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Title: A Mile Beyond the Moon (1976 reprint of 1958 edition)
Date of first publication: 1958
Author: Cyril M. Kornbluth (1923 - 1958)
Date first posted: March 25 2013
Date last updated: March 25 2013
Faded Page eBook #20130352

This eBook was produced by: Delphine Lettau, Mary Meehan
& the online Distributed Proofreaders Canada team at http://www.pgdpcanada.net




                        A MILE BEYOND THE MOON

                           C. M. KORNBLUTH


    MANOR
    BOOKS
    INC.

    A MANOR BOOK       1976

    Manor Books, Inc.
    432 Park Avenue South
    New York, New York 10016

    Copyright, ©, 1958, by Doubleday & Company, Inc.
    All rights reserved. Published by arrangement with
    Doubleday & Company, Inc.
    Printed in U.S.A.

       *       *       *       *       *

C. M. KORNBLUTH WAS ONE OF THE GREAT MASTERS

_This collection takes you on wild excursions past the unexplored
boundaries of time and space, society, morals, customs and science. Here
are the dilemmas--comic and tragic, ironic and fantastic--that confront
the individual when technology advances relentlessly past humanity's
capacity to absorb it. These are sensitive, superbly written tales of
people struggling in a world they might have made--but never mastered._

STORIES LIKE....


THE LITTLE BLACK BAG

C. M. Kornbluth's most famous story, about the physician's bag that
appeared from nowhere and rejuvenated a sodden twentieth century drunk
who suddenly remembered that he had once been a doctor.


SHARK SHIP

Ordinarily, the ship--with 20,000 aboard--would have been doomed. But
the lady archivist found a loophole in the Charter. So after 141 years
at sea, the ship headed for land, the unknown.


TIME BUM

Jubilantly, he knew he had the greatest con of his career. No one would
ever tip the cops afterward--no one. And Harry was right. He was also
peculiarly wrong.


AND OTHERS...

from the pen of one of the most inimitable science fiction creators of
our time.




Contents


    MAKE MINE MARS                                    7

    THE EVENTS LEADING DOWN TO THE TRAGEDY           38

    THE LITTLE BLACK BAG                             46

    EVERYBODY KNOWS JOE                              75

    TIME BUM                                         79

    VIRGINIA                                         88

    KAZAM COLLECTS                                   95

    THE LAST MAN LEFT IN THE BAR                    109

    THE ADVENTURER                                  121

    THE WORDS OF GURU                               135

    SHARK SHIP                                      143




_Make Mine Mars_

Copyright 1952 by Science Fiction Publications, Inc. for _Science
Fiction Adventures Magazine_


    "_X is for the ecstasy she ga-a-ave me;_
    _E is for her eyes--one, two, and three-ee;_
    _T is for the teeth with which she'd sha-a-ave me;_
    _S is for her scales of i-vo-ree-ee-ee..._"

Somebody was singing, and my throbbing head objected. I seemed to have a
mouthful of sawdust.

    "_T is for her tentacles ah-round me;_
    _J is for her jowls--were none soo-oo fair;_
    _H is for the happy day she found me;_
    _Fe is for the iron in her hair..._"

I ran my tongue around inside my mouth. It was full of sawdust--spruce
and cedar, rocketed in from Earth.

    "_Put them all to-gether, they spell Xetstjhfe..._"

My eyes snapped open, and I sat up, cracking my head on the underside of
the table beneath which I was lying. I lay down and waited for the
pinwheels to stop spinning. I tried to think it out. Spruce and
cedar ... Honest Blogri's Olde Earthe Saloon ... eleven stingers with a
Sirian named Wenjtkpli...

    "_A worrud that means the wur-r-l-l-d too-oo mee-ee-ee!_"

Through the fading pinwheels I saw a long and horrid face, a Sirian
face, peering at me with kindly interest under the table. It was
Wenjtkpli.

"Good morning, little Earth chum," he said. "You feel not so tired now?"

"Morning?" I yelled, sitting up again and cracking my head again and
lying down again to wait for the pinwheels to fade again.

"You sleep," I heard him say, "fourteen hours--so happy, so peaceful!"

"I gotta get out of here," I mumbled, scrambling about on the imported
sawdust for my hat. I found I was wearing it, and climbed out, stood up,
and leaned against the table, swaying and spitting out the last of the
spruce and cedar.

"You like another stinger?" asked Wenjtkpli brightly. I retched feebly.

"Fourteen hours," I mumbled. "That makes it 0900 Mars now, or exactly
ten hours past the time I was supposed to report for the nightside at
the bureau."

"But last night you talk different," the Sirian told me in surprise.
"You say many times how bureau chief McGillicuddy can take lousy job and
jam--"

"That was last night," I moaned. "This is this morning."

"Relax, little Earth chum. I sing again song you taught me:

    _X is for the ecstasy she ga-a-ave me;_
    _E is for_--"

My throbbing head still objected. I flapped good-by at him and set a
course for the door of Blogri's joint. The quaint period mottoes:


    "QUAFFE YE NUT-BROWN AYLE"
       "DROPPE DEAD TWYCE"

and so on--didn't look so quaint by the cold light of the Martian dawn.

An unpleasant little character, Venusian or something, I'd seen around
the place oozed up to me. "Head hurt plenty, huh?" he simpered.

"This is no time for sympathy," I said. "Now one side or a flipper
off--I gotta go to work."

"No sympathy," he said, his voice dropping to a whisper. He fumbled
oddly in his belt, then showed me a little white capsule. "Clear your
head, huh? Work like lightning, you bet!"

I was interested. "How much?"

"For you, friend, nothing. Because I hate seeing fellows suffer with big
head."

"Beat it," I told him, and shoved past through the door. That pitch of
his with a free sample meant he was pushing J-K-B. I was in enough
trouble without adding an unbreakable addiction to the stuff. If I'd
taken his free sample, I would have been back to see him in 12 hours,
sweating blood for more. And that time he would have named his own
price.

I fell into an eastbound chair and fumbled a quarter into the slot. The
thin, cold air of the pressure dome was clearing my head already. I was
sorry for all the times I'd cussed a skinflint dome administration for
not supplying a richer air mix or heating the outdoors more lavishly. I
felt good enough to shave, and luckily had my razor in my wallet. By the
time the chair was gliding past the building where Interstellar News had
a floor, I had the whiskers off my jaw and most of the sawdust out of my
hair.

The floater took me up to our floor while I tried not to think of what
McGillicuddy would have to say.

The newsroom was full of noise as usual. McGillicuddy was in the
copydesk slot chewing his way through a pile of dispatches due to be
filed on the pressure dome split for A.M. newscasts in four minutes by
the big wall clock. He fed his copy, without looking, to an operator
battering the keys of the old-fashioned radioteletype that was good
enough to serve our local clients.

"Two minutes short!" he yelled at one of the men on the rim. "Gimme a
brightener! Gimme a god-damned brightener!" The rim man raced to the
receiving ethertypes from Gammadion, Betelgeuse, and the other
Interstellar bureaus. He yanked an item from one of the clicking
machines and scaled it at McGillicuddy, who slashed at it with his
pencil and passed it to the operator. The tape the operator was cutting
started through the transmitter-distributor, and on all local clients'
radioteletypes appeared:

     "FIFTEEN-MINUTE INTERSTELLAR NEWSCAST AM MARS PRESSURE DOMES."

Everybody leaned back and lit up. McGillicuddy's eye fell on me, and I
cleared my throat.

"Got a cold?" he asked genially.

"Nope. No cold."

"Touch of indigestion? Flu, maybe? You're tardy today."

"I know it."

"Bright boy." He was smiling. That was bad.

"Spencer," he told me. "I thought long and hard about you. I thought
about you when you failed to show up for the nightside. I thought about
you intermittently through the night as I took your shift. Along about
0300 I decided what to do with you. It was as though Providence had
taken a hand. It was as though I prayed 'Lord, what shall I do with a
drunken, no-good son of a spacecook who ranks in my opinion with the
boils of Job as an affliction to man?' Here's the answer, Spencer."

He tossed me a piece of ethertype paper, torn from one of our
interstellar-circuit machines. On it was the following dialogue:

     ANYBODY TTHURE I MEAN THERE THIS MARSBUO ISN GA PLS WOT TTHUT I
     MEAN WOT THAT MEAN PLEASE

     THIS IS THE MARS BUREAU OF INTERSTELLAR NEWS. WHO ARE YOU AND WHAT
     ARE YOU DOING HORSING AROUND ON OUR KRUEGER 60-B CIRCUIT TELETYPE
     QUESTIONMARK. WHERE IS REGULAR STAFFER. GO AHEAD

     THATIS WOT I AM CALLING YOU ABBOUUT. KENNEDY DIED THIS
     MORNINGPNEUMONIA. I AM WEEMS EDITOR PHOENIX. U SENDING REPLLACEMENT
     KENNEDY PLEAS

     THIS MCGILLICUDDY, MARSBUO ISN CHIEF. SENDING REPLACEMENT KENNEDY
     SOONEST. HAVE IDEAL MAN FOR JOB. END.

That was all. It was enough.

"Chief," I said to McGillicuddy. "Chief, you can't. You
wouldn't--_would_ you?"

"Better get packed," he told me, busily marking up copy. "Better take
plenty of nice, warm clothing. I understand Krueger 60-B is about one
thousand times dimmer than the sun. That's absolute magnitude, of
course--Frostbite's in quite close. A primitive community, I'm told.
Kennedy didn't like it. But of course the poor old duffer wasn't good
enough to handle anything swifter than a one-man bureau on a one-planet
split. Better take _lots_ of warm clothing."

"I quit," I said.

"Sam," said somebody, in a voice that always makes me turn to custard
inside.

"Hello, Ellie," I said. "I was just telling Mr. McGillicuddy that he
isn't going to shoot me off to Frostbite to rot."

"Freeze," corrected McGillicuddy with relish. "Freeze. Good morning,
Miss Masters. Did you want to say a few parting words to your friend?"

"I do," she told him, and drew me aside to no man's land where the
ladies of the press prepared strange copy for the gentler sex. "Don't
quit, Sam," she said in that voice. "I could never love a quitter. What
if it _is_ a minor assignment?"

"Minor," I said. "What a gem of understatement _that_ is!"

"It'll be good for you," she insisted. "You can show him what you've got
on the ball. You'll be on your own except for the regular dispatches to
the main circuit and your local split. You could dig up all sorts of
cute feature stories that'd get your name known." And so on. It was
partly her logic, partly that voice and partly her promise to kiss me
good-by at the port.

"I'll take it," I told McGillicuddy. He looked up with a pleased smile
and murmured: "The power of prayer..."

       *       *       *       *       *

The good-by kiss from Ellie was the only thing about the journey that
wasn't nightmarish. ISN's expense account stuck me on a rusty bucket
that I shared with glamorous freight like yak kids and tenpenny nails.
The little yaks blatted whenever we went into overdrive to break through
the speed of light. The Greenhough Effect--known to readers of the
science features as "supertime"--scared hell out of them. On ordinary
rocket drive, they just groaned and whimpered to each other the yak
equivalent of "Thibet was never like this!"

The Frostbite spaceport wasn't like the South Pole, but it was like
Greenland. There was a bunch of farmers waiting for their yaks, beating
their mittened hands together and exhaling long plumes of vapor. The
collector of customs, a rat-faced city boy, didn't have the decency to
turn them over and let the hayseeds get back to the administration
building. I watched through a porthole and saw him stalling and dawdling
over a sheaf of papers for each of the farmers. Oddly enough, the
stalling and dawdling stopped as soon as the farmers caught on and
passed over a few dollars. Nobody even bothered to slip it shamefacedly
from one hand to another. They just handed it over, not caring who
saw--Rat-Face sneering, the farmers dumbly accepting the racket.

My turn came. Rat-Face came aboard and we were introduced by the chief
engineer. "Harya," he said. "Twenny bucks."

"What for?"

"Landing permit. Later at the administration you can pay your visitor's
permit. That's twenny bucks too."

"I'm not a visitor. I'm coming here to work."

"Work, schmurk. So you'll need a work permit--twenny bucks." His eyes
wandered. "Whaddaya got there?"

"Ethertype parts. May need them for replacements."

He was on his knees in front of the box, crooning, "Triple ad valorem
plus twenny dollars security bond for each part plus twenny dollars
inspection fee plus twenny dollars for decontamination plus twenny
dollars for failure to declare plus--"

"Break it up, Joe," said a new arrival--a grey-mustached little man,
lost in his parka. "He's a friend of mine. Extend the courtesies of the
port."

Rat-Face--Joe--didn't like it, but he took it. He muttered about doing
his duty and gave me a card.

"Twenny bucks?" I asked, studying it.

"Nah," he said angrily. "You're free-loading." He got out.

"Looks as if you saved ISN some money," I said to the little man. He
threw back the hood of his parka in the relative warmth of the ship.

"Why not? We'll be working together. I'm Chenery from the _Phoenix_."

"Oh, yeah--the client."

"That's right," he agreed, grinning. "_The_ client. What exactly did you
do to get banished to Frostbite?"

Since there was probably a spacemail aboard from McGillicuddy telling
him exactly what I did, I told him. "Chief thought I was generally
shiftless."

"You'll do here," he said. "It's a shiftless, easy-going kind of place.
I have the key to your bureau. Want me to lead the way?"

"What about my baggage?"

"Your stuff's safe. Port officers won't loot it when they know you're a
friend of the _Phoenix_."

That wasn't exactly what I'd meant; I'd always taken it for granted that
port officers didn't loot anybody's baggage, no matter whose friends
they were or weren't. As Chenery had said, it seemed to be a shiftless,
easy-going place. I let him lead the way; he had a jeep waiting to take
us to the administration building, a musty, too-tight hodgepodge of
desks. A lot of them were vacant, and the dowdy women and fattish men at
the others didn't seem to be very busy. The women were doing their nails
or reading; the men mostly were playing blotto with pocket-size dials
for small change. A couple were sleeping.

From the administration building a jet job took us the 20 kilos to town.
Frostbite, the capital of Frostbite, housed maybe 40,000 people. No
pressure dome. Just the glorious outdoors, complete with dust, weather,
insects, and a steady, icy wind. Hick towns seem to be the same the
universe over. There was a main street called Main Street with clothing
shops and restaurants, gambling houses, and more or less fancy saloons,
a couple of vaudeville theaters, and dance halls. At the unfashionable
end of Main Street were some farm implement shops, places to buy
surveying instruments and geologic detectors and the building that
housed the Interstellar News Service Frostbite Bureau. It was a couple
of front rooms on the second floor, with a mechanical dentist below, an
osteopath above, and a "ride-up-and-save" parka emporium to the rear.

Chenery let me in, and it was easy to see at once why Kennedy had died
of pneumonia. Bottles. The air conditioning must have carried away every
last sniff of liquor, but it still seemed to me that I could smell the
rancid, home-brew stuff he'd been drinking. They were everywhere, the
relics of a shameless, hopeless alcoholic who'd been good for nothing
better than Frostbite. Sticky glasses and bottles everywhere told the
story.

I slid open the hatch of the incinerator and started tossing down
bottles and glasses from the copy desk, the morgue, the ethertype.
Chenery helped, and decently kept his mouth shut. When we'd got the
place kind of cleaned up I wanted to know what the daily routine was
like.

Chenery shrugged. "Anything you make it, I guess. I used to push Kennedy
to get more low-temperature agriculture stories for us. And those yaks
that landed with you started as a civic-betterment stunt the _Phoenix_
ran. It was all tractors until our farm editor had a brainstorm and
brought in a pair. It's a hell of a good idea--you can't get milk,
butter and meat out of a tractor. Kennedy helped us get advice from some
Earthside agronomy station to set it up and helped get clearance for the
first pair too. I don't have much idea of what copy he filed back to
ISN. Frankly, we used him mostly as a contact man."

I asked miserably: "What the hell kind of copy _can_ you file from a
hole like this?" He laughed and cheerfully agreed that things were
pretty slow.

"Here's today's _Phoenix_," he said, as the faxer began to hum. A neat,
16-page tabloid, stapled, pushed its way out in a couple of seconds. I
flipped through it and asked: "No color at _all_?"

Chenery gave me a wink. "What the subscribers and advertisers don't know
won't hurt them. Sometimes we break down and give them a page-one color
pic."

I studied the _Phoenix_. Very conservative layout--naturally. It's
competition that leads to circus make-up, and the _Phoenix_ was the only
sheet on the planet. The number-one story under a modest two-column head
was an ISN farm piece on fertilizers for high-altitude agriculture,
virtually unedited. The number-two story was an ISN piece on the current
United Planets assembly.

"Is Frostbite in the UP, by the way?" I asked.

"No. It's the big political question here. The _Phoenix_ is against
applying. We figure the planet can't afford the assessment in the first
place, and if it could there wouldn't be anything to gain by joining."

"Um." I studied the ISN piece closer and saw that the _Phoenix_ was very
much opposed indeed. The paper had doctored our story plenty. I hadn't
seen the original, but ISN is--in fact and according to its charter--as
impartial as it's humanly possible to be. But our story, as it emerged
in the _Phoenix_, consisted of: a paragraph about an undignified,
wrangling debate over the Mars-excavation question; a fist-fight between
a Titanian and an Earth delegate in a corridor; a Sirian's red-hot
denunciation of the UP as a power-politics instrument of the old
planets; and a report of UP administrative expenses--without a
corresponding report of achievements.

"I suppose," I supposed, "that the majority of the planet is stringing
along with the _Phoenix_?"

"Eight to one, the last time a plebiscite was run off," said Chenery
proudly.

"You amaze me." I went on through the paper. It was about 70 per cent
ads, most of them from the Main Street stores we'd passed. The editorial
page had an anti-UP cartoon showing the secretary-general of the UP as
the greasy, affable conductor of a jetbus jammed to the roof with
passengers. A sign on the bus said "Fare, $15,000,000 and up per year."
A road sign pointing in the direction the bus was heading said, "To
Nowhere." The conductor was saying to a small, worried-looking man in a
parka labeled "New Agricultural Planets" that, "There's always room for
one more!!" The outline said: "But is there--and is it worth it?"

The top editorial was a glowing tribute from the _Phoenix_ to the
_Phoenix_ for its pioneering work in yaks, pinned on the shipment that
arrived today. The second editorial was anti-UP, echoing the cartoon and
quoting from the Sirian in the page-one ISN piece.

It was a good, efficient job of the kind that turns a working newsman's
stomach while he admires the technique.

"Well, what do you think of it?" asked Chenery proudly.

I was saved from answering by a _brrp_ from the ethertype.

"GPM FRB GA PLS" it said. "Good-afternoon, Frostbite Bureau--go ahead,
please." What with? I hunted around and found a typed schedule on the
wall that Kennedy had evidently once drawn up in a spasm of activity.

"MIN PLS" I punched out on the ethertype, and studied the sked.

It was quite a document.

    0900-1030: BREAKFAST
    1030-1100: PHONE WEEMS FOR BITCHES RE SVS
    1100-1200: NOTE MARSBUO RE BITCHES
    1200-1330: LUNCH
    1330-1530: RUN DROPS TO WEEMS: GAB WITH CHENERY
    1530-1700: CLIP PHOENIX, REWRITE PUNCH & FILE

    SUNDAYS
    0900-1700: WRITE AND FILE ENTERPRISERS.

Chenery spared my blushes by looking out the window as I read the awful
thing. I hadn't quite realized how low I'd sunk until then.

"Think it's funny?" I asked him--unfairly, I knew. He was being decent.
It was decent of him not to spit in my eye and shove me off the sidewalk
for that matter. I had hit bottom.

He didn't answer. He was embarrassed, and in the damn-fool way people
have of finding a scapegoat I tried to make him feel worse. Maybe if I
rubbed it in real hard he'd begin to feel almost as bad as I did. "I
see," I told him, "that I've wasted a morning. Do you or Weems have any
bitches for me to messenger-boy to Mars?"

"Nothing special," he said. "The way I said, we always like
low-temperature and high-altitude agriculture stuff. And good
farm-and-home material."

"You'll get it," I told him. "And now I see I'm behind clipping and
rewriting and filing stories from your paper."

"Don't take it so hard," he said unhappily. "It's not such a bad place.
I'll have them take your personal stuff to the Hamilton House and the
bureau stuff here. It's the only decent hotel in town except the
_Phoenix_ and that's kind of high--" He saw that I didn't like him
jumping to such accurate conclusions about my pay check and beat it with
an apologetic grimace of a smile.

The ethertype went _brrp_ again and said "GB FRB CU LTR" "Good-by,
Frostbite. See you later." There must have been many days when old
Kennedy was too sick or too sick at heart to rewrite pieces from the
lone client. Then the machine began beating out news items which I'd
tear off eventually and run over to the _Phoenix_.

"Okay, sweetheart," I told the clattering printer. "You'll get copy from
Frostbite. You'll get copy that'll make the whole damned ISN sit up and
take notice--" and I went on kidding myself in that vein for a couple of
minutes but it went dry very soon.

Good God, but they've got me! I thought. If I'm no good on the job
they'll keep me here because there's nothing lower. And if I'm good on
the job they'll keep me here because I'm good at it. Not a chance in a
trillion to _do_ anything that'll get noticed--just plain stuck on a
crummy planet with a crummy political machine that'll never make news in
a million years!

I yanked down Kennedy's library--"YOUR FUTURE ON FROSTBITE," which was a
C. of C. recruiting pamphlet, "MANUAL OF ETHERTYPE MAINTENANCE AND
REPAIR," an ISN house handbook and "THE UNITED PLANETS ORGANIZATION
SECRETARIAT COMMITTEE INTERIM REPORT ON HABIT-FORMING DRUGS IN
INTERPLANETARY COMMERCE," a grey-backed UP monograph that got to
Frostbite God knew how. Maybe Kennedy had planned to switch from home
brew to something that would kill him quicker.

The Chamber of Commerce job gave a thumbnail sketch of my new home.
Frostbite had been colonized about five generations ago for the usual
reason. Somebody had smelled money. A trading company planted a power
reactor--still going strong--at the South Pole in exchange for choice
tracts of land which they'd sold off to homesteaders, all from Earth and
Earth-colonized planets. In fine print the pamphlet gave lip service to
the UP ideal of interspecific brotherhood, _but_--So Frostbite, in
typical hick fashion, thought only genus homo was good enough for its
sacred soil and that all non-human species were more or less alarming
monsters.

I looked at that editorial-page cartoon in the _Phoenix_ again and
really noticed this time that there were Sirians, Venusians, Martians,
Lyrans, and other non-human beings jammed into the jetbus, and that they
were made to look sinister. On my first glance, I'd taken them in
casually, the way you would on Earth or Mars or Vega's Quembrill, but
here they were supposed to scare me stiff and I was supposed to go
around saying, "Now, don't get me wrong, some of my best friends are
Martians, _but_--"

Back to the pamphlet. The trading company suddenly dropped out of the
chronology. By reading between the lines I could figure out that it was
one of the outfits which had over-extended itself planting colonies so
it could have a monopoly hauling to and from the new centers. A lot of
them had gone smash when the Greenhough Effect took interstellar flight
out of the exclusive hands of the supergiant corporations and put it in
the reach of medium-sized operators like the rusty-bucket line that had
hauled in me, the yaks, and the tenpenny nails.

In a constitutional convention two generations back the colonists had
set up a world government of the standard type, with a president, a
unicameral house, and a three-step hierarchy of courts. They'd adopted
the United Planets model code of laws except for the bill of rights--to
keep the slimy extra-terrestrials out--with no thanks to the UP.

And that was it, except for the paean of praise to the independent
farmer, the backbone of his planet, beholden to no man, etc.

I pawed through the ethertype handbook. The introduction told me that
the perfection of instantaneous transmission had opened the farthest
planets to the Interstellar News Service, which I knew; that it was
knitting the colonized universe together with bonds of understanding,
which I doubted; and that it was a boon to all human and non-human
intelligences, which I thought was a bare-faced lie. The rest of it was
"see Fig. 76 3b," "Wire 944 will slip easily through orifice 459j," "if
Knob 545 still refuses to turn, take Wrench 31 and gently, without
forcing--" Nothing I couldn't handle.

The ethertype was beating out:

     FARM--NOTE FROSTBITE
     NOME, ALASKA, EARTH--ISN--HOUSEWIVES OF THE COLDER FARM PLANETS
     WOULD DO WELL TO TAKE A LEAF FROM THE BOOK OF THE PRIMITIVE
     AMERINDIAN SEAMSTRESS. SO SAYS PROFESSOR OF DOMESTIC SCIENCE MADGE
     MCGUINESS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF NOME'S SCHOOL OF LOW-TEMPERATURE
     AGRONOMY. THE INDIAN MAID BY SEWING LONG, NARROW STRIPS OF FUR AND
     BASKET-WEAVING THEM INTO A BLANKET TURNED OUT COVERINGS WITH TWICE
     THE WARMTH AND HALF THE WEIGHT OF FUR ROBES SIMPLY SEWED EDGE TO
     EDGE--

That was my darling, with her incurable weakness for quote leads and the
unspeakable "so says." Ellie Masters, I thought, you're a lousy writer
but I love you and I'd like to wring your neck for helping McGillicuddy
con me into this. "Dig up all sorts of cute feature stories," you told
me and you made it sound sensible. Better I should be under the table at
Blogri's with a hangover and sawdust in my hair than writing little
by-liners about seventeen tasty recipes for yak manure, which is all
that's ever going to come out of this God-forsaken planet.

Rat-Face barged in without knocking; a moronic-looking boy was with him
toting the box of ethertype spare parts.

"Just set it anywhere," I said. "Thanks for getting it right over here.
Uh, Joe, isn't it?--Joe, where could I get me a parka like that? I like
those lines. Real mink?"

It was the one way to his heart. "You betcha. Only plaid mink lining on
Frostbite. Ya notice the lapels? Look!" He turned them forward and
showed me useless little hidden pockets with zippers that looked like
gold.

"I can see you're a man with taste."

"Yeah. Not like some of these bums. If a man's Collector of the Port
he's got a position to live up to. Look, I hope ya didn't get me wrong
there at the field. Nobody told me you were coming. If you're right with
the _Phoenix_ you're right with the Organization. If you're right with
the Organization, you're right with Joe Downing. I'm regular."

He said that last word the way a new bishop might say: "I am
consecrated."

"Glad to hear that. Joe, when could I get a chance to meet some of the
other regular Boys?"

"Ya wanna get In, huh?" he asked shrewdly. "There's been guys here a lot
longer than you, Spencer."

"In, Out," I shrugged. "I want to play it smart. It won't do me any
harm."

He barked with laughter. "Not a bit," he said. "Old man Kennedy didn't
see it that way. You'll get along here. Keep ya nose clean and we'll see
about The Boys." He beckoned the loutish porter and left me to my
musings.

That little rat had killed his man, I thought--but where, why, and for
whom?

I went out into the little corridor and walked into the
"ride-up-and-save" parka emporium that shared the second floor with me.
Leon Portwanger, said the sign on the door. He was a fat old man sitting
cross-legged, peering through bulging shell-rimmed glasses at his needle
as it flashed through fur.

"Mr. Portwanger? I'm the new ISN man, Sam Spencer."

"So?" he grunted, not looking up.

"I guess you knew Kennedy pretty well."

"Never. Never."

"But he was right in front there--"

"Never," grunted the old man. He stuck himself with the needle, swore,
and put his finger in his mouth. "Now see what you made me do?" he said
angrily and indistinctly around the finger. "You shouldn't bother me
when I'm working. Can't you see when a man's working?"

"I'm sorry," I said, and went back into the newsroom. A man as old as
Leon, tailoring as long as Leon, didn't stick himself. He didn't even
wear a thimble--the forefinger was calloused enough to be a thimble
itself. He didn't stick himself unless he was very, very excited--or
unless he wanted to get rid of somebody. I began to wish I hadn't fired
those bottles of Kennedy's home brew down to the incinerator so quickly.

At that point I began a thorough shakedown of the bureau. I found memos
torn from the machine concerning overfiling or failure to file,
clippings from the _Phoenix_, laundry lists, style memos from ISN, paid
bills, blacksheets of letters to Marsbuo requesting a transfer to
practically anywhere but Frostbite, a list of phone numbers and a nasty
space-mailed memo from McGillicuddy.

It said: "Re worldshaker, wll blv whn see. Meanwhile sggst keep closer
sked avoid wastage costly wiretime. Reminder guppy's firstest job
offhead orchidbitches three which bypassed u yestermonth. How? McG."

It was typical of McGillicuddy to memo in cablese. Since news bureaus
began--as "wire services"; see his archaic "wiretime"--their
executives have been memoing underlings in cablese as part of
one-of-the-working-press-Jones-boys act that they affect. They also type
badly so they can slash up their memo with copyreader symbols. This
McGillicuddy did too, of course. The cablese, the bad typing, and the
copy-reading made it just about unintelligible to an outsider.

To me it said that McGillicuddy doubted Kennedy's promise to file a
worldshaking story, that he was sore about Kennedy missing his scheduled
times for filing on the ethertype, and that he was plenty sore about
Kennedy failing to intercept complaints from the client _Phoenix_, three
of which McGillicuddy had been bothered by during the last month.

So old Kennedy had dreamed of filing a worldshaker. I dug further into
the bureau files and the desk drawers, finding only an out of date
"WHO'S WHO IN THE GALAXY." No notes, no plans, no lists of interviewees,
no tipsters--no blacksheet, I realized, of the letter to which
McGillicuddy's cutting memo was a reply.

God only knew what it all meant. I was hungry, sleepy and sick at heart.
I looked up the number of the Hamilton House and found that helpful
little Chenery had got me a reservation and that my luggage had arrived
from the field. I headed for a square meal and my first night in bed for
a week without yaks blatting at me through a thin bulkhead.

       *       *       *       *       *

It wasn't hard to fit in. Frostbite was a swell place to lose your
ambition and acquire a permanent thirst. The sardonic sked posted on the
bureau wall--I had been planning to tear it down for a month, but the
inclination became weaker and weaker. It was so true to life.

