur easily in space. The passengers and the two crewmen on that particular waking shift (including Jakdane) were eating lunch on the center-deck. Quest picked up his bulb of coffee, but inadvertently pressed it before he got it to his lips. The coffee squirted all over the front of Asrange's clean white tunic. “I'm sorry!” exclaimed Quest in distress. The man's eyes went wide and he snarled. So quickly it seemed impossible, he had unbuckled himself from his seat and hurled himself backward from the table with an incoherent cry. He seized the first object his hand touched—it happened to be a heavy wooden cane leaning against Jakdane's bunk—propelled himself like a projectile at Quest. Quest rose from the table in a sudden uncoiling of movement. He did not unbuckle his safety belt—he rose and it snapped like a string. For a moment Trella thought he was going to meet Asrange's assault. But he fled in a long leap toward the companionway leading to the astrogation deck 56 above. Landing feet-first in the middle of the table and rebounding, Asrange pursued with the stick upraised. In his haste, Quest missed the companionway in his leap and was cornered against one of the bunks. Asrange descended on him like an avenging angel and, holding onto the bunk with one hand, rained savage blows on his head and shoulders with the heavy stick. Quest made no effort to retaliate. He cowered under the attack, holding his hands in front of him as if to ward it off. In a moment, Jakdane and the other crewman had reached Asrange and pulled him off. When they had Asrange in irons, Jakdane turned to Quest, who was now sitting unhappily at the table. “Take it easy,” he advised. “I'll wake the psychosurgeon and have him look you over. Just stay there.” Quest shook his head. “Don't bother him,” he said. “It's nothing but a few bruises.” “Bruises? Man, that club could have broken your skull! Or a couple of ribs, at the very least.” “I'm all right,” insisted Quest; and when the skeptical Jakdane insisted on examining him carefully, he had to admit it. There was hardly a mark on him from the blows. “If it didn't hurt you any more than that, why didn't you take that stick away from him?” demanded Jakdane. “You could have, easily.” “I couldn't,” said Quest miserably, and turned his face away. Later, alone with Trella on the control deck, Jakdane gave her some sober advice. “If you think you're in love with Quest, forget it,” he said. “Why? Because he's a coward? I know that ought to make me despise him, but it doesn't any more.” “Not because he's a coward. Because he's an android!” “What? Jakdane, you can't be serious!” “I am. I say he's an android, an artificial imitation of a man. It all figures. “Look, Trella, he said he was born on Jupiter. A human could stand the gravity of Jupiter, inside a dome or a ship, but what human could stand the rocket acceleration necessary to break free of Jupiter? Here's a man strong enough to break a spaceship safety belt just by getting up out of his chair against it, tough enough to take a beating with a heavy stick without being injured. How can you believe he's really human?” Trella remembered the thug Kregg striking Quest in the face and then crying that he had injured his hand on the bar. “But he said Dr. Mansard was his father,” protested Trella. “Robots and androids frequently look on their makers as their parents,” said Jakdane. “Quest may not even know he's 57 artificial. Do you know how Mansard died?” “The oxygen equipment failed, Quest said.” “Yes. Do you know when?” “No. Quest never did tell me, that I remember.” “He told me: a year before Quest made his rocket flight to Ganymede! If the oxygen equipment failed, how do you think Quest lived in the poisonous atmosphere of Jupiter, if he's human?” Trella was silent. “For the protection of humans, there are two psychological traits built into every robot and android,” said Jakdane gently. “The first is that they can never, under any circumstances, attack a human being, even in self defense. The second is that, while they may understand sexual desire objectively, they can never experience it themselves. “Those characteristics fit your man Quest to a T, Trella. There is no other explanation for him: he must be an android.” Trella did not want to believe Jakdane was right, but his reasoning was unassailable. Looking upon Quest as an android, many things were explained: his great strength, his short, broad build, his immunity to injury, his refusal to defend himself against a human, his inability to return Trella's love for him. It was not inconceivable that she should have unknowingly fallen in love with an android. Humans could love androids, with real affection, even knowing that they were artificial. There were instances of android nursemaids who were virtually members of the families owning them. She was glad now that she had not told Quest of her mission to Ganymede. He thought he was Dr. Mansard's son, but an android had no legal right of inheritance from his owner. She would leave it to Dom Blessing to decide what to do about Quest. Thus she did not, as she had intended originally, speak to Quest about seeing him again after she had completed her assignment. Even if Jakdane was wrong and Quest was human—as now seemed unlikely—Quest had told her he could not love her. Her best course was to try to forget him. Nor did Quest try to arrange with her for a later meeting. “It has been pleasant knowing you, Trella,” he said when they left the G-boat at White Sands. A faraway look came into his blue eyes, and he added: “I'm sorry things couldn't have been different, somehow.” “Let's don't be sorry for what we can't help,” she said gently, taking his hand in farewell. Trella took a fast plane from White Sands, and twenty-four hours later walked up the front steps of the familiar brownstone house on the outskirts of Washington. Dom Blessing himself met her at the door, a stooped, graying 58 man who peered at her over his spectacles. “You have the papers, eh?” he said, spying the brief case. “Good, good. Come in and we'll see what we have, eh?” She accompanied him through the bare, windowless anteroom which had always seemed to her such a strange feature of this luxurious house, and they entered the big living room. They sat before a fire in the old-fashioned fireplace and Blessing opened the brief case with trembling hands. “There are things here,” he said, his eyes sparkling as he glanced through the notebooks. “Yes, there are things here. We shall make something of these, Miss Trella, eh?” “I'm glad they're something you can use, Mr. Blessing,” she said. “There's something else I found on my trip, that I think I should tell you about.” She told him about Quest. “He thinks he's the son of Dr. Mansard,” she finished, “but apparently he is, without knowing it, an android Dr. Mansard built on Jupiter.” “He came back to Earth with you, eh?” asked Blessing intently. “Yes. I'm afraid it's your decision whether to let him go on living as a man or to tell him he's an android and claim ownership as Dr. Mansard's heir.” Trella planned to spend a few days resting in her employer's spacious home, and then to take a short vacation before resuming her duties as his confidential secretary. The next morning when she came down from her room, a change had been made. Two armed men were with Dom Blessing at breakfast and accompanied him wherever he went. She discovered that two more men with guns were stationed in the bare anteroom and a guard was stationed at every entrance to the house. “Why all the protection?” she asked Blessing. “A wealthy man must be careful,” said Blessing cheerfully. “When we don't understand all the implications of new circumstances, we must be prepared for anything, eh?” There was only one new circumstance Trella could think of. Without actually intending to, she exclaimed: “You aren't afraid of Quest? Why, an android can't hurt a human!” Blessing peered at her over his spectacles. “And what if he isn't an android, eh? And if he is—what if old Mansard didn't build in the prohibition against harming humans that's required by law? What about that, eh?” Trella was silent, shocked. There was something here she hadn't known about, hadn't even suspected. For some reason, Dom Blessing feared Dr. Eriklund Mansard … or his heir … or his mechanical servant. She was sure that Blessing was wrong, that Quest, whether man or android, intended no 59 harm to him. Surely, Quest would have said something of such bitterness during their long time together on Ganymede and aspace, since he did not know of Trella's connection with Blessing. But, since this was to be the atmosphere of Blessing's house, she was glad that he decided to assign her to take the Mansard papers to the New York laboratory. Quest came the day before she was scheduled to leave. Trella was in the living room with Blessing, discussing the instructions she was to give to the laboratory officials in New York. The two bodyguards were with them. The other guards were at their posts. Trella heard the doorbell ring. The heavy oaken front door was kept locked now, and the guards in the anteroom examined callers through a tiny window. Suddenly alarm bells rang all over the house. There was a terrific crash outside the room as the front door splintered. There were shouts and the sound of a shot. “The steel doors!” cried Blessing, turning white. “Let's get out of here.” He and his bodyguards ran through the back of the house out of the garage. Blessing, ahead of the rest, leaped into one of the cars and started the engine. The door from the house shattered and Quest burst through. The two guards turned and fired together. He could be hurt by bullets. He was staggered momentarily. Then, in a blur of motion, he sprang forward and swept the guards aside with one hand with such force that they skidded across the floor and lay in an unconscious heap against the rear of the garage. Trella had opened the door of the car, but it was wrenched from her hand as Blessing stepped on the accelerator and it leaped into the driveway with spinning wheels. Quest was after it, like a chunky deer, running faster than Trella had ever seen a man run before. Blessing slowed for the turn at the end of the driveway and glanced back over his shoulder. Seeing Quest almost upon him, he slammed down the accelerator and twisted the wheel hard. The car whipped into the street, careened, and rolled over and over, bringing up against a tree on the other side in a twisted tangle of wreckage. With a horrified gasp, Trella ran down the driveway toward the smoking heap of metal. Quest was already beside it, probing it. As she reached his side, he lifted the torn body of Dom Blessing. Blessing was dead. “I'm lucky,” said Quest soberly. “I would have murdered him.” “But why, Quest? I knew he was afraid of you, but he didn't tell me why.” “It was conditioned into me,” answered Quest “I didn't know 60 it until just now, when it ended, but my father conditioned me psychologically from my birth to the task of hunting down Dom Blessing and killing him. It was an unconscious drive in me that wouldn't release me until the task was finished. “You see, Blessing was my father's assistant on Ganymede. Right after my father completed development of the surgiscope, he and my mother blasted off for Io. Blessing wanted the valuable rights to the surgiscope, and he sabotaged the ship's drive so it would fall into Jupiter. “But my father was able to control it in the heavy atmosphere of Jupiter, and landed it successfully. I was born there, and he conditioned me to come to Earth and track down Blessing. I know now that it was part of the conditioning that I was unable to fight any other man until my task was finished: it might have gotten me in trouble and diverted me from that purpose.” More gently than Trella would have believed possible for his Jupiter-strong muscles, Quest took her in his arms. “Now I can say I love you,” he said. “That was part of the conditioning too: I couldn't love any woman until my job was done.” Trella disengaged herself. “I'm sorry,” she said. “Don't you know this, too, now: that you're not a man, but an android?” He looked at her in astonishment, stunned by her words. “What in space makes you think that?” he demanded. “Why, Quest, it's obvious,” she cried, tears in her eyes. “Everything about you … your build, suited for Jupiter's gravity … your strength … the fact that you were able to live in Jupiter's atmosphere after the oxygen equipment failed. I know you think Dr. Mansard was your father, but androids often believe that.” He grinned at her. “I'm no android,” he said confidently. “Do you forget my father was inventor of the surgiscope? He knew I'd have to grow up on Jupiter, and he operated on the genes before I was born. He altered my inherited characteristics to adapt me to the climate of Jupiter … even to being able to breathe a chlorine atmosphere as well as an oxygen atmosphere.” Trella looked at him. He was not badly hurt, any more than an elephant would have been, but his tunic was stained with red blood where the bullets had struck him. Normal android blood was green. “How can you be sure?” she asked doubtfully. “Androids are made,” he answered with a laugh. “They don't grow up. And I remember my boyhood on Jupiter very well.” He took her in his arms again, and this time she did not resist. His lips were very human. THE END

Saturn

Jupiter

One of Jupiter's moons

One of Saturn's moons

27588_1RSI6ZBB_4

How was Quest able to survive and grow up on Jupiter?