I would wake up the Hamilton House, have a skimpy breakfast and get down
to the bureau. Then there'd be a phone conversation with Weems during
which he'd nag me for more and better Frostbite-slant stories. In an
hour of "wiretime" I'd check in with Marsbuo. At first I risked trying
to sneak a chat with Ellie, but the jokers around Marsbuo cured me of
that. One of them pretended he was Ellie on the other end of the wire
and before I caught on had me believing that she was six months pregnant
with a child by McGillicuddy and was going to kill herself for betraying
me. Good clean fun, and after that I stuck to spacemail for my happy
talk.

After lunch, at the Hamilton House or more often in a tavern, I'd tear
up the copy from the printer into neat sheets and deliver them to the
_Phoenix_ building on the better end of Main Street. (If anything big
had come up, I would have phoned them to hold the front page open. If
not, local items filled it, and ISN copy padded out the rest of their
sheet.) As in Kennedy's sked, I gabbed with Chenery or watched the
compositors or proof pullers or transmittermen at work, and then went
back to the office to clip my copy rolling out of the faxer. On a good
day I'd get four or five items--maybe a human interester about a yak
mothering an orphaned baby goat, a new wrinkle on barn insulation with
native materials that the other cold-farming planets we served could
use, a municipal election or a murder trial verdict to be filed just for
the record.

Evenings I spent at a tavern talking and sopping up home brew, or at one
of the two-a-day vaudeville houses, or at the Clubhouse. I once worked
on the Philadelphia _Bulletin_, so the political setup was nothing new
to me. After Joe Downing decided I wouldn't get pushy, he took me around
to meet The Boys.

The Clubhouse was across the street from the three-story capitol
building of Frostbite's World Government. It was a little bigger than
the capitol and in much better repair. Officially it was the
headquarters of the Frostbite Benevolent Society, a charitable, hence
tax-free, organization. Actually it was the headquarters of the
Frostbite Planetary Party, a standard gang of brigands. Down on the
wrong end of Main Street somewhere was an upper room where the Frostbite
Interplanetary Party, made up of liberals, screwballs, and disgruntled
ex-members of the Organization but actually run by stooges of that
Organization, hung out.

The Boys observed an orderly rotation of officers based on seniority.
If you got in at the age of 18, didn't bolt and didn't drop dead
you'd be president some day. To the party you had to bring loyalty,
hard work--not on your payroll job, naturally, but on your
electioneering--and cash. You kept bringing cash all your life; salary
kickbacks, graft kickbacks, contributions for gold dinner services,
tickets to testimonial banquets, campaign chest assignments, widows' and
orphans' fund contributions, burial insurance, and dues, dues, dues.

As usual, it was hard to learn who was who. The President of Frostbite
was a simple-minded old boy named Witherspoon, so far gone in senile
decay that he had come to believe the testimonial-banquet platitudes he
uttered. You could check him off as a wheelhorse. He was serving the
second and last year of his second and last term, and there was a mild
battle going on between his Vice-President and the Speaker of the House
as to who would succeed him. It was a traditional battle and didn't mean
much; whoever lost would be next in line. When one of the contestants
was so old or ill that he might not live to claim his term if he lost,
the scrap would be waived in a spirit of good sportsmanship that the
voters would probably admire if they ever heard of it.

Joe Downing was a comer. His sponsorship of me meant more than the
friendship of Witherspoon would have. He was Chenery's ally; they were
the leadership of the younger, sportier element. Chenery's boss Weems
was with the older crowd that ate more, talked more, and drank less.

I had to join a committee before I heard of George, though. That's the
way those things work.

It was a special committee for organizing a testimonial banquet for
Witherspoon on his 40th year in the party. I wound up in the
subcommittee to determine a testimonial gift for the old buffer. I knew
damned well that we'd be expected to start the subscription for the gift
rolling, so I suggested a handsome--and--inexpensive--illuminated scroll
with a sentiment lettered on it. The others were scandalized. One fat
old woman called me "cheap" and a fat male pay-roller came close to
accusing me of irregularity, at which I was supposed to tremble and
withdraw my suggestion. I stood on my rights, and wrote a minority
report standing up for the scroll while the majority of the subcommittee
agreed on an inscribed sterling tea service.

At the next full committee meeting we delivered our reports and I
thought it would come to a vote right away. But it seemed they weren't
used to there being two opinions about anything. They were flustered,
and the secretary slipped out with both reports during a five-minute
adjournment. He came back and told me, beaming, "Chenery says George
liked your idea." The committee was reconvened and because George liked
my idea my report was adopted and I was appointed a subcommittee of one
to procure the scroll.

I didn't learn any more about George after the meeting except that some
people who liked me were glad I'd been favorably noticed and others were
envious about the triumph of the Johnny-come-lately.

I asked Chenery in the bar. He laughed at my ignorance and said, "George
_Parsons_."

"Publisher of the _Phoenix_? I thought he was an absentee owner."

"He doesn't spend a lot of time on Frostbite. At least I don't think he
does. As a matter of fact, I don't know a lot about his comings and
goings. Maybe Weems does."

"He swings a lot of weight in the Organization."

Chenery looked puzzled. "I guess he does at that. Every once in a while
he does speak up and you generally do what he says. It's the paper, I
suppose. He could wreck any of the boys." Chenery wasn't being
irregular: newsmen are always in a special position.

I went back to the office and, late as it was, sent a note to the desk
to get the one man subcommittee job cleaned up:

     ATTN MCGILLICUDDY RE CLIENT RELATIONS NEED SOONEST ILLUMINATED
     SCROLL PRESENT HOMER WITHERSPOON PRESIDENT FROSTBITE HONORING HIM
     40 YEARS MEMBERSHIP FROSTBITE PLANETARY PARTY USUAL SENTIMENTS NOTE
     MUST BE TERRESTRIAL STYLE ART IF NOT ACTUAL WORK EARTHER ACCOUNT
     ANTIBEM PREJUDICE HERE FRBBUO END.

That happened on one of those Sundays which, according to Kennedy's
sardonic sked, was to be devoted to writing and filing enterprisers.

The scroll came through with a memo from McGillicuddy: "Fyi ckng w/ clnt
etif this gag wll hv ur hide. Reminder guppy's firstest job offheading
orchidbitches one which bypassed u yesterweek. How? McG."

There was a sadly sweet letter from Ellie aboard the same rust-bucket.
She wanted me to come back to her, but not a broken man. She wanted me
to do something really big on Frostbite to show what I had in me. She
was sure that if I really looked there'd be something more to file than
the copy I'd been sending in. Yeah.

Well, the big news that week would be the arrival of a loaded immigrant
ship from Thetis of Procyon, a planet whose ecology had been wrecked
beyond repair in a few short generations by DDT, hydraulic mining,
unrestricted logging, introduction of rabbits and house cats and the use
of poison bait to kill varmints. In a few thousand years maybe the
planet would have topsoil, cover crops, forests, and a balanced animal
population again, but Thetis as of now was a ruin whose population was
streaming away to whatever havens it could find.

Frostbite had agreed to take 500 couples provided they were of
terrestrial descent and could pass a means test--that is, provided
they had money to be fleeced of. They were arriving on a bottom
called _Esmeralda_. According to my year-old "LLOYDS' SHIPPING
INDEX"--"exclusive accurate and up-to-date, being the result of daily
advices from every part of the galaxy"--_Esmeralda_ was owned
by the Frimstedt Atomic Astrogation Company, Gammadion, gross tonnage
830,000, net tonnage 800,000, class GX--"freighter/steerage
passengers"--insurance rating: hull A, atomics A. The tonnage difference
meant real room for only about 850. If she took the full 1,000 she'd be
jammed. She was due to arrive at Frostbite in the very early morning.
Normally I would have kept a deathwatch, but the AA rating lulled me
and I went to the Hamilton House to sleep.

At 4:30, the bedside phone chimed. "This Willie Egan," a frightened
voice said. "You remember--on the desk at the _Phoenix_." Desk, hell--he
was a 17-year-old copyboy I'd tipped to alert me on any hot breaks.

"There's some kind of trouble with the _Esmeralda_," he said. "That big
immigrant ship. They had a welcoming committee out, but the ship's
overdue. I thought there might be a story in it. You got my home
address? You better send the check there. Mr. Weems doesn't like us to
do string work. How much do I get?"

"Depends," I said, waking up abruptly. "Thanks, kid." I was into my
clothes and down the street in five minutes. It looked good; mighty
good.

The ship was overcrowded, the AA insurance rating I had was a year
old--maybe it had gone to pot since then and we'd have a major disaster
on our hands.

I snapped on the newsroom lights and grabbed the desk phone, knocked
down one toggle on the key box and demanded: "Space operator! Space
operator!"

"Yes, sir. Let me have your call, please?"

"Gimme the bridge of the _Esmeralda_ due to dock at the Frostbite
spaceport today. While you're setting up the call gimme interplanetary
and break in when you get the _Esmeralda_."

"Yes, sir." Click-click-click.

"Interplanetary operator."

"Gimme Planet Gammadion. Person-to-person, to the public relations
officer of the Frimstedt Atomic Astrogation Company. No, I don't know
his name. No, I _don't_ know the Gammadion routing. While you're setting
up the call gimme the local operator and break in when you get my
party."

"Yes, sir." Click-click-click.

"Your call, please."

"Person-to-person, captain of the spaceport."

"Yes, sir."

Click-click-click. "Here is _Esmeralda_, sir."

"Who's calling?" yelled a voice. "This is the purser's office, who's
calling?"

"Interstellar News, Frostbite Bureau. What's up about the ship being
late?"

"I can't talk now! Oh, my God! I can't talk now! They're going crazy in
the steerage--" He hung up and I swore a little.

"Space operator!" I yelled. "Get me _Esmeralda_ again--if you can't get
the bridge get the radio shack, the captain's cabin, anything in-board!"

"Yes, sir."

Click-click-click. "Here is your party, sir."

"Captain of the port's office," said the phone.

"This is Interstellar News. What's up about _Esmeralda_? I just talked
to the purser in space and there's some trouble aboard."

"I don't know anything more about it than you boys," said the captain of
the port. But his voice didn't sound right.

"How about those safety-standard stories?" I fired into the dark.

"That's a tomfool rumor!" he exploded. "Her atomics are perfectly safe!"

"Still," I told him, fishing, "it was an engineer's report--"

"Eh? What was? I don't know what you're talking about." He realized he'd
been had. "Other ships have been an hour late before and there are
always rumors about shipping. That's absolutely all I have to
say--absolutely all!" He hung up.

Click-click-click. "Interplanetary operator. I am trying to place your
call, sir." She must be too excited to plug in the right hole on her
switchboard. A Frostbite Gammadion call probably cost more than her
annual salary, and it was a gamble at that on the feeble and
mysteriously erratic sub-radiation that carried voices across segments
of the galaxy.

But there came a faint harumph from the phone. "This is Captain
Gulbransen. Who is calling, please?"

I yelled into the phone respectfully: "Captain Gulbransen, this is
Interstellar News Service on Frostbite." I knew the way conservative
shipping companies have of putting ancient, irritable astrogators into
public-relations berths after they are ripe to retire from space. "I was
wondering, sir," I shouted, "if you'd care to comment on the fact that
_Esmeralda_ is overdue at Frostbite with 1,000 immigrants."

"Young man," wheezed Gulbransen dimly, "it is clearly stated in our
tariffs filed with the ICC that all times of arrival are to be read as
plus or minus eight Terrestrial Hours, and that the company assumes no
liability in such cases as--"

"Excuse me, sir, but I'm aware that the eight-hour leeway is
traditional. But isn't it a fact that the average voyage hits, the
E.T.A. plus or minus only fifteen minutes T.H.?"

"That's so, but--"

"Please excuse me once more, sir--I'd like to ask just one more
question. There is, of course, no reason for alarm in the lateness of
_Esmeralda_, but wouldn't you consider a ship as much as one hour
overdue as possibly in danger? And wouldn't the situation be rather
alarming?"

"Well, one full hour, perhaps you would. Yes, I suppose so--but the
eight-hour leeway, you understand--" I laid the phone down quietly on
the desk and ripped through the _Phoenix_ for yesterday. In the business
section it said "_Esmeralda_ due 0330." And the big clock on the wall
said 0458.

I hung up the phone and sprinted for the ethertype, with the successive
stories clear in my head, ready to be punched and fired off to Marsbuo
for relay on the galactic trunk. I would beat out 15 clanging bells on
the printer and follow them with

     INTERSTELLAR FLASH
     IMMIGRANT SHIP ESMERALDA SCHEDULED TO LAND FROSTBITE WITH 1,000
     FROM THETIS PROCYON ONE AND ONE HALF HOURS OVERDUE: OWNER ADMITS
     SITUATION "ALARMING," CRAFT "IN DANGER."

And immediately after that a five-bell bulletin:

     INTERSTELLAR BULLETIN
     FROSTBITE--THE IMMIGRANT SHIP ESMERALDA, DUE TODAY AT FROSTBITE
     FROM THETIS PROCYON WITH 1,000 STEERAGE PASSENGERS ABOARD IS ONE
     AND ONE HALF HOURS OVERDUE. A SPOKESMAN FOR THE OWNERS, THE
     FRIMSTEDT ATOMIC ASTROGATION COMPANY, SAID SUCH A SITUATION IS
     "ALARMING" AND THAT THE CRAFT MIGHT BE CONSIDERED "IN DANGER."
     ESMERALDA IS AN 830 THOUSAND-TON FREIGHTER-STEERAGE PASSENGER
     CARRIER.

     THE CAPTAIN OF THE PORT AT FROSTBITE ADMITTED THAT THERE HAVE BEEN
     RUMORS CIRCULATING ABOUT THE CONDITION OF THE CRAFTS ATOMICS
     THOUGH THESE WERE RATED "A" ONE YEAR AGO.

     THE PURSER OF THE SPACESHIP, CONTACTED IN SPACE, WAS AGITATED AND
     INCOHERENT WHEN QUESTIONED. HE SAID--

"Get up, Spencer, get away from the machine."

It was Joe Downing, with a gun in his hand.

"I've got a story to file," I said blankly.

"Some other time." He stepped closer to the ethertype and let out a
satisfied grunt when he saw the paper was clean. "Port captain called
me," he said. "Told me you were nosing around."

"Will you get out of here?" I asked, stupefied. "Man, I've flash and
bulletin matter to clear. Let me alone!"

"I said to get away from that machine or I'll cut ya down, boy."

"But why? _Why?_"

"George don't want any big stories out of Frostbite."

"You're crazy. Mr. Parsons is a newsman himself. Put that damn-fool gun
away and let me get this out!"

I turned to the printer when a new voice said, "No! Don't do it, Mr.
Spencer. He is a Nietzschean. He'll kill you, all right. He'll kill you,
all right."

It was Leon Portwanger, the furrier, my neighbor, the man who claimed he
never knew Kennedy. His fat, sagging face, his drooping white mustache,
his sad black eyes enormous behind the bull's-eye spectacles were very
matter-of-fact. He meant what he said. I got up and backed away from the
ethertype.

"I don't understand it," I told them.

"You don't have to understand it," said the rat-faced collector of the
port. "All you have to understand is that George don't like it." He
fired one bullet through the printer and I let out a yelp. I'd felt that
bullet going right through me.

"Don't," the steady voice of the furrier cautioned. I hadn't realized
that I was walking toward Downing and that his gun was now on my middle.
I stopped.

"That's better," said Downing. He kicked the phone connection box off
the baseboard, wires snapping and trailing. "Now go to the Hamilton
House and stay there for a couple of days."

I couldn't get it through my head. "But _Esmeralda's_ a cinch to blow
up," I told him. "It'll be a major space disaster. _Half of them are
women!_ I've got to get it out!"

"I'll take him back to his hotel, Mr. Downing," said Portwanger. He took
my arm in his flabby old hand and led me out while that beautiful flash
and bulletin and the first lead disaster and the new lead disaster went
running through my head to a futile obbligato of: "They can't _do_ this
to me!" But they did it.

Somebody gave me a drink at the hotel and I got sick and a couple of
bellboys helped me to bed. The next thing I knew I was feeling very
clear-headed and wakeful and Chenery was hovering over me looking
worried.

"You've been out cold for forty-eight hours," he said. "You had a high
fever, chills, the works. What happened to you and Downing?"

"How's _Esmeralda_?" I demanded.

"Huh? Exploded about half a million miles off. The atomics went."

"Did anybody get it to ISN for me?"

"Couldn't. Interplanetary phones are out again. You seem to have got the
last clear call through to Gammadion. And you put a bullet through your
ethertype--"

"_I_ did? Like hell--Downing did!"

"Oh? Well, that makes better sense. The fact is, Downing's dead. He went
crazy with that gun of his and Chief Selig shot him. But old Portwanger
said you broke the ethertype when you got the gun away from Downing for
a minute--no, that doesn't make sense. What's the old guy up to?"

"I don't give a damn. You see my pants anywhere? I want to get that
printer fixed."

He helped me dress. I was a little weak on my pins and he insisted on
pouring expensive eggnog into me before he'd let me go to the bureau.

Downing hadn't done much of a job, or maybe you can't do much of a job
on an ethertype without running it through an induction furnace.
Everything comes apart, everything's replaceable. With a lot of thumbing
through the handbook I had all the busted bits and pieces out and new
ones in. The adjustment was harder, needing two pairs of eyes. Chenery
watched the meters while I turned the screws. In about four hours I was
ready to call. I punched out:

     NOTE MARSBUO ISN. FRBBUO RESTORED TO SVC AFTR MECHNCL TRBL
     ETILLNESS.

The machine spat back:

     NOTE FRBBUO. HW ILLNSS COINCDE WTH MJR DISSTR YR TRRTRY? FYI
     GAMMADION BUO ISN OUTRCHD FR ESMERALDA AFTR YR INXPLCBL SLNCE ETWS
     BDLY BTN GAMMADION BUOS COMPTSHN. MCG END.

He didn't want to hear any more about it. I could see him stalking away
from the printer to the copydesk slot to chew his way viciously through
wordage for the major splits. I wished I could see in my mind's eye
Ellie slipping over to the Krueger 60-B circuit sending printer and
punching out a word or two of kindness--the machine stirred again. It
said: "JOE JOE HOW COULD YOU? ELLIE."

Oh, God.

"Leave me alone, will you?" I asked Chenery.

"Sure--sure. Anything you say," he humored me, and slipped out.

I sat for a while at the desk, noticing that the smashed phone
connection had been installed again, that the place had been policed up.

Leon Portwanger came waddling in with a bottle in his hand. "I have here
some prune brandy," he said.

Things began to clear up. "_You_ gave me that mickey," I said slowly.
"And you've been lying about me. You said I wrecked the ethertype."

"You are a determinist and I was trying to save your life," he said,
setting down two glasses and filling them. "Take your choice and I will
have the other. No mickeys." I picked one and gulped it down--nasty,
too-sweet stuff that tasted like plum peelings. He sipped his and seemed
to enjoy it.

"I thought," he said, "that you were in with their gang. What _was_ I to
think? They got rid of poor Kennedy. Pneumonia! You too would have
pneumonia if they drenched you with water and put you on the roof in
your underwear overnight. The bottles were planted here. He used to
drink a little with me, he used to get drunk now and then--so did
I--nothing bad."

"You thought I was in their gang." I said. "What gang are you in?"

"The Frostbite Interplanetary Party," he said wryly. "I would smile with
you if the joke were not on me. I know, I know--we are Outs who want to
be Ins, we are neurotic youngsters, we are led by stooges of the
Planetary Party. So what should I do--start a one-man party alone on a
mountain-top, so pure that I must blackball everybody except myself from
membership? I am an incorrigible reformer and idealist whether I like it
or not--and sometimes, I assure you, I don't like it very well.

"Kennedy was no reformer and idealist. He was a pragmatist, a good man
who wanted a good news story that would incidentally blow the present
administration up. He used me, I used him. He got his story and they
killed him and burglarized the bureau to remove all traces of it. Or did
they?"

"I don't know," I muttered. "Why did you dope me? Did Downing really go
crazy?"

"I poisoned you a little because Downing did _not_ go crazy. Downing was
under orders to keep you from sending out that story. Probably after he
had got you away from the ethertype he would have killed you if I had
not poisoned you with some of my heart medicine. They realized while you
were ill and feverish that it might as well be one as another. If they
killed you, there would only be another newsman sent out to be inveigled
into their gang. If they killed Downing, they could blame everything on
him, you would never be able to have anything more than suspicions,
and--there are a lot more Downings available, are there not?"

My brain began to click. "So your mysterious 'they' didn't want a
top-drawer story to center around Frostbite. If it did, there'd be
follow-ups, more reporters, ICC people investigating the explosion.
Since the news break came from Gammadion, that's where the reporters
would head and that's where the ICC investigation would be based. But
what have they got to hide? The political setup here smells to high
heaven, but it's no worse than on fifty other planets. Graft, liquor,
vice, drugs, gambling--"

"No drugs," said the furrier.

"That's silly," I told him. "Of course they have drugs. With everything
else, why not drugs?"

He shrugged apologetically. "Excuse me," he said. "I told you I was a
reformer and an idealist. I did not mention that I used to be an
occasional user of narcotics. A little something to take the pressure
off--those very small morphine sulphate tablets. You can imagine my
horror when I emigrated to this planet twenty-eight years ago and found
there were no drugs--literally. Believe me when I tell you that
I--_looked hard_. _Now_, of course, I am grateful. But I had a few very
difficult weeks." He shuddered, finished his prune brandy and filled
both our glasses again.

He tossed down his glass.

"Damn it all!" he exploded. "Must I rub your nose in it? Are you going
to figure it out for yourself? And are you going to get killed like my
poor friend, Kennedy? Look here! And here!" He lurched to his feet and
yanked down "WHO'S WHO IN THE GALAXY" and the United Planets Drug
Committee Report.

His pudgy finger pointed to:

"PARSONS, George Warmerdam, organic chemist, news-ppr pubr, b. Gammadion
172, s. Henry and Dolores (Warmerdam) P., studied Gammadion Chem. Inst.
B.Ch 191, M.Ch 193, D.Ch 194; empl. dir research Hawley Mfg
Co.,(Gammadion) 194-198; founded Parsons Chem Mfg Labs (Gammadion) 198,
headed same 198-203; removed Frostbite 203; founded newspaper Frostbite
_Phoenix_ 203. Author, tech papers organ chem 193-196. Mem Univ Organ
Chem Soc. Address c/o Frostbite _Phoenix_, Frostbite."

And in the other book:

"--particular difficulty encountered with the stupefiant known as
'J-K-B.' It was first reported on Gammadion in the year 197, when a few
isolated cases presented themselves for medical treatment. The problem
rapidly worsened through the year 203, by which time the drug was in
widespread illicit interplanetary commerce. The years 203-204 saw a
cutting-off of the supply of J-K-B for reasons unknown. Prices soared to
fantastic levels, unnumbered robberies and murders were committed by
addicts to obtain possession of the minute quantities remaining on the
market, and other addicts, by the hundreds, of thousands presented
themselves to the authorities hoping more or less in vain for a 'cure.'
J-K-B appeared again in the year 205, not confined to any segment of the
inhabited galaxy. Supplies have since remained at a constant
level--enough to brutalize, torment, and shorten the lives of the
several score million terrestrial and extra-terrestrial beings who have
come into its grip. Interrogation of peddlers intercepted with J-K-B has
so far only led back through a seemingly endless chain of middlemen. The
nature of the drug is such that it cannot be analyzed and synthesized--"

My head spun over the damning parallel trails. Where Parsons tried his
wings in chemistry, J-K-B appeared. When he went on his own, the
quantity increased. When he moved to another planet, the supply was cut
off. When he was established, the supply grew to a constant level and
stayed there.

And what could be sweeter than a thoroughly corrupt planet to take over
with his money and his newspaper? Dominate a machine and the members'
"regularity" will lead them to kill for you--or to kill killers if need
be. Encourage planetary ignorance and isolationism; keep the planet
unattractive and depressed by letting your free-booters run
wild--that'll discourage intelligent immigration. Let token parties in,
fleece them fast and close, let them spread the word that Frostbite's no
place for anybody with brains.

"A reformer and idealist I am," said Portwanger calmly. "Not a man of
action. What should be done next?"

I thought it over and told him; "If it kills me, and it might, I am
going to send a rash of flashes and bulletins from this God-forsaken
planet. My love life depends on it. Leon, do you know anybody on Mars?"

"A Sirian fellow named Wenjtkpli--a philosophical anarchist. An unreal
position to take. This is the world we are in, there are certain social
leverages to apply. Who is he to say--?"

I held up my hand. "I know him too." I could taste that eleventh stinger
again; by comparison the prune brandy was mellow. I took a gulp. "Do you
think you could go to Mars without getting bumped off?"

"A man could try."

       *       *       *       *       *

The next two weeks were agonizing. Those Assyrian commissars or Russian
belshazzars or whatever they were who walked down prison corridors
waiting to be shot in the back of the head never went through what I
did. I walked down the corridor for fourteen days.

First Leon got off all right on a bucket of bolts. I had no guarantee
that he wouldn't be plugged by a crew member who was in on the party.
Then there was a period of waiting for the first note that I'd swap you
for a mad tarantula.

It came:

     NOTE FRBBUO HOW HELL XPCT KP CLNT IF UNABL DROP COPY? MCG MARSBUO.

I'd paved the way for that one by drinking myself into a hangover on
home brew and lying in bed and groaning when I should have been
delivering the printer copy to the _Phoenix_. I'd been insulting as
possible to Weems to insure that he'd phone a squawk to McGillicuddy--I
hoped. The tipoff was "hell." Profanity was never, ever used on our
circuits--I hoped. "Hell" meant "Portwanger contacted me, I got the
story, I am notifying United Planets Patrol in utmost secrecy."

Two days later came:

     NOTE FRBBUO BD CHMN WNTS KNO WHT KIND DAMN KNUCKLHED FILING ONLY
     FOURFIVE ITMS DAILY FM XPNSVE ONEMAN BUO. XPCT UPSTEP PRDCTN IMMY,
     RPT IMMY MCG MARSBUO.

"Damn" meant "Patrol contacted, preparing to raid Frostbite." "Fourfive"
meant "fourfive"--days from message.

The next note would have got ISN in trouble with the Interplanetary
Communications Commission if it hadn't been in a good cause. I'm unable
to quote it. But it came as I was in the bureau about to leave for the
Honorable Homer Witherspoon's testimonial banquet. I locked the door,
took off my parka and rolled up my sleeves. I was going to sweat for the
next few hours.

When I heard the multiple roar of the Patrol ships on rockets I very
calmly beat out fifteen bells and sent:

     INTERSTELLAR FLASH
     UNITED PLANETS PATROL DESCENDING ON FROSTBITE, KRUEGER 60-B'S ONLY
     PLANET, IN UNPRECEDENTED MASS RAID ON TIP OF INTERSTELLAR NEWS
     SERVICE THAT WORLD IS SOLE SOURCE OF DEADLY DRUG J-K-B.

     INTERSTELLAR BULLETIN
     THE MASSED PATROL OF THE UNITED PLANETS ORGANIZATION DESCENDED ON
     THE ONLY PLANET OF KRUEGER 60-B, FROSTBITE, IN AN UNPRECEDENTED
     MASS RAID THIS EVENING. ON INFORMATION FURNISHED BY INTERSTELLAR
     NEWS REPORTER JOE SPENCER THE PATROL HOPES TO WIPE OUT THE SOURCE
     OF THE DEADLY DRUG J-K-B, WHICH HAS PLAGUED THE GALAXY FOR 20
     YEARS. THE CHEMICAL GENIUS SUSPECTED OF INVENTING AND PRODUCING THE
     DRUG IS GEORGE PARSONS, RESPECTED PUBLISHER OF FROSTBITE'S ONLY
     NEWSPAPER.

     INTERSTELLAR FLASH
     FIRST UNITED PLANETS PATROL SHIP LANDS IN FROSTBITE CAPITAL CITY OF
     PLANET.

     INTERSTELLAR FLASH
     PATROL COMMANDER PHONES EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW TO INTERSTELLAR NEWS
     SERVICE FROSTBITE BUREAU REPORTING ROUND-UP OF PLANETARY GOVERNMENT
     LEADERS AT TESTIMONIAL DINNER

     (WITH FROSTBITE)
     FROSTBITE--ISN--ONE INTERSTELLAR NEWS REPORTER HAS ALREADY GIVEN
     HIS LIFE IN THE CAMPAIGN TO EXPOSE THE MAKER OF J-K-B. ED KENNEDY,
     ISN BUREAU CHIEF, WAS ASSASSINATED BY AGENTS OF DRUGMAKER GEORGE
     PARSONS THREE MONTHS AGO. AGENTS OF PARSONS STRIPPED KENNEDY AND
     EXPOSED HIM OVERNIGHT TO THE BITTER COLD OF THIS PLANET, CAUSING
     HIS DEATH BY PNEUMONIA. A SECOND INTERSTELLAR NEWS SERVICE
     REPORTER, JOE SPENCER, NARROWLY ESCAPED DEATH AT THE HANDS OF A
     DRUG-RING MEMBER WHO SOUGHT TO PREVENT HIM FROM SENDING NEWS OVER
     THE CIRCUITS OF THE INTERSTELLAR NEWS SERVICE.

     INTERSTELLAR FLASH
     PATROL SEIZES PARSONS

     INTERSTELLAR BULLETIN
     FROSTBITE--IN A TELEPHONE MESSAGE TO INTERSTELLAR NEWS SERVICE A
     PATROL SPOKESMAN SAID GEORGE PARSONS HAD BEEN TAKEN INTO CUSTODY
     AND UNMISTAKABLY IDENTIFIED. PARSONS HAD BEEN LIVING A LIE ON
     FROSTBITE, USING THE NAME CHENERY AND THE GUISE OF A COLUMNIST FOR
     PARSONS' NEWSPAPER. SAID THE PATROL SPOKESMAN;--"IT IS A TYPICAL
     MANEUVER. WE NEVER GOT SO FAR ALONG THE CHAIN OF J-K-B PEDDLERS
     THAT WE NEVER FOUND ONE MORE. APPARENTLY THE SOURCE OF THE DRUG
     HIMSELF THOUGHT HE COULD PUT HIMSELF OUT OF THE REACH OF
     INTERPLANETARY JUSTICE BY ASSUMING A FICTITIOUS PERSONALITY.
     HOWEVER, WE HAVE ABSOLUTELY IDENTIFIED HIM AND EXPECT A CONFESSION
     WITHIN THE HOUR. PARSONS APPEARS TO BE A J-K-B ADDICT HIMSELF."

     INTERSTELLAR FLASH
     PARSONS CONFESSES

     (FIRST LEAD FROSTBITE)
     FROSTBITE--ISN--THE UNITED PLANETS PATROL AND THE INTERSTELLAR NEWS
     SERVICE JOINED HANDS TODAY IN TRIUMPH AFTER WIPING OUT THE MOST
     VICIOUS NEST OF DRUGMAKERS IN THE GALAXY. J-K-B, THE INFAMOUS
     NARCOTIC WHICH HAS MENACED--

I ground out nearly thirty thousand words of copy that night.
Bleary-eyed at the end of the run, I could barely read a note that came
across:

    NOTE FRBBUO: WELL DONE. RETURN MARS IMMY: SNDNG REPLCEMNT. MARSBUO
    MCG.

The Patrol flagship took me back in a quick, smooth trip with lots of
service and no yaks.

After a smooth landing I took an eastbound chair from the field and
whistled as the floater lifted me to the ISN floor. The newsroom was
quiet for a change and the boys and girls stood up for me.

McGillicuddy stepped out from the copy table slot to say: "Welcome back.
Frankly, I didn't think you had it in you, but you proved me wrong.
You're a credit to the profession and the ISN." Portwanger was there,
too. "A pragmatist, your McGillicuddy," he muttered. "But you did a good
job."

I didn't pay very much attention; my eyes were roving over no man's
land. Finally I asked McGillicuddy: "Where's Miss Masters? Day off?"

"How do you like that?" laughed McGillicuddy. "I forgot to tell you.
She's your replacement on Frostbite. Fired her off yesterday. I thought
the woman's angle--where do you think _you're_ going?"

"Honest Blogri's Olde Earthe Saloon," I told him with dignity. "If you
want me, I'll be under the third table from the left as you come in.
With sawdust in my hair."




_The Events Leading Down to the Tragedy_

© 1957, Fantasy House, Inc. for _The Magazine of Fantasy and Science
Fiction_


DOCUMENT ONE

_Being the First Draft of a Paper to be Read before the Tuscarora
Township Historical Society by Mr. Hardeign Spoynte, B.A._

    Madame President, members, guests:

    It is with unabashed pride that I stand before you this evening. You
    will recall from your perusal of our Society's _Bulletin_ (Vol.
    XLII, No. 3, Fall, 1955, pp. 7-8) [pp. correct? check before making
    fair copy. HS] that I had undertaken a research into the origins of
    that event so fraught with consequences to the development of our
    township, the Watling-Fraskell duel. I virtually promised that the
    cause of the fatal strife would be revealed by, so to speak, the
    spotlight of science [metaphor here suff. graceful? perh. "magic"
    better? HS]. I am here to carry out that promise.

    Major Watling _did_ [tell a lie] prevaricate. Colonel Fraskell
    _rightly_ reproached him with mendacity. Perhaps from this day the
    breach between Watlingist and Fraskellite may begin to heal, the
    former honestly acknowledging themselves in error and the latter
    magnanimous in victory.

    My report reflects great credit on a certain modest resident of
    historic old Northumberland County who, to my regret, is evidently
    away on a well-earned vacation from his arduous labors [perh.
    cliché? No. Fine phrase. _Stet!_ HS]. Who he is you will learn in
    good time.

    I shall begin with a survey of known facts relating to the
    Watling-Fraskell duel, and as we are all aware, there is for such a
    quest no starting point better than the monumental work of our late
    learned county historian, Dr. Donge. Donge states (_Old Times on the
    Oquanantic_, 2nd ed., 1873, pp. 771-2): "No less to be deplored than
    the routing of the West Brance Canal to bypass Eleusis was the duel
    in which perished miserably Major Elisha Watling and Colonel Hiram
    Fraskell, those two venerable pioneers of the Oquanantic Valley.
    Though in no way to be compared with the barbarous _blood feuds_ of
    the benighted Southern States of our Union, there has persisted to
    our own day a certain division of loyalty among residents of
    Tuscarora Township and particularly the borough of Eleusis. Do we
    not see elm-shaded Northumberland Street adorned by _two_ gracefully
    pillared bank buildings, one the stronghold of the Fraskellite and
    the other of the Watlingist? Is not the debating society of Eleusis
    Academy sundered annually by the proposition, 'Resolved: that Major
    Elisha Watling (on alternate years, Colonel Hiram Fraskell) was no
    gentleman'? And did not the Watlingist propensities of the Eleusis
    Colonial Dames and the Fraskellite inclination of the Eleusis
    Daughters of the American Revolution 'clash' in September, 1869, at
    the storied Last Joint Lawn Fête during which éclairs and (some say)
    tea cups were hurled?" [Dear old Donge! Prose equal Dr. Johnson!]

    If I may venture to follow those stately periods with my own
    faltering style, it is of course known to us all that the
    controversy has scarcely diminished to the present time. Eleusis
    Academy, famed _alma mater_ (_i.e._, "foster mother") of the
    immortal Hovington[1] is, alas, no more. It expired in flames on the
    tragic night of August 17, 1901, while the Watlingist members of
    that Eleusis Hose Company Number One which was stabled in
    Northumberland Street battled for possession of the fire hydrant
    which might have saved the venerable pile against the members of the
    predominantly Fraskellite Eleusis Hose Company Number One which was
    then stabled in Oquanantic Street. (The confusion of the
    nomenclature is only a part of the duel's bitter heritage.)
    Nevertheless, though the Academy and its Debating Society be gone,
    the youth of Eleusis still carries on the fray in a more modern
    fashion which rises each November to a truly disastrous climax
    during "Football Pep Week" when the "Colonels" of Central High
    School meet in sometimes gory combat with the "Majors" of North Side
    High. I am privately informed by our borough's Supervising
    Principal, George Croud, Ph.B., that last November's bill for
    replacement of broken window panes in both school buildings amounted
    to $231.47, exclusive of state sales tax; and that the two school
    nurses are already "stockpiling" gauze, liniment, disinfectants and
    splints in anticipation of the seemingly inevitable autumnal crop of
    abrasions, lacerations and fractures. [_mem._ Must ask Croud whether
    willing be publ. quoted or "informed source." HS] And the adults of
    Eleusis no less assiduously prosecute the controversy by choice of
    merchants, the granting of credit, and social exclusiveness.

    [Footnote 1: _vide_ Spoynte, H.: "Egney Hovington,
    Nineteenth-Century American Nature Poet, and his career at Eleusis
    Academy, October 4-October 28, 1881" (art.) in _Bull. of the
    Tuscarora Township Hist. Soc._, Vol. XVI, No. 4, Winter, 1929, pp.
    4-18.]

    The need for a determination of the rights and wrongs in the
    _affaire_ Fraskell-Watling is, clearly, no less urgent now than it
    has ever been.

    Dr. Donge, by incredible, indeed almost impossible, labor has proved
    that the issue was one of _veracity_. Colonel Fraskell intimated to
    Joseph Cooper, following a meeting of the Society of the Cincinnati,
    that Major Watling had been, in the words of Cooper's letter of July
    18, 1789, to his brother Puntell in Philadelphia, "drauin [drawing]
    the long Bow."[2]

    [Footnote 2: DONGE, Dr. J.: _supra_, p. 774, _n._]

    O fatal indiscretion! For Puntell Cooper delayed not a week to
    "relay" the intelligence to Major Watling by post, as a newsy
    appendix to his order for cordwood from the major's lot!

    The brief, fatally terminated correspondence between the major and
    the colonel then began; I suppose most of us have it [better change
    to "at least key passages of corresp." HS] committed to memory.

    The first letter offers a tantalizing glimpse. Watling writes to
    Fraskell, _inter alia_: "I said I seen it at the Meetin the Nigh
    before Milkin Time by my Hoss Barn and I seen it are you a Atheist
    Colonel?" It has long been agreed that the masterly conjectural
    emendation of this passage proposed by Miss Stolp in her
    epoch-making paper[3] is the correct one, _i.e._: "I said at the
    meeting [of the Society of the Cincinnati] that I saw it the night
    before [the meeting] at milking time, by my horse barn; and I
    [maintain in the face of your expressions of disbelief that I] saw
    it. Are you an atheist, colonel?"

    [Footnote 3: STOLP, A. DeW.: "Some Textual Problems Relating to the
    Correspondence between Major Elisha Watling and Colonel Hiram
    Fraskell, Eleusis, Pennsylvania, July 27-September 1, 1789" (art.)
    in _Bull. of the Tuscarora Township Hist. Soc._, Vol. IV, No. 1,
    Spring, 1917.]

    There thus appears to have been at the outset of the correspondence
    a clear-cut issue: did or did not Major Watling see "it"? The
    reference to atheism suggests that "it" may have been some
    apparition deemed supernatural by the major, but we know absolutely
    nothing more of what "it" may have been.

    Alas, but the correspondents at once lost sight of the "point." The
    legendary Watling Temper and the formidable Fraskell Pride made it
    certain that one would sooner or later question the gentility of the
    other as they wrangled by post. The fact is that both did so
    simultaneously, on August 20, in letters that crossed. Once this
    stone was hurled [say "these stones"? HS] there was in those days no
    turning back. The circumstance that both parties were simultaneously
    offended and offending perplexed their seconds, and ultimately the
    choice of weapons had to be referred to a third party mutually
    agreeable to the duelists, Judge E. Z. C. Mosh.

    Woe that he chose the deadly Pennsylvania Rifle![4] Woe that the two
    old soldiers knew that dread arm as the husbandman his sickle! At
    six o'clock on the morning of September 1, 1789, the major and the
    colonel expired on the sward behind Brashear's Creek, each shot
    through the heart. The long division of our beloved borough into
    Fraskellite and Watlingist had begun.

    [Footnote 4: Amusingly known to _hoi polloi_ and some who should
    know better as the "Kentucky" Rifle.]

    After this preamble, I come now to the modern part of my tale. It
    begins in 1954, with the purchase of the Haddam property by our
    respected fellow-townsman, that adoptive son of Eleusis, Dr. Gaspar
    Mord. I much regret that Dr. Mord is apparently on an extended
    vacation [where _can_ the man be? HS]; since he is not available
    [confound it! HS] to grant permission, I must necessarily "skirt"
    certain topics, with a plea that to do otherwise might involve a
    violation of confidence. [Positively, there are times when one
    wishes that one were _not_ a gentleman! HS]

    I am quite aware that there was an element in our town which once
    chose to deprecate Dr. Mord, to question his degree, to inquire
    suspiciously into matters which are indubitably his own business and
    no one else's, such as his source of income. This element of which I
    speak came perilously close to sullying the hospitable name of
    Eleusis by calling on Dr. Mord in a delegation afire with the
    ridiculous rumor that the doctor had been "hounded out of Peoria in
    1929 for vivisection."

    Dr. Mord, far from reacting with justified wrath, chose the way of
    the true scientist. He showed this delegation through his laboratory
    to demonstrate that his activities were innocent, and it departed
    singing his praises, so to speak. They were particularly
    enthusiastic about two "phases" of his work which he demonstrated:
    some sort of "waking anaesthesia" gas, and a mechanical device for
    the induction of the hypnotic state.

    I myself called on Dr. Mord as soon as he had settled down, in my
    capacity as President of the Eleusis Committee for the Preservation
    of Local Historical Buildings and Sites. I explained to the good
    doctor that in the parlor of the Haddam house had been formed in
    1861 the Oquanantic Zouaves, that famed regiment of daredevils who
    with zeal and dash guarded the Boston (Massachusetts) Customs House
    through the four sanguinary years of conflict. I expressed the hope
    that the intricate fretsaw work, the stained glass, the elegant
    mansard roof and the soaring central tower would remain mute
    witnesses to the martial glory of Eleusis, and not fall victim to
    the "remodeling" craze.

    Dr. Mord, with his characteristic smile (its first effect is
    unsettling, I confess, but when one later learns of the kindly
    intentions behind it, one grows accustomed to his face) replied
    somewhat irrelevantly by asking whether I had any dependents. He
    proceeded to a rather searching inquiry, explaining that as a man of
    science he liked to be sure of his facts. I advised him that I
    understood, diffidently mentioning that I was no stranger to
    scientific rigor, my own grandfather having published a massive
    _Evidences for the Phlogiston Theory of Heat_.[5] Somehow the
    interview concluded with Dr. Mord asking: "Mr. Spoynte, what do you
    consider your greatest contribution to human knowledge and welfare,
    and do you suppose that you will ever surpass that contribution?"

    [Footnote 5: Generally considered the last word on the subject
    though, as I understand it, somewhat eclipsed at present by the
    flashy and mystical "molecular theory" of the notorious Tory
    sympathizer and renegade Benjamin Thompson, styled "Count" Rumford.
    "A fool can always find a bigger fool to admire him." [Quote in
    orig. French? Check source and exact text. HS]]

    I replied after consideration that no doubt my "high water mark" was
    my discovery of the 1777 Order Book of the Wyalusing Militia Company
    in the basement of the Spodder Memorial Library, where it had been
    lost to sight for thirty-eight years after being misfiled under
    "Indian Religions (Local)." To the second part of his question I
    could only answer that it was given to few men twice to perform so
    momentous a service to scholarship.

    On this odd note we parted; it occurred to me as I wended my way
    home that I had not succeeded in eliciting from the doctor a reply
    as to his intentions of preserving intact the Haddam house! But he
    "struck" me as an innately conservative person, and I had little
    real fear of the remodeler's ruthless hammer and saw.

    This impression was reinforced during the subsequent month, for the
    doctor intimated that he would be pleased to have me call on him
    Thursday evenings for a chat over the coffee cups.

    These chats were the customary conversations of two learned men of
    the world, skimming lightly over knowledge's whole domain. Once, for
    example, Dr. Mord amusingly theorized that one of the most difficult
    things in the world for a private person to do was to find a
    completely useless human being. The bad men were in prison or
    hiding, he explained, and when one investigated the others it always
    turned out that they had some redeeming quality or usefulness to
    somebody. "Almost always," he amended with a laugh. At other times
    he would question me deeply about my life and activities, now and
    then muttering: "I must be sure; I must be _sure_"--typical of his
    scientist's passion for precision. Yet again, he would speak of the
    glorious Age of Pericles, saying fervently: "Spoynte, I would give
    anything, do anything, to look upon ancient Athens in its flower!"

    Now, I claim no genius inspired my rejoinder. I was merely "the
    right man in the right place." I replied: "Dr. Mord, your wish to
    visit ancient Athens could be no more fervent than mine to visit
    Major Watling's horse barn at milking time the evening of July 17,
    1789."

    I must, at this point, [confound it! I am _sure_ Dr. M. would give
    permission to elaborate if he were only here! HS] drop an
    impenetrable veil of secrecy over certain episodes, for reasons
    which I have already stated.

    I am, however, in a position to state with absolute authority _that
    there was_ NO _apparition at Major Watling's horse barn at milking
    time the evening of_--

    [Steady on, Hardeign. Think. Think. Major W. turned. I looked about.
    No apparitions, spooks, goblins. Just Major W. and myself. He looked
    at me and made a curious sort of face. No. Nonono. Can't be. Oh, my
    God! _I_ was the--Fault all mine. Duel, feud. Traitor to dear
    Eleusis. Feel _sick_. HS]

       *       *       *       *       *

DOCUMENT TWO

_Being a note delivered by Mrs. Irving McGuinness, Domestic, to Miss
Agnes DeW. Stolp, President, the Tuscarora Township Historical Society._

    "The Elms"
    Wednesday

    Dear Miss Stolp,

    Pray forgive my failure to attend the last meeting of the Society to
    read my paper. I was writing the last words when--I can tell you no
    more. Young Dr. Scantt has been in constant attendance at my
    bedside, and my temperature has not fallen below 99.8 degrees in the
    past 48 hours. I have been, I am, a sick and suffering man. I
    abjectly hope that you and everybody in Eleusis will bear this in
    mind if certain facts should come to your attention.

    I cannot close without a warning against that rascal, "Dr." Gaspar
    Mord. A pledge prevents me from entering into details, but I urge
    you, should he dare to rear his head in Eleusis again, to hound him
    out of town as he was hounded out of Peoria in 1929. _Verbum
    sapientibus satis._

    Hardeign Spoynte




The Little Black Bag

Copyright 1950 by Street and Smith Publications, Inc. for _Astounding
Science Fiction_.


Old Dr. Full felt the winter in his bones as he limped down the alley.
It was the alley and the back door he had chosen rather than the
sidewalk and the front door because of the brown paper bag under his
arm. He knew perfectly well that the flat-faced, stringy-haired women of
his street and their gap-toothed, sour-smelling husbands did not notice
if he brought a bottle of cheap wine to his room. They all but lived on
the stuff themselves, varied with whiskey when pay checks were boosted
by overtime. But Dr. Full, unlike them, was ashamed. A complicated
disaster occurred as he limped down the littered alley. One of the
neighborhood dogs--a mean little black one he knew and hated, with its
teeth always bared and always snarling with menace--hurled at his legs
through a hole in the board fence that lined his path. Dr. Full
flinched, then swung his leg in what was to have been a satisfying kick
to the animal's gaunt ribs. But the winter in his bones weighed down the
leg. His foot failed to clear a half-buried brick, and he sat down
abruptly, cursing. When he smelled unbottled wine and realized his brown
paper package had slipped from under his arm and smashed, his curses
died on his lips. The snarling black dog was circling him at a yard's
distance, tensely stalking, but he ignored it in the greater disaster.

With stiff fingers as he sat on the filth of the alley, Dr. Full
unfolded the brown paper bag's top, which had been crimped over,
grocer-wise. The early autumnal dusk had come; he could not see plainly
what was left. He lifted out the jug-handled top of his half gallon, and
some fragments, and then the bottom of the bottle. Dr. Full was far too
occupied to exult as he noted that there was a good pint left. He had a
problem, and emotions could be deferred until the fitting time.

The dog closed in, its snarl rising in pitch. He set down the bottom of
the bottle and pelted the dog with the curved triangular glass fragments
of its top. One of them connected, and the dog ducked back through the
fence, howling. Dr. Full then placed a razor-like edge of the
half-gallon bottle's foundation to his lips and drank from it as though
it were a giant's cup. Twice he had to put it down to rest his arms, but
in one minute he had swallowed the pint of wine.

He thought of rising to his feet and walking through the alley to his
room, but a flood of well-being drowned the notion. It was, after all,
inexpressibly pleasant to sit there and feel the frost-hardened mud of
the alley turn soft, or seem to, and to feel the winter evaporating from
his bones under a warmth which spread from his stomach through his
limbs.

A three-year-old girl in a cut-down winter coat squeezed through the
same hole in the board fence from which the black dog had sprung its
ambush. Gravely she toddled up to Dr. Full and inspected him with her
dirty forefinger in her mouth. Dr. Full's happiness had been
providentially made complete; he had been supplied with an audience.

"Ah, my dear," he said hoarsely. And then: "Preposserous accusation. 'If
that's what you call evidence,' I should have told them, 'you better
stick to your doctoring.' I should have told them: 'I was here before
your County Medical Society. And the License Commissioner never proved a
thing on me. So, gennulmen, doesn't it stand to reason? I appeal to you
as fellow memmers of a great profession--'"

The little girl, bored, moved away, picking up one of the triangular
pieces of glass to play with as she left. Dr. Full forgot her
immediately, and continued to himself earnestly: "But so help me, they
_couldn't_ prove a thing. Hasn't a man got any _rights_?" He brooded
over the question, of whose answer he was so sure, but on which the
Committee on Ethics of the County Medical Society had been equally
certain. The winter was creeping into his bones again, and he had no
money and no more wine.

Dr. Full pretended to himself that there was a bottle of whiskey
somewhere in the fearful litter of his room. It was an old and cruel
trick he played on himself when he simply had to be galvanized into
getting up and going home. He might freeze there in the alley. In his
room he would be bitten by bugs and would cough at the moldy reek from
his sink, but he would not freeze and be cheated of the hundreds of
bottles of wine that he still might drink, the thousands of hours of
glowing content he still might feel. He thought about that bottle of
whiskey--was it back of a mounded heap of medical journals? No; he had
looked there last time. Was it under the sink, shoved well to the rear,
behind the rusty drain? The cruel trick began to play itself out again.
Yes, he told himself with mounting excitement, yes, it might be! Your
memory isn't so good nowadays, he told himself with rueful
good-fellowship. You know perfectly well you might have bought a bottle
of whiskey and shoved it behind the sink drain for a moment just like
this.

The amber bottle, the crisp snap of the sealing as he cut it, the
pleasurable exertion of starting the screw cap on its threads, and then
the refreshing tangs in his throat, the warmth in his stomach, the dark,
dull happy oblivion of drunkenness--they became real to him. You _could_
have, you know! You _could_ have! he told himself. With the blessed
conviction growing in his mind--It _could_ have happened, you know! It
_could_ have!--he struggled to his right knee. As he did, he heard a
yelp behind him, and curiously craned his neck around while resting. It
was the little girl, who had cut her hand quite badly on her toy, the
piece of glass. Dr. Full could see the rilling bright blood down her
coat, pooling at her feet.

He almost felt inclined to defer the image of the amber bottle for her,
but not seriously. He knew that it was there, shoved well to the rear
under the sink, behind the rusty drain where he had hidden it. He would
have a drink and then magnanimously return to help the child. Dr. Full
got to his other knee and then his feet, and proceeded at a rapid totter
down the littered alley toward his room, where he would hunt with calm
optimism at first for the bottle that was not there, then with anxiety,
and then with frantic violence. He would hurl books and dishes about
before he was done looking for the amber bottle of whiskey, and finally
would beat his swollen knuckles against the brick wall until old scars
on them opened and his thick old blood oozed over his hands. Last of
all, he would sit down somewhere on the floor, whimpering, and would
plunge into the abyss of purgative nightmare that was his sleep.

After twenty generations of shilly-shallying and "we'll cross that
bridge when we come to it," genus homo had bred himself into an impasse.
Dogged biometricians had pointed out with irrefutable logic that mental
subnormals were outbreeding mental normals and supernormals, and that
the process was occurring on an exponential curve. Every fact that could
be mustered in the argument proved the biometricians' case, and led
inevitably to the conclusion that genus homo was going to wind up in a
preposterous jam quite soon. If you think that had any effect on
breeding practices, you do not know genus homo.

There was, of course, a sort of masking effect produced by that other
exponential function, the accumulation of technological devices. A moron
trained to punch an adding machine seems to be a more skillful computer
than a medieval mathematician trained to count on his fingers. A moron
trained to operate the twenty-first century equivalent of a linotype
seems to be a better typographer than a Renaissance printer limited to a
few fonts of movable type. This is also true of medical practice.

It was a complicated affair of many factors. The supernormals "improved
the product" at greater speed than the subnormals degraded it, but in
smaller quantity because elaborate training of their children was
practiced on a custom-made basis. The fetish of higher education had
some weird avatars by the twentieth generation: "colleges" where not a
member of the student body could read words of three syllables;
"universities" where such degrees as "Bachelor of Typewriting," "Master
of Shorthand" and "Doctor of Philosophy (Card Filing)" were conferred
with the traditional pomp. The handful of supernormals used such devices
in order that the vast majority might keep some semblance of a social
order going.

Some day the supernormals would mercilessly cross the bridge; at the
twentieth generation they were standing irresolutely at its approaches
wondering what had hit them. And the ghosts of twenty generations of
biometricians chuckled malignantly.

It is a certain Doctor of Medicine of this twentieth generation that we
are concerned with. His name was Hemingway--John Hemingway, B.Sc., M.D.
He was a general practitioner, and did not hold with running to
specialists with every trifling ailment. He often said as much, in
approximately these words: "Now, uh, what I mean is you got a good old
G.P. See what I mean? Well, uh, now a good old G.P. don't claim he knows
all about lungs and glands and them things, get me? But you got a G.P.,
you got, uh, you got a, well, you got a ... _all-around man!_ That's
what you got when you got a G.P.--you got a all-around man."

But from this, do not imagine that Dr. Hemingway was a poor doctor. He
could remove tonsils or appendixes, assist at practically any
confinement and deliver a living, uninjured infant, correctly diagnose
hundreds of ailments, and prescribe and administer the correct
medication or treatment for each. There was, in fact, only one thing he
could not do in the medical line, and that was, violate the ancient
canons of medical ethics. And Dr. Hemingway knew better than to try.

Dr. Hemingway and a few friends were chatting one evening when the event
occurred that precipitates him into our story. He had been through a
hard day at the clinic, and he wished his physicist friend Walter
Gillis, B.Sc., M.Sc., Ph.D., would shut up so he could tell everybody
about it. But Gillis kept rambling on, in his stilted fashion: "You got
to hand it to old Mike; he don't have what we call the scientific
method, but you got to hand it to him. There this poor little dope is,
puttering around with some glassware and I come up and I ask him,
kidding of course, 'How's about a time-travel machine, Mike?'"

Dr. Gillis was not aware of it, but "Mike" had an I.Q. six times his
own, and was--to be blunt--his keeper. "Mike" rode herd on the
pseudo-physicists in the pseudo-laboratory, in the guise of a
bottle-washer. It was a social waste--but as has been mentioned before,
the supernormals were still standing at the approaches to a bridge.
Their irresolution led to many such preposterous situations. And it
happens that "Mike," having grown frantically bored with his task, was
malevolent enough to--but let Dr. Gillis tell it:

"So he gives me these here tube numbers and says, 'Series circuit. Now
stop bothering me. Build your time machine, sit down at it and turn on
the switch. That's all I ask, Dr. Gillis--that's all I ask.'"

"Say," marveled a brittle and lovely blond guest, "you remember real
good, don't you, doc?" She gave him a melting smile.

"Heck," said Gillis modestly, "I always remember good. It's what you
call an inherent facility. And besides I told it quick to my secretary,
so she wrote it down. I don't read so good, but I sure remember good,
all right. Now, where was I?"

Everybody thought hard, and there were various suggestions:

"Something about bottles, doc?"

"You was starting a fight. You said 'time somebody was traveling.'"

"Yeah--you called somebody a swish. Who did you call a swish?"

"Not swish--_switch_."

Dr. Gillis' noble brow grooved with thought, and he declared: "Switch is
right. It was about time travel. What we call travel through time. So I
took the tube numbers he gave me and I put them into the
circuit-builder; I set it for 'series' and there it is--my
time-traveling machine. It travels things through time real good." He
displayed a box.

"What's in the box?" asked the lovely blond.

Dr. Hemingway told her: "Time travel. It travels things through time."

"Look," said Gillis, the physicist. He took Dr. Hemingway's little black
bag and put it on the box. He turned on the switch and the little black
bag vanished.

"Say," said Dr. Hemingway, "that was, uh, swell. Now bring it back."

"Huh?"

"Bring back my little black bag."

"Well," said Dr. Gillis, "they don't come back. I tried it backwards and
they don't come back. I guess maybe that dummy Mike give me a bum
steer."

There was wholesale condemnation of "Mike" but Dr. Hemingway took no
part in it. He was nagged by a vague feeling that there was something he
would have to do. He reasoned: "I am a doctor, and a doctor has got to
have a little black bag. I ain't got a little black bag--so ain't I a
doctor no more?" He decided that this was absurd. He _knew_ he was a
doctor. So it must be the bag's fault for not being there. It was no
good, and he would get another one tomorrow from that dummy Al, at the
clinic. Al could find things good, but he was a dummy--never liked to
talk sociable to you.

So the next day Dr. Hemingway remembered to get another little black bag
from his keeper--another little black bag with which he could perform
tonsillectomies, appendectomies and the most difficult confinements, and
with which he could diagnose and cure his kind until the day when the
supernormals could bring themselves to cross that bridge. Al was kinda
nasty about the missing little black bag, but Dr. Hemingway didn't
exactly remember what had happened, so no tracer was sent out, so--

       *       *       *       *       *

Old Dr. Full awoke from the horrors of the night to the horrors of the
day. His gummy eyelashes pulled apart convulsively. He was propped
against a corner of his room, and something was making a little drumming
noise. He felt very cold and cramped. As his eyes focused on his lower
body, he croaked out a laugh. The drumming noise was being made by his
left heel, agitated by fine tremors against the bare floor. It was going
to be the D.T.'s again, he decided dispassionately. He wiped his mouth
with his bloody knuckles, and the fine tremor coarsened; the snare-drum
beat became louder and slower. He was getting a break this fine morning,
he decided sardonically. You didn't get the horrors until you had been
tightened like a violin string, just to the breaking point. He had a
reprieve, if a reprieve into his old body with the blazing, endless
headache just back of the eyes and the screaming stiffness in the joints
were anything to be thankful for.

There was something or other about a kid, he thought vaguely. He was
going to doctor some kid. His eyes rested on a little black bag in the
center of the room, and he forgot about the kid. "I could have sworn,"
said Dr. Full, "I hocked that two years ago!" He hitched over and
reached the bag, and then realized it was some stranger's kit, arriving
here he did not know how. He tentatively touched the lock and it snapped
open and lay flat, rows and rows of instruments and medications tucked
into loops in its four walls. It seemed vastly larger open than closed.
He didn't see how it could possibly fold up into that compact size
again, but decided it was some stunt of the instrument makers. Since his
time--that made it worth more at the hock shop, he thought with
satisfaction.

Just for old times' sake, he let his eyes and fingers rove over the
instruments before he snapped the bag shut and headed for Uncle's. More
than a few were a little hard to recognize--exactly that is. You could
see the things with blades for cutting, the forceps for holding and
pulling, the retractors for holding fast, the needles and gut for
suturing, the hypos--a fleeting thought crossed his mind that he could
peddle the hypos separately to drug addicts.