Transcriber's Note: Every effort has been made to replicate this text as faithfully as possible; changes (corrections of spelling and punctuation) made to the original text are marked like this . The original text appears when hovering the cursor over the marked text. This e-text was produced from Amazing Science Fiction Stories March 1959. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U. S. copyright on this publication was renewed. 50 THE JUPITER WEAPON By CHARLES L. FONTENAY He was a living weapon of destruction— immeasurably powerful, utterly invulnerable. There was only one question: Was he human? Trella feared she was in for trouble even before Motwick's head dropped forward on his arms in a drunken stupor. The two evil-looking men at the table nearby had been watching her surreptitiously, and now they shifted restlessly in their chairs. Trella had not wanted to come to the Golden Satellite. It was a squalid saloon in the rougher section of Jupiter's View, the terrestrial dome-colony on Ganymede. Motwick, already drunk, had insisted. A woman could not possibly make her way through these streets alone to the better section of town, especially one clad in a silvery evening dress. Her only hope was that this place had a telephone. Perhaps she could call one of Motwick's friends; she had no one on Ganymede she could call a real friend herself. Tentatively, she pushed her chair back from the table and arose. She had to brush close by the other table to get to the bar. As she did, the dark, slick-haired man reached out and grabbed her around the waist with a steely arm. Trella swung with her whole body, and slapped him so hard he nearly fell from his chair. As she walked swiftly toward the bar, he leaped up to follow her. There were only two other people in the Golden Satellite: the fat, mustached bartender and a short, square-built man at the bar. The latter swung around at the pistol-like report of her slap, and she saw that, though no more than four and a half feet tall, he was as heavily muscled as a lion. 51 His face was clean and open, with close-cropped blond hair and honest blue eyes. She ran to him. “Help me!” she cried. “Please help me!” He began to back away from her. “I can't,” he muttered in a deep voice. “I can't help you. I can't do anything.” The dark man was at her heels. In desperation, she dodged around the short man and took refuge behind him. Her protector was obviously unwilling, but the dark man, faced with his massiveness, took no chances. He stopped and shouted: “Kregg!” The other man at the table arose, ponderously, and lumbered toward them. He was immense, at least six and a half feet tall, with a brutal, vacant face. Evading her attempts to stay behind him, the squat man began to move down the bar away from the approaching Kregg. The dark man moved in on Trella again as Kregg overtook his quarry and swung a huge fist like a sledgehammer. Exactly what happened, Trella wasn't sure. She had the impression that Kregg's fist connected squarely with the short man's chin before he dodged to one side in a movement so fast it was a blur. But that couldn't have been, because the short man wasn't moved by that blow that would have felled a steer, and Kregg roared in pain, grabbing his injured fist. “The bar!” yelled Kregg. “I hit the damn bar!” At this juncture, the bartender took a hand. Leaning far over the bar, he swung a full bottle in a complete arc. It smashed on Kregg's head, splashing the floor with liquor, and Kregg sank stunned to his knees. The dark man, who had grabbed Trella's arm, released her and ran for the door. Moving agilely around the end of the bar, the bartender stood over Kregg, holding the jagged-edged bottleneck in his hand menacingly. “Get out!” rumbled the bartender. “I'll have no coppers raiding my place for the likes of you!” Kregg stumbled to his feet and staggered out. Trella ran to the unconscious Motwick's side. “That means you, too, lady,” said the bartender beside her. “You and your boy friend get out of here. You oughtn't to have come here in the first place.” “May I help you, Miss?” asked a deep, resonant voice behind her. She straightened from her anxious examination of Motwick. The squat man was standing there, an apologetic look on his face. She looked contemptuously at the massive muscles whose help had been denied her. Her arm ached where the dark man had grasped it. The broad face before 52 her was not unhandsome, and the blue eyes were disconcertingly direct, but she despised him for a coward. “I'm sorry I couldn't fight those men for you, Miss, but I just couldn't,” he said miserably, as though reading her thoughts. “But no one will bother you on the street if I'm with you.” “A lot of protection you'd be if they did!” she snapped. “But I'm desperate. You can carry him to the Stellar Hotel for me.” The gravity of Ganymede was hardly more than that of Earth's moon, but the way the man picked up the limp Motwick with one hand and tossed him over a shoulder was startling: as though he lifted a feather pillow. He followed Trella out the door of the Golden Satellite and fell in step beside her. Immediately she was grateful for his presence. The dimly lighted street was not crowded, but she didn't like the looks of the men she saw. The transparent dome of Jupiter's View was faintly visible in the reflected night lights of the colonial city, but the lights were overwhelmed by the giant, vari-colored disc of Jupiter itself, riding high in the sky. “I'm Quest Mansard, Miss,” said her companion. “I'm just in from Jupiter.” “I'm Trella Nuspar,” she said, favoring him with a green-eyed glance. “You mean Io, don't you—or Moon Five?” “No,” he said, grinning at her. He had an engaging grin, with even white teeth. “I meant Jupiter.” “You're lying,” she said flatly. “No one has ever landed on Jupiter. It would be impossible to blast off again.” “My parents landed on Jupiter, and I blasted off from it,” he said soberly. “I was born there. Have you ever heard of Dr. Eriklund Mansard?” “I certainly have,” she said, her interest taking a sudden upward turn. “He developed the surgiscope, didn't he? But his ship was drawn into Jupiter and lost.” “It was drawn into Jupiter, but he landed it successfully,” said Quest. “He and my mother lived on Jupiter until the oxygen equipment wore out at last. I was born and brought up there, and I was finally able to build a small rocket with a powerful enough drive to clear the planet.” She looked at him. He was short, half a head shorter than she, but broad and powerful as a man might be who had grown up in heavy gravity. He trod the street with a light, controlled step, seeming to deliberately hold himself down. “If Dr. Mansard succeeded in landing on Jupiter, why didn't anyone ever hear from him again?” she demanded. “Because,” said Quest, “his radio was sabotaged, just as his ship's drive was.” “Jupiter strength,” she murmured, looking him over coolly. 53 “You wear Motwick on your shoulder like a scarf. But you couldn't bring yourself to help a woman against two thugs.” He flushed. “I'm sorry,” he said. “That's something I couldn't help.” “Why not?” “I don't know. It's not that I'm afraid, but there's something in me that makes me back away from the prospect of fighting anyone.” Trella sighed. Cowardice was a state of mind. It was peculiarly inappropriate, but not unbelievable, that the strongest and most agile man on Ganymede should be a coward. Well, she thought with a rush of sympathy, he couldn't help being what he was. They had reached the more brightly lighted section of the city now. Trella could get a cab from here, but the Stellar Hotel wasn't far. They walked on. Trella had the desk clerk call a cab to deliver the unconscious Motwick to his home. She and Quest had a late sandwich in the coffee shop. “I landed here only a week ago,” he told her, his eyes frankly admiring her honey-colored hair and comely face. “I'm heading for Earth on the next spaceship.” “We'll be traveling companions, then,” she said. “I'm going back on that ship, too.” For some reason she decided against telling him that the assignment on which she had come to the Jupiter system was to gather his own father's notebooks and take them back to Earth. Motwick was an irresponsible playboy whom Trella had known briefly on Earth, and Trella was glad to dispense with his company for the remaining three weeks before the spaceship blasted off. She found herself enjoying the steadier companionship of Quest. As a matter of fact, she found herself enjoying his companionship more than she intended to. She found herself falling in love with him. Now this did not suit her at all. Trella had always liked her men tall and dark. She had determined that when she married it would be to a curly-haired six-footer. She was not at all happy about being so strongly attracted to a man several inches shorter than she. She was particularly unhappy about feeling drawn to a man who was a coward. The ship that they boarded on Moon Nine was one of the newer ships that could attain a hundred-mile-per-second velocity and take a hyperbolic path to Earth, but it would still require fifty-four days to make the trip. So Trella was delighted to find that the ship was the Cometfire and its skipper was her old friend, dark-eyed, curly-haired Jakdane Gille. “Jakdane,” she said, flirting with him with her eyes as in 54 days gone by, “I need a chaperon this trip, and you're ideal for the job.” “I never thought of myself in quite that light, but maybe I'm getting old,” he answered, laughing. “What's your trouble, Trella?” “I'm in love with that huge chunk of man who came aboard with me, and I'm not sure I ought to be,” she confessed. “I may need protection against myself till we get to Earth.” “If it's to keep you out of another fellow's clutches, I'm your man,” agreed Jakdane heartily. “I always had a mind to save you for myself. I'll guarantee you won't have a moment alone with him the whole trip.” “You don't have to be that thorough about it,” she protested hastily. “I want to get a little enjoyment out of being in love. But if I feel myself weakening too much, I'll holler for help.” The Cometfire swung around great Jupiter in an opening arc and plummeted ever more swiftly toward the tight circles of the inner planets. There were four crew members and three passengers aboard the ship's tiny personnel sphere, and Trella was thrown with Quest almost constantly. She enjoyed every minute of it. She told him only that she was a messenger, sent out to Ganymede to pick up some important papers and take them back to Earth. She was tempted to tell him what the papers were. Her employer had impressed upon her that her mission was confidential, but surely Dom Blessing could not object to Dr. Mansard's son knowing about it. All these things had happened before she was born, and she did not know what Dom Blessing's relation to Dr. Mansard had been, but it must have been very close. She knew that Dr. Mansard had invented the surgiscope. This was an instrument with a three-dimensional screen as its heart. The screen was a cubical frame in which an apparently solid image was built up of an object under an electron microscope. The actual cutting instrument of the surgiscope was an ion stream. By operating a tool in the three-dimensional screen, corresponding movements were made by the ion stream on the object under the microscope. The principle was the same as that used in operation of remote control “hands” in atomic laboratories to handle hot material, and with the surgiscope very delicate operations could be performed at the cellular level. Dr. Mansard and his wife had disappeared into the turbulent atmosphere of Jupiter just after his invention of the surgiscope, and it had been developed by Dom Blessing. Its success had built Spaceway Instruments, Incorporated, which Blessing headed. Through all these years since Dr. Mansard's disappearance, 55 Blessing had been searching the Jovian moons for a second, hidden laboratory of Dr. Mansard. When it was found at last, he sent Trella, his most trusted secretary, to Ganymede to bring back to him the notebooks found there. Blessing would, of course, be happy to learn that a son of Dr. Mansard lived, and would see that he received his rightful share of the inheritance. Because of this, Trella was tempted to tell Quest the good news herself; but she decided against it. It was Blessing's privilege to do this his own way, and he might not appreciate her meddling. At midtrip, Trella made a rueful confession to Jakdane. “It seems I was taking unnecessary precautions when I asked you to be a chaperon,” she said. “I kept waiting for Quest to do something, and when he didn't I told him I loved him.” “What did he say?” “It's very peculiar,” she said unhappily. “He said he can't love me. He said he wants to love me and he feels that he should, but there's something in him that refuses to permit it.” She expected Jakdane to salve her wounded feelings with a sympathetic pleasantry, but he did not. Instead, he just looked at her very thoughtfully and said no more about the matter. He explained his attitude after Asrange ran amuck. Asrange was the third passenger. He was a lean, saturnine individual who said little and kept to himself as much as possible. He was distantly polite in his relations with both crew and other passengers, and never showed the slightest spark of emotion … until the day Quest squirted coffee on him. It was one of those accidents that can occur easily in space. The passengers and the two crewmen on that particular waking shift (including Jakdane) were eating lunch on the center-deck. Quest picked up his bulb of coffee, but inadvertently pressed it before he got it to his lips. The coffee squirted all over the front of Asrange's clean white tunic. “I'm sorry!” exclaimed Quest in distress. The man's eyes went wide and he snarled. So quickly it seemed impossible, he had unbuckled himself from his seat and hurled himself backward from the table with an incoherent cry. He seized the first object his hand touched—it happened to be a heavy wooden cane leaning against Jakdane's bunk—propelled himself like a projectile at Quest. Quest rose from the table in a sudden uncoiling of movement. He did not unbuckle his safety belt—he rose and it snapped like a string. For a moment Trella thought he was going to meet Asrange's assault. But he fled in a long leap toward the companionway leading to the astrogation deck 56 above. Landing feet-first in the middle of the table and rebounding, Asrange pursued with the stick upraised. In his haste, Quest missed the companionway in his leap and was cornered against one of the bunks. Asrange descended on him like an avenging angel and, holding onto the bunk with one hand, rained savage blows on his head and shoulders with the heavy stick. Quest made no effort to retaliate. He cowered under the attack, holding his hands in front of him as if to ward it off. In a moment, Jakdane and the other crewman had reached Asrange and pulled him off. When they had Asrange in irons, Jakdane turned to Quest, who was now sitting unhappily at the table. “Take it easy,” he advised. “I'll wake the psychosurgeon and have him look you over. Just stay there.” Quest shook his head. “Don't bother him,” he said. “It's nothing but a few bruises.” “Bruises? Man, that club could have broken your skull! Or a couple of ribs, at the very least.” “I'm all right,” insisted Quest; and when the skeptical Jakdane insisted on examining him carefully, he had to admit it. There was hardly a mark on him from the blows. “If it didn't hurt you any more than that, why didn't you take that stick away from him?” demanded Jakdane. “You could have, easily.” “I couldn't,” said Quest miserably, and turned his face away. Later, alone with Trella on the control deck, Jakdane gave her some sober advice. “If you think you're in love with Quest, forget it,” he said. “Why? Because he's a coward? I know that ought to make me despise him, but it doesn't any more.” “Not because he's a coward. Because he's an android!” “What? Jakdane, you can't be serious!” “I am. I say he's an android, an artificial imitation of a man. It all figures. “Look, Trella, he said he was born on Jupiter. A human could stand the gravity of Jupiter, inside a dome or a ship, but what human could stand the rocket acceleration necessary to break free of Jupiter? Here's a man strong enough to break a spaceship safety belt just by getting up out of his chair against it, tough enough to take a beating with a heavy stick without being injured. How can you believe he's really human?” Trella remembered the thug Kregg striking Quest in the face and then crying that he had injured his hand on the bar. “But he said Dr. Mansard was his father,” protested Trella. “Robots and androids frequently look on their makers as their parents,” said Jakdane. “Quest may not even know he's 57 artificial. Do you know how Mansard died?” “The oxygen equipment failed, Quest said.” “Yes. Do you know when?” “No. Quest never did tell me, that I remember.” “He told me: a year before Quest made his rocket flight to Ganymede! If the oxygen equipment failed, how do you think Quest lived in the poisonous atmosphere of Jupiter, if he's human?” Trella was silent. “For the protection of humans, there are two psychological traits built into every robot and android,” said Jakdane gently. “The first is that they can never, under any circumstances, attack a human being, even in self defense. The second is that, while they may understand sexual desire objectively, they can never experience it themselves. “Those characteristics fit your man Quest to a T, Trella. There is no other explanation for him: he must be an android.” Trella did not want to believe Jakdane was right, but his reasoning was unassailable. Looking upon Quest as an android, many things were explained: his great strength, his short, broad build, his immunity to injury, his refusal to defend himself against a human, his inability to return Trella's love for him. It was not inconceivable that she should have unknowingly fallen in love with an android. Humans could love androids, with real affection, even knowing that they were artificial. There were instances of android nursemaids who were virtually members of the families owning them. She was glad now that she had not told Quest of her mission to Ganymede. He thought he was Dr. Mansard's son, but an android had no legal right of inheritance from his owner. She would leave it to Dom Blessing to decide what to do about Quest. Thus she did not, as she had intended originally, speak to Quest about seeing him again after she had completed her assignment. Even if Jakdane was wrong and Quest was human—as now seemed unlikely—Quest had told her he could not love her. Her best course was to try to forget him. Nor did Quest try to arrange with her for a later meeting. “It has been pleasant knowing you, Trella,” he said when they left the G-boat at White Sands. A faraway look came into his blue eyes, and he added: “I'm sorry things couldn't have been different, somehow.” “Let's don't be sorry for what we can't help,” she said gently, taking his hand in farewell. Trella took a fast plane from White Sands, and twenty-four hours later walked up the front steps of the familiar brownstone house on the outskirts of Washington. Dom Blessing himself met her at the door, a stooped, graying 58 man who peered at her over his spectacles. “You have the papers, eh?” he said, spying the brief case. “Good, good. Come in and we'll see what we have, eh?” She accompanied him through the bare, windowless anteroom which had always seemed to her such a strange feature of this luxurious house, and they entered the big living room. They sat before a fire in the old-fashioned fireplace and Blessing opened the brief case with trembling hands. “There are things here,” he said, his eyes sparkling as he glanced through the notebooks. “Yes, there are things here. We shall make something of these, Miss Trella, eh?” “I'm glad they're something you can use, Mr. Blessing,” she said. “There's something else I found on my trip, that I think I should tell you about.” She told him about Quest. “He thinks he's the son of Dr. Mansard,” she finished, “but apparently he is, without knowing it, an android Dr. Mansard built on Jupiter.” “He came back to Earth with you, eh?” asked Blessing intently. “Yes. I'm afraid it's your decision whether to let him go on living as a man or to tell him he's an android and claim ownership as Dr. Mansard's heir.” Trella planned to spend a few days resting in her employer's spacious home, and then to take a short vacation before resuming her duties as his confidential secretary. The next morning when she came down from her room, a change had been made. Two armed men were with Dom Blessing at breakfast and accompanied him wherever he went. She discovered that two more men with guns were stationed in the bare anteroom and a guard was stationed at every entrance to the house. “Why all the protection?” she asked Blessing. “A wealthy man must be careful,” said Blessing cheerfully. “When we don't understand all the implications of new circumstances, we must be prepared for anything, eh?” There was only one new circumstance Trella could think of. Without actually intending to, she exclaimed: “You aren't afraid of Quest? Why, an android can't hurt a human!” Blessing peered at her over his spectacles. “And what if he isn't an android, eh? And if he is—what if old Mansard didn't build in the prohibition against harming humans that's required by law? What about that, eh?” Trella was silent, shocked. There was something here she hadn't known about, hadn't even suspected. For some reason, Dom Blessing feared Dr. Eriklund Mansard … or his heir … or his mechanical servant. She was sure that Blessing was wrong, that Quest, whether man or android, intended no 59 harm to him. Surely, Quest would have said something of such bitterness during their long time together on Ganymede and aspace, since he did not know of Trella's connection with Blessing. But, since this was to be the atmosphere of Blessing's house, she was glad that he decided to assign her to take the Mansard papers to the New York laboratory. Quest came the day before she was scheduled to leave. Trella was in the living room with Blessing, discussing the instructions she was to give to the laboratory officials in New York. The two bodyguards were with them. The other guards were at their posts. Trella heard the doorbell ring. The heavy oaken front door was kept locked now, and the guards in the anteroom examined callers through a tiny window. Suddenly alarm bells rang all over the house. There was a terrific crash outside the room as the front door splintered. There were shouts and the sound of a shot. “The steel doors!” cried Blessing, turning white. “Let's get out of here.” He and his bodyguards ran through the back of the house out of the garage. Blessing, ahead of the rest, leaped into one of the cars and started the engine. The door from the house shattered and Quest burst through. The two guards turned and fired together. He could be hurt by bullets. He was staggered momentarily. Then, in a blur of motion, he sprang forward and swept the guards aside with one hand with such force that they skidded across the floor and lay in an unconscious heap against the rear of the garage. Trella had opened the door of the car, but it was wrenched from her hand as Blessing stepped on the accelerator and it leaped into the driveway with spinning wheels. Quest was after it, like a chunky deer, running faster than Trella had ever seen a man run before. Blessing slowed for the turn at the end of the driveway and glanced back over his shoulder. Seeing Quest almost upon him, he slammed down the accelerator and twisted the wheel hard. The car whipped into the street, careened, and rolled over and over, bringing up against a tree on the other side in a twisted tangle of wreckage. With a horrified gasp, Trella ran down the driveway toward the smoking heap of metal. Quest was already beside it, probing it. As she reached his side, he lifted the torn body of Dom Blessing. Blessing was dead. “I'm lucky,” said Quest soberly. “I would have murdered him.” “But why, Quest? I knew he was afraid of you, but he didn't tell me why.” “It was conditioned into me,” answered Quest “I didn't know 60 it until just now, when it ended, but my father conditioned me psychologically from my birth to the task of hunting down Dom Blessing and killing him. It was an unconscious drive in me that wouldn't release me until the task was finished. “You see, Blessing was my father's assistant on Ganymede. Right after my father completed development of the surgiscope, he and my mother blasted off for Io. Blessing wanted the valuable rights to the surgiscope, and he sabotaged the ship's drive so it would fall into Jupiter. “But my father was able to control it in the heavy atmosphere of Jupiter, and landed it successfully. I was born there, and he conditioned me to come to Earth and track down Blessing. I know now that it was part of the conditioning that I was unable to fight any other man until my task was finished: it might have gotten me in trouble and diverted me from that purpose.” More gently than Trella would have believed possible for his Jupiter-strong muscles, Quest took her in his arms. “Now I can say I love you,” he said. “That was part of the conditioning too: I couldn't love any woman until my job was done.” Trella disengaged herself. “I'm sorry,” she said. “Don't you know this, too, now: that you're not a man, but an android?” He looked at her in astonishment, stunned by her words. “What in space makes you think that?” he demanded. “Why, Quest, it's obvious,” she cried, tears in her eyes. “Everything about you … your build, suited for Jupiter's gravity … your strength … the fact that you were able to live in Jupiter's atmosphere after the oxygen equipment failed. I know you think Dr. Mansard was your father, but androids often believe that.” He grinned at her. “I'm no android,” he said confidently. “Do you forget my father was inventor of the surgiscope? He knew I'd have to grow up on Jupiter, and he operated on the genes before I was born. He altered my inherited characteristics to adapt me to the climate of Jupiter … even to being able to breathe a chlorine atmosphere as well as an oxygen atmosphere.” Trella looked at him. He was not badly hurt, any more than an elephant would have been, but his tunic was stained with red blood where the bullets had struck him. Normal android blood was green. “How can you be sure?” she asked doubtfully. “Androids are made,” he answered with a laugh. “They don't grow up. And I remember my boyhood on Jupiter very well.” He took her in his arms again, and this time she did not resist. His lips were very human. THE END

Quest's DNA is mutated

Quest is an android

Quest's father programmed his DNA for survival

Quest did not actually grow up on Jupiter

27588_1RSI6ZBB_5

How was Dr. Mansard's radio and ship drive destroyed?