Let's go, he decided, and tried to fold up the case. It didn't fold
until he happened to touch the lock, and then it folded all at once into
a little black bag. Sure have forged ahead, he thought, almost able to
forget that what he was primarily interested in was its pawn value.

With a definite objective, it was not too hard for him to get to his
feet. He decided to go down the front steps, out the front door and down
the sidewalk. But first--

He snapped the bag open again on his kitchen table, and pored through
the medication tubes. "Anything to sock the autonomic nervous system
good and hard," he mumbled. The tubes were numbered, and there was a
plastic card which seemed to list them. The left margin of the card was
a rundown of the systems--vascular, muscular, nervous. He followed the
last entry across to the right. There were columns for "stimulant,"
"depressant," and so on. Under "nervous system" and "depressant" he
found the number 17, and shakily located the little glass tube which
bore it. It was full of pretty blue pills and he took one.

It was like being struck by a thunderbolt.

Dr. Full had so long lacked any sense of well-being except the brief
glow of alcohol that he had forgotten its very nature. He was
panic-stricken for a long moment at the sensation that spread through
him slowly, finally tingling in his fingertips. He straightened up, his
pains gone and his leg tremor stilled.

That was great, he thought. He'd be able to _run_ to the hock shop, pawn
the little black bag and get some booze. He started down the stairs. Not
even the street, bright with mid-morning sun, into which he emerged made
him quail. The little black bag in his left hand had a satisfying,
authoritative weight. He was walking erect, he noted, and not in the
somewhat furtive crouch that had grown on him in recent years. A little
self-respect, he told himself, that's what I need. Just because a man's
down doesn't mean--

"Docta, please-a come with'!--" somebody yelled at him, tugging his arm.
"Da litt-la girl, she's-a burn' up!" It was one of the slum's
innumberable flat-faced, stringy-haired women, in a slovenly wrapper.

"Ah, I happen to be retired from practice--" he began hoarsely, but she
would not be put off.

"In by here, Docta!" she urged, tugging him to a doorway. "You come
look-a da litt-la girl. I got two dolla, you come look!" That put a
different complexion on the matter. He allowed himself to be towed
through the doorway into a mussy, cabbage-smelling flat. He knew the
woman now, or rather knew who she must be--a new arrival who had moved
in the other night These people moved at night, in motorcades of
battered cars supplied by friends and relations, with furniture lashed
to the tops, swearing and drinking until the small hours. It explained
why she had stopped him: she did not yet know he was old Dr. Full, a
drunken reprobate whom nobody would trust. The little black bag had been
his guarantee, outweighing his whiskery face and stained black suit.

He was looking down on a three-year-old girl who had, he rather
suspected, just been placed in the mathematical center of a freshly
changed double bed. God knew what sour and dirty mattress she usually
slept on. He seemed to recognize her as he noted a crusted bandage on
her right hand. Two dollars, he thought--An ugly flush had spread up her
pipe-stem arm. He poked a finger into the socket of her elbow, and felt
little spheres like marbles under the skin and ligaments roll apart. The
child began to squall thinly; beside him, the woman gasped and began to
weep herself.

"Out," he gestured briskly at her, and she thudded away, still sobbing.

Two dollars, he thought--Give her some mumbo jumbo, take the money and
tell her to go to a clinic. Strep, I guess, from that stinking alley.
It's a wonder any of them grow up. He put down the little black bag and
forgetfully fumbled for his key, then remembered and touched the lock.
It flew open, and he selected a bandage shears, with a blunt wafer for
the lower jaw. He fitted the lower jaw under the bandage, trying not to
hurt the kid by its pressure on the infection, and began to cut. It was
amazing how easily and swiftly the shining shears snipped through the
crusty rag around the wound. He hardly seemed to be driving the shears
with fingers at all. It almost seemed as though the shears were driving
his fingers instead as they scissored a clean, light line through the
bandage.

Certainly have forged ahead since my time, he thought--sharper than a
microtome knife. He replaced the shears in their loop on the
extraordinarily big board that the little black bag turned into when it
unfolded, and leaned over the wound. He whistled at the ugly gash, and
the violent infection which had taken immediate root in the sickly
child's thin body. Now what can you do with a thing like that? He pawed
over the contents of the little black bag, nervously. If he lanced it
and let some of the pus out, the old woman would think he'd done
something for her and he'd get the two dollars. But at the clinic they'd
want to know who did it and if they got sore enough they might send a
cop around. Maybe there was something in the kit--

He ran down the left edge of the card to "lymphatic" and read across to
the column under "infection." It didn't sound right at all to him; he
checked again, but it still said that. In the square to which the line
and column led were the symbols: "IV-g-3cc." He couldn't find any
bottles marked with Roman numerals, and then noticed that that was how
the hypodermic needles were designated. He lifted number IV from its
loop, noting that it was fitted with a needle already and even seemed to
be charged. What a way to carry those things around! So--three cc. of
whatever was in hypo number IV ought to do something or other about
infections settled in the lymphatic system--which, God knows, this one
was. What did the lower-case "g" mean, though? He studied the glass hypo
and saw letters engraved on what looked like a rotating disk at the top
of the barrel. They ran from "a" to "i," and there was an index line
engraved on the barrel on the opposite side from the calibrations.

Shrugging, old Dr. Full turned the disk until "g" coincided with the
index line, and lifted the hypo to eye level. As he pressed in the
plunger he did not see the tiny thread of fluid squirt from the tip of
the needle. There was a sort of dark mist for a moment about the tip. A
closer inspection showed that the needle was not even pierced at the
tip. It had the usual slanting cut across the bias of the shaft, but the
cut did not expose an oval hole. Baffled, he tried pressing the plunger
again. Again _something_ appeared around the tip and vanished. "We'll
settle this," said the doctor. He slipped the needle into the skin of
his forearm. He thought at first that he had missed--that the point had
glided over the top of his skin instead of catching and slipping under
it. But he saw a tiny blood-spot and realized that somehow he just
hadn't felt the puncture. Whatever was in the barrel, he decided,
couldn't do him any harm if it lived up to its billing--and if it could
come out through a needle that had no hole. He gave himself three cc.
and twitched the needle out. There was the swelling--painless, but
otherwise typical.

Dr. Full decided it was his eyes or something, and gave three cc. of "g"
from hypodermic IV to the feverish child. There was no interruption to
her wailing as the needle went in and the swelling rose. But a long
instant later, she gave a final gasp and was silent.

Well, he told himself, cold with horror, you did it that time. You
killed her with that stuff.

Then the child sat up and said: "Where's my mommy?"

Incredulously, the doctor seized her arm and palpated the elbow. The
gland infection was zero, and the temperature seemed normal. The
blood-congested tissues surrounding the wound were subsiding as he
watched. The child's pulse was stronger and no faster than a child's
should be. In the sudden silence of the room he could hear the little
girl's mother sobbing in her kitchen, outside. And he also heard a
girl's insinuating voice:

"She gonna be O.K., doc?"

He turned and saw a gaunt-faced, dirty-blond sloven of perhaps eighteen
leaning in the doorway and eying him with amused contempt. She
continued: "I heard about you, _Doc-tor_ Full. So don't go try and put
the bite on the old lady. You couldn't doctor up a sick cat."

"Indeed?" he rumbled. This young person was going to get a lesson she
richly deserved. "Perhaps you would care to look at my patient?"

"Where's my mommy?" insisted the little girl, and the blond's jaw fell.
She went to the bed and cautiously asked: "You O.K. now, Teresa? You all
fixed up?"

"Where's my mommy?" demanded Teresa. Then, accusingly, she gestured with
her wounded hand at the doctor. "You _poke_ me!" she complained, and
giggled pointlessly.

"Well--" said the blond girl, "I guess I got to hand it to you, doc.
These loud-mouth women around here said you didn't know your ... I
mean, didn't know how to cure people. They said you ain't a real
doctor."

"I _have_ retired from practice," he said. "But I happened to be taking
this case to a colleague as a favor, your good mother noticed me, and--"
a deprecating smile. He touched the lock of the case and it folded up
into the little black bag again.

"You stole it," the girl said flatly.

He sputtered.

"Nobody'd trust you with a thing like that. It must be worth plenty. You
stole that case. I was going to stop you when I come in and saw you
working over Teresa, but it looked like you wasn't doing her any harm.
But when you give me that line about taking that case to a colleague I
know you stole it. You gimme a cut or I go to the cops. A thing like
that must be worth twenty-thirty dollars."

The mother came timidly in, her eyes red. But she let out a whoop of joy
when she saw the little girl sitting up and babbling to herself,
embraced her madly, fell on her knees for a quick prayer, hopped up to
kiss the doctor's hand, and then dragged him into the kitchen, all the
while rattling in her native language while the blond girl let her eyes
go cold with disgust. Dr. Full allowed himself to be towed into the
kitchen, but flatly declined a cup of coffee and a plate of anise cakes
and St. John's Bread.

"Try him on some wine, ma," said the girl sardonically.

"Hyass! Hyass!" breathed the woman delightedly. "You like-a wine,
docta?" She had a carafe of purplish liquid before him in an instant,
and the blond girl snickered as the doctor's hand twitched out at it. He
drew his hand back, while there grew in his head the old image of how it
would smell and then taste and then warm his stomach and limbs. He made
the kind of calculation at which he was practiced; the delighted woman
would not notice as he downed two tumblers, and he could overawe her
through two tumblers more with his tale of Teresa's narrow brush with
the Destroying Angel, and then--why, then it would not matter. He would
be drunk.

But for the first time in years, there was a sort of counter-image: a
blend of the rage he felt at the blond girl to whom he was so
transparent, and of pride at the cure he had just effected. Much to his
own surprise, he drew back his hand from the carafe and said,
luxuriating in the words: "No, thank you. I don't believe I'd care for
any so early in the day." He covertly watched the blond girl's face, and
was gratified at her surprise. Then the mother was shyly handing him two
bills and saying: "Is no much-a money, docta--but you come again, see
Teresa?"

"I shall be glad to follow the case through," he said. "But now excuse
me--I really must be running along." He grasped the little black bag
firmly and got up; he wanted very much to get away from the wine and the
older girl.

"Wait up, doc," said she, "I'm going your way." She followed him out and
down the street. He ignored her until he felt her hand on the black bag.
Then old Dr. Full stopped and tried to reason with her:

"Look, my dear. Perhaps you're right. I might have stolen it. To be
perfectly frank, I don't remember how I got it. But you're young and you
can earn your own money--"

"Fifty-fifty," she said, "or I go to the cops. And if I get another word
outta you, it's sixty-forty. And you know who gets the short end, don't
you, doc?"

Defeated, he marched to the pawnshop, her impudent hand still on the
handle with his, and her heels beating out a tattoo against his stately
tread.

In the pawnshop, they both got a shock.

"It ain't stendard," said Uncle, unimpressed by the ingenious lock. "I
ain't nevva seen one like it. Some cheap Jap stuff, maybe? Try down the
street. This I nevva could sell."

Down the street they got an offer of one dollar. The same complaint was
made: "I ain't a collecta, mista--I buy stuff that got resale value. Who
could I sell this to, a Chinaman who don't know medical instruments?
Every one of them looks funny. You sure you didn't make these yourself?"
They didn't take the one-dollar offer.

The girl was baffled and angry; the doctor was baffled too, but
triumphant. He had two dollars, and the girl had a half-interest in
something nobody wanted. But, he suddenly marveled, the thing had been
all right to cure the kid, hadn't it?

"Well," he asked her, "do you give up? As you see, the kit is
practically valueless."

She was thinking hard. "Don't fly off the handle, doc. I don't get this
but something's going on all right ... would those guys know good stuff
if they saw it?"

"They would. They make a living from it. Wherever this kit came from--"

She seized on that, with a devilish faculty she seemed to have of
eliciting answers without asking questions. "I thought so. You don't
know either, huh? Well, maybe I can find out for you. C'mon in here. I
ain't letting go of that thing. There's money in it--some way, I don't
know how, there's money in it." He followed her into a cafeteria and to
an almost-empty corner. She was oblivious to stares and snickers from
the other customers as she opened the little black bag--it almost
covered a cafeteria table--and ferreted through it. She picked out a
retractor from a loop, scrutinized it, contemptuously threw it down,
picked out a speculum, threw it down, picked out the lower half of an
O.B. forceps, turned it over, close to her sharp young eyes--and saw
what the doctor's dim old ones could not have seen.

All old Dr. Full knew was that she was peering at the neck of the
forceps and then turned white. Very carefully, she placed the half of
the forceps back in its loop of cloth and then replaced the retractor
and the speculum. "Well?" he asked. "What did you see?"

"'Made in U.S.A.,'" she quoted hoarsely. "'Patent Applied for July
2450.'"

He wanted to tell her she must have misread the inscription, that it
must be a practical joke, that--

But he knew she had read correctly. Those bandage shears: they _had_
driven his fingers, rather than his fingers driving them. The hypo
needle that had no hole. The pretty blue pill that had struck him like a
thunderbolt.

"You know what I'm going to do?" asked the girl, with sudden animation.
"I'm going to go to charm school. You'll like that, won't ya, doc?
Because we're sure going to be seeing a lot of each other."

Old Dr. Full didn't answer. His hands had been playing idly with that
plastic card from the kit on which had been printed the rows and columns
that had guided him twice before. The card had a slight convexity; you
could snap the convexity back and forth from one side to the other. He
noted, in a daze, that with each snap a different text appeared on the
cards, _Snap_. "The knife with the blue dot in the handle is for tumors
only. Diagnose tumors with your Instrument Seven, the Swelling Tester.
Place the Swelling Tester--" _Snap._ "An overdose of the pink pills in
Bottle 3 can be fixed with one white pill from Bottle--" _Snap._ "Hold
the suture needle by the end without the hole in it. Touch it to one end
of the wound you want to close and let go. After it has made the knot,
touch it--" _Snap._ "Place the top half of the O.B. Forceps near the
opening. Let go. After it has entered and conformed to the shape of--"
_Snap._

       *       *       *       *       *

The slot man saw "FLANNERY 1--MEDICAL" in the upper left corner of the
hunk of copy. He automatically scribbled "trim to .75" on it and skimmed
it across the horseshoe-shaped copy desk to Piper, who had been handling
Edna Flannery's quack-exposé series. She was a nice youngster, he
thought, but like all youngsters she over-wrote. Hence, the "trim."

Piper dealt back a city hall story to the slot, pinned down Flannery's
feature with one hand and began to tap his pencil across it, one tap to
a word, at the same steady beat as a teletype carriage traveling across
the roller. He wasn't exactly reading it this first time. He was just
looking at the letters and words to find out whether, as letters and
words, they conformed to _Herald_ style. The steady tap of his pencil
ceased at intervals as it drew a black line ending with a stylized
letter "d" through the word "breast" and scribbled in "chest" instead,
or knocked down the capital "E" in "East" to lower case with a diagonal,
or closed up a split word--in whose middle Flannery had bumped the space
bar of her typewriter--with two curved lines like parentheses rotated
through ninety degrees. The thick black pencil zipped a ring around the
"30" which, like all youngsters, she put at the end of her stories. He
turned back to the first page for the second reading. This time the
pencil drew lines with the stylized "d's" at the end of them through
adjectives and whole phrases, printed big "L's" to mark paragraphs,
hooked some of Flannery's own paragraphs together with swooping
re-curved lines.

At the bottom of "FLANNERY ADD 2--MEDICAL" the pencil slowed down and
stopped. The slot man, sensitive to the rhythm of his beloved copy desk,
looked up almost at once. He saw Piper squinting at the story, at a
loss. Without wasting words, the copy reader skimmed it back across the
Masonite horseshoe to the chief, caught a police story in return and
buckled down, his pencil tapping. The slot man read as far as the fourth
add, barked at Howard, on the rim: "Sit in for me," and stumped through
the clattering city room toward the alcove where the managing editor
presided over his own bedlam.

The copy chief waited his turn while the make-up editor, the press-room
foreman and the chief photographer had words with the M.E. When his turn
came, he dropped Flannery's copy on his desk and said: "She says this
one isn't a quack."

The M.E. read:

"FLANNERY 1--MEDICAL, by Edna Flannery, _Herald_ Staff Writer.

"The sordid tale of medical quackery which the _Herald_ has exposed in
this series of articles undergoes a change of pace today which the
reporter found a welcome surprise. Her quest for the facts in the case
of today's subject started just the same way that her exposure of one
dozen shyster M.D.'s and faith-healing phonies did. But she can report
for a change that Dr. Bayard Full is, despite unorthodox practices which
have drawn the suspicion of the rightly hypersensitive medical
associations, a true healer living up to the highest ideals of his
profession.

"Dr. Full's name was given to the _Herald's_ reporter by the ethical
committee of a county medical association, which reported that he had
been expelled from the association on July 18, 1941 for allegedly
'milking' several patients suffering from trivial complaints. According
to sworn statements in the committee's files, Dr. Full had told them
they suffered from cancer, and that he had a treatment which would
prolong their lives. After his expulsion from the association, Dr. Full
dropped out of their sight--until he opened a mid-town 'sanitarium' in a
brownstone front which had for years served as a rooming house.

"The _Herald's_ reporter went to that sanitarium, on East 89th Street,
with the full expectation of having numerous imaginary ailments
diagnosed and of being promised a sure cure for a flat sum of money. She
expected to find unkempt quarters, dirty instruments and the mumbo-jumbo
paraphernalia of the shyster M.D. which she had seen a dozen times
before.

"She was wrong.

"Dr. Full's sanitarium is spotlessly clean, from its tastefully
furnished entrance hall to its shining, white treatment rooms. The
attractive, blond receptionist who greeted the reporter was soft-spoken
and correct, asking only the reporter's name, address and the general
nature of her complaint. This was given, as usual, as 'nagging
backache.' The receptionist asked the _Herald's_ reporter to be seated,
and a short while later conducted her to a second-floor treatment room
and introduced her to Dr. Full.

"Dr. Full's alleged past, as described by the medical society spokesman,
is hard to reconcile with his present appearance. He is a clear-eyed,
white-haired man in his sixties, to judge by his appearance--a little
above middle height and apparently in good physical condition. His voice
was firm and friendly, untainted by the ingratiating whine of the
shyster M.D. which the reporter has come to know too well.

"The receptionist did not leave the room as he began his examination
after a few questions as to the nature and location of the pain. As the
reporter lay face down on a treatment table the doctor pressed some
instrument to the small of her back. In about one minute he made this
astounding statement: 'Young woman, there is no reason for you to have
any pain where you say you do. I understand they're saying nowadays that
emotional upsets cause pains like that. You'd better go to a
psychologist or psychiatrist if the pain keeps up. There is no physical
cause for it, so I can do nothing for you.'

"His frankness took the reporter's breath away. Had he guessed she was,
so to speak, a spy in his camp? She tried again: 'Well, doctor, perhaps
you'd give me a physical checkup, I feel run-down all the time, besides
the pains. Maybe I need a tonic.' This is never-failing bait to shyster
M.D.'s--an invitation for them to find all sorts of mysterious
conditions wrong with a patient, each of which 'requires' an expensive
treatment. As explained in the first article of this series, of course,
the reporter underwent a thorough physical checkup before she embarked
on her quack-hunt, and was found to be in one hundred percent perfect
condition, with the exception of a 'scarred' area at the bottom tip of
her left lung resulting from a childhood attack of tuberculosis and a
tendency toward 'hyperthyroidism'--overactivity of the thyroid gland
which makes it difficult to put on weight and sometimes causes a slight
shortness of breath.

"Dr. Full consented to perform the examination, and took a number of
shining, spotlessly clean instruments from loops in a large board
literally covered with instruments--most of them unfamiliar to the
reporter. The instrument with which he approached first was a tube with
a curved dial in its surface and two wires that ended on flat disks
growing from its ends. He placed one of the disks on the back of the
reporter's right hand and the other on the back of her left. 'Reading
the meter,' he called out some number which the attentive receptionist
took down on a ruled form. The same procedure was repeated several
times, thoroughly covering the reporter's anatomy and thoroughly
convincing her that the doctor was a complete quack. The reporter had
never seen any such diagnostic procedure practiced during the weeks she
put in preparing for this series.

"The doctor then took the ruled sheet from the receptionist, conferred
with her in low tones and said: 'You have a slightly overactive thyroid,
young woman. And there's something wrong with your left lung--not
seriously, but I'd like to take a closer look.'

"He selected an instrument from the board which, the reporter knew, is
called a 'speculum'--a scissorlike device which spreads apart body
openings such as the orifice of the ear, the nostril and so on, so that
a doctor can look in during an examination. The instrument was, however,
too large to be an aural or nasal speculum but too small to be anything
else. As the _Herald's_ reporter was about to ask further questions, the
attending receptionist told her: 'It's customary for us to blindfold our
patients during lung examinations--do you mind?' The reporter,
bewildered, allowed her to tie a spotlessly clean bandage over her eyes,
and waited nervously for what would come next.

"She still cannot say exactly what happened while she was
blindfolded--but X rays confirm her suspicions. She felt a cold
sensation at her ribs on the left side--a cold that seemed to enter
inside her body. Then there was a snapping feeling, and the cold
sensation was gone. She heard Dr. Full say in a matter-of-fact voice:
'You have an old tubercular scar down there. It isn't doing any
particular harm, but an active person like you needs all the oxygen she
can get. Lie still and I'll fix it for you.'

"Then there was a repetition of the cold sensation, lasting for a longer
time. 'Another batch of alveoli and some more vascular glue,' the
_Herald's_ reporter heard Dr. Full say, and the receptionist's crisp
response to the order. Then the strange sensation departed and the
eye-bandage was removed. The reporter saw no scar on her ribs, and yet
the doctor assured her: 'That did it. We took out the fibrosis--and a
good fibrosis it was, too; it walled off the infection so you're still
alive to tell the tale. Then we planted a few clumps of alveoli--they're
the little gadgets that get the oxygen from the air you breathe into
your blood. I won't monkey with your thyroxin supply. You've got used to
being the kind of person you are, and if you suddenly found yourself
easy-going and all the rest of it, chances are you'd only be upset.
About the backache: just check with the county medical society for the
name of a good psychologist or psychiatrist. And look out for quacks;
the woods are full of them.'

"The doctor's self-assurance took the reporter's breath away. She asked
what the charge would be, and was told to pay the receptionist fifty
dollars. As usual, the reporter delayed paying until she got a receipt
signed by the doctor himself, detailing the services for which it paid.
Unlike most, the doctor cheerfully wrote: 'For removal of fibrosis from
left lung and restoration of alveoli,' and signed it.

"The reporter's first move when she left the sanitarium was to head for
the chest specialist who had examined her in preparation for this
series. A comparison of X rays taken on the day of the 'operation' and
those taken previously would, the _Herald's_ reporter then thought,
expose Dr. Full as a prince of shyster M.D.'s and quacks.

"The chest specialist made time on his crowded schedule for the
reporter, in whose series he has shown a lively interest from the
planning stage on. He laughed uproariously in his staid Park Avenue
examining room as she described the weird procedure to which she had
been subjected. But he did not laugh when he took a chest X ray of the
reporter, developed it, dried it, and compared it with the ones he had
taken earlier. The chest specialist took six more X rays that afternoon,
but finally admitted that they all told the same story. The _Herald's_
reporter has it on his authority that the scar she had eighteen days ago
from her tuberculosis is now gone and has been replaced by healthy
lung-tissue. He declares that this is a happening unparalleled in
medical history. He does not go along with the reporter in her firm
conviction that Dr. Full is responsible for the change.

"The _Herald's_ reporter, however, sees no two ways about it. She
concludes that Dr. Bayard Full--whatever his alleged past may have
been--is now an unorthodox but highly successful practitioner of
medicine, to whose hands the reporter would trust herself in any
emergency.

"Not so is the case of 'Rev.' Annie Dimsworth--a female harpy who, under
the guise of 'faith' preys on the ignorant and suffering who come to her
sordid 'healing parlor' for help and remain to feed 'Rev.' Annie's bank
account, which now totals up to $53,238.64. Tomorrow's article will
show, with photostats of bank statements and sworn testimony that--"

The managing editor turned down "FLANNERY LAST ADD--MEDICAL" and tapped
his front teeth with a pencil, trying to think straight. He finally told
the copy chief: "Kill the story. Run the teaser as a box." He tore off
the last paragraph--the "teaser" about "Rev." Annie--and handed it to
the desk man, who stumped back to his Masonite horseshoe.

The make-up editor was back, dancing with impatience as he tried to
catch the M.E.'s eye. The interphone buzzed with the red light which
indicated that the editor and publisher wanted to talk to him. The M.E.
thought briefly of a special series on this Dr. Full, decided nobody
would believe it and that he probably was a phony anyway. He spiked the
story on the "dead" hook and answered his interphone.

       *       *       *       *       *

Dr. Full had become almost fond of Angie. As his practice had grown to
engross the neighborhood illnesses, and then to a corner suite in an
uptown taxpayer building, and finally to the sanitarium, she seemed to
have grown with it. Oh, he thought, we have our little disputes--

The girl, for instance, was too much interested in money. She had wanted
to specialize in cosmetic surgery--removing wrinkles from wealthy old
women and whatnot. She didn't realize, at first, that a thing like this
was in their trust, that they were the stewards and not the owners of
the little black bag and its fabulous contents.

He had tried, ever so cautiously, to analyze them, but without success.
All the instruments were slightly radioactive, for instance, but not
quite so. They would make a Geiger-Mueller counter indicate, but they
would not collapse the leaves of an electroscope. He didn't pretend to
be up on the latest developments, but as he understood it, that was just
plain _wrong_. Under the highest magnification there were lines on the
instruments' superfinished surfaces: incredibly fine lines, engraved in
random hatchments which made no particular sense. Their magnetic
properties were preposterous. Sometimes the instruments were strongly
attracted to magnets, sometimes less so, and sometimes not at all.

Dr. Full had taken X rays in fear and trembling lest he disrupt whatever
delicate machinery worked in them. He was _sure_ they were not solid,
that the handles and perhaps the blades must be mere shells filled with
busy little watch-works--but the X rays showed nothing of the sort. Oh,
yes--and they were always sterile, and they wouldn't rust. Dust _fell_
off them if you shook them: now, that was something he understood. They
ionized the dust, or were ionized themselves, or something of the sort.
At any rate, he had read of something similar that had to do with
phonograph records.

_She_ wouldn't know about that, he proudly thought. She kept the books
well enough, and perhaps she gave him a useful prod now and then when he
was inclined to settle down. The move from the neighborhood slum to the
uptown quarters had been her idea, and so had the sanitarium. Good,
good, it enlarged his sphere of usefulness. Let the child have her mink
coats and her convertible, as they seemed to be calling roadsters
nowadays. He himself was too busy and too old. He had so much to make up
for.

Dr. Full thought happily of his Master Plan. She would not like it much,
but she would have to see the logic of it. This marvelous thing that had
happened to them must be handed on. She was herself no doctor; even
though the instruments practically ran themselves, there was more to
doctoring than skill. There were the ancient canons of the healing art.
And so, having seen the logic of it, Angie would yield; she would assent
to his turning over the little black bag to all humanity.

He would probably present it to the College of Surgeons, with as little
fuss as possible--well, perhaps a _small_ ceremony, and he would like a
souvenir of the occasion, a cup or a framed testimonial. It would be a
relief to have the thing out of his hands, in a way; let the giants of
the healing art decide who was to have its benefits. No, Angie would
understand. She was a goodhearted girl.

It was nice that she had been showing so much interest in the surgical
side lately--asking about the instruments, reading the instruction card
for hours, even practicing on guinea pigs. If something of his love for
humanity had been communicated to her, old Dr. Full sentimentally
thought, his life would not have been in vain. Surely she would realize
that a greater good would be served by surrendering the instruments to
wiser hands than theirs, and by throwing aside the cloak of secrecy
necessary to work on their small scale.

Dr. Full was in the treatment room that had been the brownstone's front
parlor; through the window he saw Angie's yellow convertible roll to a
stop before the stoop. He liked the way she looked as she climbed the
stairs; neat, not flashy, he thought. A sensible girl like her, she'd
understand. There was somebody with her--a fat woman, puffing up the
steps, overdressed and petulant. Now, what could she want?

Angie let herself in and went into the treatment room, followed by the
fat woman. "Doctor," said the blond girl gravely, "may I present Mrs.
Coleman?" Charm school had not taught her everything, but Mrs. Coleman,
evidently _noveau riche_, thought the doctor, did not notice the
blunder.

"Miss Aquella told me _so_ much about you, doctor, and your remarkable
system!" she gushed.

Before he could answer, Angie smoothly interposed: "Would you excuse us
for just a moment, Mrs. Coleman?"

She took the doctor's arm and led him into the reception hall. "Listen,"
she said swiftly, "I know this goes against your grain, but I couldn't
pass it up. I met this old thing in the exercise class at Elizabeth
Barton's. Nobody else'll talk to her there. She's a widow. I guess her
husband was a black marketeer or something, and she has a pile of dough.
I gave her a line about how you had a system of massaging wrinkles out.
My idea is, you blindfold her, cut her neck open with the Cutaneous
Series knife, shoot some Firmol into the muscles, spoon out some of that
blubber with an Adipose Series curette and spray it all with Skintite.
When you take the blindfold off she's got rid of a wrinkle and doesn't
know what happened. She'll pay five hundred dollars. Now, don't say 'no,'
doc. Just this once, let's do it my way, can't you? I've been working on
this deal all along too, haven't I?"

"Oh," said the doctor, "very well." He was going to have to tell her
about the Master Plan before long anyway. He would let her have it her
way this time.

Back in the treatment room, Mrs. Coleman had been thinking things over.
She told the doctor sternly as he entered: "Of course, your system is
permanent, isn't it?"

"It is, madam," he said shortly. "Would you please lie down there? Miss
Aquella, get a sterile three-inch bandage for Mrs. Coleman's eyes." He
turned his back on the fat woman to avoid conversation, and pretended to
be adjusting the lights. Angie blindfolded the woman, and the doctor
selected the instruments he would need. He handed the blond girl a pair
of retractors, and told her: "Just slip the corners of the blades in as
I cut--" She gave him an alarmed look, and gestured at the reclining
woman. He lowered his voice: "Very well. Slip in the corners and rock
them along the incision. I'll tell you when to pull them out."

Dr. Full held the Cutaneous Series knife to his eyes as he adjusted the
little slide for three centimeters depth. He sighed a little as he
recalled that its last use had been in the extirpation of an
"inoperable" tumor of the throat.

"Very well," he said, bending over the woman. He tried a tentative pass
through her tissues. The blade dipped in and flowed through them, like a
finger through quicksilver, with no wound left in the wake. Only the
retractors could hold the edges of the incision apart.

Mrs. Coleman stirred and jabbered: "Doctor, that felt so peculiar! Are
you sure you're rubbing the right way?"

"Quite sure, madam," said the doctor wearily. "Would you please try not
to talk during the massage?"

He nodded at Angie, who stood ready with the retractors. The blade sank
in to its three centimeters, miraculously cutting only the dead horny
tissues of the epidermis and the live tissue of the dermis, pushing
aside mysteriously all major and minor blood vessels and muscular
tissue, declining to affect any system or organ except the one it
was--tuned to, could you say? The doctor didn't know the answer, but he
felt tired and bitter at this prostitution. Angie slipped in the
retractor blades and rocked them as he withdrew the knife, then pulled
to separate the lips of the incision. It bloodlessly exposed an
unhealthy string of muscle, sagging in a dead-looking loop from
blue-gray ligaments. The doctor took a hypo. Number IX, pre-set to "g"
and raised it to his eye level. The mist came and went; there probably
was no possibility of an embolus with one of these gadgets, but why take
chances? He shot one cc. of "g"--identified as "Firmol" by the
card--into the muscle. He and Angie watched as it tightened up against
the pharynx.

He took the Adipose Series curette, a small one, and spooned out
yellowish tissue, dropping it into the incinerator box, and then nodded
to Angie. She eased out the retractors and the gaping incision slipped
together into unbroken skin, sagging now. The doctor had the
atomizer--dialed to "Skintite"--ready. He sprayed, and the skin shrank
up into the new firm throat line.

As he replaced the instruments, Angie removed Mrs. Coleman's bandage and
gayly announced: "We're finished! And there's a mirror in the reception
hall--"

Mrs. Coleman didn't need to be invited twice. With incredulous fingers
she felt her chin, and then dashed for the hall. The doctor grimaced as
he heard her yelp of delight, and Angie turned to him with a tight
smile. "I'll get the money and get her out," she said. "You won't have
to be bothered with her any more."

He was grateful for that much.

She followed Mrs. Coleman into the reception hall, and the doctor
dreamed over the case of instruments. A ceremony, certainly--he was
_entitled_ to one. Not everybody, he thought, would turn such a sure
source of money over to the good of humanity. But you reached an age
when money mattered less, and when you thought of these things you had
done that _might_ be open to misunderstanding if, just if, there chanced
to be any of that, well, that judgment business. The doctor wasn't a
religious man, but you certainly found yourself thinking hard about some
things when your time drew near--

Angie was back, with a bit of paper in her hands. "Five hundred
dollars," she said matter-of-factly. "And you realize, don't you, that
we could go over her an inch at a time--at five hundred dollars an
inch?"

"I've been meaning to talk to you about that," he said.

There was bright fear in her eyes, he thought--but why?

"Angie, you've been a good girl and an understanding girl, but we can't
keep this up forever, you know."

"Let's talk about it some other time," she said flatly. "I'm tired now."

"No--I really feel we've gone far enough on our own. The instruments--"

"Don't say it, doc!" she hissed. "Don't say it, or you'll be sorry!" In
her face there was a look that reminded him of the hollow-eyed,
gaunt-faced, dirty-blond creature she had been. From under the
charm-school finish there burned the guttersnipe whose infancy had been
spent on a sour and filthy mattress, whose childhood had been play in
the littered alley and whose adolescence had been the sweatshops and
the aimless gatherings at night under the glaring street lamps.

He shook his head to dispel the puzzling notion. "It's this way," he
patiently began. "I told you about the family that invented the O.B.
forceps and kept them a secret for so many generations, how they could
have given them to the world but didn't?"

"They knew what they were doing," said the guttersnipe flatly.

"Well, that's neither here nor there," said the doctor, irritated. "My
mind is made up about it. I'm going to turn the instruments over to the
College of Surgeons. We have enough money to be comfortable. You can
even have the house. I've been thinking of going to a warmer climate,
myself." He felt peeved with her for making the unpleasant scene. He was
unprepared for what happened next.

Angie snatched the little black bag and dashed for the door, with panic
in her eyes. He scrambled after her, catching her arm, twisting it in a
sudden rage. She clawed at his face with her free hand, babbling curses.
Somehow, somebody's finger touched the little black bag, and it opened
grotesquely into the enormous board, covered with shining instruments,
large and small. Half a dozen of them joggled loose and fell to the
floor.

"_Now_ see what you've done!" roared the doctor, unreasonably. Her hand
was still viselike on the handle, but she was standing still, trembling
with choked-up rage. The doctor bent stiffly to pick up the fallen
instruments. Unreasonable girl! he thought bitterly. Making a scene--

Pain drove in between his shoulderblades and he fell face-down. The
light ebbed. "Unreasonable girl!" he tried to croak. And then: "They'll
know I tried, anyway--"

Angie looked down on his prone body, with the handle of the Number Six
Cautery Series knife protruding from it. "--will cut through all
tissues. Use for amputations before you spread on the Re-Gro. Extreme
caution should be used in the vicinity of vital organs and major blood
vessels or nerve trunks--"

"I didn't mean to do that," said Angie, dully, cold with horror. Now the
detective would come, the implacable detective who would reconstruct the
crime from the dust in the room. She would run and turn and twist, but
the detective would find her out and she would be tried in a courtroom
before a judge and jury; the lawyer would make speeches, but the jury
would convict her anyway, and the headlines would scream: "BLOND KILLER
GUILTY!" and she'd maybe get the chair, walking down a plain corridor
where a beam of sunlight struck through the dusty air, with an iron door
at the end of it. Her mink, her convertible, her dresses, the handsome
man she was going to meet and marry--

The mist of cinematic clichés cleared, and she knew what she would do
next. Quite steadily, she picked the incinerator box from its loop in
the board--a metal cube with a different-textured spot on one side.
"--to dispose of fibroses or other unwanted matter, simply touch the
disk--" You dropped something in and touched the disk. There was a sort
of soundless whistle, very powerful and unpleasant if you were too
close, and a sort of lightless flash. When you opened the box again, the
contents were gone. Angie took another of the Cautery Series knives and
went grimly to work. Good thing there wasn't any blood to speak of--She
finished the awful task in three hours.

She slept heavily that night, totally exhausted by the wringing
emotional demands of the slaying and the subsequent horror. But in the
morning, it was as though the doctor had never been there. She ate
breakfast, dressed with unusual care--and then undid the unusual care.
Nothing out of the ordinary, she told herself. Don't do one thing
different from the way you would have done it before. After a day or
two, you can phone the cops. Say he walked out spoiling for a drunk, and
you're worried. But don't rush it, baby--_don't rush it_.

Mrs. Coleman was due at 10:00 a.m. Angie had counted on being able to
talk the doctor into at least one more five-hundred-dollar session.
She'd have to do it herself now--but she'd have to start sooner or
later.

The woman arrived early. Angie explained smoothly: "The doctor asked me
to take care of the massage today. Now that he has the tissue-firming
process beginning, it only requires somebody trained in his methods--"
As she spoke, her eyes swiveled to the instrument case--open! She cursed
herself for the single flaw as the woman followed her gaze and recoiled.

"What are those things!" she demanded. "Are you going to cut me with
them? I _thought_ there was something fishy--"

"Please, Mrs. Coleman," said Angie, "please, _dear_ Mrs. Coleman--you
don't understand about the ... the massage instruments!"

"Massage instruments, my foot!" squabbled the woman shrilly. "That
doctor _operated_ on me. Why, he might have killed me!"

Angie wordlessly took one of the smaller Cutaneous Series knives and
passed it through her forearm. The blade flowed like a finger through
quicksilver, leaving no wound in its wake. _That_ should convince the
old cow!

It didn't convince her, but it did startle her. "What did you do with
it? The blade folds up into the handle--that's it!"

"Now look closely, Mrs. Coleman," said Angie, thinking desperately of
the five hundred dollars. "Look very closely and you'll see that the,
uh, the sub-skin massager simply slips beneath the tissues without doing
any harm, tightening and firming the muscles themselves instead of
having to work through layers of skin and adipose tissue. It's the
secret of the doctor's method. Now, how can outside massage have the
effect that we got last night?"

Mrs. Coleman was beginning to calm down. "It _did_ work, all right," she
admitted, stroking the new line of her neck. "But your arm's one thing
and my neck's another! Let me see you do that with your neck!"

Angie smiled--

       *       *       *       *       *

Al returned to the clinic after an excellent lunch that had almost
reconciled him to three more months he would have to spend on duty. And
then, he thought, and then a blessed year at the blessedly super-normal
South Pole working on his specialty--which happened to be telekinesis
exercises for ages three to six. Meanwhile, of course, the world had to
go on and of course he had to shoulder his share in the running of it.

Before settling down to desk work he gave a routine glance at the bag
board. What he saw made him stiffen with shocked surprise. A red light
was on next to one of the numbers--the first since he couldn't think
when. He read off the number and murmured "O.K., 674,101. That fixes
_you_." He put the number on a card sorter and in a moment the record
was in his hand. Oh, yes--Hemingway's bag. The big dummy didn't remember
how or where he had lost it; none of them ever did. There were hundreds
of them floating around.

Al's policy in such cases was to leave the bag turned on. The things
practically ran themselves, it was practically impossible to do harm
with them, so whoever found a lost one might as well be allowed to use
it. You turn it off, you have a social loss--you leave it on, it may do
some good. As he understood it, and not very well at that, the stuff
wasn't "used up." A temporalist had tried to explain it to him with
little success that the prototypes in the transmitter _had been
transducted_ through a series of point-events of transfinite
cardinality. Al had innocently asked whether that meant prototypes had
been stretched, so to speak, through all time, and the temporalist had
thought he was joking and left in a huff.

"Like to see him do this," thought Al darkly, as he telekinized himself
to the coinbox, after a cautious look to see that there were no medics
around. To the box he said: "Police chief," and then to the police
chief: "There's been a homicide committed with Medical Instrument Kit
674,101. It was lost some months ago by one of my people, Dr. John
Hemingway. He didn't have a clear account of the circumstances."

The police chief groaned and said: "I'll call him in and question him."
He was to be astonished by the answers, and was to learn that the
homicide was well out of his jurisdiction.

Al stood for a moment at the bag board by the glowing red light that had
been sparked into life by a departing vital force giving, as its last
act, the warning that Kit 674,101 was in homicidal hands. With a sigh,
Al pulled the plug and the light went out.

       *       *       *       *       *

"Yah," jeered the woman. "You'd fool around with my neck, but you
wouldn't risk your own with that thing!"

Angie smiled with serene confidence a smile that was to shock hardened
morgue attendants. She set the Cutaneous Series knife to three
centimeters before drawing it across her neck. Smiling, knowing the
blade would cut only the dead horny tissue of the epidermis and the live
tissue of the dermis, mysteriously push aside all major and minor blood
vessels and muscular tissue--

Smiling, the knife plunging in and its microtomesharp metal shearing
through major and minor blood vessels and muscular tissue and pharynx,
Angie cut her throat.

In the few minutes it took the police, summoned by the shrieking Mrs.
Coleman, to arrive, the instruments had become crusted with rust, and
the flasks which had held vascular glue and clumps of pink, rubbery
alveoli and spare gray cells and coils of receptor nerves held only
black slime, and from them when opened gushed the foul gases of
decomposition.




_Everybody Knows Joe_

Copyright 1953 by King-Size Publications, Inc. for _Fantastic Universe_.


Joe had quite a day for himself Thursday, and as usual I had to tag
along. If I had a right arm to give, I'd give it for a day off now and
then. Like on Thursday. On Thursday he really outdid himself.

He woke up in the hotel room and had a shower. He wasn't going to shave
until I told him he looked like a bum. So he shaved and then he stood
for a whole minute admiring his beauty in the mirror, forgetting whose
idea it was in the first place.

So down to the coffee shop for breakfast. A hard-working man needs a
good breakfast. So getting ready for a back-breaking day of copying
references at the library, he had tomato juice, two fried eggs, three
sausages, a sugared doughnut, and coffee--with cream and sugar.

He couldn't work that off his pot in a week of ditch-digging under a
July sun, but a hard-working man needs a good breakfast. I was too
disgusted to argue with him. He's hopeless when he smells that
short-order smell of smoking grease, frying bacon and coffee.

He wanted to take a taxi to the library--eight blocks!

"Walk, you jerk!" I told him. He started to mumble about pulling down
six hundred bucks for this week's work and then he must have thought I
was going to mention the high-calory breakfast. To him that's hitting
below the belt. He thinks he's an unfortunate man with an
affliction--about twenty pounds of it. He walked and arrived at the
library glowing with virtue.

Making out his slip at the newspaper room he blandly put down next to
_firm_--_The Griffin Press, Inc._--when he knew as well as I did that he
was a free lance and hadn't even got a definite assignment from Griffin.

There's a line on the slip where you put down _reason for consulting
files_ (_please be specific_). It's a shame to cramp Joe's style to just
one line after you pitch him an essay-type question like that. He
squeezed in, _Preparation of article on year in biochemistry for Griffin
Pr. Encyc. 1952 Yrbk._, and handed it with a flourish to the librarian.

The librarian, a nice old man, was polite to him, which is usually a
mistake with Joe. After he finished telling the librarian how his
microfilm files ought to be organized and how they ought to switch from
microfilm to microcard and how in spite of everything the New York
Public Library wasn't such a bad place to research, he got down to work.

He's pretty harmless when he's working--it's one of the things that
keeps me from cutting his throat. With a noon break for apple pie and
coffee he transcribed about a hundred entries onto his cards, mopping up
the year in biochemistry nicely. He swaggered down the library steps,
feeling like Herman Melville after finishing _Moby Dick_.

"Don't be so smug," I told him. "You still have to write the piece. And
they still have to buy it."

"A detail," he said grandly. "Just journalism. I can do it with my eyes
shut."

Just journalism. Somehow his three months of running copy for the A.P.
before the war has made him an Ed Leahy.

"_When_ are you going to do it with your eyes...?" I began but it wasn't
any use. He began telling me about how Gautama Buddha didn't break with
the world until he was 29 and Mohammed didn't announce that he was a
prophet until he was 30, so why couldn't _he_ one of these days suddenly
bust loose with a new revelation or something and set the world on its
ear? What it boiled down to was he didn't think he'd write the article
tonight.

He postponed his break with the world long enough to have a ham and
cheese on rye and more coffee at an automat and then phoned Maggie. She
was available as usual. She said as usual, "Well then, why don't you
just drop by and we'll spend a quiet evening with some records?"

As usual he thought that would be fine since he was so beat after a hard
day. As usual I told him, "You're a louse, Joe. You know all she wants
is a husband and you know it isn't going to be you, so why don't you let
go of the girl so she can find somebody who means business?"

The usual answers rolled out automatically and we got that out of the
way.

Maybe Maggie isn't very bright but she seemed glad to see him. She's
shooting for her Doctorate in sociology at N.Y.U., she does part-time
case work for the city, she has one of those three-room Greenwich
Village apartments with dyed burlap drapes and studio couches and
home-made mobiles. She thinks writing is something holy and Joe's
careful not to tell her different.

They drank some rhine wine and seltzer while Joe talked about the day's
work as though he'd won the Nobel prize for biochemistry. He got
downright brutal about Maggie being mixed up in such an approximate
unquantitative excuse for a science as sociology and she apologized
humbly and eventually he forgave her. Big-hearted Joe.

But he wasn't so fried that he _had_ to start talking about a man
wanting to settle down--"not this year but maybe next. Thirty's a
dividing point that makes you stop and wonder what you really want and
what you've really got out of life, Maggie darlin'." It was as good as
telling her that she should be a good girl and continue to keep open
house for him and maybe some day ... maybe.

As I said, maybe Maggie isn't very bright. But as I also said, Thursday
was the day Joe picked to outdo himself.

"Joe," she said with this look on her face, "I got a new LP of the
Brahms Serenade Number One. It's on top of the stack. Would you tell me
what you think of it?"

So he put it on and they sat sipping rhine wine and seltzer and he
turned it over and they sat sipping rhine wine and seltzer until both
sides were played. And she kept watching him. Not adoringly.

"Well," she asked with this new look, "what did you think of it?"

He told her, of course. There was some comment on Brahms'
architectonics and his resurrection of the contrapuntal style. Because
he'd sneaked a look at the record's envelope he was able to spend a
couple of minutes on Brahms' debt to Haydn and the young Beethoven in
the fifth movement (_allegro_, D Major) and the gay _rondo_ of the----

"Joe," she said, not looking at him. "Joe," she said, "I got that record
at one hell of a discount down the street. It's a wrong pressing.
Somehow the first side is the first half of the Serenade but the second
half is Schumann's Symphonic Studies Opus Thirteen. Somebody noticed it
when they played it in a booth. But I guess you didn't notice it."

"Get out of _this one_, braino," I told him.

He got up and said in a strangled voice, "And I thought you were my
friend. I suppose I'll never learn." He walked out.

I suppose he never will.

God help me, I ought to know.




_Time Bum_


Harry Twenty-Third Street suddenly burst into laughter. His friend and
sometimes roper Farmer Brown looked inquisitive.

"I just thought of a new con," Harry Twenty-Third Street said, still
chuckling.

Farmer Brown shook his head positively. "There's no such thing, my man,"
he said. "There are only new switches on old cons. What have you got--a
store con? Shall you be needing a roper?" He tried not to look eager as
a matter of principle, but everybody knew the Farmer needed a connection
badly. His girl had two-timed him on a badger game, running off with the
chump and marrying him after an expensive, month-long buildup.

Harry said, "Sorry, old boy. No details. It's too good to split up. I
shall rip and tear the suckers with this con for many a year, I trust,
before the details become available to the trade. Nobody, but nobody, is
going to call copper after I take him. It's beautiful and it's mine. I
will see you around, my friend."

Harry got up from the booth and left, nodding cheerfully to a safeblower
here, a fixer there, on his way to the locked door of the hangout.
Naturally he didn't nod to such small fry as pickpockets and dope
peddlers. Harry had his pride.

The puzzled Farmer sipped his lemon squash and concluded that Harry had
been kidding him. He noticed that Harry had left behind him in the booth
a copy of a magazine with a space ship and a pretty girl in green bra
and pants on the cover.

       *       *       *       *       *

"A furnished ... bungalow?" the man said hesitantly, as though he knew
what he wanted but wasn't quite sure of the word.

"Certainly, Mr. Clurg," Walter Lachlan said. "I'm sure we can suit you.
Wife and family?"

"No," said Clurg. "They are ... far away." He seemed to get some secret
amusement from the thought. And then, to Walter's horror, he sat down
calmly in empty air beside the desk and, of course, crashed to the floor
looking ludicrous and astonished.

Walter gaped and helped him up, sputtering apologies and wondering
privately what was wrong with the man. There wasn't a chair there. There
was a chair on the other side of the desk and a chair against the wall.
But there just wasn't a chair where Clurg had sat down.

Clurg apparently was unhurt; he protested against Walter's apologies,
saying: "I should have known, Master Lachlan. It's quite all right; it
was all my fault. What about the bang--the bungalow?"

Business sense triumphed over Walter's bewilderment. He pulled out his
listings and they conferred on the merits of several furnished
bungalows. When Walter mentioned that the Curran place was especially
nice, in an especially nice neighborhood--he lived up the street
himself--Clurg was impressed. "I'll take that one," he said. "What is
the ... feoff?"

Walter had learned a certain amount of law for his real-estate license
examination; he recognized the word. "The _rent_ is seventy-five
dollars," he said. "You speak English very well, Mr. Clurg." He hadn't
been certain that the man was a foreigner until the dictionary word came
out. "You have hardly any accent."

"Thank you," Clurg said, pleased. "I worked hard at it. Let me
see--seventy-five is six twelves and three." He opened one of his
shiny-new leather suitcases and calmly laid six heavy little paper rolls
on Walter's desk. He broke open a seventh and laid down three mint-new
silver dollars. "There I am," he said. "I mean, there you are."

Walter didn't know what to say. It had never happened before. People
paid by check or in bills. They just didn't pay in silver dollars. But
it was money--why shouldn't Mr. Clurg pay in silver dollars if he wanted
to? He shook himself, scooped the rolls into his top desk drawer and
said: "I'll drive you out there if you like. It's nearly quitting time
anyway."

       *       *       *       *       *

Walter told his wife Betty over the dinner table: "We ought to have him
in some evening. I can't imagine where on Earth he comes from. I had to
show him how to turn on the kitchen range. When it went on he said, 'Oh,
yes--electricity!' and laughed his head off. And he kept ducking the
question when I tried to ask him in a nice way. Maybe he's some kind of
a political refugee."

"Maybe ..." Betty began dreamily, and then shut her mouth. She didn't
want Walter laughing at her again. As it was, he made her buy her
science-fiction magazines downtown instead of at neighborhood
newsstands. He thought it wasn't becoming for his wife to read them.
He's so eager for success, she thought sentimentally.

That night, while Walter watched a television variety show, she read a
story in one of her magazines. (Its cover, depicting a space ship and a
girl in green bra and shorts, had been prudently torn off and thrown
away.) It was about a man from the future who had gone back in time,
bringing with him all sorts of marvelous inventions. In the end the Time
Police punished him for unauthorized time traveling. They had come back
and got him, brought him back to his own time. She smiled. It _would_ be
nice if Mr. Clurg, instead of being a slightly eccentric foreigner, were
a man from the future with all sorts of interesting stories to tell and
a satchelful of gadgets that could be sold for millions and millions of
dollars.

       *       *       *       *       *

After a week they did have Clurg over for dinner. It started badly. Once
more he managed to sit down in empty air and crash to the floor. While
they were brushing him off he said fretfully: "I _can't_ get used to
not--" and then said no more.

He was a picky eater. Betty had done one of her mother's specialties,
veal cutlet with tomato sauce, topped by a poached egg. He ate the egg
and sauce, made a clumsy attempt to cut up the meat, and abandoned it.
She served a plate of cheese, half a dozen kinds, for dessert, and Clurg
tasted them uncertainly, breaking off a crumb from each, while Betty
wondered where that constituted good manners. His face lit up when he
tried a ripe cheddar. He popped the whole wedge into his mouth and said
to Betty: "I will have that, please."

"Seconds?" asked Walter. "Sure. Don't bother, Betty. I'll get it." He
brought back a quarter-pound wedge of the cheddar.

Walter and Betty watched silently as Clurg calmly ate every crumb of it.
He sighed. "Very good. Quite like--" The word, Walter and Betty later
agreed, was _see-mon-joe_. They were able to agree quite early in the
evening, because Clurg got up after eating the cheese, said warmly,
"Thank you so much!" and walked out of the house.

Betty said, "_What--on--Earth!_"

Walter said uneasily, "I'm sorry, doll. I didn't think he'd be quite
that peculiar--"

"--But after _all_!"

"--Of course he's a foreigner. What was that word?"

He jotted it down.

While they were doing the dishes Betty said, "I think he was drunk.
Falling-down drunk."

"No," Walter said. "It's exactly the same thing he did in my office. As
though he expected a chair to come to him instead of him going to a
chair." He laughed and said uncertainly, "Or maybe he's royalty. I read
once about Queen Victoria never looking around before she sat down, she
was so sure there'd be a chair there."

"Well, there isn't any more royalty, not to speak of," she said angrily,
hanging up the dish towel. "What's on TV tonight?"

"Uncle Miltie. But ... uh ... I think I'll read. Uh ... where do you
keep those magazines of yours, doll? Believe I'll give them a try."

She gave him a look that he wouldn't meet, and she went to get him some
of her magazines. She also got a slim green book which she hadn't looked
at for years. While Walter flipped uneasily through the magazines she
studied the book.

After about ten minutes she said: "Walter. _Seemonjoe_. I I think I know
what language it is."

He was instantly alert "Yeah? What?"

"It should be spelled c-i-m-a-n-g-o, with little jiggers over the C and
G. It means 'Universal food' in Esperanto."

"Where's Esperanto?" he demanded.

"Esperanto isn't anywhere. It's an artificial language. I played around
with it a little once. It was supposed to end war and all sorts of
things. Some people called it 'the language of the future'." Her voice
was tremulous.

Walter said, "I'm going to get to the bottom of this."

       *       *       *       *       *

He saw Clurg go into the neighborhood movie for the matinee. That gave
him about three hours.

Walter hurried to the Curran bungalow, remembered to slow down and tried
hard to look casual as he unlocked the door and went in. There wouldn't
be any trouble--he was a good citizen, known and respected--he could let
himself into a tenant's house and wait for him to talk about business if
he wanted to.

He tried not to think of what people would think if he should be caught
rifling Clurg's luggage, as he intended to do. He had brought along an
assortment of luggage keys. Surprised by his own ingenuity, he had got
them at a locksmith's by saying his own key was lost and he didn't want
to haul a heavy packed bag downtown.

But he didn't need the keys. In the bedroom closet the two suitcases
stood, unlocked.

There was nothing in the first except uniformly new clothes, bought
locally at good shops. The second was full of the same. Going through a
rather extreme sports jacket, Walter found a wad of paper in the breast
pocket. It was a newspaper page. A number had been penciled on a margin;
apparently the sheet had been torn out and stuck into the pocket and
forgotten. The dateline on the paper was July 18th, 2403.

Walter had some trouble reading the stories at first, but found it was
easy enough if he read them aloud and listened to his voice.

One said:

     TAIM KOP NABD:
     PROSKYOOTR ASKS DETH

     Patrolm'n Oskr Garth 'v thi Taim Polis w'z arest'd toodei at hiz
     hom, 4365 9863th Strit, and bookd at 9768th Prisint on tchardg'z
     'v Polis-Ekspozh'r. Thi aledjd Ekspozh'r okur'd hwaile Garth w'z on
     dooti in thi Twenti-Furst Sentch'ri. It konsist'd 'v hiz admish'n
     too a sit'zen 'v thi Twenti-Furst Sentch'ri that thi Taim Polis
     ekzisted and woz op'rated fr'm thi Twenti-Fifth Sentch'ri. Thi
     Proskyoot'rz Ofis sed thi deth pen'lti wil be askt in vyoo 'v thi
     heinus neitch'r 'v thi ofens, hwitch thret'nz thi hwol fabrik 'v
     Twenti-Fifth-Sentch'ri eksiztens.

There was an advertisement on the other side:

     BOIZ'ND YUNG MEN!
     SERV EUR SENTCH'RI!
     ENLIST IN THI TAIM POLIS RISURV NOW!

     RIMEMB'R--

     'V THI AJEZ! ONLY IN THI TAIM POLIS KAN EU PROTEKT EUR SIVILIZASH'N
     FR'M VARI'NS! THEIR IZ NO HAIER SERVIS TOO AR KULTCH'R! THEIR IZ NO
     K'REER SO FAS'NATING AZ A K'REER IN THI TAIM POLIS!

Underneath it another ad asked:

     HWAI BI ASHEIM'D 'V EUR TCHAIRZ? GET ROLFASTS!

     No uth'r tcheir haz thi immidjit respons 'v a Rolfast. Sit
     enihweir--eor Rolfast iz their!

     Ear Rolfast met'l partz ar solid gold to avoid tairsum polishing.
     Eur Rolfast beirings are thi fain'st six-intch dupliks di'mondz for
     long wair.

Walter's heart pounded. Gold--to avoid tiresome polishing! Six-inch
diamonds--for long wear!

And Clurg must be a time policeman. "Only in the time police can you see
the pageant of the ages!" What did a time policeman do? He wasn't quite
clear about that. But what they _didn't_ do was let anybody
else--anybody earlier--know that the Time Police existed. He, Walter
Lachlan of the Twentieth Century, held in the palm of his hand Time
Policeman Clurg of the Twenty-Fifth Century--the Twenty-Fifth Century
where gold and diamonds were common as steel and glass in this!

       *       *       *       *       *

He was there when Clurg came back from the matinee.

Mutely, Walter extended the page of newsprint. Clurg snatched it
incredulously, stared at it and crumpled it in his fist. He collapsed on
the floor with a groan. "I'm done for!" Walter heard him say.

"Listen, Clurg," Walter said. "Nobody ever needs to know about
this--_nobody_."

Clurg looked up with sudden hope in his eyes. "You will keep silent?" he
asked wildly. "It is my life!"

"What's it worth to you?" Walter demanded with brutal directness. "I can
use some of those diamonds and some of that gold. Can you get it into
this century?"

"It would be missed. It would be over my mass-balance," Clurg said. "But
I have a Duplix. I can copy diamonds and gold for you; that was how I
made my feoff money."

He snatched an instrument from his pocket--a fountain pen, Walter
thought "It is low in charge. It would Duplix about five kilograms in
one operation--"

"You mean," Walter demanded, "that if I brought you five kilograms of
diamonds and gold you could duplicate it? And the originals wouldn't be
harmed? Let me see that thing. Can I work it?"

Clurg passed over the "fountain pen". Walter saw that within the case
was a tangle of wires, tiny tubes, lenses--he passed it back hastily.
Clurg said, "That is correct. You could buy or borrow jewelry and I
could duplix it. Then you could return the originals and retain the
copies. You swear by your contemporary God that you would say nothing?"

Walter was thinking. He could scrape together a good thirty thousand
dollars by pledging the house, the business, his own real estate, the
bank account, the life insurance, the securities. Put it all into
diamonds, of course and then--_doubled! Overnight!_

"I'll say nothing," he told Clurg. "If you come through." He took the
sheet from the twenty-fifth-century newspaper from Clurg's hands and put
it securely in his own pocket. "When I get those diamonds duplicated,"
he said, "I'll burn this and forget the rest. Until then, I want you to
stay close to home. I'll come around in a day or so with the stuff for
you to duplicate."