Transcriber's Note: Every effort has been made to replicate this text as faithfully as possible; changes (corrections of spelling and punctuation) made to the original text are marked like this . The original text appears when hovering the cursor over the marked text. This e-text was produced from Amazing Science Fiction Stories March 1959. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U. S. copyright on this publication was renewed. 50 THE JUPITER WEAPON By CHARLES L. FONTENAY He was a living weapon of destruction— immeasurably powerful, utterly invulnerable. There was only one question: Was he human? Trella feared she was in for trouble even before Motwick's head dropped forward on his arms in a drunken stupor. The two evil-looking men at the table nearby had been watching her surreptitiously, and now they shifted restlessly in their chairs. Trella had not wanted to come to the Golden Satellite. It was a squalid saloon in the rougher section of Jupiter's View, the terrestrial dome-colony on Ganymede. Motwick, already drunk, had insisted. A woman could not possibly make her way through these streets alone to the better section of town, especially one clad in a silvery evening dress. Her only hope was that this place had a telephone. Perhaps she could call one of Motwick's friends; she had no one on Ganymede she could call a real friend herself. Tentatively, she pushed her chair back from the table and arose. She had to brush close by the other table to get to the bar. As she did, the dark, slick-haired man reached out and grabbed her around the waist with a steely arm. Trella swung with her whole body, and slapped him so hard he nearly fell from his chair. As she walked swiftly toward the bar, he leaped up to follow her. There were only two other people in the Golden Satellite: the fat, mustached bartender and a short, square-built man at the bar. The latter swung around at the pistol-like report of her slap, and she saw that, though no more than four and a half feet tall, he was as heavily muscled as a lion. 51 His face was clean and open, with close-cropped blond hair and honest blue eyes. She ran to him. “Help me!” she cried. “Please help me!” He began to back away from her. “I can't,” he muttered in a deep voice. “I can't help you. I can't do anything.” The dark man was at her heels. In desperation, she dodged around the short man and took refuge behind him. Her protector was obviously unwilling, but the dark man, faced with his massiveness, took no chances. He stopped and shouted: “Kregg!” The other man at the table arose, ponderously, and lumbered toward them. He was immense, at least six and a half feet tall, with a brutal, vacant face. Evading her attempts to stay behind him, the squat man began to move down the bar away from the approaching Kregg. The dark man moved in on Trella again as Kregg overtook his quarry and swung a huge fist like a sledgehammer. Exactly what happened, Trella wasn't sure. She had the impression that Kregg's fist connected squarely with the short man's chin before he dodged to one side in a movement so fast it was a blur. But that couldn't have been, because the short man wasn't moved by that blow that would have felled a steer, and Kregg roared in pain, grabbing his injured fist. “The bar!” yelled Kregg. “I hit the damn bar!” At this juncture, the bartender took a hand. Leaning far over the bar, he swung a full bottle in a complete arc. It smashed on Kregg's head, splashing the floor with liquor, and Kregg sank stunned to his knees. The dark man, who had grabbed Trella's arm, released her and ran for the door. Moving agilely around the end of the bar, the bartender stood over Kregg, holding the jagged-edged bottleneck in his hand menacingly. “Get out!” rumbled the bartender. “I'll have no coppers raiding my place for the likes of you!” Kregg stumbled to his feet and staggered out. Trella ran to the unconscious Motwick's side. “That means you, too, lady,” said the bartender beside her. “You and your boy friend get out of here. You oughtn't to have come here in the first place.” “May I help you, Miss?” asked a deep, resonant voice behind her. She straightened from her anxious examination of Motwick. The squat man was standing there, an apologetic look on his face. She looked contemptuously at the massive muscles whose help had been denied her. Her arm ached where the dark man had grasped it. The broad face before 52 her was not unhandsome, and the blue eyes were disconcertingly direct, but she despised him for a coward. “I'm sorry I couldn't fight those men for you, Miss, but I just couldn't,” he said miserably, as though reading her thoughts. “But no one will bother you on the street if I'm with you.” “A lot of protection you'd be if they did!” she snapped. “But I'm desperate. You can carry him to the Stellar Hotel for me.” The gravity of Ganymede was hardly more than that of Earth's moon, but the way the man picked up the limp Motwick with one hand and tossed him over a shoulder was startling: as though he lifted a feather pillow. He followed Trella out the door of the Golden Satellite and fell in step beside her. Immediately she was grateful for his presence. The dimly lighted street was not crowded, but she didn't like the looks of the men she saw. The transparent dome of Jupiter's View was faintly visible in the reflected night lights of the colonial city, but the lights were overwhelmed by the giant, vari-colored disc of Jupiter itself, riding high in the sky. “I'm Quest Mansard, Miss,” said her companion. “I'm just in from Jupiter.” “I'm Trella Nuspar,” she said, favoring him with a green-eyed glance. “You mean Io, don't you—or Moon Five?” “No,” he said, grinning at her. He had an engaging grin, with even white teeth. “I meant Jupiter.” “You're lying,” she said flatly. “No one has ever landed on Jupiter. It would be impossible to blast off again.” “My parents landed on Jupiter, and I blasted off from it,” he said soberly. “I was born there. Have you ever heard of Dr. Eriklund Mansard?” “I certainly have,” she said, her interest taking a sudden upward turn. “He developed the surgiscope, didn't he? But his ship was drawn into Jupiter and lost.” “It was drawn into Jupiter, but he landed it successfully,” said Quest. “He and my mother lived on Jupiter until the oxygen equipment wore out at last. I was born and brought up there, and I was finally able to build a small rocket with a powerful enough drive to clear the planet.” She looked at him. He was short, half a head shorter than she, but broad and powerful as a man might be who had grown up in heavy gravity. He trod the street with a light, controlled step, seeming to deliberately hold himself down. “If Dr. Mansard succeeded in landing on Jupiter, why didn't anyone ever hear from him again?” she demanded. “Because,” said Quest, “his radio was sabotaged, just as his ship's drive was.” “Jupiter strength,” she murmured, looking him over coolly. 53 “You wear Motwick on your shoulder like a scarf. But you couldn't bring yourself to help a woman against two thugs.” He flushed. “I'm sorry,” he said. “That's something I couldn't help.” “Why not?” “I don't know. It's not that I'm afraid, but there's something in me that makes me back away from the prospect of fighting anyone.” Trella sighed. Cowardice was a state of mind. It was peculiarly inappropriate, but not unbelievable, that the strongest and most agile man on Ganymede should be a coward. Well, she thought with a rush of sympathy, he couldn't help being what he was. They had reached the more brightly lighted section of the city now. Trella could get a cab from here, but the Stellar Hotel wasn't far. They walked on. Trella had the desk clerk call a cab to deliver the unconscious Motwick to his home. She and Quest had a late sandwich in the coffee shop. “I landed here only a week ago,” he told her, his eyes frankly admiring her honey-colored hair and comely face. “I'm heading for Earth on the next spaceship.” “We'll be traveling companions, then,” she said. “I'm going back on that ship, too.” For some reason she decided against telling him that the assignment on which she had come to the Jupiter system was to gather his own father's notebooks and take them back to Earth. Motwick was an irresponsible playboy whom Trella had known briefly on Earth, and Trella was glad to dispense with his company for the remaining three weeks before the spaceship blasted off. She found herself enjoying the steadier companionship of Quest. As a matter of fact, she found herself enjoying his companionship more than she intended to. She found herself falling in love with him. Now this did not suit her at all. Trella had always liked her men tall and dark. She had determined that when she married it would be to a curly-haired six-footer. She was not at all happy about being so strongly attracted to a man several inches shorter than she. She was particularly unhappy about feeling drawn to a man who was a coward. The ship that they boarded on Moon Nine was one of the newer ships that could attain a hundred-mile-per-second velocity and take a hyperbolic path to Earth, but it would still require fifty-four days to make the trip. So Trella was delighted to find that the ship was the Cometfire and its skipper was her old friend, dark-eyed, curly-haired Jakdane Gille. “Jakdane,” she said, flirting with him with her eyes as in 54 days gone by, “I need a chaperon this trip, and you're ideal for the job.” “I never thought of myself in quite that light, but maybe I'm getting old,” he answered, laughing. “What's your trouble, Trella?” “I'm in love with that huge chunk of man who came aboard with me, and I'm not sure I ought to be,” she confessed. “I may need protection against myself till we get to Earth.” “If it's to keep you out of another fellow's clutches, I'm your man,” agreed Jakdane heartily. “I always had a mind to save you for myself. I'll guarantee you won't have a moment alone with him the whole trip.” “You don't have to be that thorough about it,” she protested hastily. “I want to get a little enjoyment out of being in love. But if I feel myself weakening too much, I'll holler for help.” The Cometfire swung around great Jupiter in an opening arc and plummeted ever more swiftly toward the tight circles of the inner planets. There were four crew members and three passengers aboard the ship's tiny personnel sphere, and Trella was thrown with Quest almost constantly. She enjoyed every minute of it. She told him only that she was a messenger, sent out to Ganymede to pick up some important papers and take them back to Earth. She was tempted to tell him what the papers were. Her employer had impressed upon her that her mission was confidential, but surely Dom Blessing could not object to Dr. Mansard's son knowing about it. All these things had happened before she was born, and she did not know what Dom Blessing's relation to Dr. Mansard had been, but it must have been very close. She knew that Dr. Mansard had invented the surgiscope. This was an instrument with a three-dimensional screen as its heart. The screen was a cubical frame in which an apparently solid image was built up of an object under an electron microscope. The actual cutting instrument of the surgiscope was an ion stream. By operating a tool in the three-dimensional screen, corresponding movements were made by the ion stream on the object under the microscope. The principle was the same as that used in operation of remote control “hands” in atomic laboratories to handle hot material, and with the surgiscope very delicate operations could be performed at the cellular level. Dr. Mansard and his wife had disappeared into the turbulent atmosphere of Jupiter just after his invention of the surgiscope, and it had been developed by Dom Blessing. Its success had built Spaceway Instruments, Incorporated, which Blessing headed. Through all these years since Dr. Mansard's disappearance, 55 Blessing had been searching the Jovian moons for a second, hidden laboratory of Dr. Mansard. When it was found at last, he sent Trella, his most trusted secretary, to Ganymede to bring back to him the notebooks found there. Blessing would, of course, be happy to learn that a son of Dr. Mansard lived, and would see that he received his rightful share of the inheritance. Because of this, Trella was tempted to tell Quest the good news herself; but she decided against it. It was Blessing's privilege to do this his own way, and he might not appreciate her meddling. At midtrip, Trella made a rueful confession to Jakdane. “It seems I was taking unnecessary precautions when I asked you to be a chaperon,” she said. “I kept waiting for Quest to do something, and when he didn't I told him I loved him.” “What did he say?” “It's very peculiar,” she said unhappily. “He said he can't love me. He said he wants to love me and he feels that he should, but there's something in him that refuses to permit it.” She expected Jakdane to salve her wounded feelings with a sympathetic pleasantry, but he did not. Instead, he just looked at her very thoughtfully and said no more about the matter. He explained his attitude after Asrange ran amuck. Asrange was the third passenger. He was a lean, saturnine individual who said little and kept to himself as much as possible. He was distantly polite in his relations with both crew and other passengers, and never showed the slightest spark of emotion … until the day Quest squirted coffee on him. It was one of those accidents that can occur easily in space. The passengers and the two crewmen on that particular waking shift (including Jakdane) were eating lunch on the center-deck. Quest picked up his bulb of coffee, but inadvertently pressed it before he got it to his lips. The coffee squirted all over the front of Asrange's clean white tunic. “I'm sorry!” exclaimed Quest in distress. The man's eyes went wide and he snarled. So quickly it seemed impossible, he had unbuckled himself from his seat and hurled himself backward from the table with an incoherent cry. He seized the first object his hand touched—it happened to be a heavy wooden cane leaning against Jakdane's bunk—propelled himself like a projectile at Quest. Quest rose from the table in a sudden uncoiling of movement. He did not unbuckle his safety belt—he rose and it snapped like a string. For a moment Trella thought he was going to meet Asrange's assault. But he fled in a long leap toward the companionway leading to the astrogation deck 56 above. Landing feet-first in the middle of the table and rebounding, Asrange pursued with the stick upraised. In his haste, Quest missed the companionway in his leap and was cornered against one of the bunks. Asrange descended on him like an avenging angel and, holding onto the bunk with one hand, rained savage blows on his head and shoulders with the heavy stick. Quest made no effort to retaliate. He cowered under the attack, holding his hands in front of him as if to ward it off. In a moment, Jakdane and the other crewman had reached Asrange and pulled him off. When they had Asrange in irons, Jakdane turned to Quest, who was now sitting unhappily at the table. “Take it easy,” he advised. “I'll wake the psychosurgeon and have him look you over. Just stay there.” Quest shook his head. “Don't bother him,” he said. “It's nothing but a few bruises.” “Bruises? Man, that club could have broken your skull! Or a couple of ribs, at the very least.” “I'm all right,” insisted Quest; and when the skeptical Jakdane insisted on examining him carefully, he had to admit it. There was hardly a mark on him from the blows. “If it didn't hurt you any more than that, why didn't you take that stick away from him?” demanded Jakdane. “You could have, easily.” “I couldn't,” said Quest miserably, and turned his face away. Later, alone with Trella on the control deck, Jakdane gave her some sober advice. “If you think you're in love with Quest, forget it,” he said. “Why? Because he's a coward? I know that ought to make me despise him, but it doesn't any more.” “Not because he's a coward. Because he's an android!” “What? Jakdane, you can't be serious!” “I am. I say he's an android, an artificial imitation of a man. It all figures. “Look, Trella, he said he was born on Jupiter. A human could stand the gravity of Jupiter, inside a dome or a ship, but what human could stand the rocket acceleration necessary to break free of Jupiter? Here's a man strong enough to break a spaceship safety belt just by getting up out of his chair against it, tough enough to take a beating with a heavy stick without being injured. How can you believe he's really human?” Trella remembered the thug Kregg striking Quest in the face and then crying that he had injured his hand on the bar. “But he said Dr. Mansard was his father,” protested Trella. “Robots and androids frequently look on their makers as their parents,” said Jakdane. “Quest may not even know he's 57 artificial. Do you know how Mansard died?” “The oxygen equipment failed, Quest said.” “Yes. Do you know when?” “No. Quest never did tell me, that I remember.” “He told me: a year before Quest made his rocket flight to Ganymede! If the oxygen equipment failed, how do you think Quest lived in the poisonous atmosphere of Jupiter, if he's human?” Trella was silent. “For the protection of humans, there are two psychological traits built into every robot and android,” said Jakdane gently. “The first is that they can never, under any circumstances, attack a human being, even in self defense. The second is that, while they may understand sexual desire objectively, they can never experience it themselves. “Those characteristics fit your man Quest to a T, Trella. There is no other explanation for him: he must be an android.” Trella did not want to believe Jakdane was right, but his reasoning was unassailable. Looking upon Quest as an android, many things were explained: his great strength, his short, broad build, his immunity to injury, his refusal to defend himself against a human, his inability to return Trella's love for him. It was not inconceivable that she should have unknowingly fallen in love with an android. Humans could love androids, with real affection, even knowing that they were artificial. There were instances of android nursemaids who were virtually members of the families owning them. She was glad now that she had not told Quest of her mission to Ganymede. He thought he was Dr. Mansard's son, but an android had no legal right of inheritance from his owner. She would leave it to Dom Blessing to decide what to do about Quest. Thus she did not, as she had intended originally, speak to Quest about seeing him again after she had completed her assignment. Even if Jakdane was wrong and Quest was human—as now seemed unlikely—Quest had told her he could not love her. Her best course was to try to forget him. Nor did Quest try to arrange with her for a later meeting. “It has been pleasant knowing you, Trella,” he said when they left the G-boat at White Sands. A faraway look came into his blue eyes, and he added: “I'm sorry things couldn't have been different, somehow.” “Let's don't be sorry for what we can't help,” she said gently, taking his hand in farewell. Trella took a fast plane from White Sands, and twenty-four hours later walked up the front steps of the familiar brownstone house on the outskirts of Washington. Dom Blessing himself met her at the door, a stooped, graying 58 man who peered at her over his spectacles. “You have the papers, eh?” he said, spying the brief case. “Good, good. Come in and we'll see what we have, eh?” She accompanied him through the bare, windowless anteroom which had always seemed to her such a strange feature of this luxurious house, and they entered the big living room. They sat before a fire in the old-fashioned fireplace and Blessing opened the brief case with trembling hands. “There are things here,” he said, his eyes sparkling as he glanced through the notebooks. “Yes, there are things here. We shall make something of these, Miss Trella, eh?” “I'm glad they're something you can use, Mr. Blessing,” she said. “There's something else I found on my trip, that I think I should tell you about.” She told him about Quest. “He thinks he's the son of Dr. Mansard,” she finished, “but apparently he is, without knowing it, an android Dr. Mansard built on Jupiter.” “He came back to Earth with you, eh?” asked Blessing intently. “Yes. I'm afraid it's your decision whether to let him go on living as a man or to tell him he's an android and claim ownership as Dr. Mansard's heir.” Trella planned to spend a few days resting in her employer's spacious home, and then to take a short vacation before resuming her duties as his confidential secretary. The next morning when she came down from her room, a change had been made. Two armed men were with Dom Blessing at breakfast and accompanied him wherever he went. She discovered that two more men with guns were stationed in the bare anteroom and a guard was stationed at every entrance to the house. “Why all the protection?” she asked Blessing. “A wealthy man must be careful,” said Blessing cheerfully. “When we don't understand all the implications of new circumstances, we must be prepared for anything, eh?” There was only one new circumstance Trella could think of. Without actually intending to, she exclaimed: “You aren't afraid of Quest? Why, an android can't hurt a human!” Blessing peered at her over his spectacles. “And what if he isn't an android, eh? And if he is—what if old Mansard didn't build in the prohibition against harming humans that's required by law? What about that, eh?” Trella was silent, shocked. There was something here she hadn't known about, hadn't even suspected. For some reason, Dom Blessing feared Dr. Eriklund Mansard … or his heir … or his mechanical servant. She was sure that Blessing was wrong, that Quest, whether man or android, intended no 59 harm to him. Surely, Quest would have said something of such bitterness during their long time together on Ganymede and aspace, since he did not know of Trella's connection with Blessing. But, since this was to be the atmosphere of Blessing's house, she was glad that he decided to assign her to take the Mansard papers to the New York laboratory. Quest came the day before she was scheduled to leave. Trella was in the living room with Blessing, discussing the instructions she was to give to the laboratory officials in New York. The two bodyguards were with them. The other guards were at their posts. Trella heard the doorbell ring. The heavy oaken front door was kept locked now, and the guards in the anteroom examined callers through a tiny window. Suddenly alarm bells rang all over the house. There was a terrific crash outside the room as the front door splintered. There were shouts and the sound of a shot. “The steel doors!” cried Blessing, turning white. “Let's get out of here.” He and his bodyguards ran through the back of the house out of the garage. Blessing, ahead of the rest, leaped into one of the cars and started the engine. The door from the house shattered and Quest burst through. The two guards turned and fired together. He could be hurt by bullets. He was staggered momentarily. Then, in a blur of motion, he sprang forward and swept the guards aside with one hand with such force that they skidded across the floor and lay in an unconscious heap against the rear of the garage. Trella had opened the door of the car, but it was wrenched from her hand as Blessing stepped on the accelerator and it leaped into the driveway with spinning wheels. Quest was after it, like a chunky deer, running faster than Trella had ever seen a man run before. Blessing slowed for the turn at the end of the driveway and glanced back over his shoulder. Seeing Quest almost upon him, he slammed down the accelerator and twisted the wheel hard. The car whipped into the street, careened, and rolled over and over, bringing up against a tree on the other side in a twisted tangle of wreckage. With a horrified gasp, Trella ran down the driveway toward the smoking heap of metal. Quest was already beside it, probing it. As she reached his side, he lifted the torn body of Dom Blessing. Blessing was dead. “I'm lucky,” said Quest soberly. “I would have murdered him.” “But why, Quest? I knew he was afraid of you, but he didn't tell me why.” “It was conditioned into me,” answered Quest “I didn't know 60 it until just now, when it ended, but my father conditioned me psychologically from my birth to the task of hunting down Dom Blessing and killing him. It was an unconscious drive in me that wouldn't release me until the task was finished. “You see, Blessing was my father's assistant on Ganymede. Right after my father completed development of the surgiscope, he and my mother blasted off for Io. Blessing wanted the valuable rights to the surgiscope, and he sabotaged the ship's drive so it would fall into Jupiter. “But my father was able to control it in the heavy atmosphere of Jupiter, and landed it successfully. I was born there, and he conditioned me to come to Earth and track down Blessing. I know now that it was part of the conditioning that I was unable to fight any other man until my task was finished: it might have gotten me in trouble and diverted me from that purpose.” More gently than Trella would have believed possible for his Jupiter-strong muscles, Quest took her in his arms. “Now I can say I love you,” he said. “That was part of the conditioning too: I couldn't love any woman until my job was done.” Trella disengaged herself. “I'm sorry,” she said. “Don't you know this, too, now: that you're not a man, but an android?” He looked at her in astonishment, stunned by her words. “What in space makes you think that?” he demanded. “Why, Quest, it's obvious,” she cried, tears in her eyes. “Everything about you … your build, suited for Jupiter's gravity … your strength … the fact that you were able to live in Jupiter's atmosphere after the oxygen equipment failed. I know you think Dr. Mansard was your father, but androids often believe that.” He grinned at her. “I'm no android,” he said confidently. “Do you forget my father was inventor of the surgiscope? He knew I'd have to grow up on Jupiter, and he operated on the genes before I was born. He altered my inherited characteristics to adapt me to the climate of Jupiter … even to being able to breathe a chlorine atmosphere as well as an oxygen atmosphere.” Trella looked at him. He was not badly hurt, any more than an elephant would have been, but his tunic was stained with red blood where the bullets had struck him. Normal android blood was green. “How can you be sure?” she asked doubtfully. “Androids are made,” he answered with a laugh. “They don't grow up. And I remember my boyhood on Jupiter very well.” He took her in his arms again, and this time she did not resist. His lips were very human. THE END

Dr. Mansard destroyed it himself to eliminate any record of his survival

It was never destroyed

Blessing intentionally ruined it in the hopes that Mansard would die

It could not withstand the harsh elements of Jupiter's atmosphere

27588_1RSI6ZBB_6

What is so significant about the surgiscope?