Clurg nervously promised.

       *       *       *       *       *

The secrecy, of course, didn't include Betty. He told her when he got
home and she let out a yell of delight. She demanded the newspaper,
read it avidly, and then demanded to see Clurg.

"I don't think he'll talk," Walter said doubtfully. "But if you really
want to ..."

She did, and they walked to the Curran bungalow. Clurg was gone, lock,
stock and barrel, leaving not a trace behind. They waited for hours,
nervously.

At last Betty said, "He's gone back."

Walter nodded. "He wouldn't keep his bargain, but by God I'm going to
keep mine. Come along. We're going to the _Enterprise_."

"Walter," she said. "You wouldn't--would you?"

He went alone, after a bitter quarrel.

At the _Enterprise_ office he was wearily listened to by a reporter, who
wearily looked over the twenty-fifth-century newspaper. "I don't know
what you're peddling, Mr. Lachlan," he said, "but we like people to buy
their ads in the _Enterprise_. This is a pretty bare-faced publicity
grab."

"But--" Walter sputtered.

"Sam, would you please ask Mr. Morris to come up here if he can?" the
reporter was saying into the phone. To Walter he explained, "Mr. Morris
is our press-room foreman."

The foreman was a huge, white-haired old fellow, partly deaf. The
reporter showed him the newspaper from the twenty-fifth century and
said, "How about this?"

Mr. Morris looked at it and smelled it and said, showing no interest in
the reading matter: "American Type Foundry Futura number nine,
discontinued about ten years ago. It's been hand-set. The ink--hard to
say. Expensive stuff, not a news ink. A book ink, a job-printing ink.
The paper, now, I know. A nice linen rag that Benziger jobs in
Philadelphia."

"You see, Mr. Lachlan? It's a fake." The reporter shrugged.

Walter walked slowly from the city room. The press-room foreman _knew_.
It was a fake. And Clurg was a faker. Suddenly Walter's heels touched
the ground after twenty-four hours and stayed there. Good God, the
diamonds! Clurg was a conman! He would have worked a package switch! He
would have had thirty thousand dollars' worth of diamonds for less than
a month's work!

He told Betty about it when he got home and she laughed unmercifully.
"Time Policeman" was to become a family joke between the Lachlans.

Harry Twenty-Third Street stood, blinking, in a very peculiar place.
Peculiarly, his feet were firmly encased, up to the ankles, in a block
of clear plastic.

There were odd-looking people and a big voice was saying: "May it please
the court. The People of the Twenty-Fifth Century versus Harold Parish,
alias Harry Twenty-Third Street, alias Clurg, of the Twentieth Century.
The charge is impersonating an officer of the Time Police. The
Prosecutor's Office will ask the death penalty in view of the heinous
nature of the offense, which threatens the whole fabric--"




_Virginia_

© 1957, Fantasy House, Inc. for _Venture Science Fiction_.


James "Bunny" Coogler woke on the morning of his father's funeral with a
confused feeling that it was awfully crowded in his bedroom. Ohara, his
valet (of the Shimanoseki Oharas, and not to be confused with the Dublin
branch of the family) was shaking his sleeve and saying: "You wake up,
Missah Bunny! Ah, such important gentermen come see you!" Bunny groped
on the bedside table for the sunglasses to shelter his pink-rimmed eyes
from the light. Ohara popped them onto his face and then rapidly poured
a prairie oyster, a bromo and a cup of black coffee laced with brandy
into him. Bunny's usual rate of morning vibration began to dampen
towards zero and he peered about the room through the dark lenses.

"Morning, young Coogler," said a gruff voice. The outline was that of J.
G. Barsax, senior partner of his late father's firm. A murmur of
greeting came from three other elephantine figures. They were
Gonfalonieri of First American, Witz of Diversified Limited, and
McChesney of Southern Development Inc. If an efficient bomb had
gone off in the room at that moment, it would have liquidated
eighteen-billion-dollars' worth of Top Management and Ownership.

"Sorry about your father," Barsax grunted. "Mind if we sit? Not much
time before the funeral. Have to brief you fast."

Bunny said, "Mr. Sankton told me what I'd have to do, Mr. Barsax. Rise
after the 'Amen,' lead the procession past the casket, up the center
aisle to the limousine exit--"

"No, no, no. Of course you know the funeral form. I'm talking about the
financial briefing. Coogler, you're a very wealthy young man."

Bunny took off his sunglasses. "I am?" he asked uncertainly. "Surely
not. There's this trust thing he was always talking about to pay me
twenty thousand a year--"

"Talked," said Gonfalonieri. "That's all he did. He never got it on
paper. You're the sole heir to the liquid equivalent of, say, three and
a half billion dollars."

Ohara hastily refilled the cup with laced coffee and put it in Bunny's
hand.

"So," little Mr. Witz said softly, "there are certain things you must
know. Certain rules that have sprung up which We observe." The
capitalized plural pronoun was definitely sounded. Whether it was to be
taken as royal, editorial, or theological, who can say?

They proceeded to brief Bunny.

Firstly, he must never admit that he was wealthy. He might use the
phrase "what I have," accompanied by a whimsical shrug.

Secondly, he must never, under any circumstances, at any time, give
anything to anybody. Whenever asked for anything he was to intimate that
this one request he simply could not grant, that it was the one crushing
straw atop his terrible burden of charitable contributions.

Thirdly, whenever offered anything--from a cigar to a million-dollar
market tip from a climber--he must take it without thanks and complain
bitterly that the gift was not handsomer.

Fourthly, he must look on Touching Capital as morally equivalent to
coprophagia, but he must not attempt to sting himself by living on the
interest of his interest; that was only for New Englanders.

Fifthly, when he married he must choose his bride from one of Us.

"You mean, one of you four gentlemen?" Bunny asked. He thought of J.G.'s
eldest daughter and repressed a shudder.

"No," said Witz. "One of Us in the larger sense. You will come to know
who is who, and eventually acquire an instinct that will enable you to
distinguish between a millionaire and a person of real substance."

"And that," said Barsax, "is the sum of it. We shall see you at the
funeral and approach you later, Coogler." He glanced at his watch.
"Come, gentlemen."

       *       *       *       *       *

Bunny had a mechanical turn of mind; he enjoyed the Museum of Suppressed
Inventions at J.G.'s Carolina estate. The quavery old curator pottered
after him complaining.

"This, sir, is the hundred-mile-per-gallon carburetor. I was more active
when it came out in '36--I was a Field Operative then. I tracked it down
to a little Iowa village on a rumor from a patent attorney; it was quite
a struggle to suppress that one. Quite a struggle, sir! But--the next
case, please, sir--it would have been rendered obsolete within two
years. Yes, sir, that's when the Gasoline Pill came out. Let me show
you, sir!"

He happily popped one of the green pills into a gallon of water and
lectured as it bubbled and fumed and turned the water into 100-octane
gasoline.

The Eternal Match was interesting, the Two-Cent Sirloin was delicious,
and the Vanishing Cream vanished a half-inch roll of fat from Bunny's
belly while he watched. "But Lord bless you, sir," tittered the curator,
"what would be the point of giving people something that worked? They'd
just go ahead and use it, and then when they had no more need they'd
stop using it, eh?

"And this one, sir, it isn't really what you'd call suppressed. We're
just working on it to build it up some; perhaps in five years we'll have
it looking like it costs five thousand dollars, and then we'll be able to
sell it." "It" was three-dimensional, full-color television; the heart
of the system was a flashlight battery, a small C-clamp and a pinch of
baking soda.

Bunny visited also the vast pest-breeding establishment in the Rockies,
where flies, roaches, mice, gnats, boll-weevils, the elm-rot fungus and
the tobacco-mosaic virus were patiently raised to maximum virulence and
dispatched by couriers to their proper places all over the world. The
taciturn Connecticut Yankee who ran the sprawling plant snapped at him,
"Danged better mousetraps almost wiped out the mousetrap industry. Think
people'd have better sense. DDT almost killed off pesticide--whole
danged business, employing two hundred thousand. They think of that?
Naw! So we had ter breed them DDT-resistant strains and seed 'em
everywhere."

Bunny began to acquire the instinct to which Witz had referred. When he
encountered an Oil Texan he could tell that the man's nervous hilarity
and brag stemmed from his poverty, and he pitied him. When he
encountered one day at Gonfalonieri's place in Baja California a certain
quiet fellow named Briggs, he knew without being told that Briggs was
one of Us. It was no surprise to learn later that Briggs held all the
basic patents on water.

Briggs it was, indeed, who took him aside for an important talk. The
quiet man offered him a thousand-dollar cigar (for the growing of whose
tobacco Briggs had caused an artificial island to be built in the deep
Central Pacific at the exactly correct point of temperature, wind and
humidity) and said to him, "It's time you took a wife."

Bunny, who could not these days leaf through _Vogue_ or the _New Yorker_
without a tender, reminiscent smile for each of the lovely models shown
in the advertisements, disagreed. "Can't see why, Briggs," he muttered.
"Having jolly good time. Never used to have much luck with girls--all
different now. Mean to say, with--" he gave the whimsical little
shrug--"what little I have, doing awfully well and it doesn't cost me
anything. Queer. When I had ten-twenty thou', when I was poor, had to
buy corsages, dinners. All different now. They buy me things. Platinum
watches. Have simply _dozens_. But the rules--have to take 'em. Queer."

"We've all been through it," Briggs said. "When you get bored let me
know."

"Oh, promise," Bunny said. "Absolutely promise."

He spent the next six months in Hollywood where golden girls vied in
plying him with _coq au vin_, solid iridium meat grinders, and similar
trifles. One charming lady who had come out to the sound stages in 1934
presented him with a genuine hand-embroidered antique scabbard said to
date back to the Crusades. It was a pleasant gift and it varied the ...

... the _monotony_?

He sat up abruptly on the mutation-mink coverlet, causing the shapely
blond head which remained on the silken pillow to emit a small sleepy
snort.

"Monotony," Bunny said in a tragic whisper. "Definitely." He went home
to Ohara, though not neglecting to pick up as he left his little
present for the evening, a golden nutcracker set with diamonds and lined
with unborn leopard pelt.

Ohara dipped into his store of Oriental wisdom in an effort to console
him. He suggested, "Missah Bunny think if must be monotonized, what
beautifurr way to _get_ monotonized?"

It did not help.

Ohara suggested, "You try make funny, fo'get monotony. Fo' exampurr,
spend coupre mirrion dorras make big reso't town, cawr same Schmir-ton,
Ohio. Think how mad Missah Nickey be, he put up hoterr, have to cawr
same Hoterr Hirton Schmir-ton! Oh, raffs!"

It would not do.

"Ohara," Bunny said tragically, "I would give--" he shrugged
whimsically--"what little I have not to be bored with, ah, life."

The impassive Oriental countenance of his manservant flickered briefly
in a grimace. His orders were clear, and he knew how terrible would be
the consequences of disobedience.

Bunny tossed fitfully alone in his bed an hour later, and Ohara was on
the phone to an unlisted New York number. "This Ohara," he whispered.
"Missah Bunny talk about giving away money. Awr his money."

The responding voice was that of an Englishman. It said: "Thank you,
Ohara. One hopes, of course, for your sake, that the information has
arrived in time. One hopes devoutly that it will not be necessary to
inflict the Death of a Thousand Cuts on you. A book could be written
about Number Three Hundred and Twenty-Eight alone, and as for Number
Four Hundred and One--! Well, I won't keep you with my chattering." He
hung up.

Within minutes the lonely house in a canyon was surrounded; the Fourth
Plutocratic Airborne and Amphibious Assault Force was the ultimate in
efficient mercenary troops. By dawn they had Bunny on his way to Barsax'
Carolina estate under heavy sedation.

He woke in the guest room he knew, just off the corridor which contained
the Museum of Suppressed Inventions. Little Mr. Witz and quiet Mr.
Briggs were there. With granite faces they told him: "You have broken
the Code, young Coogler. You said there was something you valued above
money. You have got to go."

"Please," Bunny blubbered. "I didn't mean it. I'll marry your daughter.
I'll marry both your daughters! Just don't kill me."

Mr. Witz said implacably, "Our decent, money-fearing girls wouldn't have
anything to do with a dirty plutophobe like you, young Coogler. If only
your poor father had put through the trust fund in time--well, thank
Heaven he's not alive to see this day. But we won't kill you, young
Coogler. It is not within our power to cause the death of a billionaire
as if he were an animal or mere human being. What we can and will do is
quarantine you. In Virginia."

This sounded like a rank _non sequitur_ to Bunny until they took him to
the Museum and trundled out a one-man space ship invented early in 1923
by a Herr Rudolf Grenzbach of Czernovitz, Upper Silesia, whose body had
been found in Lower Silesia later that year.

Officers of the Fourth P.A.A.A.F. loaded him into the bomblike
contrivance over his spirited protest and pre-set the course. Virginia,
it seemed, was an asteroid rather than the neighboring state. They fired
the rockets and Bunny was on his way.

       *       *       *       *       *

Four years later Mr. Witz and Mr. Briggs conferred again. "Perhaps,"
said Mr. Witz, "we've put enough of a scare into him. Let's radio the
lad and find out whether he's given up his wild seditious notions and is
ready to be rescued."

They tuned in the asteroid Virginia on another suppressed invention.
"Young Coogler," Briggs said into the microphone. "This is Briggs. We
wish to know whether you've come to your senses and are ready to take
your place in society--ours, of course."

There squawked over the loud-speaker the voice of Bunny. "I say, what
_was_ that. No, not now, not for a second please. Where did that voice
come from? Can you hear me, Mr. Briggs?"

"I hear you," said Mr. Briggs.

"Extraordinary! Another invention, eh?"

"Yes," said Briggs. "I am calling, young Coogler, to learn whether you
are properly contrite and if so to arrange for your rescue."

"Rescue?" said the voice of Bunny. "Why, no thanks. That won't be
necessary. Having a fine time here. They need me, you know. They love me
for, ah, myself alone. Not the dashed money. _Double_-dash the money, I
say!"

Mr. Briggs, white to the lips, broke the connection.

"He meant you to do that," Mr. Witz remarked.

"I know. Let him rot there."

The quavery old curator had been listening. "On Virginia?" he asked
tremulously. "You don't rot on Virginia. Don't you gentlemen know how it
got its name?"

"Never bothered to find out," Mr. Briggs snapped. "Since you're bursting
to tell us, you might as well."

The curator beamed. "They call it Virginia because it's the planetoid of
virgins. The dangdest thing. _Perpetual_ virgins. The Plutocratic Space
Force says they've never seen anything like it, not on Mars, not on
Callisto. Self-renewing--the _dangdest_ thing!"

Mr. Briggs and Mr. Witz looked at each other. After a while Mr. Witz
spoke.

"Bunny," he said reflectively. "Bunny. He was well named."




_Kazam Collects_

Copyright 1941 by Albing Publications


"Hail, jewel in the lotus," half whispered the stringy, brown person.
His eyes were shut in holy ecstasy, his mouth pursed as though he were
tasting the sweetest fruit that ever grew.

"Hail, jewel in the lotus," mumbled back a hundred voices in a confused
backwash of sound. The stringy, brown person turned and faced his
congregation. He folded his hands.

"Children of Hagar," he intoned. His voice was smooth as old ivory and
had a mellow sheen about it.

"Children of Hagar, you who have found delight and peace in the bosom of
the Elemental, the Eternal, the Un-knowingness that is without bounds,
make Peace with me." You could tell by his very voice that the words
were capitalized.

"Let our Word," intoned the stringy, brown person, "be spread. Let our
Will be brought about. Let us destroy, let us mould, let us build. Speak
low and make your spirits white as Hagar's beard." With a reverent
gesture he held before them two handfuls of an unattached beard that
hung from the altar.

"Children of Hagar, unite your Wills into One." The congregation kneeled
as he gestured at them, gestured as one would at a puppy one was
training to play dead.

The meeting hall--or rather, temple--of the Cult of Hagar was on the
third floor of a little building on East 59th Street, otherwise almost
wholly unused. The hall had been fitted out to suit the sometimes
peculiar requirements of the unguessable Will-Mind-Urge of Hagar
Inscrutable; that meant that there was gilded wood everywhere there
could be, and strips of scarlet cloth hanging from the ceiling in
circles of five. There was, you see, a Sanctified Ineffability about the
unequal lengths of the cloth strips.

The faces of the congregation were varying studies in rapture. As the
stringy, brown person tinkled a bell they rose and blinked absently at
him as he waved a benediction and vanished behind a door covered with
chunks of gilded wood.

The congregation began to buzz quietly.

"Well?" demanded one of another. "What did you think of it?"

"I dunno. Who's _he_, anyway?" A respectful gesture at the door covered
with gilded wood.

"Kazam's his name. They say he hasn't touched food since he saw the
Ineluctable Modality."

"What's _that_?"

Pitying smile. "You couldn't understand it just yet. Wait till you've
come around a few more times. Then maybe you'll be able to read _his_
book--'The Unravelling.' After that you can tackle the 'Isba Kazhlunk'
that he found in the Siberian ice. It opened the way to the Ineluctable
Modality, but it's pretty deep stuff--even for me."

They filed from the hall buzzing quietly, dropping coins into a bowl
that stood casually by the exit. Above the bowl hung from the ceiling
strips of red cloth in a circle of five. The bowl, of course, was
covered with chunks of gilded wood.

Beyond the door the stringy, brown man was having a little trouble.
Detective Fitzgerald would not be convinced.

"In the first place," said the detective, "you aren't licensed to
collect charities. In the second place this whole thing looks like fraud
and escheatment. In the third place this building isn't a dwelling and
you'll have to move that cot out of here." He gestured disdainfully at
an army collapsible that stood by the battered rolltop desk. Detective
Fitzgerald was a big, florid man who dressed with exquisite neatness.

"I am sorry," said the stringy, brown man. "What must I do?"

"Let's begin at the beginning. The Constitution guarantees freedom of
worship, but I don't know if they meant something like this. Are you a
citizen?"

"No. Here are my registration papers." The stringy, brown man took them
from a cheap, new wallet.

"Born in Persia. Name's Joseph Kazam. Occupation, scholar. How do you
make that out?"

"It's a good word," said Joseph Kazam with a hopeless little gesture.
"Are you going to send me away--deport me?"

"I don't know," said the detective thoughtfully. "If you register your
religion at City Hall before we get any more complaints, it'll be all
right."

"Ah," breathed Kazam. "Complaints?"

Fitzgerald looked at him quizzically. "We got one from a man named
Rooney," he said. "Do you know him?"

"Yes. Runi Sarif is his real name. He has hounded me out of Norway,
Ireland and Canada--wherever I try to reestablish the Cult of Hagar."

Fitzgerald looked away. "I suppose," he said matter-of-factly, "you have
lots of secret enemies plotting against you."

Kazam surprised him with a burst of rich laughter. "I have been
investigated too often," grinned the Persian, "not to recognize that
one. You think I'm mad."

"No," mumbled the detective, crestfallen. "I just wanted to find out.
Anybody running a nut cult's automatically reserved a place in
Bellevue."

"Forget it, sir. I spit on the Cult of Hagar. It is my livelihood, but I
know better than any man that it is a mockery. Do you know what our
highest mystery is? The Ineluctable Modality." Kazam sneered.

"That's Joyce," said Fitzgerald with grin. "You have a sense of humor,
Mr. Kazam. That's a rare thing in the religious."

"Please," said Joseph Kazam. "Don't call me that. I am not worthy--the
noble, sincere men who work for their various faiths are my envy. I have
seen too much to be one of them."

"Go on," said Fitzgerald, leaning forward. He read books, this
detective, and dearly loved an abstract discussion.

The Persian hesitated. "I," he said at length, "am an occult engineer. I
am a man who can make the hidden forces work."

"Like staring a leprechaun in the eye till he finds you a pot of gold?"
suggested the detective with a chuckle.

"One manifestation," said Kazam calmly. "Only one."

"Look," said Fitzgerald. "They still have that room in Bellevue. Don't
say that in public--stick to the Ineluctable Modality if you know what's
good for you."

"Tut," said the Persian regretfully. "He's working on you."

The detective looked around the room. "Meaning who?" he demanded.

"Runi Sarif. He's trying to reach your mind and turn you against me."

"Balony," said Fitzgerald coarsely. "You get yourself registered as a
religion in twenty-four hours; then find yourself a place to live. I'll
hold off any charges of fraud for a while. Just watch your step." He
jammed a natty Homburg down over his sandy hair and strode pugnaciously
from the office.

Joseph Kazman sighed. Obviously the detective had been disappointed.

That night, in his bachelor's flat, Fitzgerald tossed and turned
uneasily on his modern bed. Being blessed with a sound digestion able to
cope even with a steady diet of chain-restaurant food and the soundest
of consciences, the detective was agitated profoundly by his
wakefulness.

Being, like all bachelors, a cautious man, he hesitated to dose himself
with the veronal he kept for occasions like this, few and far between
though they were. Finally, as he heard the locals pass one by one on the
El a few blocks away and then heard the first express of the morning,
with its higher-pitched bickering of wheels and quicker vibration
against the track, he stumbled from bed and walked dazedly into his
bathroom, fumbled open the medicine chest.

Only when he had the bottle and had shaken two pills into his hand did
he think to turn on the light. He pulled the cord and dropped the pills
in horror. They weren't the veronal at all but an old prescription which
he had thriftily kept till they might be of use again.

Two would have been a fatal overdose. Shakily Fitzgerald filled a glass
of water and drank it down, spilling about a third on his pajamas. He
replaced the pills and threw away the entire bottle. You never know when
a thing like that might happen again, he thought--too late to mend.

Now thoroughly sure that he needed the sedative, he swallowed a dose. By
the time he had replaced the bottle he could scarcely find his way back
to the bed, so sleepy was he.

He dreamed then. Detective Fitzgerald was standing on a plain, a white
plain, that was very hot. His feet were bare. In the middle distance
was a stone tower above which circled winged skulls--bat-winged skulls,
whose rattling and flapping he could plainly hear.

From the plain--he realized then that it was a desert of fine, white
sand--spouted up little funnels or vortices of fog in a circle around
him. He began to run very slowly, much slower than he wanted to. He
thought he was running away from the tower and the vortices, but somehow
they continued to stay in his field of vision. No matter where he
swerved the tower was always in front and the little twisters around
him. The circle was growing smaller around him, and he redoubled his
efforts to escape.

Finally he tried flying, leaping into the air. Though he drifted for
yards at a time, slowly and easily, he could not land where he wanted
to. From the air the vortices looked like petals of a flower, and when
he came drifting down to the desert he would land in the very center of
the strange blossom.

Again he ran, the circle of foggy cones following still, the tower still
before him. He felt with his bare feet something tinglingly clammy. The
circle had contracted to the point of coalescence, had gripped his two
feet like a trap.

He shot into the air and headed straight for the tower. The creaking,
flapping noise of the bat-winged skulls was very much louder now. He
cast his eyes to the side and was just able to see the tips of his own
black, flapping membranes.

As though regular nightmares--always the same, yet increasingly
repulsive to the detective--were not enough woe for one man to bear, he
was troubled with a sudden, appalling sharpness of hearing. This was
strange, for Fitzgerald had always been a little deaf in one ear.

The noises he heard were distressing things, things like the ticking of
a wristwatch two floors beneath his flat, the gurgle of water in sewers
as he walked the streets, humming of underground telephone wires.
Headquarters was a bedlam with its stentorian breathing, the machine-gun
fire of a telephone being dialed, the howitzer crash of a cigarette case
snapping shut.

He had his bedroom soundproofed and tried to bear it. The inches of
fibreboard helped a little; he found that he could focus his attention
on a book and practically exclude from his mind the regular swish of air
in his bronchial tubes, the thudding at his wrists and temples, the
slushing noise of food passing through his transverse colon.

Fitzgerald did not go mad for he was a man with ideals. He believed in
clean government and total extirpation of what he fondly believed was a
criminal class which could be detected by the ear lobes and other
distinguishing physical characteristics.

He did not go to a doctor because he knew that the word would get back
to headquarters that Fitzgerald heard things and would probably begin to
see things pretty soon and that it wasn't good policy to have a man like
that on the force.

The detective read up on the later Freudians, trying to interpret the
recurrent dream. The book said that it meant he had been secretly in
love with a third cousin on his mother's side and that he was ashamed of
it now and wanted to die, but that he was afraid of heavenly judgment.
He knew that wasn't so; his mother had had no relations and detective
Fitzgerald wasn't afraid of anything under the sun.

After two weeks of increasing horror he was walking around like a
corpse, moving by instinct and wearily doing his best to dodge the
accidents that seemed to trail him. It was then that he was assigned to
check on the Cult of Hagar. The records showed that they had registered
at City Hall, but records don't show everything.

He walked in on the cult during a service and dully noted that its
members were more prosperous in appearance than they had been, and that
there were more women present. Joseph Kazam was going through precisely
the same ritual that the detective had last seen.

When the last bill had fallen into the pot covered with gilded wood and
the last dowager had left Kazam emerged and greeted the detective.

"Fitzgerald," he said, "you damned fool, why didn't you come to me in
the first place?"

"For what?" asked the detective, loosening the waxed cotton plugs in his
ears.

The stringy, brown man chuckled. "Your friend Rooney's been at work on
you. You hear things. You can't sleep and when you do--"

"That's plenty," interjected Fitzgerald. "Can you help me out of this
mess I'm in?"

"Nothing to it. Nothing at all. Come into the office."

Dully the detective followed, wondering if the cot had been removed.

The ritual that Kazam performed was simple in the extreme, but a little
revolting. The mucky aspects of it Fitzgerald completely excused when he
suddenly realized that he no longer heard his own blood pumping through
his veins, and that the asthmatic wheeze of the janitor in the basement
was now private to the janitor again.

"How does it feel?" asked Kazam concernedly.

"Magnificent," breathed the detective, throwing away his cotton plugs.
"Too wonderful for words."

"I'm sorry about what I had to do," said the other man, "but that was to
get your attention principally. The real cure was mental projection." He
then dismissed the bedevilment of Fitzgerald with an airy wave of the
hand. "Look at this," he said.

"My God!" breathed the detective. "Is it real?"

Joseph Kazam was holding out an enormous diamond cut into a thousand
glittering facets that shattered the light from his desk lamp into a
glorious blaze of color.

"This," said the stringy, brown man, "is the Charity Diamond."

"You mean," sputtered the detective, "you got it from--"

"The very woman," said Kazam hastily. "And of her own free will. I have
a receipt: 'For the sum of one dollar in payment for the Charity
Diamond. Signed, Mrs. ----'"

"Yes," said the detective. "Happy days for the Sons of Hagar. Is this
what you've been waiting for?"

"This," said Kazam curiously turning the stone in his hand, "is what
I've been hunting over all the world for years. And only by starting a
nut cult could I get it. Thank God it's legal."

"What are you going to do now?" asked the detective.

"Use the diamond for a little trip. You will want to come along, I
think. You'll have a chance to meet your Mr. Rooney."

"Lead on," said Fitzgerald. "After the past two weeks I can stand
anything."

"Very well." Kazam turned out the desk lamp.

"It glows," whispered Fitzgerald. He was referring to the diamond, over
whose surface was passing an eerie blue light, like the invisible flame
of anthracite.

"I'd like you to pray for success, Mr. Fitzgerald," said Kazam. The
detective began silently to go over his brief stock of prayers. He was
barely conscious of the fact that the other man was mumbling to himself
and caressing the diamond with long, wiry fingers.

The shine of the stone grew brighter yet; strangely, though, it did not
pick out any of the details of the room.

Then Kazam let out an ear-splitting howl. Fitzgerald winced, closing his
eyes for just a moment. When he opened them he began to curse in real
earnest.

"You damned rotter!" he cried. "Taking me here--"

The Persian looked at him coldly and snapped: "Easy, man! This is
real--look around you!"

The detective looked around and saw that the tower of stone was rather
far in the distance, farther than in his dreams, usually. He stooped and
picked up a handful of the fine white desert sand, let it run through
his fingers.

"How did you get us here?" he asked hoarsely.

"Same way I cured you of Runi Sarif's curse. The diamond has rare powers
to draw the attention. Ask any jewel-thief. This one, being enormously
expensive, is so completely engrossing that unsuspected powers of
concentration are released. That, combined with my own sound knowledge
of a particular traditional branch of psychology, was enough to break
the walls down which held us pent to East 59th Street."

The detective was beginning to laugh, flatly and hysterically. "I come
to you hag-ridden, you first cure me and then plunge me twice as deep
into Hell, Kazam! What's the good of it?"

"This isn't Hell," said the Persian matter-of-factly. "It isn't Hell,
but it isn't Heaven either. Sit down and let me explain." Obediently
Fitzgerald squatted on the sand. He noticed that Kazam cast an
apprehensive glance at the horizon before beginning.

"I was born in Persia," said Kazam, "but I am not Persian by blood,
religion or culture. My life began in a little mountain village where I
soon saw that I was treated not as the other children were. My slightest
wish could command the elders of the village and if I gave an order it
would be carried out.

"The reasons for all this were explained to me on my thirteenth birthday
by an old man--a very old man whose beard reached to his knees. He said
that he had in him only a small part of the blood of Kaidar, but that I
was almost full of it, that there was little human blood in me.

"I cried and screamed and said that I didn't want to be Kaidar, that I
just wanted to be a person. I ran away from the village after another
year, before they began to teach me their twisted, ritualistic versions
of occult principles. It was this flight which saved me from the usual
fate of the Kaidar; had I stayed I would have become a celebrated
miracle man, known for all of two hundred miles or so, curing the sick
and cursing the well. My highest flight would be to create a new Islamic
faction--number three hundred and eighty-two, I suppose.

"Instead I knocked around the world. And Lord, got knocked around too.
Tramp steamers, maritime strike in Frisco, the Bela Kun regime in
Hungary--I wound up in North Africa when I was about thirty years old.

"I was broke, as broke as any person could be and stay alive. A
Scotswoman picked me up, hired me, taught me mathematics. I plunged into
it, algebra, conics, analytics, calculus, relativity. Before I was done,
I'd worked out wave-mechanics three years before that Frenchman had even
begun to think about it.

"When I showed her the set of differential equations for the carbon
molecule, all solved, she damned me for an unnatural monster and threw
me out. But she'd given me the beginnings of mental discipline, and done
it many thousands of times better than they could have in that Persian
village. I began to realize what I was.

"It was then that I drifted into the nut cult business. I found out that
all you need for capital is a stock of capitalized abstract qualities,
like All-Knowingness, Will-Mind-Urge, Planetude and Exciliation. With
that to work on I can make my living almost anywhere on the globe.

"I met Runi Sarif, who was running an older-established sect, the
Pan-European Astral Confederation of Healers. He was a Hindu from the
Punjab plains in the North of India. Lord, what a mind he had! He worked
me over quietly for three months before I realized what was up.

"Then there was a little interview with him. He began with the
complicated salute of the Astral Confederation and got down to business.
'Brother Kazam,' he said, 'I wish to show you an ancient sacred book I
have just discovered.' I laughed, of course. By that time I'd already
discovered seven ancient books by myself, all ready-translated into the
language of the country I would be working at the time. The 'Isba
Kazhlunk' was the most successful; that's the one I found preserved in
the hide of a mammoth in a Siberian glacier.

"Runi looked sour. 'Brother Kazam,' said he, 'do not scoff. Does the
word _Kaidar_ mean anything to you?' I played dumb and asked whether it
was something out of the third chapter of the Lost Lore of Atlantis, but
I remembered ever so faintly that I had been called that once.

"'A Kaidar,' said Runi, 'is an atavism to an older, stronger people who
once visited this plane and left their seed. They can be detected
by'--he squinted at me sharply--'by a natural aptitude for occult
pursuits. They carry in their minds learning undreamable by mortals.
Now, Brother Kazam, if we could only find a Kaidar ...'

"'Don't carry yourself away,' I said. 'What good would that be to us?'

"Silently he produced what I'll swear was actually an ancient sacred
book. And I wouldn't be surprised if he'd just discovered it, moreover.
It was the psaltery of a small, very ancient sect of Edomites who had
migrated beyond the Euphrates and died out. When I'd got around the
rock-Hebrew it was written in I was very greatly impressed. They had
some noble religious poems, one simply blistering exorcism and anathema,
a lot of tedious genealogy in verse form. And they had a didactic poem
on the Kaidar, based on one who had turned up in their tribe.

"They had treated him horribly--chained him to a cave wall and used him
for a sort of male Sybil. They found out that the best way to get him to
prophesy was to show him a diamond. Then, one sad day, they let him
touch it. Blam! He vanished, taking two of the rabbis with him. The
rabbis came back later; appeared in broad daylight raving about visions
of Paradise they had seen.

"I quite forgot about the whole affair. At that time I was obsessed with
the idea that I would become the Rockefeller of occultism--get
disciples, train them carefully and spread my cult. If Mohammed could do
it, why not I? To this day I don't know the answer.

"While I was occupying myself with grandiose daydreams, Runi was busily
picking over my mind. To a natural cunning and a fantastic ability to
concentrate he added what I unconsciously knew, finally achieving
adequate control of many factors.

"Then he stole a diamond, I don't know where, and vanished. One presumes
he wanted to have that Paradise that the rabbis told of for his very
own. Since then he has been trying to destroy me, sending out messages,
dominating other minds on the Earthly plane--if you will excuse the
jargon--to that end. He reached you, Fitzgerald, through a letter he got
someone else to write and post, then when you were located and itemized
he could work on you directly.

"You failed him, and he, fearing I would use you, tried to destroy you
by heightening your sense of hearing and sending you visions nightly of
this plane. It would destroy any common man; we are very fortunate that
you are extraordinarily tough in your psychological fibre.

"Since then I have been dodging Runi Sarif, trying to get a diamond big
enough to send me here through all the barriers he has prepared against
my coming. You helped me very greatly." Again Kazam cast an apprehensive
look at the horizon.

The detective looked around slowly. "Is this a paradise?" he asked. "If
so I've been seriously misled by my Sunday School teachers." He tried
weakly to smile.

"That is one of the things I don't understand--yet," said the Persian.
"And this is another unpleasantness which approaches."

Fitzgerald stared in horror at the little spills of fog which were
upending themselves from the sand. He had the ghastly, futile dream
sensation again.

"Don't try to get away from them," snapped Kazam. "Walk _at_ the
things." He strode directly and pugnaciously at one of the little puffs,
and it gave way before him and they were out of the circle.

"That was easy," said the detective weakly.

Suddenly before them loomed the stone tower. The winged skulls were
nowhere to be seen.

Sheer into the sky reared the shaft, solid and horribly hewn from grey
granite, rough-finished on the outside. The top was shingled to a
shallow cone, and embrasures were black slots in the wall.

Then, Fitzgerald never knew how, they were inside the tower, in the
great round room at its top. The winged skulls were perched on little
straggling legs along a golden rail. Aside from the flat blackness of
their wings all was crimson and gold in that room. There was a sickly
feeling of decay and corruption about it, a thing that sickened the
detective.

Hectic blotches of purple marked the tapestries that hung upon that
circular wall, blotches that seemed like the high spots in rotten meat.
The tapestries themselves the detective could not look at again after
one glance. The thing he saw, sprawling over a horde of men and women,
drooling flame on them, a naked figure still between its jaws, colossal,
slimy paws on a little heap of human beings, was not a pretty sight.

Light came from flambeaux in the wall, and the torches cast a sickly,
reddish-orange light over the scene. Thin curls of smoke from the
sockets indicated an incense.

And lastly there was to be seen a sort of divan, heaped with cushions in
fantastic shapes. Reclining easily on them was the most grotesque,
abominable figure Fitzgerald had ever seen. It was a man, had been once.
But incredible incontinence had made the creature gross and bloated with
what must have been four hundred pounds of fat. Fat swelled out the
cummerbund that spanned the enormous belly, fat welted out the cheeks so
that the ears of the creature could not be seen beneath the embroidered
turban, gouts of fat rolled in a blubbery mass about the neck like the
wattles of a dead cockerel.

"Ah," hissed Joseph Kazam. "Runi Sarif ..." He drew from his shirt a
little sword or big knife from whose triangular blade glinted the light
of the flambeaux.

The suety monster quivered as though maggots were beneath his skin. In a
voice that was like the sound a butcher makes when he tears the fat
belly from a hog's carcass, Runi Sarif said: "Go--go back. Go
back--where you came from--" There was no beginning or ending to the
speech. It came out between short, grunting gasps for breath.

Kazam advanced, running a thumb down the knife-blade. The monster on the
divan lifted a hand that was like a bunch of sausages. The nails were a
full half-inch below the level of the skin. Afterwards Fitzgerald
assured himself that the hand was the most repellent aspect of the
entire affair.

With creaking, flapping wingstrokes the skulls launched themselves at
the Persian, their jaws clicking stonily. Kazam and the detective were
in the middle of a cloud of flying jaws that were going for their
throats.

Insanely Fitzgerald beat at the things, his eyes shut. When he looked
they were lying on the floor. He was surprised to see that there were
just four of them. He would have sworn to a dozen at least. And they all
four bore the same skillfully delivered slash mark of Kazam's knife.

There was a low, choking noise from the monster on the divan. As the
detective stared Kazam stepped up the first of the three shallow steps
leading to it.

What followed detective Fitzgerald could never disentangle. The lights
went out, yet he could plainly see. He saw that the monstrous Runi Sarif
had turned into a creature such as he had seen on the tapestry, and he
saw that so had Kazam, save that the thing which was the Persian carried
in one paw a blade.

They were no longer in the tower room, it seemed, nor were they on the
white desert below. They were hovering in a roaring squalling tumult, in
a confusion of spheres which gently collided and caromed off each other
without noise.

As the detective watched, the Runi monster changed into one of the
spheres and so, promptly, did Kazam. On the side of the Kazam sphere was
the image of the knife. Tearing at a furious rate through the jostling
confusion and blackness Fitzgerald followed, and he never knew how.

The Kazam sphere caught the other and spun dizzily around it, with a
screaming noise which rose higher and higher. As it passed the top
threshold of hearing, both spheres softened and spread into black,
crawling clouds. Suspended in the middle of one was the knife.

The other cloud knotted itself into a furious, tight lump and charged
the one which carried the blade. It hurtled into and through it,
impaling itself.

Fitzgerald shook his head dizzily. They were in the tower room, and Runi
Sarif lay on the divan with a cut throat. The Persian had dropped the
knife, and was staring with grim satisfaction at the bleeding figure.

"Where were we?" stuttered the detective. "Where--?" At the look in
Kazam's eyes he broke off and did not ask again.

The Persian said: "He stole my rights. It is fitting that I should
recover them, even thus. In one plane--there is no room for two in
contest."

Jovially he clapped the detective on the shoulder. "I'll send you back
now. From this moment I shall be a card in your Bureau of Missing
Persons. Tell whatever you wish--it won't be believed."

"It was supposed to be a paradise," said the detective.

"It is," said Kazam. "Look."

They were no longer in the tower, but on a mossy bank above a river
whose water ran a gamut of pastels, changing hues without end. It
tinkled out something like a Mozart sonata and was fragrant with a score
of scents.

The detective looked at one of the flowers on the bank. It was swaying
of itself and talking quietly in a very small voice, like a child.

"They aren't clever," said Kazam, "but they're lovely."

Fitzgerald drew in his breath sharply as a flight of butterfly things
passed above. "Send me away," he gasped. "Send me away now or I'll never
be able to go. I'd kill you to stay here in another minute."

Kazam laughed. "Folly," he said. "Just as the dreary world of sand and a
tower that--a certain unhappy person--created was his and him so this
paradise is me and mine. My bones are its rock, my flesh is its earth,
my blood is its waters, my mind is its living things."

As an unimaginably glowing drift of crystalline, chiming creatures loped
across the whispering grass of the bank Kazam waved one hand in a
gesture of farewell.

Fitzgerald felt himself receding with incredible velocity, and for a
brief moment saw an entire panorama of the world that was Kazam. Three
suns were rising from three points of the horizon, and their slanting
rays lit a paradise whose only inglorious speck was a stringy, brown man
on a riverbank. Then the man vanished as though he had been absorbed
into the ground.




_The Last Man Left in the Bar_

Copyright 1957 by Royal Publications, Inc. for _Infinity Science
Fiction_


You know him, Joe--or Sam, Mike, Tony, Ben, whatever your deceitful,
cheaply genial name may be. And do not lie to yourself, Gentle Reader;
you know him too.

A loner, he was.

You did not notice him when he slipped in; you only knew by his
aggrieved air when he (finally) caught your eye and self-consciously
said "Shot of Red Top and a beer" that he'd ruffle your working day.
(Six at night until two in the morning is a day? But ah, the horrible
alternative is to work for a living.)

Shot of Red Top and a beer at 8:35.

And unbeknownst to him, Gentle Reader, in the garage up the street the
two contrivers of his dilemma conspired; the breaths of tall dark
stooped cadaverous Galardo and the mouse-eyed lassie mingled.

"Hyü shall be a religion-isst," he instructed her.

"I know the role," she squeaked and quoted: "'Woe to the day on which I
was born into the world! Woe to the womb which bare me! Woe to the
bowels which admitted me! Woe to the breasts which suckled me! Woe to
the feet upon which I sat and rested! Woe to the hands which carried me
and reared me until I grew! Woe to my tongue and my lips which have
brought forth and spoken vanity, detraction, falsehood, ignorance,
derision, idle tales, craft and hypocrisy! Woe to mine eyes which have
looked upon scandalous things! Woe to mine ears which have delighted in
the words of slanderers! Woe to my hands which have seized what did not
of right belong to them! Woe to my belly and my bowels which have lusted
after food unlawful to be eaten! Woe to my throat which like a fire has
consumed all that it found!'"

He sobbed with the beauty of it and nodded at last, tears hanging in his
eyes: "Yess, that religion. It iss one of my fave-o-ritts."

She was carried away. "I can do others. Oh, I can do others. I can do
Mithras, and Isis, and Marduk, and Eddyism and Billsword and Pealing and
Uranium, both orthodox and reformed."

"Mithras, Isis and Marduk are long gone and the resst are sss-till tü
come. Listen tü your master, dü not chat-ter, and we shall an artwork
make of which there will be talk under the green sky until all food is
eaten."

Meanwhile, Gentle Reader, the loner listened. To his left strong silent
sinewy men in fellowship, the builders, the doers, the darers: "So I
told the foreman where he should put his Bullard. I told him I run a
Warner and Swasey, I run a Warner and Swasey good, I never even _seen_ a
Bullard up close in my life, and where he should put it. I know how to
run a Warner and Swasey and why should he take me off a Warner and
Swasey I know how to run and put me on a Bullard and where he should put
it ain't I right?"

"Absolutely."

To his right the clear-eyed virtuous matrons, the steadfast, the
true-seeing, the loving-kind: "Oh, I don't know what I want, what do you
want? I'm a Scotch drinker really but I don't feel like Scotch but if I
come home with muscatel on my breath Eddie calls me a wino and laughs
his head off. I don't know what I want. What do you want?"

In the box above the bar the rollicking raster raced.

                VIDEO                              AUDIO

    _Gampa_ smashes bottle over the     _Gampa_: Young whippersnapper!
    head of _Bibby_.

    _Bibby_ spits out water.            _Bibby_: Next time put some
                                        flavoring in it, Gramps!

    _Gampa_ picks up sugar bowl and     _Bibby_: My, that's better!
    smashes it over _Bibby's_ head.     But what of Naughty Roger and
    _Bibby_ licks sugar from face.      his attempted kidnapping of Sis
                                        to extort the secret of the
                                        Q-Bomb?


                cut to
    _Limbo Shot_ of Reel-Rye bottle.    _Announcer_: Yes, kiddies! What
                                        of Roger?
                                        But first a word from the makers
                                        of Reel-Rye, that happy syrup
                                        that gives your milk grown up
                                        flavor! YES! Grown up flavor!

Shot of Red Top and a beer. At 8:50.

In his own un-secret heart: Steady, boy. You've got to think this out.
Nothing impossible about it, no reason to settle for a stalemate; just a
little time to think it out. Galardo said the Black Chapter would accept
a token submission, let me return the Seal, and that would be that. But
I mustn't count on that as a datum; he lied to me about the Serpentists.
Token submission _sounds_ right; they go in big for symbolism. Maybe
because they're so stone-broke, like the Japs. Drinking a cup of tea,
they gussie it all up until it's a religion; that's the way you squeeze
nourishment out of poverty--

Skip the Japs. Think. He lied to me about the Serpentists. The big thing
to remember is, I have the Chapter Seal and they need it back, or think
they do. All you need's a little time to think things through, place
where he won't dare jump you and grab the Seal. And this is it.

"Joe. Sam, Mike, Tony, Ben, whoever you are. Hit me again."

Joe--Sam, Mike, Tony, Ben?--tilts the amber bottle quietly; the liquid's
level rises and crowns the little glass with a convex meniscus. He turns
off the stream with an easy roll of the wrist. The suntan line of neon
tubing at the bar back twinkles off the curve of surface tension, the
placid whiskey, the frothy beer. At 9:05.

To his left: "So Finkelstein finally meets Goldberg in the garment
center and he grabs him like this by the lapel, and he yells, 'You
louse, you rat, you no-good, what's this about you running around with
my wife? I ought to--I ought to--say, you call _this_ a _button_hole?'"

Restrained and apprehensive laughter; Catholic, Protestant, Jew (choice
of one), what's the difference I always say.

Did they have a Jewish Question still, or was all smoothed and troweled
and interfaithed and brotherhoodooed--

Wait. Your formulation implies that they're in the future, and you have
no proof of that. Think straighter; you don't know _where_ they are, or
_when_ they are, or _who_ they are. You _do_ know that you walked into
Big Maggie's resonance chamber to change the target, experimental
iridium for old reliable zinc

_and_

"Bartender," in a controlled and formal voice. Shot of Red Top and a
beer at 9:09, the hand vibrating with remembrance of a dirty-green el
Greco sky which _might_ be Brookhaven's heavens a million years either
way from now, or one second sideways, or (bow to Method and formally
exhaust the possibilities) a hallucination. The Seal snatched from the
greenlit rock altar could be a blank washer, a wheel from a toy truck,
or the screw top from a jar of shaving cream but for the fact that it
wasn't. It was the Seal.

_So_: they began seeping through after that. The Chapter wanted it back.
The Serpentists wanted it, period. Galardo had started by bargaining and
wound up by threatening, but how could you do anything but laugh at his
best offer, a rusty five-pound spur gear with a worn keyway and three
teeth missing? His threats were richer than his bribes; they culminated
with The Century of Flame. "Faith, father, it doesn't scare me at all,
at all; sure, no man could stand it." Subjective-objective (How you used
to sling _them_ around!), and Master Newton's billiard-table similes
dissolve into sense-impressions of pointer-readings as you learn your
trade, but Galardo had scared hell out of you, or into you, with The
Century of Flame.

But you had the Seal of the Chapter and you had time to think, while on
the screen above the bar:

              VIDEO                                   AUDIO

    Long shot down steep, cobblestoned
    French village street.
    _Pierre_ darts out of alley in
    middle distance, looks wildly
    around and runs toward camera,
    pistol in hand. _Annette_ and
    _Paul_ appear from same alley and   _Paul_: Stop, you fool!
    dash after him.

    Cut to _Cu_ of _Pierre's_ face;     _Pierre_: A fool, am I?
    beard stubble and sweat.

    Cut to long shot; _Pierre_ aims
    and fires; _Paul_ grabs his left
    shoulder and falls.                 _Annette_: Darling!

    Cut to two-shot, _Annette_ and      _Paul_: Don't mind me. Take my
    _Paul_.                             gun--after him. He's a mad dog,
                                        I tell you!

    Dolly back.                         _Annette_: This, my dear, is as
    _Annette_ takes his pistol.         good a time as any to drop my
                                        little masquerade. Are you
                                        American agents really so stupid
                                        that you never thought I might
                                        be--a plant, as you call it?

    _Annette_ stands; we see her aim
    down at _Paul_, out of the
    picture. Then we dolly in to a
    _Cu_ of her head; she is smiling    _Sound_: click of cocking
    triumphantly.                       pistol.

    A hand holding a pistol enters      _Harkrider_: Drop it, Madame
    the _Cu_; the pistol muzzle         Golkov.
    touches _Annette's_ neck.

    Dolly back to middle shot           _Paul_: No, Madame Golkov; we
    _Harkrider_ stands behind           American agents were not really
    _Annette_as _Paul_ gets up          so stupid. Wish I could say the
    briskly andtakes the pistol         same for--your people. Pierre
    from her hand.                      Tourneur _was_ a plant, I am
                                        glad to say; otherwise he would
                                        not have missed me. He is one of
                                        the best pistol shots in
                                        Counterintelligence.

    Cut to long shot of street,         _Harkrider_: Come along, madame
    _Harkrider_ and _Paul_ walk away    Golkov.
    from the camera, _Annette_
    between them. Fadeout.              Music: theme up and out.

Them and their neatly packaged problems, them and their neatly packaged
shows with beginning middle and end. The rite of the low-budget
shot-in-Europe spy series, the rite of pugilism, the rite of the
dog-walk after dinner and the beer at the bar with co-celebrant
worshippers at the high altar of Nothing.

9:30. Shot of Red Top and a beer, positively the last one until you get
this figured out; you're beginning to buzz like a transformer.

Do they have transformers? Do they have vitamins? Do they have anything
but that glaring green sky, and the rock altar and treasures like the
Seal and the rusty gear with three broken teeth? "All smelling of
iodoform. And all quite bald." But Galardo looked as if he were dying of
tuberculosis, and the letter from the Serpentists was in a sick and
straggling hand. Relics of mediaeval barbarism.

To his left--

"_Galardo!_" he screamed.

The bartender scurried over--Joe, Sam, Mike, Tony, Ben?--scowling.
"What's the matter, mister?"

"I'm sorry. I got a stitch in my side. A cramp."

Bullyboy scowled competently and turned. "What'll you have, mister?"

Galardo said cadaverously: "Wodeffer my vriend hyere iss havfing."

"Shot of Red Top and a beer, right?

"_What are you doing here?_"

"Drink-ing beferachiss ... havf hyü de-site-it hwat tü dü?"

The bartender rapped down the shot glass and tilted the bottle over it,
looking at Garlardo. Some of the whiskey slopped over. The bartender
started, went to the tap and carefully drew a glass of beer, slicing the
collar twice.

"My vriend hyere will pay."

He got out a half dollar, fumbling, and put it on the wet wood. The
bartender, old-fashioned, rapped it twice on the bar to show he wasn't
stealing it even though you weren't watching; he rang it up double
virtuous on the cash register, the absent owner's fishy eye.

"What are you doing here?" again, in a low, reasonable, almost amused
voice to show him you have the whip hand.

"Drink-ing beferachiss ... it iss so cle-an hyere." Galardo's sunken
face, unbelievably, looked wistful as he surveyed the barroom, his head
swiveling slowly from extreme left to extreme right.

"Clean. Well. Isn't it clean there?"

"Sheh, not!" Galardo said mournfully. "Sheh, not! Hyere it iss so
cle-an ... hwai did yü outreach tü us? Hag-rid us, wretch-it, hag-rid
us?" There were tears hanging in his eyes. "Haff yü de-site-it hwat tü
dü?"

Expansively: "I don't pretend to understand the situation _fully_,
Galardo. But you know and I know that I've got something you people
[think you] need. Now there doesn't seem to be any body of law covering
artifacts that appear [_plink!_] in a magnetron on accidental overload,
and I just have your word that it's yours."

"Ah, that iss how yü re-member it now," said sorrowful Galardo.

"Well, it's the way it [but wasn't something green? I think of spired
Toledo and three angled crosses toppling] happened. I don't want
anything silly, like a million dollars in small unmarked bills, and I
don't want to be bullied, to be bullied, no, I mean not by you, not by
anybody. Just, just tell me who you are, what all this is about. This is
nonsense, you see, and we can't have nonsense. I'm afraid I'm not
expressing myself very well--"

And a confident smile and turn away from him, which shows that you
aren't afraid, you can turn your back and dare him to make something of
it. In public, in the bar? It is laughable; you have him in the palm of
your hand. "Shot of Red Top and a beer, please, Sam." At 9:48.

The bartender draws the beer and pours the whiskey. He pauses before he
picks up the dollar bill fished from the pants pocket, pauses almost
timidly and works his face into a friend's grimace. But you can read
him; he is making amends for his suspicion that you were going to start
a drunken brawl when Galardo merely surprised you a bit. You can read
him because your mind is tensed to concert pitch tonight, ready for
Galardo, ready for the Serpentists, ready to crack this thing wide open;
strange!

But you weren't ready for the words he spoke from his fake apologetic
friend's grimace as you delicately raised the heavy amber-filled glass
to your lips: "Where'd your friend go?"

You slopped the whiskey as you turned and looked.

Galardo gone.

You smiled and shrugged; he comes and goes as he pleases, you know.
Irresponsible, no manners at all--but _loyal_. A prince among men when
you get to know him, a prince, I tell you. All this in your smile and
shrug--why, you could have been an actor! The worry, the faint neurotic
worry, didn't show at all, and indeed there is no reason why it should.
You have the whip hand; you have the Seal; Galardo will come crawling
back and explain everything. As for example:

"You may wonder why I've asked all of you to assemble in the libr'reh."

_or_

"For goodness' sake, Gracie, I wasn't going to go to Cuba! When you
heard me on the extension phone I was just ordering a dozen Havana
_cigars_!"

_or_

"In your notation, we are from 19,276 AD. Our basic mathematic is a
quite comprehensible subsumption of your contemporary statistical
analysis and topology which I shall now proceed to explain to you."

And that was all.

With sorrow, Gentle Reader, you will have noticed that the marble did
not remark: "I am chiseled," the lumber "I am sawn," the paint "I am
applied to canvas," the tea leaf "I am whisked about in an exquisite
Korean bowl to brew while the celebrants of _cha no yu_ squeeze this
nourishment out of their poverty." Vain victim, relax and play your
hunches; subconscious integration does it. Stick with your lit-tle old
subconscious integration and all will go _swimmingly_, if only it
weren't so damned noisy in here. But it was dark on the street and
conceivably things could happen there; stick with crowds and stick with
witnesses, but if only it weren't so ...

To his left they were settling down; it was the hour of confidences, and
man to man they told the secret of their success: "In the needle trade,
I'm in the needle trade, I don't sell anybody a crooked needle, my
father told me that. Albert, he said to me, don't never sell nobody
nothing but a straight needle. And today I have four shops."

To his right they were settling down; freed of the cares of the day they
invited their souls, explored the spiritual realm, theologized with
exquisite distinctions: "Now _wait_ a minute, I didn't say I was a
_good_ Mormon, I said I was a Mormon and that's what I am, a Mormon. I
_never_ said I was a _good_ Mormon, I just said I was a Mormon, my
mother was a Mormon and my father was a Mormon, and that makes me a
Mormon but I _never_ said I was a _good_ Mormon----"

_Distinguo_, rolled the canonical thunder; _distinguo_.

Demurely a bonneted lassie shook her small-change tambourine beneath his
chin and whispered, snarling: "Galardo lied."

Admit it; you were startled. But what need for the bartender to come
running with raised hand, what need for needle-trader to your left to
shrink away, the L.D.S. to cower?

"Mister, that's twice you let out a yell, we run a quiet place, if you
can't be good, begone."

Begob.

"I ash-assure you, bartender, it was--unintenable."

Greed vies with hate; greed wins; greed always wins: "Just keep it
quiet, mister, this ain't the Bowery, this is a family place." Then,
relenting: "The same?"

"Yes, please." At 10:15 the patient lassie jingled silver on the
parchment palm outstretched. He placed a quarter on the tambourine and
asked politely: "Did you say something to me before, Miss?"

"God bless you, sir. Yes, sir, I did say something. I said Galardo lied;
the Seal is holy to the Serpent, sir, and to his humble emissaries. If
you'll only hand it over, sir, the Serpent will somewhat mitigate the
fearsome torments which are rightly yours for snatching the Seal from
the Altar, sir."

[Snatchings from Altars? _Ma foi_, the wench is mad!]

"Listen, lady. That's only talk. What annoys me about you people is, you
won't talk sense. I want to know who you are, what this is about, maybe
just a little hint about your mathematics, and I'll do the rest and you
can have the blooming Seal. I'm a passable physicist even if I'm only a
technician. I bet there's something you didn't know. I bet you didn't
know the tech shortage is tighter than the scientist shortage. You get a
guy can tune a magnetron, he writes his own ticket. So I'm weak on
quantum mechanics, the theory side, I'm still a good all-around man and
be-_lieve_ me, the Ph.D.'s would kiss my ever-loving _feet_ if I told
them I got an offer from Argonne----

"So listen, you Janissary emissary. I'm happy right here in this
necessary commissary and here I _stay_."

But she was looking at him with bright frightened mouse's eyes and
slipped on down the line when he paused for breath, putting out the
parchment palm to others but not ceasing to watch him.

Coins tapped the tambour. "God bless you. God bless you. God bless you."

The raving-maniacal ghost of G. Washington Hill descended then into a
girdled sibyl; she screamed from the screen: "It's _Hit_ Pa-_rade_!"

"I like them production numbers."

"I like that Pigalle Mackintosh."

"I like them production numbers. Lotsa pretty girls, pretty clothes,
something to take your mind off your troubles."

"I like that Pigalle Mackintosh. She don't just sing, mind you, she
plays the saxophone. Talent."

"I like them production numbers. They show you just what the song is all
about. Like last week they did _Sadist Calypso_ with this mad scientist
cutting up the girls, and then Pigalle comes in and whips him to death
at the last verse, you see just what the song's all about, something to
take your mind off your troubles."

"I like that Pigalle Mackintosh. She don't just sing, mind you, she
plays the saxophone and cracks a blacksnake whip, like last week in
_Sadist Calypso_----"

"Yeah. Something to take your mind off your troubles."

Irritably he felt in his pocket for the Seal and moved, stumbling a
little, to one of the tables against the knotty pine wall. His head
slipped forward on the polished wood and he sank into the sea of myth.

Galardo came to him in his dream and spoke under a storm-green sky:
"Take your mind off your troubles, Edward. It was stolen like the first
penny, like the quiz answers, like the pity for your bereavement." His
hand, a tambourine, was out.

"Never shall I yield," he declaimed to the miserable wretch. "By the
_honneur_ of a Gascon. I stole it fair and square; 'tis mine, knave! _En
garde!_"

Galardo quailed and ran, melting into the sky, the altar, the
tambourine.

       *       *       *       *       *

A ham-hand manhandled him. "Light-up time," said Sam. "I let you sleep
because you got it here, but I got to close up now."

"Sam," he says uncertainly.

"One for the road, mister. On the house, _Up-sy_-daisy!" meaty hooks
under his armpits heaving him to the bar.

The lights are out behind the bar, the jolly neons, glittering off how
many gems of amber rye and the tan crystals of beer? A meager bulb above
the register is the oasis in the desert of inky night.

"Sam," groggily, "you don't understand. I mean I never explained it--"

"Drink up, mister," a pale free drink, soda bubbles lightly tinged with
tawny rye. A small sip to gain time.

"Sam, there are some people after me--"

"You'll feel better in the morning, mister. Drink up, I got to close up,
hurry up."

"These people, Sam [it's cold in here and scary as a noise in the attic;
the bottles stand accusingly, the chrome globes that top them eye you]
these people, they've got a thing, The Century of--"

"Sure, mister, I let you sleep because you got it here, but we close up
now, drink up your drink."

"Sam, let me go home with you, will you? It isn't anything like that,
don't misunderstand, I just can't be alone. These people--look, I've got
money--"

He spreads out what he dug from his pocket.