Transcriber's Note: Every effort has been made to replicate this text as faithfully as possible; changes (corrections of spelling and punctuation) made to the original text are marked like this . The original text appears when hovering the cursor over the marked text. This e-text was produced from Amazing Science Fiction Stories March 1959. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U. S. copyright on this publication was renewed. 50 THE JUPITER WEAPON By CHARLES L. FONTENAY He was a living weapon of destruction— immeasurably powerful, utterly invulnerable. There was only one question: Was he human? Trella feared she was in for trouble even before Motwick's head dropped forward on his arms in a drunken stupor. The two evil-looking men at the table nearby had been watching her surreptitiously, and now they shifted restlessly in their chairs. Trella had not wanted to come to the Golden Satellite. It was a squalid saloon in the rougher section of Jupiter's View, the terrestrial dome-colony on Ganymede. Motwick, already drunk, had insisted. A woman could not possibly make her way through these streets alone to the better section of town, especially one clad in a silvery evening dress. Her only hope was that this place had a telephone. Perhaps she could call one of Motwick's friends; she had no one on Ganymede she could call a real friend herself. Tentatively, she pushed her chair back from the table and arose. She had to brush close by the other table to get to the bar. As she did, the dark, slick-haired man reached out and grabbed her around the waist with a steely arm. Trella swung with her whole body, and slapped him so hard he nearly fell from his chair. As she walked swiftly toward the bar, he leaped up to follow her. There were only two other people in the Golden Satellite: the fat, mustached bartender and a short, square-built man at the bar. The latter swung around at the pistol-like report of her slap, and she saw that, though no more than four and a half feet tall, he was as heavily muscled as a lion. 51 His face was clean and open, with close-cropped blond hair and honest blue eyes. She ran to him. “Help me!” she cried. “Please help me!” He began to back away from her. “I can't,” he muttered in a deep voice. “I can't help you. I can't do anything.” The dark man was at her heels. In desperation, she dodged around the short man and took refuge behind him. Her protector was obviously unwilling, but the dark man, faced with his massiveness, took no chances. He stopped and shouted: “Kregg!” The other man at the table arose, ponderously, and lumbered toward them. He was immense, at least six and a half feet tall, with a brutal, vacant face. Evading her attempts to stay behind him, the squat man began to move down the bar away from the approaching Kregg. The dark man moved in on Trella again as Kregg overtook his quarry and swung a huge fist like a sledgehammer. Exactly what happened, Trella wasn't sure. She had the impression that Kregg's fist connected squarely with the short man's chin before he dodged to one side in a movement so fast it was a blur. But that couldn't have been, because the short man wasn't moved by that blow that would have felled a steer, and Kregg roared in pain, grabbing his injured fist. “The bar!” yelled Kregg. “I hit the damn bar!” At this juncture, the bartender took a hand. Leaning far over the bar, he swung a full bottle in a complete arc. It smashed on Kregg's head, splashing the floor with liquor, and Kregg sank stunned to his knees. The dark man, who had grabbed Trella's arm, released her and ran for the door. Moving agilely around the end of the bar, the bartender stood over Kregg, holding the jagged-edged bottleneck in his hand menacingly. “Get out!” rumbled the bartender. “I'll have no coppers raiding my place for the likes of you!” Kregg stumbled to his feet and staggered out. Trella ran to the unconscious Motwick's side. “That means you, too, lady,” said the bartender beside her. “You and your boy friend get out of here. You oughtn't to have come here in the first place.” “May I help you, Miss?” asked a deep, resonant voice behind her. She straightened from her anxious examination of Motwick. The squat man was standing there, an apologetic look on his face. She looked contemptuously at the massive muscles whose help had been denied her. Her arm ached where the dark man had grasped it. The broad face before 52 her was not unhandsome, and the blue eyes were disconcertingly direct, but she despised him for a coward. “I'm sorry I couldn't fight those men for you, Miss, but I just couldn't,” he said miserably, as though reading her thoughts. “But no one will bother you on the street if I'm with you.” “A lot of protection you'd be if they did!” she snapped. “But I'm desperate. You can carry him to the Stellar Hotel for me.” The gravity of Ganymede was hardly more than that of Earth's moon, but the way the man picked up the limp Motwick with one hand and tossed him over a shoulder was startling: as though he lifted a feather pillow. He followed Trella out the door of the Golden Satellite and fell in step beside her. Immediately she was grateful for his presence. The dimly lighted street was not crowded, but she didn't like the looks of the men she saw. The transparent dome of Jupiter's View was faintly visible in the reflected night lights of the colonial city, but the lights were overwhelmed by the giant, vari-colored disc of Jupiter itself, riding high in the sky. “I'm Quest Mansard, Miss,” said her companion. “I'm just in from Jupiter.” “I'm Trella Nuspar,” she said, favoring him with a green-eyed glance. “You mean Io, don't you—or Moon Five?” “No,” he said, grinning at her. He had an engaging grin, with even white teeth. “I meant Jupiter.” “You're lying,” she said flatly. “No one has ever landed on Jupiter. It would be impossible to blast off again.” “My parents landed on Jupiter, and I blasted off from it,” he said soberly. “I was born there. Have you ever heard of Dr. Eriklund Mansard?” “I certainly have,” she said, her interest taking a sudden upward turn. “He developed the surgiscope, didn't he? But his ship was drawn into Jupiter and lost.” “It was drawn into Jupiter, but he landed it successfully,” said Quest. “He and my mother lived on Jupiter until the oxygen equipment wore out at last. I was born and brought up there, and I was finally able to build a small rocket with a powerful enough drive to clear the planet.” She looked at him. He was short, half a head shorter than she, but broad and powerful as a man might be who had grown up in heavy gravity. He trod the street with a light, controlled step, seeming to deliberately hold himself down. “If Dr. Mansard succeeded in landing on Jupiter, why didn't anyone ever hear from him again?” she demanded. “Because,” said Quest, “his radio was sabotaged, just as his ship's drive was.” “Jupiter strength,” she murmured, looking him over coolly. 53 “You wear Motwick on your shoulder like a scarf. But you couldn't bring yourself to help a woman against two thugs.” He flushed. “I'm sorry,” he said. “That's something I couldn't help.” “Why not?” “I don't know. It's not that I'm afraid, but there's something in me that makes me back away from the prospect of fighting anyone.” Trella sighed. Cowardice was a state of mind. It was peculiarly inappropriate, but not unbelievable, that the strongest and most agile man on Ganymede should be a coward. Well, she thought with a rush of sympathy, he couldn't help being what he was. They had reached the more brightly lighted section of the city now. Trella could get a cab from here, but the Stellar Hotel wasn't far. They walked on. Trella had the desk clerk call a cab to deliver the unconscious Motwick to his home. She and Quest had a late sandwich in the coffee shop. “I landed here only a week ago,” he told her, his eyes frankly admiring her honey-colored hair and comely face. “I'm heading for Earth on the next spaceship.” “We'll be traveling companions, then,” she said. “I'm going back on that ship, too.” For some reason she decided against telling him that the assignment on which she had come to the Jupiter system was to gather his own father's notebooks and take them back to Earth. Motwick was an irresponsible playboy whom Trella had known briefly on Earth, and Trella was glad to dispense with his company for the remaining three weeks before the spaceship blasted off. She found herself enjoying the steadier companionship of Quest. As a matter of fact, she found herself enjoying his companionship more than she intended to. She found herself falling in love with him. Now this did not suit her at all. Trella had always liked her men tall and dark. She had determined that when she married it would be to a curly-haired six-footer. She was not at all happy about being so strongly attracted to a man several inches shorter than she. She was particularly unhappy about feeling drawn to a man who was a coward. The ship that they boarded on Moon Nine was one of the newer ships that could attain a hundred-mile-per-second velocity and take a hyperbolic path to Earth, but it would still require fifty-four days to make the trip. So Trella was delighted to find that the ship was the Cometfire and its skipper was her old friend, dark-eyed, curly-haired Jakdane Gille. “Jakdane,” she said, flirting with him with her eyes as in 54 days gone by, “I need a chaperon this trip, and you're ideal for the job.” “I never thought of myself in quite that light, but maybe I'm getting old,” he answered, laughing. “What's your trouble, Trella?” “I'm in love with that huge chunk of man who came aboard with me, and I'm not sure I ought to be,” she confessed. “I may need protection against myself till we get to Earth.” “If it's to keep you out of another fellow's clutches, I'm your man,” agreed Jakdane heartily. “I always had a mind to save you for myself. I'll guarantee you won't have a moment alone with him the whole trip.” “You don't have to be that thorough about it,” she protested hastily. “I want to get a little enjoyment out of being in love. But if I feel myself weakening too much, I'll holler for help.” The Cometfire swung around great Jupiter in an opening arc and plummeted ever more swiftly toward the tight circles of the inner planets. There were four crew members and three passengers aboard the ship's tiny personnel sphere, and Trella was thrown with Quest almost constantly. She enjoyed every minute of it. She told him only that she was a messenger, sent out to Ganymede to pick up some important papers and take them back to Earth. She was tempted to tell him what the papers were. Her employer had impressed upon her that her mission was confidential, but surely Dom Blessing could not object to Dr. Mansard's son knowing about it. All these things had happened before she was born, and she did not know what Dom Blessing's relation to Dr. Mansard had been, but it must have been very close. She knew that Dr. Mansard had invented the surgiscope. This was an instrument with a three-dimensional screen as its heart. The screen was a cubical frame in which an apparently solid image was built up of an object under an electron microscope. The actual cutting instrument of the surgiscope was an ion stream. By operating a tool in the three-dimensional screen, corresponding movements were made by the ion stream on the object under the microscope. The principle was the same as that used in operation of remote control “hands” in atomic laboratories to handle hot material, and with the surgiscope very delicate operations could be performed at the cellular level. Dr. Mansard and his wife had disappeared into the turbulent atmosphere of Jupiter just after his invention of the surgiscope, and it had been developed by Dom Blessing. Its success had built Spaceway Instruments, Incorporated, which Blessing headed. Through all these years since Dr. Mansard's disappearance, 55 Blessing had been searching the Jovian moons for a second, hidden laboratory of Dr. Mansard. When it was found at last, he sent Trella, his most trusted secretary, to Ganymede to bring back to him the notebooks found there. Blessing would, of course, be happy to learn that a son of Dr. Mansard lived, and would see that he received his rightful share of the inheritance. Because of this, Trella was tempted to tell Quest the good news herself; but she decided against it. It was Blessing's privilege to do this his own way, and he might not appreciate her meddling. At midtrip, Trella made a rueful confession to Jakdane. “It seems I was taking unnecessary precautions when I asked you to be a chaperon,” she said. “I kept waiting for Quest to do something, and when he didn't I told him I loved him.” “What did he say?” “It's very peculiar,” she said unhappily. “He said he can't love me. He said he wants to love me and he feels that he should, but there's something in him that refuses to permit it.” She expected Jakdane to salve her wounded feelings with a sympathetic pleasantry, but he did not. Instead, he just looked at her very thoughtfully and said no more about the matter. He explained his attitude after Asrange ran amuck. Asrange was the third passenger. He was a lean, saturnine individual who said little and kept to himself as much as possible. He was distantly polite in his relations with both crew and other passengers, and never showed the slightest spark of emotion … until the day Quest squirted coffee on him. It was one of those accidents that can occur easily in space. The passengers and the two crewmen on that particular waking shift (including Jakdane) were eating lunch on the center-deck. Quest picked up his bulb of coffee, but inadvertently pressed it before he got it to his lips. The coffee squirted all over the front of Asrange's clean white tunic. “I'm sorry!” exclaimed Quest in distress. The man's eyes went wide and he snarled. So quickly it seemed impossible, he had unbuckled himself from his seat and hurled himself backward from the table with an incoherent cry. He seized the first object his hand touched—it happened to be a heavy wooden cane leaning against Jakdane's bunk—propelled himself like a projectile at Quest. Quest rose from the table in a sudden uncoiling of movement. He did not unbuckle his safety belt—he rose and it snapped like a string. For a moment Trella thought he was going to meet Asrange's assault. But he fled in a long leap toward the companionway leading to the astrogation deck 56 above. Landing feet-first in the middle of the table and rebounding, Asrange pursued with the stick upraised. In his haste, Quest missed the companionway in his leap and was cornered against one of the bunks. Asrange descended on him like an avenging angel and, holding onto the bunk with one hand, rained savage blows on his head and shoulders with the heavy stick. Quest made no effort to retaliate. He cowered under the attack, holding his hands in front of him as if to ward it off. In a moment, Jakdane and the other crewman had reached Asrange and pulled him off. When they had Asrange in irons, Jakdane turned to Quest, who was now sitting unhappily at the table. “Take it easy,” he advised. “I'll wake the psychosurgeon and have him look you over. Just stay there.” Quest shook his head. “Don't bother him,” he said. “It's nothing but a few bruises.” “Bruises? Man, that club could have broken your skull! Or a couple of ribs, at the very least.” “I'm all right,” insisted Quest; and when the skeptical Jakdane insisted on examining him carefully, he had to admit it. There was hardly a mark on him from the blows. “If it didn't hurt you any more than that, why didn't you take that stick away from him?” demanded Jakdane. “You could have, easily.” “I couldn't,” said Quest miserably, and turned his face away. Later, alone with Trella on the control deck, Jakdane gave her some sober advice. “If you think you're in love with Quest, forget it,” he said. “Why? Because he's a coward? I know that ought to make me despise him, but it doesn't any more.” “Not because he's a coward. Because he's an android!” “What? Jakdane, you can't be serious!” “I am. I say he's an android, an artificial imitation of a man. It all figures. “Look, Trella, he said he was born on Jupiter. A human could stand the gravity of Jupiter, inside a dome or a ship, but what human could stand the rocket acceleration necessary to break free of Jupiter? Here's a man strong enough to break a spaceship safety belt just by getting up out of his chair against it, tough enough to take a beating with a heavy stick without being injured. How can you believe he's really human?” Trella remembered the thug Kregg striking Quest in the face and then crying that he had injured his hand on the bar. “But he said Dr. Mansard was his father,” protested Trella. “Robots and androids frequently look on their makers as their parents,” said Jakdane. “Quest may not even know he's 57 artificial. Do you know how Mansard died?” “The oxygen equipment failed, Quest said.” “Yes. Do you know when?” “No. Quest never did tell me, that I remember.” “He told me: a year before Quest made his rocket flight to Ganymede! If the oxygen equipment failed, how do you think Quest lived in the poisonous atmosphere of Jupiter, if he's human?” Trella was silent. “For the protection of humans, there are two psychological traits built into every robot and android,” said Jakdane gently. “The first is that they can never, under any circumstances, attack a human being, even in self defense. The second is that, while they may understand sexual desire objectively, they can never experience it themselves. “Those characteristics fit your man Quest to a T, Trella. There is no other explanation for him: he must be an android.” Trella did not want to believe Jakdane was right, but his reasoning was unassailable. Looking upon Quest as an android, many things were explained: his great strength, his short, broad build, his immunity to injury, his refusal to defend himself against a human, his inability to return Trella's love for him. It was not inconceivable that she should have unknowingly fallen in love with an android. Humans could love androids, with real affection, even knowing that they were artificial. There were instances of android nursemaids who were virtually members of the families owning them. She was glad now that she had not told Quest of her mission to Ganymede. He thought he was Dr. Mansard's son, but an android had no legal right of inheritance from his owner. She would leave it to Dom Blessing to decide what to do about Quest. Thus she did not, as she had intended originally, speak to Quest about seeing him again after she had completed her assignment. Even if Jakdane was wrong and Quest was human—as now seemed unlikely—Quest had told her he could not love her. Her best course was to try to forget him. Nor did Quest try to arrange with her for a later meeting. “It has been pleasant knowing you, Trella,” he said when they left the G-boat at White Sands. A faraway look came into his blue eyes, and he added: “I'm sorry things couldn't have been different, somehow.” “Let's don't be sorry for what we can't help,” she said gently, taking his hand in farewell. Trella took a fast plane from White Sands, and twenty-four hours later walked up the front steps of the familiar brownstone house on the outskirts of Washington. Dom Blessing himself met her at the door, a stooped, graying 58 man who peered at her over his spectacles. “You have the papers, eh?” he said, spying the brief case. “Good, good. Come in and we'll see what we have, eh?” She accompanied him through the bare, windowless anteroom which had always seemed to her such a strange feature of this luxurious house, and they entered the big living room. They sat before a fire in the old-fashioned fireplace and Blessing opened the brief case with trembling hands. “There are things here,” he said, his eyes sparkling as he glanced through the notebooks. “Yes, there are things here. We shall make something of these, Miss Trella, eh?” “I'm glad they're something you can use, Mr. Blessing,” she said. “There's something else I found on my trip, that I think I should tell you about.” She told him about Quest. “He thinks he's the son of Dr. Mansard,” she finished, “but apparently he is, without knowing it, an android Dr. Mansard built on Jupiter.” “He came back to Earth with you, eh?” asked Blessing intently. “Yes. I'm afraid it's your decision whether to let him go on living as a man or to tell him he's an android and claim ownership as Dr. Mansard's heir.” Trella planned to spend a few days resting in her employer's spacious home, and then to take a short vacation before resuming her duties as his confidential secretary. The next morning when she came down from her room, a change had been made. Two armed men were with Dom Blessing at breakfast and accompanied him wherever he went. She discovered that two more men with guns were stationed in the bare anteroom and a guard was stationed at every entrance to the house. “Why all the protection?” she asked Blessing. “A wealthy man must be careful,” said Blessing cheerfully. “When we don't understand all the implications of new circumstances, we must be prepared for anything, eh?” There was only one new circumstance Trella could think of. Without actually intending to, she exclaimed: “You aren't afraid of Quest? Why, an android can't hurt a human!” Blessing peered at her over his spectacles. “And what if he isn't an android, eh? And if he is—what if old Mansard didn't build in the prohibition against harming humans that's required by law? What about that, eh?” Trella was silent, shocked. There was something here she hadn't known about, hadn't even suspected. For some reason, Dom Blessing feared Dr. Eriklund Mansard … or his heir … or his mechanical servant. She was sure that Blessing was wrong, that Quest, whether man or android, intended no 59 harm to him. Surely, Quest would have said something of such bitterness during their long time together on Ganymede and aspace, since he did not know of Trella's connection with Blessing. But, since this was to be the atmosphere of Blessing's house, she was glad that he decided to assign her to take the Mansard papers to the New York laboratory. Quest came the day before she was scheduled to leave. Trella was in the living room with Blessing, discussing the instructions she was to give to the laboratory officials in New York. The two bodyguards were with them. The other guards were at their posts. Trella heard the doorbell ring. The heavy oaken front door was kept locked now, and the guards in the anteroom examined callers through a tiny window. Suddenly alarm bells rang all over the house. There was a terrific crash outside the room as the front door splintered. There were shouts and the sound of a shot. “The steel doors!” cried Blessing, turning white. “Let's get out of here.” He and his bodyguards ran through the back of the house out of the garage. Blessing, ahead of the rest, leaped into one of the cars and started the engine. The door from the house shattered and Quest burst through. The two guards turned and fired together. He could be hurt by bullets. He was staggered momentarily. Then, in a blur of motion, he sprang forward and swept the guards aside with one hand with such force that they skidded across the floor and lay in an unconscious heap against the rear of the garage. Trella had opened the door of the car, but it was wrenched from her hand as Blessing stepped on the accelerator and it leaped into the driveway with spinning wheels. Quest was after it, like a chunky deer, running faster than Trella had ever seen a man run before. Blessing slowed for the turn at the end of the driveway and glanced back over his shoulder. Seeing Quest almost upon him, he slammed down the accelerator and twisted the wheel hard. The car whipped into the street, careened, and rolled over and over, bringing up against a tree on the other side in a twisted tangle of wreckage. With a horrified gasp, Trella ran down the driveway toward the smoking heap of metal. Quest was already beside it, probing it. As she reached his side, he lifted the torn body of Dom Blessing. Blessing was dead. “I'm lucky,” said Quest soberly. “I would have murdered him.” “But why, Quest? I knew he was afraid of you, but he didn't tell me why.” “It was conditioned into me,” answered Quest “I didn't know 60 it until just now, when it ended, but my father conditioned me psychologically from my birth to the task of hunting down Dom Blessing and killing him. It was an unconscious drive in me that wouldn't release me until the task was finished. “You see, Blessing was my father's assistant on Ganymede. Right after my father completed development of the surgiscope, he and my mother blasted off for Io. Blessing wanted the valuable rights to the surgiscope, and he sabotaged the ship's drive so it would fall into Jupiter. “But my father was able to control it in the heavy atmosphere of Jupiter, and landed it successfully. I was born there, and he conditioned me to come to Earth and track down Blessing. I know now that it was part of the conditioning that I was unable to fight any other man until my task was finished: it might have gotten me in trouble and diverted me from that purpose.” More gently than Trella would have believed possible for his Jupiter-strong muscles, Quest took her in his arms. “Now I can say I love you,” he said. “That was part of the conditioning too: I couldn't love any woman until my job was done.” Trella disengaged herself. “I'm sorry,” she said. “Don't you know this, too, now: that you're not a man, but an android?” He looked at her in astonishment, stunned by her words. “What in space makes you think that?” he demanded. “Why, Quest, it's obvious,” she cried, tears in her eyes. “Everything about you … your build, suited for Jupiter's gravity … your strength … the fact that you were able to live in Jupiter's atmosphere after the oxygen equipment failed. I know you think Dr. Mansard was your father, but androids often believe that.” He grinned at her. “I'm no android,” he said confidently. “Do you forget my father was inventor of the surgiscope? He knew I'd have to grow up on Jupiter, and he operated on the genes before I was born. He altered my inherited characteristics to adapt me to the climate of Jupiter … even to being able to breathe a chlorine atmosphere as well as an oxygen atmosphere.” Trella looked at him. He was not badly hurt, any more than an elephant would have been, but his tunic was stained with red blood where the bullets had struck him. Normal android blood was green. “How can you be sure?” she asked doubtfully. “Androids are made,” he answered with a laugh. “They don't grow up. And I remember my boyhood on Jupiter very well.” He took her in his arms again, and this time she did not resist. His lips were very human. THE END

It can allow a surgeon to permanently alter a person's DNA

It can perform fine operations at a microscopic level

It can be used to turn a human into an android

It can probe the brain of any creature, dead or alive

27588_1RSI6ZBB_7

What incorrect assumption does Trella make about Blessing?

Transcriber's Note: Every effort has been made to replicate this text as faithfully as possible; changes (corrections of spelling and punctuation) made to the original text are marked like this . The original text appears when hovering the cursor over the marked text. This e-text was produced from Amazing Science Fiction Stories March 1959. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U. S. copyright on this publication was renewed. 50 THE JUPITER WEAPON By CHARLES L. FONTENAY He was a living weapon of destruction— immeasurably powerful, utterly invulnerable. There was only one question: Was he human? Trella feared she was in for trouble even before Motwick's head dropped forward on his arms in a drunken stupor. The two evil-looking men at the table nearby had been watching her surreptitiously, and now they shifted restlessly in their chairs. Trella had not wanted to come to the Golden Satellite. It was a squalid saloon in the rougher section of Jupiter's View, the terrestrial dome-colony on Ganymede. Motwick, already drunk, had insisted. A woman could not possibly make her way through these streets alone to the better section of town, especially one clad in a silvery evening dress. Her only hope was that this place had a telephone. Perhaps she could call one of Motwick's friends; she had no one on Ganymede she could call a real friend herself. Tentatively, she pushed her chair back from the table and arose. She had to brush close by the other table to get to the bar. As she did, the dark, slick-haired man reached out and grabbed her around the waist with a steely arm. Trella swung with her whole body, and slapped him so hard he nearly fell from his chair. As she walked swiftly toward the bar, he leaped up to follow her. There were only two other people in the Golden Satellite: the fat, mustached bartender and a short, square-built man at the bar. The latter swung around at the pistol-like report of her slap, and she saw that, though no more than four and a half feet tall, he was as heavily muscled as a lion. 51 His face was clean and open, with close-cropped blond hair and honest blue eyes. She ran to him. “Help me!” she cried. “Please help me!” He began to back away from her. “I can't,” he muttered in a deep voice. “I can't help you. I can't do anything.” The dark man was at her heels. In desperation, she dodged around the short man and took refuge behind him. Her protector was obviously unwilling, but the dark man, faced with his massiveness, took no chances. He stopped and shouted: “Kregg!” The other man at the table arose, ponderously, and lumbered toward them. He was immense, at least six and a half feet tall, with a brutal, vacant face. Evading her attempts to stay behind him, the squat man began to move down the bar away from the approaching Kregg. The dark man moved in on Trella again as Kregg overtook his quarry and swung a huge fist like a sledgehammer. Exactly what happened, Trella wasn't sure. She had the impression that Kregg's fist connected squarely with the short man's chin before he dodged to one side in a movement so fast it was a blur. But that couldn't have been, because the short man wasn't moved by that blow that would have felled a steer, and Kregg roared in pain, grabbing his injured fist. “The bar!” yelled Kregg. “I hit the damn bar!” At this juncture, the bartender took a hand. Leaning far over the bar, he swung a full bottle in a complete arc. It smashed on Kregg's head, splashing the floor with liquor, and Kregg sank stunned to his knees. The dark man, who had grabbed Trella's arm, released her and ran for the door. Moving agilely around the end of the bar, the bartender stood over Kregg, holding the jagged-edged bottleneck in his hand menacingly. “Get out!” rumbled the bartender. “I'll have no coppers raiding my place for the likes of you!” Kregg stumbled to his feet and staggered out. Trella ran to the unconscious Motwick's side. “That means you, too, lady,” said the bartender beside her. “You and your boy friend get out of here. You oughtn't to have come here in the first place.” “May I help you, Miss?” asked a deep, resonant voice behind her. She straightened from her anxious examination of Motwick. The squat man was standing there, an apologetic look on his face. She looked contemptuously at the massive muscles whose help had been denied her. Her arm ached where the dark man had grasped it. The broad face before 52 her was not unhandsome, and the blue eyes were disconcertingly direct, but she despised him for a coward. “I'm sorry I couldn't fight those men for you, Miss, but I just couldn't,” he said miserably, as though reading her thoughts. “But no one will bother you on the street if I'm with you.” “A lot of protection you'd be if they did!” she snapped. “But I'm desperate. You can carry him to the Stellar Hotel for me.” The gravity of Ganymede was hardly more than that of Earth's moon, but the way the man picked up the limp Motwick with one hand and tossed him over a shoulder was startling: as though he lifted a feather pillow. He followed Trella out the door of the Golden Satellite and fell in step beside her. Immediately she was grateful for his presence. The dimly lighted street was not crowded, but she didn't like the looks of the men she saw. The transparent dome of Jupiter's View was faintly visible in the reflected night lights of the colonial city, but the lights were overwhelmed by the giant, vari-colored disc of Jupiter itself, riding high in the sky. “I'm Quest Mansard, Miss,” said her companion. “I'm just in from Jupiter.” “I'm Trella Nuspar,” she said, favoring him with a green-eyed glance. “You mean Io, don't you—or Moon Five?” “No,” he said, grinning at her. He had an engaging grin, with even white teeth. “I meant Jupiter.” “You're lying,” she said flatly. “No one has ever landed on Jupiter. It would be impossible to blast off again.” “My parents landed on Jupiter, and I blasted off from it,” he said soberly. “I was born there. Have you ever heard of Dr. Eriklund Mansard?” “I certainly have,” she said, her interest taking a sudden upward turn. “He developed the surgiscope, didn't he? But his ship was drawn into Jupiter and lost.” “It was drawn into Jupiter, but he landed it successfully,” said Quest. “He and my mother lived on Jupiter until the oxygen equipment wore out at last. I was born and brought up there, and I was finally able to build a small rocket with a powerful enough drive to clear the planet.” She looked at him. He was short, half a head shorter than she, but broad and powerful as a man might be who had grown up in heavy gravity. He trod the street with a light, controlled step, seeming to deliberately hold himself down. “If Dr. Mansard succeeded in landing on Jupiter, why didn't anyone ever hear from him again?” she demanded. “Because,” said Quest, “his radio was sabotaged, just as his ship's drive was.” “Jupiter strength,” she murmured, looking him over coolly. 53 “You wear Motwick on your shoulder like a scarf. But you couldn't bring yourself to help a woman against two thugs.” He flushed. “I'm sorry,” he said. “That's something I couldn't help.” “Why not?” “I don't know. It's not that I'm afraid, but there's something in me that makes me back away from the prospect of fighting anyone.” Trella sighed. Cowardice was a state of mind. It was peculiarly inappropriate, but not unbelievable, that the strongest and most agile man on Ganymede should be a coward. Well, she thought with a rush of sympathy, he couldn't help being what he was. They had reached the more brightly lighted section of the city now. Trella could get a cab from here, but the Stellar Hotel wasn't far. They walked on. Trella had the desk clerk call a cab to deliver the unconscious Motwick to his home. She and Quest had a late sandwich in the coffee shop. “I landed here only a week ago,” he told her, his eyes frankly admiring her honey-colored hair and comely face. “I'm heading for Earth on the next spaceship.” “We'll be traveling companions, then,” she said. “I'm going back on that ship, too.” For some reason she decided against telling him that the assignment on which she had come to the Jupiter system was to gather his own father's notebooks and take them back to Earth. Motwick was an irresponsible playboy whom Trella had known briefly on Earth, and Trella was glad to dispense with his company for the remaining three weeks before the spaceship blasted off. She found herself enjoying the steadier companionship of Quest. As a matter of fact, she found herself enjoying his companionship more than she intended to. She found herself falling in love with him. Now this did not suit her at all. Trella had always liked her men tall and dark. She had determined that when she married it would be to a curly-haired six-footer. She was not at all happy about being so strongly attracted to a man several inches shorter than she. She was particularly unhappy about feeling drawn to a man who was a coward. The ship that they boarded on Moon Nine was one of the newer ships that could attain a hundred-mile-per-second velocity and take a hyperbolic path to Earth, but it would still require fifty-four days to make the trip. So Trella was delighted to find that the ship was the Cometfire and its skipper was her old friend, dark-eyed, curly-haired Jakdane Gille. “Jakdane,” she said, flirting with him with her eyes as in 54 days gone by, “I need a chaperon this trip, and you're ideal for the job.” “I never thought of myself in quite that light, but maybe I'm getting old,” he answered, laughing. “What's your trouble, Trella?” “I'm in love with that huge chunk of man who came aboard with me, and I'm not sure I ought to be,” she confessed. “I may need protection against myself till we get to Earth.” “If it's to keep you out of another fellow's clutches, I'm your man,” agreed Jakdane heartily. “I always had a mind to save you for myself. I'll guarantee you won't have a moment alone with him the whole trip.” “You don't have to be that thorough about it,” she protested hastily. “I want to get a little enjoyment out of being in love. But if I feel myself weakening too much, I'll holler for help.” The Cometfire swung around great Jupiter in an opening arc and plummeted ever more swiftly toward the tight circles of the inner planets. There were four crew members and three passengers aboard the ship's tiny personnel sphere, and Trella was thrown with Quest almost constantly. She enjoyed every minute of it. She told him only that she was a messenger, sent out to Ganymede to pick up some important papers and take them back to Earth. She was tempted to tell him what the papers were. Her employer had impressed upon her that her mission was confidential, but surely Dom Blessing could not object to Dr. Mansard's son knowing about it. All these things had happened before she was born, and she did not know what Dom Blessing's relation to Dr. Mansard had been, but it must have been very close. She knew that Dr. Mansard had invented the surgiscope. This was an instrument with a three-dimensional screen as its heart. The screen was a cubical frame in which an apparently solid image was built up of an object under an electron microscope. The actual cutting instrument of the surgiscope was an ion stream. By operating a tool in the three-dimensional screen, corresponding movements were made by the ion stream on the object under the microscope. The principle was the same as that used in operation of remote control “hands” in atomic laboratories to handle hot material, and with the surgiscope very delicate operations could be performed at the cellular level. Dr. Mansard and his wife had disappeared into the turbulent atmosphere of Jupiter just after his invention of the surgiscope, and it had been developed by Dom Blessing. Its success had built Spaceway Instruments, Incorporated, which Blessing headed. Through all these years since Dr. Mansard's disappearance, 55 Blessing had been searching the Jovian moons for a second, hidden laboratory of Dr. Mansard. When it was found at last, he sent Trella, his most trusted secretary, to Ganymede to bring back to him the notebooks found there. Blessing would, of course, be happy to learn that a son of Dr. Mansard lived, and would see that he received his rightful share of the inheritance. Because of this, Trella was tempted to tell Quest the good news herself; but she decided against it. It was Blessing's privilege to do this his own way, and he might not appreciate her meddling. At midtrip, Trella made a rueful confession to Jakdane. “It seems I was taking unnecessary precautions when I asked you to be a chaperon,” she said. “I kept waiting for Quest to do something, and when he didn't I told him I loved him.” “What did he say?” “It's very peculiar,” she said unhappily. “He said he can't love me. He said he wants to love me and he feels that he should, but there's something in him that refuses to permit it.” She expected Jakdane to salve her wounded feelings with a sympathetic pleasantry, but he did not. Instead, he just looked at her very thoughtfully and said no more about the matter. He explained his attitude after Asrange ran amuck. Asrange was the third passenger. He was a lean, saturnine individual who said little and kept to himself as much as possible. He was distantly polite in his relations with both crew and other passengers, and never showed the slightest spark of emotion … until the day Quest squirted coffee on him. It was one of those accidents that can occur easily in space. The passengers and the two crewmen on that particular waking shift (including Jakdane) were eating lunch on the center-deck. Quest picked up his bulb of coffee, but inadvertently pressed it before he got it to his lips. The coffee squirted all over the front of Asrange's clean white tunic. “I'm sorry!” exclaimed Quest in distress. The man's eyes went wide and he snarled. So quickly it seemed impossible, he had unbuckled himself from his seat and hurled himself backward from the table with an incoherent cry. He seized the first object his hand touched—it happened to be a heavy wooden cane leaning against Jakdane's bunk—propelled himself like a projectile at Quest. Quest rose from the table in a sudden uncoiling of movement. He did not unbuckle his safety belt—he rose and it snapped like a string. For a moment Trella thought he was going to meet Asrange's assault. But he fled in a long leap toward the companionway leading to the astrogation deck 56 above. Landing feet-first in the middle of the table and rebounding, Asrange pursued with the stick upraised. In his haste, Quest missed the companionway in his leap and was cornered against one of the bunks. Asrange descended on him like an avenging angel and, holding onto the bunk with one hand, rained savage blows on his head and shoulders with the heavy stick. Quest made no effort to retaliate. He cowered under the attack, holding his hands in front of him as if to ward it off. In a moment, Jakdane and the other crewman had reached Asrange and pulled him off. When they had Asrange in irons, Jakdane turned to Quest, who was now sitting unhappily at the table. “Take it easy,” he advised. “I'll wake the psychosurgeon and have him look you over. Just stay there.” Quest shook his head. “Don't bother him,” he said. “It's nothing but a few bruises.” “Bruises? Man, that club could have broken your skull! Or a couple of ribs, at the very least.” “I'm all right,” insisted Quest; and when the skeptical Jakdane insisted on examining him carefully, he had to admit it. There was hardly a mark on him from the blows. “If it didn't hurt you any more than that, why didn't you take that stick away from him?” demanded Jakdane. “You could have, easily.” “I couldn't,” said Quest miserably, and turned his face away. Later, alone with Trella on the control deck, Jakdane gave her some sober advice. “If you think you're in love with Quest, forget it,” he said. “Why? Because he's a coward? I know that ought to make me despise him, but it doesn't any more.” “Not because he's a coward. Because he's an android!” “What? Jakdane, you can't be serious!” “I am. I say he's an android, an artificial imitation of a man. It all figures. “Look, Trella, he said he was born on Jupiter. A human could stand the gravity of Jupiter, inside a dome or a ship, but what human could stand the rocket acceleration necessary to break free of Jupiter? Here's a man strong enough to break a spaceship safety belt just by getting up out of his chair against it, tough enough to take a beating with a heavy stick without being injured. How can you believe he's really human?” Trella remembered the thug Kregg striking Quest in the face and then crying that he had injured his hand on the bar. “But he said Dr. Mansard was his father,” protested Trella. “Robots and androids frequently look on their makers as their parents,” said Jakdane. “Quest may not even know he's 57 artificial. Do you know how Mansard died?” “The oxygen equipment failed, Quest said.” “Yes. Do you know when?” “No. Quest never did tell me, that I remember.” “He told me: a year before Quest made his rocket flight to Ganymede! If the oxygen equipment failed, how do you think Quest lived in the poisonous atmosphere of Jupiter, if he's human?” Trella was silent. “For the protection of humans, there are two psychological traits built into every robot and android,” said Jakdane gently. “The first is that they can never, under any circumstances, attack a human being, even in self defense. The second is that, while they may understand sexual desire objectively, they can never experience it themselves. “Those characteristics fit your man Quest to a T, Trella. There is no other explanation for him: he must be an android.” Trella did not want to believe Jakdane was right, but his reasoning was unassailable. Looking upon Quest as an android, many things were explained: his great strength, his short, broad build, his immunity to injury, his refusal to defend himself against a human, his inability to return Trella's love for him. It was not inconceivable that she should have unknowingly fallen in love with an android. Humans could love androids, with real affection, even knowing that they were artificial. There were instances of android nursemaids who were virtually members of the families owning them. She was glad now that she had not told Quest of her mission to Ganymede. He thought he was Dr. Mansard's son, but an android had no legal right of inheritance from his owner. She would leave it to Dom Blessing to decide what to do about Quest. Thus she did not, as she had intended originally, speak to Quest about seeing him again after she had completed her assignment. Even if Jakdane was wrong and Quest was human—as now seemed unlikely—Quest had told her he could not love her. Her best course was to try to forget him. Nor did Quest try to arrange with her for a later meeting. “It has been pleasant knowing you, Trella,” he said when they left the G-boat at White Sands. A faraway look came into his blue eyes, and he added: “I'm sorry things couldn't have been different, somehow.” “Let's don't be sorry for what we can't help,” she said gently, taking his hand in farewell. Trella took a fast plane from White Sands, and twenty-four hours later walked up the front steps of the familiar brownstone house on the outskirts of Washington. Dom Blessing himself met her at the door, a stooped, graying 58 man who peered at her over his spectacles. “You have the papers, eh?” he said, spying the brief case. “Good, good. Come in and we'll see what we have, eh?” She accompanied him through the bare, windowless anteroom which had always seemed to her such a strange feature of this luxurious house, and they entered the big living room. They sat before a fire in the old-fashioned fireplace and Blessing opened the brief case with trembling hands. “There are things here,” he said, his eyes sparkling as he glanced through the notebooks. “Yes, there are things here. We shall make something of these, Miss Trella, eh?” “I'm glad they're something you can use, Mr. Blessing,” she said. “There's something else I found on my trip, that I think I should tell you about.” She told him about Quest. “He thinks he's the son of Dr. Mansard,” she finished, “but apparently he is, without knowing it, an android Dr. Mansard built on Jupiter.” “He came back to Earth with you, eh?” asked Blessing intently. “Yes. I'm afraid it's your decision whether to let him go on living as a man or to tell him he's an android and claim ownership as Dr. Mansard's heir.” Trella planned to spend a few days resting in her employer's spacious home, and then to take a short vacation before resuming her duties as his confidential secretary. The next morning when she came down from her room, a change had been made. Two armed men were with Dom Blessing at breakfast and accompanied him wherever he went. She discovered that two more men with guns were stationed in the bare anteroom and a guard was stationed at every entrance to the house. “Why all the protection?” she asked Blessing. “A wealthy man must be careful,” said Blessing cheerfully. “When we don't understand all the implications of new circumstances, we must be prepared for anything, eh?” There was only one new circumstance Trella could think of. Without actually intending to, she exclaimed: “You aren't afraid of Quest? Why, an android can't hurt a human!” Blessing peered at her over his spectacles. “And what if he isn't an android, eh? And if he is—what if old Mansard didn't build in the prohibition against harming humans that's required by law? What about that, eh?” Trella was silent, shocked. There was something here she hadn't known about, hadn't even suspected. For some reason, Dom Blessing feared Dr. Eriklund Mansard … or his heir … or his mechanical servant. She was sure that Blessing was wrong, that Quest, whether man or android, intended no 59 harm to him. Surely, Quest would have said something of such bitterness during their long time together on Ganymede and aspace, since he did not know of Trella's connection with Blessing. But, since this was to be the atmosphere of Blessing's house, she was glad that he decided to assign her to take the Mansard papers to the New York laboratory. Quest came the day before she was scheduled to leave. Trella was in the living room with Blessing, discussing the instructions she was to give to the laboratory officials in New York. The two bodyguards were with them. The other guards were at their posts. Trella heard the doorbell ring. The heavy oaken front door was kept locked now, and the guards in the anteroom examined callers through a tiny window. Suddenly alarm bells rang all over the house. There was a terrific crash outside the room as the front door splintered. There were shouts and the sound of a shot. “The steel doors!” cried Blessing, turning white. “Let's get out of here.” He and his bodyguards ran through the back of the house out of the garage. Blessing, ahead of the rest, leaped into one of the cars and started the engine. The door from the house shattered and Quest burst through. The two guards turned and fired together. He could be hurt by bullets. He was staggered momentarily. Then, in a blur of motion, he sprang forward and swept the guards aside with one hand with such force that they skidded across the floor and lay in an unconscious heap against the rear of the garage. Trella had opened the door of the car, but it was wrenched from her hand as Blessing stepped on the accelerator and it leaped into the driveway with spinning wheels. Quest was after it, like a chunky deer, running faster than Trella had ever seen a man run before. Blessing slowed for the turn at the end of the driveway and glanced back over his shoulder. Seeing Quest almost upon him, he slammed down the accelerator and twisted the wheel hard. The car whipped into the street, careened, and rolled over and over, bringing up against a tree on the other side in a twisted tangle of wreckage. With a horrified gasp, Trella ran down the driveway toward the smoking heap of metal. Quest was already beside it, probing it. As she reached his side, he lifted the torn body of Dom Blessing. Blessing was dead. “I'm lucky,” said Quest soberly. “I would have murdered him.” “But why, Quest? I knew he was afraid of you, but he didn't tell me why.” “It was conditioned into me,” answered Quest “I didn't know 60 it until just now, when it ended, but my father conditioned me psychologically from my birth to the task of hunting down Dom Blessing and killing him. It was an unconscious drive in me that wouldn't release me until the task was finished. “You see, Blessing was my father's assistant on Ganymede. Right after my father completed development of the surgiscope, he and my mother blasted off for Io. Blessing wanted the valuable rights to the surgiscope, and he sabotaged the ship's drive so it would fall into Jupiter. “But my father was able to control it in the heavy atmosphere of Jupiter, and landed it successfully. I was born there, and he conditioned me to come to Earth and track down Blessing. I know now that it was part of the conditioning that I was unable to fight any other man until my task was finished: it might have gotten me in trouble and diverted me from that purpose.” More gently than Trella would have believed possible for his Jupiter-strong muscles, Quest took her in his arms. “Now I can say I love you,” he said. “That was part of the conditioning too: I couldn't love any woman until my job was done.” Trella disengaged herself. “I'm sorry,” she said. “Don't you know this, too, now: that you're not a man, but an android?” He looked at her in astonishment, stunned by her words. “What in space makes you think that?” he demanded. “Why, Quest, it's obvious,” she cried, tears in her eyes. “Everything about you … your build, suited for Jupiter's gravity … your strength … the fact that you were able to live in Jupiter's atmosphere after the oxygen equipment failed. I know you think Dr. Mansard was your father, but androids often believe that.” He grinned at her. “I'm no android,” he said confidently. “Do you forget my father was inventor of the surgiscope? He knew I'd have to grow up on Jupiter, and he operated on the genes before I was born. He altered my inherited characteristics to adapt me to the climate of Jupiter … even to being able to breathe a chlorine atmosphere as well as an oxygen atmosphere.” Trella looked at him. He was not badly hurt, any more than an elephant would have been, but his tunic was stained with red blood where the bullets had struck him. Normal android blood was green. “How can you be sure?” she asked doubtfully. “Androids are made,” he answered with a laugh. “They don't grow up. And I remember my boyhood on Jupiter very well.” He took her in his arms again, and this time she did not resist. His lips were very human. THE END

He would be thrilled to hear that Quest is alive and well

He murdered Dr. Mansard and got away with it

He turned Mansard's son into an android

He has no prior knowledge of the contents of Mansard's documents

27588_1RSI6ZBB_8

What is Blessing's fear regarding Dr. Mansard?

Transcriber's Note: Every effort has been made to replicate this text as faithfully as possible; changes (corrections of spelling and punctuation) made to the original text are marked like this . The original text appears when hovering the cursor over the marked text. This e-text was produced from Amazing Science Fiction Stories March 1959. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U. S. copyright on this publication was renewed. 50 THE JUPITER WEAPON By CHARLES L. FONTENAY He was a living weapon of destruction— immeasurably powerful, utterly invulnerable. There was only one question: Was he human? Trella feared she was in for trouble even before Motwick's head dropped forward on his arms in a drunken stupor. The two evil-looking men at the table nearby had been watching her surreptitiously, and now they shifted restlessly in their chairs. Trella had not wanted to come to the Golden Satellite. It was a squalid saloon in the rougher section of Jupiter's View, the terrestrial dome-colony on Ganymede. Motwick, already drunk, had insisted. A woman could not possibly make her way through these streets alone to the better section of town, especially one clad in a silvery evening dress. Her only hope was that this place had a telephone. Perhaps she could call one of Motwick's friends; she had no one on Ganymede she could call a real friend herself. Tentatively, she pushed her chair back from the table and arose. She had to brush close by the other table to get to the bar. As she did, the dark, slick-haired man reached out and grabbed her around the waist with a steely arm. Trella swung with her whole body, and slapped him so hard he nearly fell from his chair. As she walked swiftly toward the bar, he leaped up to follow her. There were only two other people in the Golden Satellite: the fat, mustached bartender and a short, square-built man at the bar. The latter swung around at the pistol-like report of her slap, and she saw that, though no more than four and a half feet tall, he was as heavily muscled as a lion. 51 His face was clean and open, with close-cropped blond hair and honest blue eyes. She ran to him. “Help me!” she cried. “Please help me!” He began to back away from her. “I can't,” he muttered in a deep voice. “I can't help you. I can't do anything.” The dark man was at her heels. In desperation, she dodged around the short man and took refuge behind him. Her protector was obviously unwilling, but the dark man, faced with his massiveness, took no chances. He stopped and shouted: “Kregg!” The other man at the table arose, ponderously, and lumbered toward them. He was immense, at least six and a half feet tall, with a brutal, vacant face. Evading her attempts to stay behind him, the squat man began to move down the bar away from the approaching Kregg. The dark man moved in on Trella again as Kregg overtook his quarry and swung a huge fist like a sledgehammer. Exactly what happened, Trella wasn't sure. She had the impression that Kregg's fist connected squarely with the short man's chin before he dodged to one side in a movement so fast it was a blur. But that couldn't have been, because the short man wasn't moved by that blow that would have felled a steer, and Kregg roared in pain, grabbing his injured fist. “The bar!” yelled Kregg. “I hit the damn bar!” At this juncture, the bartender took a hand. Leaning far over the bar, he swung a full bottle in a complete arc. It smashed on Kregg's head, splashing the floor with liquor, and Kregg sank stunned to his knees. The dark man, who had grabbed Trella's arm, released her and ran for the door. Moving agilely around the end of the bar, the bartender stood over Kregg, holding the jagged-edged bottleneck in his hand menacingly. “Get out!” rumbled the bartender. “I'll have no coppers raiding my place for the likes of you!” Kregg stumbled to his feet and staggered out. Trella ran to the unconscious Motwick's side. “That means you, too, lady,” said the bartender beside her. “You and your boy friend get out of here. You oughtn't to have come here in the first place.” “May I help you, Miss?” asked a deep, resonant voice behind her. She straightened from her anxious examination of Motwick. The squat man was standing there, an apologetic look on his face. She looked contemptuously at the massive muscles whose help had been denied her. Her arm ached where the dark man had grasped it. The broad face before 52 her was not unhandsome, and the blue eyes were disconcertingly direct, but she despised him for a coward. “I'm sorry I couldn't fight those men for you, Miss, but I just couldn't,” he said miserably, as though reading her thoughts. “But no one will bother you on the street if I'm with you.” “A lot of protection you'd be if they did!” she snapped. “But I'm desperate. You can carry him to the Stellar Hotel for me.” The gravity of Ganymede was hardly more than that of Earth's moon, but the way the man picked up the limp Motwick with one hand and tossed him over a shoulder was startling: as though he lifted a feather pillow. He followed Trella out the door of the Golden Satellite and fell in step beside her. Immediately she was grateful for his presence. The dimly lighted street was not crowded, but she didn't like the looks of the men she saw. The transparent dome of Jupiter's View was faintly visible in the reflected night lights of the colonial city, but the lights were overwhelmed by the giant, vari-colored disc of Jupiter itself, riding high in the sky. “I'm Quest Mansard, Miss,” said her companion. “I'm just in from Jupiter.” “I'm Trella Nuspar,” she said, favoring him with a green-eyed glance. “You mean Io, don't you—or Moon Five?” “No,” he said, grinning at her. He had an engaging grin, with even white teeth. “I meant Jupiter.” “You're lying,” she said flatly. “No one has ever landed on Jupiter. It would be impossible to blast off again.” “My parents landed on Jupiter, and I blasted off from it,” he said soberly. “I was born there. Have you ever heard of Dr. Eriklund Mansard?” “I certainly have,” she said, her interest taking a sudden upward turn. “He developed the surgiscope, didn't he? But his ship was drawn into Jupiter and lost.” “It was drawn into Jupiter, but he landed it successfully,” said Quest. “He and my mother lived on Jupiter until the oxygen equipment wore out at last. I was born and brought up there, and I was finally able to build a small rocket with a powerful enough drive to clear the planet.” She looked at him. He was short, half a head shorter than she, but broad and powerful as a man might be who had grown up in heavy gravity. He trod the street with a light, controlled step, seeming to deliberately hold himself down. “If Dr. Mansard succeeded in landing on Jupiter, why didn't anyone ever hear from him again?” she demanded. “Because,” said Quest, “his radio was sabotaged, just as his ship's drive was.” “Jupiter strength,” she murmured, looking him over coolly. 53 “You wear Motwick on your shoulder like a scarf. But you couldn't bring yourself to help a woman against two thugs.” He flushed. “I'm sorry,” he said. “That's something I couldn't help.” “Why not?” “I don't know. It's not that I'm afraid, but there's something in me that makes me back away from the prospect of fighting anyone.” Trella sighed. Cowardice was a state of mind. It was peculiarly inappropriate, but not unbelievable, that the strongest and most agile man on Ganymede should be a coward. Well, she thought with a rush of sympathy, he couldn't help being what he was. They had reached the more brightly lighted section of the city now. Trella could get a cab from here, but the Stellar Hotel wasn't far. They walked on. Trella had the desk clerk call a cab to deliver the unconscious Motwick to his home. She and Quest had a late sandwich in the coffee shop. “I landed here only a week ago,” he told her, his eyes frankly admiring her honey-colored hair and comely face. “I'm heading for Earth on the next spaceship.” “We'll be traveling companions, then,” she said. “I'm going back on that ship, too.” For some reason she decided against telling him that the assignment on which she had come to the Jupiter system was to gather his own father's notebooks and take them back to Earth. Motwick was an irresponsible playboy whom Trella had known briefly on Earth, and Trella was glad to dispense with his company for the remaining three weeks before the spaceship blasted off. She found herself enjoying the steadier companionship of Quest. As a matter of fact, she found herself enjoying his companionship more than she intended to. She found herself falling in love with him. Now this did not suit her at all. Trella had always liked her men tall and dark. She had determined that when she married it would be to a curly-haired six-footer. She was not at all happy about being so strongly attracted to a man several inches shorter than she. She was particularly unhappy about feeling drawn to a man who was a coward. The ship that they boarded on Moon Nine was one of the newer ships that could attain a hundred-mile-per-second velocity and take a hyperbolic path to Earth, but it would still require fifty-four days to make the trip. So Trella was delighted to find that the ship was the Cometfire and its skipper was her old friend, dark-eyed, curly-haired Jakdane Gille. “Jakdane,” she said, flirting with him with her eyes as in 54 days gone by, “I need a chaperon this trip, and you're ideal for the job.” “I never thought of myself in quite that light, but maybe I'm getting old,” he answered, laughing. “What's your trouble, Trella?” “I'm in love with that huge chunk of man who came aboard with me, and I'm not sure I ought to be,” she confessed. “I may need protection against myself till we get to Earth.” “If it's to keep you out of another fellow's clutches, I'm your man,” agreed Jakdane heartily. “I always had a mind to save you for myself. I'll guarantee you won't have a moment alone with him the whole trip.” “You don't have to be that thorough about it,” she protested hastily. “I want to get a little enjoyment out of being in love. But if I feel myself weakening too much, I'll holler for help.” The Cometfire swung around great Jupiter in an opening arc and plummeted ever more swiftly toward the tight circles of the inner planets. There were four crew members and three passengers aboard the ship's tiny personnel sphere, and Trella was thrown with Quest almost constantly. She enjoyed every minute of it. She told him only that she was a messenger, sent out to Ganymede to pick up some important papers and take them back to Earth. She was tempted to tell him what the papers were. Her employer had impressed upon her that her mission was confidential, but surely Dom Blessing could not object to Dr. Mansard's son knowing about it. All these things had happened before she was born, and she did not know what Dom Blessing's relation to Dr. Mansard had been, but it must have been very close. She knew that Dr. Mansard had invented the surgiscope. This was an instrument with a three-dimensional screen as its heart. The screen was a cubical frame in which an apparently solid image was built up of an object under an electron microscope. The actual cutting instrument of the surgiscope was an ion stream. By operating a tool in the three-dimensional screen, corresponding movements were made by the ion stream on the object under the microscope. The principle was the same as that used in operation of remote control “hands” in atomic laboratories to handle hot material, and with the surgiscope very delicate operations could be performed at the cellular level. Dr. Mansard and his wife had disappeared into the turbulent atmosphere of Jupiter just after his invention of the surgiscope, and it had been developed by Dom Blessing. Its success had built Spaceway Instruments, Incorporated, which Blessing headed. Through all these years since Dr. Mansard's disappearance, 55 Blessing had been searching the Jovian moons for a second, hidden laboratory of Dr. Mansard. When it was found at last, he sent Trella, his most trusted secretary, to Ganymede to bring back to him the notebooks found there. Blessing would, of course, be happy to learn that a son of Dr. Mansard lived, and would see that he received his rightful share of the inheritance. Because of this, Trella was tempted to tell Quest the good news herself; but she decided against it. It was Blessing's privilege to do this his own way, and he might not appreciate her meddling. At midtrip, Trella made a rueful confession to Jakdane. “It seems I was taking unnecessary precautions when I asked you to be a chaperon,” she said. “I kept waiting for Quest to do something, and when he didn't I told him I loved him.” “What did he say?” “It's very peculiar,” she said unhappily. “He said he can't love me. He said he wants to love me and he feels that he should, but there's something in him that refuses to permit it.” She expected Jakdane to salve her wounded feelings with a sympathetic pleasantry, but he did not. Instead, he just looked at her very thoughtfully and said no more about the matter. He explained his attitude after Asrange ran amuck. Asrange was the third passenger. He was a lean, saturnine individual who said little and kept to himself as much as possible. He was distantly polite in his relations with both crew and other passengers, and never showed the slightest spark of emotion … until the day Quest squirted coffee on him. It was one of those accidents that can occur easily in space. The passengers and the two crewmen on that particular waking shift (including Jakdane) were eating lunch on the center-deck. Quest picked up his bulb of coffee, but inadvertently pressed it before he got it to his lips. The coffee squirted all over the front of Asrange's clean white tunic. “I'm sorry!” exclaimed Quest in distress. The man's eyes went wide and he snarled. So quickly it seemed impossible, he had unbuckled himself from his seat and hurled himself backward from the table with an incoherent cry. He seized the first object his hand touched—it happened to be a heavy wooden cane leaning against Jakdane's bunk—propelled himself like a projectile at Quest. Quest rose from the table in a sudden uncoiling of movement. He did not unbuckle his safety belt—he rose and it snapped like a string. For a moment Trella thought he was going to meet Asrange's assault. But he fled in a long leap toward the companionway leading to the astrogation deck 56 above. Landing feet-first in the middle of the table and rebounding, Asrange pursued with the stick upraised. In his haste, Quest missed the companionway in his leap and was cornered against one of the bunks. Asrange descended on him like an avenging angel and, holding onto the bunk with one hand, rained savage blows on his head and shoulders with the heavy stick. Quest made no effort to retaliate. He cowered under the attack, holding his hands in front of him as if to ward it off. In a moment, Jakdane and the other crewman had reached Asrange and pulled him off. When they had Asrange in irons, Jakdane turned to Quest, who was now sitting unhappily at the table. “Take it easy,” he advised. “I'll wake the psychosurgeon and have him look you over. Just stay there.” Quest shook his head. “Don't bother him,” he said. “It's nothing but a few bruises.” “Bruises? Man, that club could have broken your skull! Or a couple of ribs, at the very least.” “I'm all right,” insisted Quest; and when the skeptical Jakdane insisted on examining him carefully, he had to admit it. There was hardly a mark on him from the blows. “If it didn't hurt you any more than that, why didn't you take that stick away from him?” demanded Jakdane. “You could have, easily.” “I couldn't,” said Quest miserably, and turned his face away. Later, alone with Trella on the control deck, Jakdane gave her some sober advice. “If you think you're in love with Quest, forget it,” he said. “Why? Because he's a coward? I know that ought to make me despise him, but it doesn't any more.” “Not because he's a coward. Because he's an android!” “What? Jakdane, you can't be serious!” “I am. I say he's an android, an artificial imitation of a man. It all figures. “Look, Trella, he said he was born on Jupiter. A human could stand the gravity of Jupiter, inside a dome or a ship, but what human could stand the rocket acceleration necessary to break free of Jupiter? Here's a man strong enough to break a spaceship safety belt just by getting up out of his chair against it, tough enough to take a beating with a heavy stick without being injured. How can you believe he's really human?” Trella remembered the thug Kregg striking Quest in the face and then crying that he had injured his hand on the bar. “But he said Dr. Mansard was his father,” protested Trella. “Robots and androids frequently look on their makers as their parents,” said Jakdane. “Quest may not even know he's 57 artificial. Do you know how Mansard died?” “The oxygen equipment failed, Quest said.” “Yes. Do you know when?” “No. Quest never did tell me, that I remember.” “He told me: a year before Quest made his rocket flight to Ganymede! If the oxygen equipment failed, how do you think Quest lived in the poisonous atmosphere of Jupiter, if he's human?” Trella was silent. “For the protection of humans, there are two psychological traits built into every robot and android,” said Jakdane gently. “The first is that they can never, under any circumstances, attack a human being, even in self defense. The second is that, while they may understand sexual desire objectively, they can never experience it themselves. “Those characteristics fit your man Quest to a T, Trella. There is no other explanation for him: he must be an android.” Trella did not want to believe Jakdane was right, but his reasoning was unassailable. Looking upon Quest as an android, many things were explained: his great strength, his short, broad build, his immunity to injury, his refusal to defend himself against a human, his inability to return Trella's love for him. It was not inconceivable that she should have unknowingly fallen in love with an android. Humans could love androids, with real affection, even knowing that they were artificial. There were instances of android nursemaids who were virtually members of the families owning them. She was glad now that she had not told Quest of her mission to Ganymede. He thought he was Dr. Mansard's son, but an android had no legal right of inheritance from his owner. She would leave it to Dom Blessing to decide what to do about Quest. Thus she did not, as she had intended originally, speak to Quest about seeing him again after she had completed her assignment. Even if Jakdane was wrong and Quest was human—as now seemed unlikely—Quest had told her he could not love her. Her best course was to try to forget him. Nor did Quest try to arrange with her for a later meeting. “It has been pleasant knowing you, Trella,” he said when they left the G-boat at White Sands. A faraway look came into his blue eyes, and he added: “I'm sorry things couldn't have been different, somehow.” “Let's don't be sorry for what we can't help,” she said gently, taking his hand in farewell. Trella took a fast plane from White Sands, and twenty-four hours later walked up the front steps of the familiar brownstone house on the outskirts of Washington. Dom Blessing himself met her at the door, a stooped, graying 58 man who peered at her over his spectacles. “You have the papers, eh?” he said, spying the brief case. “Good, good. Come in and we'll see what we have, eh?” She accompanied him through the bare, windowless anteroom which had always seemed to her such a strange feature of this luxurious house, and they entered the big living room. They sat before a fire in the old-fashioned fireplace and Blessing opened the brief case with trembling hands. “There are things here,” he said, his eyes sparkling as he glanced through the notebooks. “Yes, there are things here. We shall make something of these, Miss Trella, eh?” “I'm glad they're something you can use, Mr. Blessing,” she said. “There's something else I found on my trip, that I think I should tell you about.” She told him about Quest. “He thinks he's the son of Dr. Mansard,” she finished, “but apparently he is, without knowing it, an android Dr. Mansard built on Jupiter.” “He came back to Earth with you, eh?” asked Blessing intently. “Yes. I'm afraid it's your decision whether to let him go on living as a man or to tell him he's an android and claim ownership as Dr. Mansard's heir.” Trella planned to spend a few days resting in her employer's spacious home, and then to take a short vacation before resuming her duties as his confidential secretary. The next morning when she came down from her room, a change had been made. Two armed men were with Dom Blessing at breakfast and accompanied him wherever he went. She discovered that two more men with guns were stationed in the bare anteroom and a guard was stationed at every entrance to the house. “Why all the protection?” she asked Blessing. “A wealthy man must be careful,” said Blessing cheerfully. “When we don't understand all the implications of new circumstances, we must be prepared for anything, eh?” There was only one new circumstance Trella could think of. Without actually intending to, she exclaimed: “You aren't afraid of Quest? Why, an android can't hurt a human!” Blessing peered at her over his spectacles. “And what if he isn't an android, eh? And if he is—what if old Mansard didn't build in the prohibition against harming humans that's required by law? What about that, eh?” Trella was silent, shocked. There was something here she hadn't known about, hadn't even suspected. For some reason, Dom Blessing feared Dr. Eriklund Mansard … or his heir … or his mechanical servant. She was sure that Blessing was wrong, that Quest, whether man or android, intended no 59 harm to him. Surely, Quest would have said something of such bitterness during their long time together on Ganymede and aspace, since he did not know of Trella's connection with Blessing. But, since this was to be the atmosphere of Blessing's house, she was glad that he decided to assign her to take the Mansard papers to the New York laboratory. Quest came the day before she was scheduled to leave. Trella was in the living room with Blessing, discussing the instructions she was to give to the laboratory officials in New York. The two bodyguards were with them. The other guards were at their posts. Trella heard the doorbell ring. The heavy oaken front door was kept locked now, and the guards in the anteroom examined callers through a tiny window. Suddenly alarm bells rang all over the house. There was a terrific crash outside the room as the front door splintered. There were shouts and the sound of a shot. “The steel doors!” cried Blessing, turning white. “Let's get out of here.” He and his bodyguards ran through the back of the house out of the garage. Blessing, ahead of the rest, leaped into one of the cars and started the engine. The door from the house shattered and Quest burst through. The two guards turned and fired together. He could be hurt by bullets. He was staggered momentarily. Then, in a blur of motion, he sprang forward and swept the guards aside with one hand with such force that they skidded across the floor and lay in an unconscious heap against the rear of the garage. Trella had opened the door of the car, but it was wrenched from her hand as Blessing stepped on the accelerator and it leaped into the driveway with spinning wheels. Quest was after it, like a chunky deer, running faster than Trella had ever seen a man run before. Blessing slowed for the turn at the end of the driveway and glanced back over his shoulder. Seeing Quest almost upon him, he slammed down the accelerator and twisted the wheel hard. The car whipped into the street, careened, and rolled over and over, bringing up against a tree on the other side in a twisted tangle of wreckage. With a horrified gasp, Trella ran down the driveway toward the smoking heap of metal. Quest was already beside it, probing it. As she reached his side, he lifted the torn body of Dom Blessing. Blessing was dead. “I'm lucky,” said Quest soberly. “I would have murdered him.” “But why, Quest? I knew he was afraid of you, but he didn't tell me why.” “It was conditioned into me,” answered Quest “I didn't know 60 it until just now, when it ended, but my father conditioned me psychologically from my birth to the task of hunting down Dom Blessing and killing him. It was an unconscious drive in me that wouldn't release me until the task was finished. “You see, Blessing was my father's assistant on Ganymede. Right after my father completed development of the surgiscope, he and my mother blasted off for Io. Blessing wanted the valuable rights to the surgiscope, and he sabotaged the ship's drive so it would fall into Jupiter. “But my father was able to control it in the heavy atmosphere of Jupiter, and landed it successfully. I was born there, and he conditioned me to come to Earth and track down Blessing. I know now that it was part of the conditioning that I was unable to fight any other man until my task was finished: it might have gotten me in trouble and diverted me from that purpose.” More gently than Trella would have believed possible for his Jupiter-strong muscles, Quest took her in his arms. “Now I can say I love you,” he said. “That was part of the conditioning too: I couldn't love any woman until my job was done.” Trella disengaged herself. “I'm sorry,” she said. “Don't you know this, too, now: that you're not a man, but an android?” He looked at her in astonishment, stunned by her words. “What in space makes you think that?” he demanded. “Why, Quest, it's obvious,” she cried, tears in her eyes. “Everything about you … your build, suited for Jupiter's gravity … your strength … the fact that you were able to live in Jupiter's atmosphere after the oxygen equipment failed. I know you think Dr. Mansard was your father, but androids often believe that.” He grinned at her. “I'm no android,” he said confidently. “Do you forget my father was inventor of the surgiscope? He knew I'd have to grow up on Jupiter, and he operated on the genes before I was born. He altered my inherited characteristics to adapt me to the climate of Jupiter … even to being able to breathe a chlorine atmosphere as well as an oxygen atmosphere.” Trella looked at him. He was not badly hurt, any more than an elephant would have been, but his tunic was stained with red blood where the bullets had struck him. Normal android blood was green. “How can you be sure?” she asked doubtfully. “Androids are made,” he answered with a laugh. “They don't grow up. And I remember my boyhood on Jupiter very well.” He took her in his arms again, and this time she did not resist. His lips were very human. THE END

Blessing is afraid that Dr. Mansard is not actually deceased and currently plotting against him

Blessing is afraid that Dr. Mansard will inform Quest that he is actually an android

Blessing is afraid that Dr. Mansard has set two assassins to come after him and the documentation he stole

Blessing is afraid that Dr. Mansard left out programming that would prevent Quest from hurting living creatures

27588_1RSI6ZBB_9

What is the central irony of Quest's last words in the story?

Transcriber's Note: Every effort has been made to replicate this text as faithfully as possible; changes (corrections of spelling and punctuation) made to the original text are marked like this . The original text appears when hovering the cursor over the marked text. This e-text was produced from Amazing Science Fiction Stories March 1959. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U. S. copyright on this publication was renewed. 50 THE JUPITER WEAPON By CHARLES L. FONTENAY He was a living weapon of destruction— immeasurably powerful, utterly invulnerable. There was only one question: Was he human? Trella feared she was in for trouble even before Motwick's head dropped forward on his arms in a drunken stupor. The two evil-looking men at the table nearby had been watching her surreptitiously, and now they shifted restlessly in their chairs. Trella had not wanted to come to the Golden Satellite. It was a squalid saloon in the rougher section of Jupiter's View, the terrestrial dome-colony on Ganymede. Motwick, already drunk, had insisted. A woman could not possibly make her way through these streets alone to the better section of town, especially one clad in a silvery evening dress. Her only hope was that this place had a telephone. Perhaps she could call one of Motwick's friends; she had no one on Ganymede she could call a real friend herself. Tentatively, she pushed her chair back from the table and arose. She had to brush close by the other table to get to the bar. As she did, the dark, slick-haired man reached out and grabbed her around the waist with a steely arm. Trella swung with her whole body, and slapped him so hard he nearly fell from his chair. As she walked swiftly toward the bar, he leaped up to follow her. There were only two other people in the Golden Satellite: the fat, mustached bartender and a short, square-built man at the bar. The latter swung around at the pistol-like report of her slap, and she saw that, though no more than four and a half feet tall, he was as heavily muscled as a lion. 51 His face was clean and open, with close-cropped blond hair and honest blue eyes. She ran to him. “Help me!” she cried. “Please help me!” He began to back away from her. “I can't,” he muttered in a deep voice. “I can't help you. I can't do anything.” The dark man was at her heels. In desperation, she dodged around the short man and took refuge behind him. Her protector was obviously unwilling, but the dark man, faced with his massiveness, took no chances. He stopped and shouted: “Kregg!” The other man at the table arose, ponderously, and lumbered toward them. He was immense, at least six and a half feet tall, with a brutal, vacant face. Evading her attempts to stay behind him, the squat man began to move down the bar away from the approaching Kregg. The dark man moved in on Trella again as Kregg overtook his quarry and swung a huge fist like a sledgehammer. Exactly what happened, Trella wasn't sure. She had the impression that Kregg's fist connected squarely with the short man's chin before he dodged to one side in a movement so fast it was a blur. But that couldn't have been, because the short man wasn't moved by that blow that would have felled a steer, and Kregg roared in pain, grabbing his injured fist. “The bar!” yelled Kregg. “I hit the damn bar!” At this juncture, the bartender took a hand. Leaning far over the bar, he swung a full bottle in a complete arc. It smashed on Kregg's head, splashing the floor with liquor, and Kregg sank stunned to his knees. The dark man, who had grabbed Trella's arm, released her and ran for the door. Moving agilely around the end of the bar, the bartender stood over Kregg, holding the jagged-edged bottleneck in his hand menacingly. “Get out!” rumbled the bartender. “I'll have no coppers raiding my place for the likes of you!” Kregg stumbled to his feet and staggered out. Trella ran to the unconscious Motwick's side. “That means you, too, lady,” said the bartender beside her. “You and your boy friend get out of here. You oughtn't to have come here in the first place.” “May I help you, Miss?” asked a deep, resonant voice behind her. She straightened from her anxious examination of Motwick. The squat man was standing there, an apologetic look on his face. She looked contemptuously at the massive muscles whose help had been denied her. Her arm ached where the dark man had grasped it. The broad face before 52 her was not unhandsome, and the blue eyes were disconcertingly direct, but she despised him for a coward. “I'm sorry I couldn't fight those men for you, Miss, but I just couldn't,” he said miserably, as though reading her thoughts. “But no one will bother you on the street if I'm with you.” “A lot of protection you'd be if they did!” she snapped. “But I'm desperate. You can carry him to the Stellar Hotel for me.” The gravity of Ganymede was hardly more than that of Earth's moon, but the way the man picked up the limp Motwick with one hand and tossed him over a shoulder was startling: as though he lifted a feather pillow. He followed Trella out the door of the Golden Satellite and fell in step beside her. Immediately she was grateful for his presence. The dimly lighted street was not crowded, but she didn't like the looks of the men she saw. The transparent dome of Jupiter's View was faintly visible in the reflected night lights of the colonial city, but the lights were overwhelmed by the giant, vari-colored disc of Jupiter itself, riding high in the sky. “I'm Quest Mansard, Miss,” said her companion. “I'm just in from Jupiter.” “I'm Trella Nuspar,” she said, favoring him with a green-eyed glance. “You mean Io, don't you—or Moon Five?” “No,” he said, grinning at her. He had an engaging grin, with even white teeth. “I meant Jupiter.” “You're lying,” she said flatly. “No one has ever landed on Jupiter. It would be impossible to blast off again.” “My parents landed on Jupiter, and I blasted off from it,” he said soberly. “I was born there. Have you ever heard of Dr. Eriklund Mansard?” “I certainly have,” she said, her interest taking a sudden upward turn. “He developed the surgiscope, didn't he? But his ship was drawn into Jupiter and lost.” “It was drawn into Jupiter, but he landed it successfully,” said Quest. “He and my mother lived on Jupiter until the oxygen equipment wore out at last. I was born and brought up there, and I was finally able to build a small rocket with a powerful enough drive to clear the planet.” She looked at him. He was short, half a head shorter than she, but broad and powerful as a man might be who had grown up in heavy gravity. He trod the street with a light, controlled step, seeming to deliberately hold himself down. “If Dr. Mansard succeeded in landing on Jupiter, why didn't anyone ever hear from him again?” she demanded. “Because,” said Quest, “his radio was sabotaged, just as his ship's drive was.” “Jupiter strength,” she murmured, looking him over coolly. 53 “You wear Motwick on your shoulder like a scarf. But you couldn't bring yourself to help a woman against two thugs.” He flushed. “I'm sorry,” he said. “That's something I couldn't help.” “Why not?” “I don't know. It's not that I'm afraid, but there's something in me that makes me back away from the prospect of fighting anyone.” Trella sighed. Cowardice was a state of mind. It was peculiarly inappropriate, but not unbelievable, that the strongest and most agile man on Ganymede should be a coward. Well, she thought with a rush of sympathy, he couldn't help being what he was. They had reached the more brightly lighted section of the city now. Trella could get a cab from here, but the Stellar Hotel wasn't far. They walked on. Trella had the desk clerk call a cab to deliver the unconscious Motwick to his home. She and Quest had a late sandwich in the coffee shop. “I landed here only a week ago,” he told her, his eyes frankly admiring her honey-colored hair and comely face. “I'm heading for Earth on the next spaceship.” “We'll be traveling companions, then,” she said. “I'm going back on that ship, too.” For some reason she decided against telling him that the assignment on which she had come to the Jupiter system was to gather his own father's notebooks and take them back to Earth. Motwick was an irresponsible playboy whom Trella had known briefly on Earth, and Trella was glad to dispense with his company for the remaining three weeks before the spaceship blasted off. She found herself enjoying the steadier companionship of Quest. As a matter of fact, she found herself enjoying his companionship more than she intended to. She found herself falling in love with him. Now this did not suit her at all. Trella had always liked her men tall and dark. She had determined that when she married it would be to a curly-haired six-footer. She was not at all happy about being so strongly attracted to a man several inches shorter than she. She was particularly unhappy about feeling drawn to a man who was a coward. The ship that they boarded on Moon Nine was one of the newer ships that could attain a hundred-mile-per-second velocity and take a hyperbolic path to Earth, but it would still require fifty-four days to make the trip. So Trella was delighted to find that the ship was the Cometfire and its skipper was her old friend, dark-eyed, curly-haired Jakdane Gille. “Jakdane,” she said, flirting with him with her eyes as in 54 days gone by, “I need a chaperon this trip, and you're ideal for the job.” “I never thought of myself in quite that light, but maybe I'm getting old,” he answered, laughing. “What's your trouble, Trella?” “I'm in love with that huge chunk of man who came aboard with me, and I'm not sure I ought to be,” she confessed. “I may need protection against myself till we get to Earth.” “If it's to keep you out of another fellow's clutches, I'm your man,” agreed Jakdane heartily. “I always had a mind to save you for myself. I'll guarantee you won't have a moment alone with him the whole trip.” “You don't have to be that thorough about it,” she protested hastily. “I want to get a little enjoyment out of being in love. But if I feel myself weakening too much, I'll holler for help.” The Cometfire swung around great Jupiter in an opening arc and plummeted ever more swiftly toward the tight circles of the inner planets. There were four crew members and three passengers aboard the ship's tiny personnel sphere, and Trella was thrown with Quest almost constantly. She enjoyed every minute of it. She told him only that she was a messenger, sent out to Ganymede to pick up some important papers and take them back to Earth. She was tempted to tell him what the papers were. Her employer had impressed upon her that her mission was confidential, but surely Dom Blessing could not object to Dr. Mansard's son knowing about it. All these things had happened before she was born, and she did not know what Dom Blessing's relation to Dr. Mansard had been, but it must have been very close. She knew that Dr. Mansard had invented the surgiscope. This was an instrument with a three-dimensional screen as its heart. The screen was a cubical frame in which an apparently solid image was built up of an object under an electron microscope. The actual cutting instrument of the surgiscope was an ion stream. By operating a tool in the three-dimensional screen, corresponding movements were made by the ion stream on the object under the microscope. The principle was the same as that used in operation of remote control “hands” in atomic laboratories to handle hot material, and with the surgiscope very delicate operations could be performed at the cellular level. Dr. Mansard and his wife had disappeared into the turbulent atmosphere of Jupiter just after his invention of the surgiscope, and it had been developed by Dom Blessing. Its success had built Spaceway Instruments, Incorporated, which Blessing headed. Through all these years since Dr. Mansard's disappearance, 55 Blessing had been searching the Jovian moons for a second, hidden laboratory of Dr. Mansard. When it was found at last, he sent Trella, his most trusted secretary, to Ganymede to bring back to him the notebooks found there. Blessing would, of course, be happy to learn that a son of Dr. Mansard lived, and would see that he received his rightful share of the inheritance. Because of this, Trella was tempted to tell Quest the good news herself; but she decided against it. It was Blessing's privilege to do this his own way, and he might not appreciate her meddling. At midtrip, Trella made a rueful confession to Jakdane. “It seems I was taking unnecessary precautions when I asked you to be a chaperon,” she said. “I kept waiting for Quest to do something, and when he didn't I told him I loved him.” “What did he say?” “It's very peculiar,” she said unhappily. “He said he can't love me. He said he wants to love me and he feels that he should, but there's something in him that refuses to permit it.” She expected Jakdane to salve her wounded feelings with a sympathetic pleasantry, but he did not. Instead, he just looked at her very thoughtfully and said no more about the matter. He explained his attitude after Asrange ran amuck. Asrange was the third passenger. He was a lean, saturnine individual who said little and kept to himself as much as possible. He was distantly polite in his relations with both crew and other passengers, and never showed the slightest spark of emotion … until the day Quest squirted coffee on him. It was one of those accidents that can occur easily in space. The passengers and the two crewmen on that particular waking shift (including Jakdane) were eating lunch on the center-deck. Quest picked up his bulb of coffee, but inadvertently pressed it before he got it to his lips. The coffee squirted all over the front of Asrange's clean white tunic. “I'm sorry!” exclaimed Quest in distress. The man's eyes went wide and he snarled. So quickly it seemed impossible, he had unbuckled himself from his seat and hurled himself backward from the table with an incoherent cry. He seized the first object his hand touched—it happened to be a heavy wooden cane leaning against Jakdane's bunk—propelled himself like a projectile at Quest. Quest rose from the table in a sudden uncoiling of movement. He did not unbuckle his safety belt—he rose and it snapped like a string. For a moment Trella thought he was going to meet Asrange's assault. But he fled in a long leap toward the companionway leading to the astrogation deck 56 above. Landing feet-first in the middle of the table and rebounding, Asrange pursued with the stick upraised. In his haste, Quest missed the companionway in his leap and was cornered against one of the bunks. Asrange descended on him like an avenging angel and, holding onto the bunk with one hand, rained savage blows on his head and shoulders with the heavy stick. Quest made no effort to retaliate. He cowered under the attack, holding his hands in front of him as if to ward it off. In a moment, Jakdane and the other crewman had reached Asrange and pulled him off. When they had Asrange in irons, Jakdane turned to Quest, who was now sitting unhappily at the table. “Take it easy,” he advised. “I'll wake the psychosurgeon and have him look you over. Just stay there.” Quest shook his head. “Don't bother him,” he said. “It's nothing but a few bruises.” “Bruises? Man, that club could have broken your skull! Or a couple of ribs, at the very least.” “I'm all right,” insisted Quest; and when the skeptical Jakdane insisted on examining him carefully, he had to admit it. There was hardly a mark on him from the blows. “If it didn't hurt you any more than that, why didn't you take that stick away from him?” demanded Jakdane. “You could have, easily.” “I couldn't,” said Quest miserably, and turned his face away. Later, alone with Trella on the control deck, Jakdane gave her some sober advice. “If you think you're in love with Quest, forget it,” he said. “Why? Because he's a coward? I know that ought to make me despise him, but it doesn't any more.” “Not because he's a coward. Because he's an android!” “What? Jakdane, you can't be serious!” “I am. I say he's an android, an artificial imitation of a man. It all figures. “Look, Trella, he said he was born on Jupiter. A human could stand the gravity of Jupiter, inside a dome or a ship, but what human could stand the rocket acceleration necessary to break free of Jupiter? Here's a man strong enough to break a spaceship safety belt just by getting up out of his chair against it, tough enough to take a beating with a heavy stick without being injured. How can you believe he's really human?” Trella remembered the thug Kregg striking Quest in the face and then crying that he had injured his hand on the bar. “But he said Dr. Mansard was his father,” protested Trella. “Robots and androids frequently look on their makers as their parents,” said Jakdane. “Quest may not even know he's 57 artificial. Do you know how Mansard died?” “The oxygen equipment failed, Quest said.” “Yes. Do you know when?” “No. Quest never did tell me, that I remember.” “He told me: a year before Quest made his rocket flight to Ganymede! If the oxygen equipment failed, how do you think Quest lived in the poisonous atmosphere of Jupiter, if he's human?” Trella was silent. “For the protection of humans, there are two psychological traits built into every robot and android,” said Jakdane gently. “The first is that they can never, under any circumstances, attack a human being, even in self defense. The second is that, while they may understand sexual desire objectively, they can never experience it themselves. “Those characteristics fit your man Quest to a T, Trella. There is no other explanation for him: he must be an android.” Trella did not want to believe Jakdane was right, but his reasoning was unassailable. Looking upon Quest as an android, many things were explained: his great strength, his short, broad build, his immunity to injury, his refusal to defend himself against a human, his inability to return Trella's love for him. It was not inconceivable that she should have unknowingly fallen in love with an android. Humans could love androids, with real affection, even knowing that they were artificial. There were instances of android nursemaids who were virtually members of the families owning them. She was glad now that she had not told Quest of her mission to Ganymede. He thought he was Dr. Mansard's son, but an android had no legal right of inheritance from his owner. She would leave it to Dom Blessing to decide what to do about Quest. Thus she did not, as she had intended originally, speak to Quest about seeing him again after she had completed her assignment. Even if Jakdane was wrong and Quest was human—as now seemed unlikely—Quest had told her he could not love her. Her best course was to try to forget him. Nor did Quest try to arrange with her for a later meeting. “It has been pleasant knowing you, Trella,” he said when they left the G-boat at White Sands. A faraway look came into his blue eyes, and he added: “I'm sorry things couldn't have been different, somehow.” “Let's don't be sorry for what we can't help,” she said gently, taking his hand in farewell. Trella took a fast plane from White Sands, and twenty-four hours later walked up the front steps of the familiar brownstone house on the outskirts of Washington. Dom Blessing himself met her at the door, a stooped, graying 58 man who peered at her over his spectacles. “You have the papers, eh?” he said, spying the brief case. “Good, good. Come in and we'll see what we have, eh?” She accompanied him through the bare, windowless anteroom which had always seemed to her such a strange feature of this luxurious house, and they entered the big living room. They sat before a fire in the old-fashioned fireplace and Blessing opened the brief case with trembling hands. “There are things here,” he said, his eyes sparkling as he glanced through the notebooks. “Yes, there are things here. We shall make something of these, Miss Trella, eh?” “I'm glad they're something you can use, Mr. Blessing,” she said. “There's something else I found on my trip, that I think I should tell you about.” She told him about Quest. “He thinks he's the son of Dr. Mansard,” she finished, “but apparently he is, without knowing it, an android Dr. Mansard built on Jupiter.” “He came back to Earth with you, eh?” asked Blessing intently. “Yes. I'm afraid it's your decision whether to let him go on living as a man or to tell him he's an android and claim ownership as Dr. Mansard's heir.” Trella planned to spend a few days resting in her employer's spacious home, and then to take a short vacation before resuming her duties as his confidential secretary. The next morning when she came down from her room, a change had been made. Two armed men were with Dom Blessing at breakfast and accompanied him wherever he went. She discovered that two more men with guns were stationed in the bare anteroom and a guard was stationed at every entrance to the house. “Why all the protection?” she asked Blessing. “A wealthy man must be careful,” said Blessing cheerfully. “When we don't understand all the implications of new circumstances, we must be prepared for anything, eh?” There was only one new circumstance Trella could think of. Without actually intending to, she exclaimed: “You aren't afraid of Quest? Why, an android can't hurt a human!” Blessing peered at her over his spectacles. “And what if he isn't an android, eh? And if he is—what if old Mansard didn't build in the prohibition against harming humans that's required by law? What about that, eh?” Trella was silent, shocked. There was something here she hadn't known about, hadn't even suspected. For some reason, Dom Blessing feared Dr. Eriklund Mansard … or his heir … or his mechanical servant. She was sure that Blessing was wrong, that Quest, whether man or android, intended no 59 harm to him. Surely, Quest would have said something of such bitterness during their long time together on Ganymede and aspace, since he did not know of Trella's connection with Blessing. But, since this was to be the atmosphere of Blessing's house, she was glad that he decided to assign her to take the Mansard papers to the New York laboratory. Quest came the day before she was scheduled to leave. Trella was in the living room with Blessing, discussing the instructions she was to give to the laboratory officials in New York. The two bodyguards were with them. The other guards were at their posts. Trella heard the doorbell ring. The heavy oaken front door was kept locked now, and the guards in the anteroom examined callers through a tiny window. Suddenly alarm bells rang all over the house. There was a terrific crash outside the room as the front door splintered. There were shouts and the sound of a shot. “The steel doors!” cried Blessing, turning white. “Let's get out of here.” He and his bodyguards ran through the back of the house out of the garage. Blessing, ahead of the rest, leaped into one of the cars and started the engine. The door from the house shattered and Quest burst through. The two guards turned and fired together. He could be hurt by bullets. He was staggered momentarily. Then, in a blur of motion, he sprang forward and swept the guards aside with one hand with such force that they skidded across the floor and lay in an unconscious heap against the rear of the garage. Trella had opened the door of the car, but it was wrenched from her hand as Blessing stepped on the accelerator and it leaped into the driveway with spinning wheels. Quest was after it, like a chunky deer, running faster than Trella had ever seen a man run before. Blessing slowed for the turn at the end of the driveway and glanced back over his shoulder. Seeing Quest almost upon him, he slammed down the accelerator and twisted the wheel hard. The car whipped into the street, careened, and rolled over and over, bringing up against a tree on the other side in a twisted tangle of wreckage. With a horrified gasp, Trella ran down the driveway toward the smoking heap of metal. Quest was already beside it, probing it. As she reached his side, he lifted the torn body of Dom Blessing. Blessing was dead. “I'm lucky,” said Quest soberly. “I would have murdered him.” “But why, Quest? I knew he was afraid of you, but he didn't tell me why.” “It was conditioned into me,” answered Quest “I didn't know 60 it until just now, when it ended, but my father conditioned me psychologically from my birth to the task of hunting down Dom Blessing and killing him. It was an unconscious drive in me that wouldn't release me until the task was finished. “You see, Blessing was my father's assistant on Ganymede. Right after my father completed development of the surgiscope, he and my mother blasted off for Io. Blessing wanted the valuable rights to the surgiscope, and he sabotaged the ship's drive so it would fall into Jupiter. “But my father was able to control it in the heavy atmosphere of Jupiter, and landed it successfully. I was born there, and he conditioned me to come to Earth and track down Blessing. I know now that it was part of the conditioning that I was unable to fight any other man until my task was finished: it might have gotten me in trouble and diverted me from that purpose.” More gently than Trella would have believed possible for his Jupiter-strong muscles, Quest took her in his arms. “Now I can say I love you,” he said. “That was part of the conditioning too: I couldn't love any woman until my job was done.” Trella disengaged herself. “I'm sorry,” she said. “Don't you know this, too, now: that you're not a man, but an android?” He looked at her in astonishment, stunned by her words. “What in space makes you think that?” he demanded. “Why, Quest, it's obvious,” she cried, tears in her eyes. “Everything about you … your build, suited for Jupiter's gravity … your strength … the fact that you were able to live in Jupiter's atmosphere after the oxygen equipment failed. I know you think Dr. Mansard was your father, but androids often believe that.” He grinned at her. “I'm no android,” he said confidently. “Do you forget my father was inventor of the surgiscope? He knew I'd have to grow up on Jupiter, and he operated on the genes before I was born. He altered my inherited characteristics to adapt me to the climate of Jupiter … even to being able to breathe a chlorine atmosphere as well as an oxygen atmosphere.” Trella looked at him. He was not badly hurt, any more than an elephant would have been, but his tunic was stained with red blood where the bullets had struck him. Normal android blood was green. “How can you be sure?” she asked doubtfully. “Androids are made,” he answered with a laugh. “They don't grow up. And I remember my boyhood on Jupiter very well.” He took her in his arms again, and this time she did not resist. His lips were very human. THE END

He claims that "androids are made" to justify his human status, disregarding the impact of his father's programming efforts

He declares that "androids don't grow up," when in reality, his father programmed him to appear to (physically) age

He states that he "remembers his boyhood on Jupiter," when in reality, he is still a boy

He says he "remembers his boyhood on Jupiter," when in reality, his memories were programmed into his brain