"Sure, mister, you got lots of money, two dollars and thirty-eight
cents. Now you take your money and get out of the store because I got to
lock up and clean out the register--"

"Listen, bartender, I'm not drunk, maybe I don't have much money on me
but I'm an important man! Important! They couldn't run Big Maggie at
Brookhaven without me, I may not have a degree but what I get from these
people if you'll only let me stay here--"

The bartender takes the pale one on the house you only sipped and dumps
it in the sink; his hands are iron on you and you float while he chants:

    "_Decent man. Decent place._
    _Hold their liquor. Got it here._
    _Try be nice. Drunken bum._
        _Don't--come--back._"

The crash of your coccyx on the concrete and the slam of the door are
one.

_Run!_

Down the black street stumbling over cans, cats, orts, to the pool of
light in the night, safe corner where a standard sprouts and sprays
radiance.

The tall black figure that steps between is Galardo.

The short one has a tamborine.

"_Take it!_" He thrust out the Seal on his shaking palm. "If you won't
tell me anything, you won't. Take it and go away!"

Galardo inspects it and sadly says: "Thiss appearss to be a blank
wash-er."

"Mistake," he slobbers. "Minute." He claws in his pockets, ripping.
"Here! Here!"

The lassie squeaks: "The wheel of a toy truck. It will not do at all,
sir." Her glittereyes.

"Then this! This is it! This must be it!"

Their heads shake slowly. Unable to look his fingers feel the rim and
rolled threading of the jar cap.

They nod together, sad and glitter-eyed, and The Century of Flame
begins.




_The Adventurer_

Copyright 1953 by Space Publications Inc. for _Space Science Fiction_


President Folsom XXIV said petulantly to his Secretary of the Treasury:
"Blow me to hell, Bannister, if I understood a single word of that.
_Why_ can't I buy the Nicolaides Collection? And don't start with the
rediscount and the Series W business again. Just tell me _why_."

The Secretary of the Treasury said with an air of apprehension and
thread-like feeling across his throat: "It boils down to--no money, Mr.
President."

The President was too engrossed in thoughts of the marvelous collection
to fly into a rage. "It's _such_ a bargain," he said mournfully. "An
archaic Henry Moore figure--really too big to finger, but I'm no
culture-snob, thank God--and fifteen early Morrisons and I can't begin
to tell you what else." He looked hopefully at the Secretary of Public
Opinion: "Mightn't I seize it for the public good or something?"

The Secretary of Public Opinion shook his head. His pose was gruffly
professional. "Not a chance, Mr. President. We'd never get away with it.
The art-lovers would scream to high Heaven."

"I suppose so ... _Why_ isn't there any money?" He had swiveled
dangerously on the Secretary of the Treasury again.

"Sir, purchases of the new Series W bond issue have lagged badly because
potential buyers have been attracted to--"

"Stop it, stop it, _stop_ it! You know I can't make head or tail of that
stuff. Where's the money _going_?"

The Director of the Budget said cautiously: "Mr. President, during the
biennium just ending, the Department of Defense accounted for 78 per
cent of expenditures--"

The Secretary of Defense growled: "Now wait a minute, Felder! We were
voted--"

The President interrupted, raging weakly: "Oh, you rascals! My father
would have known what to do with you! But don't think I can't handle it.
_Don't_ think you can hoodwink me." He punched a button ferociously; his
silly face was contorted with rage and there was a certain tension on
all the faces around the Cabinet table.

Panels slid down abruptly in the walls, revealing grim-faced Secret
Servicemen. Each Cabinet officer was covered by at least two automatic
rifles.

"Take that--that traitor away!" the President yelled. His finger pointed
at the Secretary of Defense, who slumped over the table, sobbing. Two
Secret Servicemen half-carried him from the room.

President Folsom XXIV leaned back, thrusting out his lower lip. He told
the Secretary of the Treasury: "_Get_ me the money for the Nicolaides
Collection. Do you understand? I don't care how you do it. _Get_ it." He
glared at the Secretary of Public Opinion. "Have you any comments?"

"No, Mr. President"

"All right, then." The President unbent and said plaintively: "I don't
see why you can't all be more reasonable. I'm a very reasonable man. I
don't see why I can't have a few pleasures along with my
responsibilities. Really I don't. And I'm sensitive. I don't _like_
these scenes. Very well. That's all. The Cabinet meeting is adjourned."

They rose and left silently in the order of their seniority. The
President noticed that the panels were still down and pushed the button
that raised them again and hid the granite-faced Secret Servicemen. He
took out of his pocket a late Morrison fingering-piece and turned it
over in his hand, a smile of relaxation and bliss spreading over his
face. _Such_ amusing textural contrast! _Such_ unexpected variations on
the classic sequences!

The Cabinet, less the Secretary of Defense, was holding a rump meeting
in an untapped corner of the White House gymnasium.

"God," the Secretary of State said, white-faced. "Poor old Willy!"

The professionally gruff Secretary of Public Opinion said: "We should
murder the bastard. I don't care what happens--"

The Director of the Budget said dryly: "We all know what would happen.
President Folsom XXV would take office. No; we've got to keep plugging
as before. Nothing short of the invincible can topple the Republic ..."

"What about a war?" the Secretary of Commerce demanded fiercely. "We've
no proof that our program will work. What about a war?"

State said wearily: "Not while there's a balance of power, my dear man.
The Io-Callisto Question proved that. The Republic and the Soviet fell
all over themselves trying to patch things up as soon as it seemed that
there would be real shooting. Folsom XXIV and his excellency Premier
Yersinsky know at least that much."

The Secretary of the Treasury said: "What would you all think of Steiner
for Defense?"

The Director of the Budget was astonished. "Would he take it?"

Treasury cleared his throat. "As a matter of fact, I've asked him to
stop by right about now." He hurled a medicine ball into the budgetary
gut.

"Oof!" said the Director. "You bastard. Steiner would be perfect. He
runs Standards like a watch." He treacherously fired the medicine ball
at the Secretary of Raw Materials, who blandly caught it and slammed it
back.

"Here he comes," said the Secretary of Raw Materials. "Steiner! Come and
sweat some oleo off!"

Steiner ambled over, a squat man in his fifties, and said: "I don't mind
if I do. Where's Willy?"

State said: "The President unmasked him as a traitor. He's probably been
executed by now."

Steiner looked grim, and grimmer yet when the Secretary of the Treasury
said, dead-pan: "We want to propose you for Defense."

"I'm happy in Standards," Steiner said. "Safer, too. The Man's father
took an interest in science, but The Man never comes around. Things are
very quiet. Why don't you invite Winch, from the National Art
Commission? It wouldn't be much of a change for the worse for him."

"No brains," the Secretary for Raw Materials said briefly. "Heads up!"

Steiner caught the ball and slugged it back at him. "What good are
brains?" he asked quietly.

"Close the ranks, gentlemen," State said. "These long shots are too hard
on my arms."

The ranks closed and the Cabinet told Steiner what good were brains. He
ended by accepting.

       *       *       *       *       *

The Moon is all Republic. Mars is all Soviet. Titan is all Republic.
Ganymede is all Soviet. But Io and Callisto, by the Treaty of Greenwich,
are half-and-half Republic and Soviet.

Down the main street of the principal settlement on Io runs an invisible
line. On one side of the line, the principal settlement is known as New
Pittsburgh. On the other side it is known as Nizhni-Magnitogorsk.

Into a miner's home in New Pittsburgh one day an eight-year-old boy
named Grayson staggered, bleeding from the head. His eyes were swollen
almost shut.

His father lurched to his feet, knocking over a bottle. He looked
stupidly at the bottle, set it upright too late to save much of the
alcohol, and then stared fixedly at the boy. "See what you made me do,
you little bastard?" he growled, and fetched the boy a clout on his
bleeding head that sent him spinning against the wall of the hut. The
boy got up slowly and silently--there seemed to be something wrong with
his left arm--and glowered at his father.

He said nothing.

"Fighting again," the father said, in a would-be fierce voice. His eyes
fell under the peculiar fire in the boy's stare. "Damn fool--"

A woman came in from the kitchen. She was tall and thin. In a flat voice
she said to the man: "Get out of here." The man hiccupped and said:
"Your brat spilled my bottle. Gimme a dollar."

In the same flat voice: "I have to buy food."

"_I said gimme a dollar!_" The man slapped her face--it did not
change--and wrenched a small purse from the string that suspended it
around her neck. The boy suddenly was a demon, flying at his father with
fists and teeth. It lasted only a second or two. The father kicked him
into a corner where he lay, still glaring, wordless and dry-eyed. The
mother had not moved; her husband's handmark was still red on her face
when he hulked out, clutching the money bag.

Mrs. Grayson at last crouched in the corner with the eight-year-old boy.
"Little Tommy," she said softly. "My little Tommy! Did you cross the
line again?"

He was blubbering in her arms, hysterically, as she caressed him. At
last he was able to say: "I didn't cross the line, Mom. Not this time.
It was in school. They said our name was really Krasinsky. God-damn
him!" the boy shrieked. "They said his grandfather was named Krasinsky
and he moved over the line and changed his name to Grayson! God-damn
him! Doing that to us!"

"Now darling," his mother said, caressing him. "Now, darling." His
trembling began to ebb. She said: "Let's get out the spools, Tommy. You
mustn't fall behind in school. You owe that to me, don't you, darling?"

"Yes, Mom," he said. He threw his spindly arms around her and kissed
her. "Get out the spools. We'll show him. I mean them."

President Folsom XXIV lay on his death-bed, feeling no pain, mostly
because his personal physician had pumped him full of morphine. Dr.
Barnes sat by the bed holding the presidential wrist and waiting,
occasionally nodding off and recovering with a belligerent stare around
the room. The four wire-service men didn't care whether he fell asleep
or not; they were worriedly discussing the nature and habits of the
President's first-born, who would shortly succeed to the highest office
in the Republic.

"A firebrand, they tell me," the A.P. man said unhappily.

"Firebrands I don't mind," the U.P. man said. "He can send out all the
inflammatory notes he wants just as long as he isn't a fiend for
exercise. I'm not as young as I once was. You boys wouldn't remember the
_old_ President, Folsom XXII. He used to do point-to-point hiking. He
worshipped old F.D.R."

The I.N.S. man said, lowering his voice: "Then he was worshipping the
wrong Roosevelt. Teddy was the athlete."

Dr. Barnes started, dropped the presidential wrist and held a mirror to
the mouth for a moment "Gentlemen," he said, "the President is dead."

"O.K.," the A.P. man said. "Let's go, boys. I'll send in the flash.
U.P., you go cover the College of Electors. I.N.S., get onto the
President Elect Trib, collect some interviews and background--"

The door opened abruptly; a colonel of infantry was standing there,
breathing hard, with an automatic rifle at port. "Is he dead?" he asked.

"Yes," the A.P. man said. "If you'll let me past--"

"Nobody leaves the room," the colonel said grimly. "I represent General
Slocum, Acting President of the Republic. The College of Electors is
acting now to ratify--"

A burst of gunfire caught the colonel in the back; he spun and fell,
with a single hoarse cry. More gunfire sounded through the White House.
A Secret Serviceman ducked his head through the door: "President's dead?
You boys stay put. We'll have this thing cleaned up in an hour--" He
vanished.

The doctor sputtered his alarm and the newsmen ignored him with
professional poise. The A.P. man asked: "Now who's Slocum? Defense
Command?"

I.N.S. said: "I remember him. Three stars. He headed up the Tactical
Airborne Force out in Kansas four-five years ago. I think he was retired
since then."

A phosphorus grenade crashed through the window and exploded with a
globe of yellow flame the size of a basketball; dense clouds of
phosphorus pentoxide gushed from it and the sprinkler system switched
on, drenching the room.

"Come on!" hacked the A.P. man, and they scrambled from the room and
slammed the door. The doctor's coat was burning in two or three places,
and he was retching feebly on the corridor floor. They tore his coat off
and flung it back into the room.

The U.P. man, swearing horribly, dug a sizzling bit of phosphorus from
the back of his hand with a pen-knife and collapsed, sweating, when it
was out. The I.N.S. man passed him a flask and he gurgled down half a
pint of liquor. "Who flang that brick?" he asked faintly.

"Nobody," the A.P. man said gloomily. "That's the hell of it. None of
this is happening. Just the way Taft the Pretender never happened in
'03. Just the way the Pentagon Mutiny never happened in '67."

"'68," the U.P. man said faintly. "It didn't happen in '68, not '67."

The A.P. man smashed a fist into the palm of his hand and swore.
"_God_-damn," he said. "Some day I'd like to--" He broke off and was
bitterly silent.

The U.P. man must have been a little dislocated with shock and quite
drunk to talk the way he did. "Me too," he said. "Like to tell the
story. Maybe it was '67 not '68. I'm not sure now. Can't write it down
so the details get lost and then after a while it didn't happen at all.
Revolution'd be good deal. But it takes people t' make revolution.
_People._ With eyes 'n ears. 'N memories. We make things not-happen an'
we make people not-see an' not-hear ..." He slumped back against the
corridor wall, nursing his burned hand. The others were watching him,
very scared.

Then the A.P. man caught sight of the Secretary of Defense striding down
the corridor, flanked by Secret Servicemen. "Mr. Steiner!" he called.
"What's the picture?"

Steiner stopped, breathing heavily, and said: "Slocum's barricaded in
the Oval Study. They don't want to smash in. He's about the only one
left. There were only fifty or so. The Acting President's taken charge
at the Study. You want to come along?"

They did, and even hauled the U.P. man after them.

The Acting President, who would be President Folsom XXV as soon as the
Electoral College got around to it, had his father's face--the petulant
lip, the soft jowl--on a hard young body. He also had an auto-rifle
ready to fire from the hip. Most of the Cabinet was present. When the
Secretary of Defense arrived, he turned on him. "Steiner," he said
nastily, "can you explain why there should be a rebellion against the
Republic in your department?"

"Mr. President," Steiner said, "Slocum was retired on my recommendation
two years ago. It seems to me that my responsibility ended there and
Security should have taken over."

The President Elect's finger left the trigger of the auto-rifle and his
lip drew in a little. "Quite so," he said curtly, and turned to the
door. "Slocum!" he shouted. "Come out of there. We can use gas if we
want."

The door opened unexpectedly and a tired-looking man with three stars on
each shoulder stood there, bare-handed. "All right," he said drearily.
"I was fool enough to think something could be done about the regime.
But you fat-faced imbeciles are going to go on and on and--"

The stutter of the auto-rifle cut him off. The President Elect's
knuckles were white as he clutched the piece's forearm and grip; the
torrent of slugs continued to hack and plow the general's body until the
magazine was empty. "Burn that," he said curtly, turning his back on it.
"Dr. Barnes, come here. I want to know about my father's passing."

The doctor, hoarse and red-eyed from the whiff of phosphorus smoke,
spoke with him. The U.P. man had sagged drunkenly into a chair, but the
other newsmen noted that Dr. Barnes glanced at them as he spoke, in a
confidential murmur.

"Thank you, doctor," the President Elect said at last, decisively. He
gestured to a Secret Serviceman. "Take those traitors away." They went,
numbly.

The Secretary of State cleared his throat. "Mr. President," he said, "I
take this opportunity to submit the resignations of myself and fellow
Cabinet members according to custom."

"That's all right," the President Elect said. "You may as well stay on.
I intend to run things myself anyway." He hefted the auto-rifle. "You,"
he said to the Secretary of Public Opinion. "You have some work to do.
Have the memory of my father's--artistic--preoccupations obliterated as
soon as possible. I wish the Republic to assume a warlike posture--yes;
what is it?"

A trembling messenger said: "Mr. President, I have the honor to inform
you that the College of Electors has elected you President of the
Republic--unanimously."

       *       *       *       *       *

Cadet Fourth Classman Thomas Grayson lay on his bunk and sobbed in an
agony of loneliness. The letter from his mother was crumpled in his
hand: "--prouder than words can tell of your appointment to the Academy.
Darling, I hardly knew my grandfather but I know that you will serve as
brilliantly as he did, to the eternal credit of the Republic. You must
be brave and strong for my sake--"

He would have given everything he had or ever could hope to have to be
back with her, and away from the bullying, sneering fellow-cadets of the
Corps. He kissed the letter--and then hastily shoved it under his
mattress as he heard footsteps.

He popped to a brace, but it was only his roommate Ferguson. Ferguson
was from Earth, and rejoiced in the lighter Lunar gravity which was
punishment to Grayson's Io-bred muscles.

"Rest, mister," Ferguson grinned.

"Thought it was night inspection."

"Any minute now. They're down the hall. Lemme tighten your bunk or
you'll be in trouble--" Tightening the bunk he pulled out the letter and
said, calfishly: "Ah-_hah_! Who is she?--" and opened it.

When the cadet officers reached the room they found Ferguson on the
floor being strangled black in the face by spidery little Grayson. It
took all three of them to pull him off. Ferguson went to the infirmary
and Grayson went to the Commandant's office.

The Commandant glared at the cadet from under the most spectacular pair
of eyebrows in the Service. "Cadet Grayson," he said, "explain what
occurred."

"Sir, Cadet Ferguson began to read a letter from my mother without my
permission."

"That is not accepted by the Corps as grounds for mayhem. Do you have
anything further to say?"

"Sir, I lost my temper. All I thought of was that it was an act of
disrespect to my mother and somehow to the Corps and the Republic
too--that Cadet Ferguson was dishonoring the Corps."

_Bushwah_, the Commandant thought. _A snow job and a crude one._ He
studied the youngster. He had never seen such a brace from an Io-bred
fourth-classman. It must be torture to muscles not yet toughened up to
even Lunar gravity. Five minutes more and the boy would have to give
way, and serve him right for showing off.

He studied Grayson's folder. It was too early to tell about academic
work, but the fourth-classman was a bear--or a fool--for extra duty. He
had gone out for half a dozen teams and applied for membership in the
exacting Math Club _and_ Writing Club. The Commandant glanced up;
Grayson was still in his extreme brace. The Commandant suddenly had the
queer idea that Grayson could hold it until it killed him.

"One hundred hours of pack-drill," he barked, "to be completed before
quarter-term. Cadet Grayson, if you succeed in walking off your tours,
remember that there is a tradition of fellowship in the Corps which its
members are expected to observe. Dismiss."

After Grayson's steel-sharp salute and exit the Commandant dug deeper
into the folder. Apparently there was something wrong with the boy's
left arm, but it had been passed by the examining team that visited Io.
Most unusual. Most irregular. But nothing could be done about it now.

       *       *       *       *       *

The President, softer now in body than on his election day, and
infinitely more cautious, snapped: "It's all very well to create an
incident. But where's the money to come from? Who wants the rest of Io
anyway? And what will happen if there's war?"

Treasury said: "The hoarders will supply the money, Mr. President. A
system of percentage-bounties for persons who report currency-hoarders,
and then enforced purchase of a bond issue."

Raw materials said: "We need that iron, Mr. President. We need it
desperately."

State said: "All our evaluations indicate that the Soviet Premier would
consider nothing less than armed invasion of his continental borders as
occasion for all-out war. The consumer-goods party in the Soviet has
gained immensely during the past five years and of course their
armaments have suffered. Your shrewd directive to put the Republic in a
warlike posture has borne fruit, Mr. President ..."

President Folsom XXV studied them narrowly. To him the need for a border
incident culminating in a forced purchase of Soviet Io did not seem as
pressing as they thought, but they were, after all, specialists. And
there was no conceivable way they could benefit from it personally. The
only alternative was that they were offering their professional advice
and that it would be best to heed it. Still, there was a vague, nagging
something ...

Nonsense, he decided. The spy dossiers on his Cabinet showed nothing but
the usual. One had been blackmailed by an actress after an affair and
railroaded her off the Earth. Another had a habit of taking bribes to
advance favorite sons in civil and military service. And so on. The
Republic could not suffer at their hands; the Republic and the dynasty
were impregnable. You simply spied on everybody--including the
spies--and ordered summary executions often enough to show that you
meant it, and kept the public ignorant: deaf-dumb-blind ignorant. The
spy system was simplicity itself; you had only to let things get as
tangled and confused as possible until _nobody_ knew who was who. The
executions were literally no problem, for guilt or innocence made no
matter. And mind-control when there were four newspapers, six magazines
and three radio and television stations was a job for a handful of
clerks.

No; the Cabinet couldn't be getting away with anything. The system was
unbeatable.

President Folsom XXV said: "Very well. Have it done."

       *       *       *       *       *

Mrs. Grayson, widow, of New Pittsburgh, Io, disappeared one night. It
was in all the papers and on all the broadcasts. Some time later she was
found dragging herself back across the line between Nizhni-Magnitogorsk
and New Pittsburgh in sorry shape. She had a terrible tale to tell
about what she had suffered at the hands and so forth of the
Nizhni-Magnitogorskniks. A diplomatic note from the Republic to the
Soviet was answered by another note which was answered by the dispatch
of the Republic's First Fleet to Io which was answered by the dispatch
of the Soviet's First and Fifth Fleets to Io.

The Republic's First Fleet blew up the customary deserted target hulk,
fulminated over a sneak sabotage attack and moved in its destroyers.
Battle was joined.

Ensign Thomas Grayson took over the command of his destroyer when its
captain was killed on his bridge. An electrified crew saw the strange,
brooding youngster perform prodigies of skill and courage, and responded
to them. In one week of desultory action the battered destroyer had
accounted for seven Soviet destroyers and a cruiser.

As soon as this penetrated to the flagship Grayson was decorated and
given a flotilla. His weird magnetism extended to every officer and man
aboard the seven craft. They struck like phantoms, cutting out cruisers
and battlewagons in wild unorthodox actions that couldn't have succeeded
but did--every time. Grayson was badly wounded twice, but his driving
nervous energy carried him through.

He was decorated again and given the battlewagon of an ailing
four-striper.

Without orders he touched down on the Soviet side of Io, led out a
landing party of marines and bluejackets, cut through two regiments of
Soviet infantry, and returned to his battlewagon with prisoners: the
top civil and military administrators of Soviet Io.

They discussed him nervously aboard the flagship.

"He had a mystical quality, Admiral. His men would follow him into an
atomic furnace. And--and I almost believe he could bring them through
safely if he wanted to." The laugh was nervous.

"He doesn't look like much. But when he turns on the charm--watch out!"

"He's--he's a _winner_. Now I wonder what I mean by that?"

"I know what you mean. They turn up every so often. People who can't be
stopped. People who have everything. Napoleons. Alexanders. Stalins. Up
from nowhere."

"Suleiman. Hitler. Folsom I. Jenghiz Khan."

"Well, let's get it over with."

They tugged at their gold-braided jackets and signalled the honor guard.

Grayson was piped aboard, received another decoration and another
speech. This time he made a speech in return.

       *       *       *       *       *

President Folsom XXV, not knowing what else to do, had summoned his
Cabinet. "Well?" he rasped at the Secretary of Defense.

Steiner said with a faint shrug: "Mr. President, there is nothing to be
done. He has the fleet, he has the broadcasting facilities, he has the
people."

"People!" snarled the President. His finger stabbed at a button and the
wall panels snapped down to show the Secret Servicemen standing in their
niches. The finger shot tremulously out at Steiner. "Kill that traitor!"
he raved.

The chief of the detail said uneasily: "Mr. President, we were listening
to Grayson before we came on duty. He says he's de facto President
now--"

"Kill him! Kill him!"

The chief went doggedly on: "--and we liked what he had to say about the
Republic and he said citizens of the Republic shouldn't take orders from
you and he'd relieve you--"

The President fell back.

Grayson walked in, wearing his plain ensign's uniform and smiling
faintly. Admirals and four-stripers flanked him.

The chief of the detail said: "Mr. Grayson! Are you taking over?"

The man in the ensign's uniform said gravely: "Yes. And just call me
'Grayson,' please. The titles come later. You can go now."

The chief gave a pleased grin and collected his detail. The rather
slight, youngish man who had something wrong with one arm was in
charge--_complete_ charge.

Grayson said: "Mr. Folsom, you are relieved of the presidency. Captain,
take him out and--" He finished with a whimsical shrug. A portly
four-striper took Folsom by one arm. Like a drugged man the deposed
president let himself be led out.

Grayson looked around the table. "Who are you gentlemen?"

They felt his magnetism, like the hum when you pass a power station.

Steiner was the spokeman. "Grayson," he said soberly, "we were Folsom's
Cabinet. However, there is more that we have to tell you. Alone, if you
will allow it."

"Very well, gentlemen." Admirals and captains backed out, looking
concerned.

Steiner said: "Grayson, the story goes back many years. My predecessor,
William Malvern, determined to overthrow the regime, holding that it was
an affront to the human spirit. There have been many such attempts. All
have broken up on the rocks of espionage, terrorism and
opinion-control--the three weapons which the regime holds firmly in its
hands.

"Malvern tried another approach than espionage versus espionage,
terrorism versus terrorism and opinion-control versus opinion-control.
He determined to use the basic fact that certain men make history: that
there are men born to be mould-breakers. They are the Philips of
Macedon, the Napoleons, Stalins and Hitlers, the Suleimans--the
adventurers. Again and again they flash across history, bringing down an
ancient empire, turning ordinary soldiers of the line into unkillable
demons of battle, uprooting cultures, breathing new life into moribund
peoples.

"There are common denominators among all the adventurers. Intelligence,
of course. Other things are more mysterious but are always present. They
are foreigners. Napoleon the Corsican. Hitler the Austrian. Stalin the
Georgian. Philip the Macedonian. Always there is an Oedipus complex.
Always there is physical deficiency. Napoleon's stature. Stalin's
withered arm--and yours. Always there is a minority disability, real or
fancied.

"This is a shock to you, Grayson, but you must face it. _You were
manufactured._

"Malvern packed the Cabinet with the slyest double-dealers he could find
and they went to work. Eighty-six infants were planted on the outposts
of the Republic in simulated family environments. Your mother was not
your mother but one of the most brilliant actresses ever to drop out of
sight on Earth. Your intelligence-heredity was so good that we couldn't
turn you down for lack of a physical deficiency. We withered your arm
with gamma radiation. I hope you will forgive us. There was no other
way.

"Of the eighty-six you are the one that worked. Somehow the combination
for you was minutely different from all the other combinations,
genetically or environmentally, and it worked. That is all we were
after. The mould has been broken, you know now what you are. Let come
whatever chaos is to come; the dead hand of the past no longer lies
on--"

Grayson went to the door and beckoned; two captains came in. Steiner
broke off his speech as Grayson said to them: "These men deny my
godhood. Take them out and--" he finished with a whimsical shrug.

"Yes, your divinity," said the captains, without a trace of humor in
their voices.




_The Words of Guru_

Copyright 1941 by Albing Publications


Yesterday, when I was going to meet Guru in the woods a man stopped me
and said: "Child, what are you doing out at one in the morning? Does
your mother know where you are? How old are you, walking around this
late?"

I looked at him, and saw that he was white-haired, so I laughed. Old men
never see; in fact men hardly see at all. Sometimes young women see
part, but men rarely ever see at all. "I'm twelve on my next birthday,"
I said. And then, because I would not let him live to tell people, I
said, "and I'm out this late to see Guru."

"Guru?" he asked. "Who is Guru? Some foreigner, I suppose? Bad business
mixing with foreigners, young fellow. Who is Guru?"

So I told him who Guru was, and just as he began talking about cheap
magazines and fairy-tales I said one of the words that Guru taught me
and he stopped talking. Because he was an old man and his joints were
stiff he didn't crumple up but fell in one piece, hitting his head on
the stone. Then I went on.

Even though I'm going to be only twelve on my next birthday I know many
things that old people don't. And I remember things that other boys
can't. I remember being born out of darkness, and I remember the noises
that people made about me. Then when I was two months old I began to
understand that the noises meant things like the things that were going
on inside my head. I found out that I could make the noises too, and
everybody was very much surprised. "Talking!" they said, again and
again. "And so very young! Clara, what do you make of it?" Clara was my
mother.

And Clara would say: "I'm sure I don't know. There never was any genius
in my family, and I'm sure there was none in Joe's." Joe was my father.

Once Clara showed me a man I had never seen before, and told me that he
was a reporter--that he wrote things in newspapers. The reporter tried
to talk to me as if I were an ordinary baby, I didn't even answer him,
but just kept looking at him until his eyes fell and he went away. Later
Clara scolded me and read me a little piece in the reporter's newspaper
that was supposed to be funny--about the reporter asking me very
complicated questions and me answering with baby-noises. It was not
true, of course. I didn't say a word to the reporter, and he didn't ask
me even one of the questions.

I heard her read the little piece, but while I listened I was watching
the slug crawling on the wall. When Clara was finished I asked her:
"What is that grey thing?"

She looked where I pointed, but couldn't see it. "What grey thing,
Peter?" she asked. I had her call me by my whole name, Peter, instead of
anything silly like Petey. "What grey thing?"

"It's as big as your hand, Clara, but soft. I don't think it has any
bones at all. It's crawling up, but I don't see any face on the topwards
side. And there aren't any legs."

I think she was worried, but she tried to baby me by putting her hand on
the wall and trying to find out where it was. I called out whether she
was right or left of the thing. Finally she put her hand right through
the slug. And then I realized that she really couldn't see it, and
didn't believe it was there. I stopped talking about it then and only
asked her a few days later: "Clara, what do you call a thing which one
person can see and another person can't?"

"An illusion, Peter," she said. "If that's what you mean." I said
nothing, but let her put me to bed as usual, but when she turned out
the light and went away I waited a little while and then called out
softly. "Illusion! Illusion!"

At once Guru came for the first time. He bowed, the way he always has
since, and said: "I have been waiting."

"I didn't know that was the way to call you," I said.

"Whenever you want me I will be ready. I will teach you, Peter--if you
want to learn. Do you know what I will teach you?"

"If you will teach me about the grey thing on the wall," I said, "I will
listen. And if you will teach me about real things and unreal things I
will listen."

"These things," he said thoughtfully, "very few wish to learn. And there
are some things that nobody ever wished to learn. And there are some
things that I will not teach."

Then I said: "The things nobody has ever wished to learn I will learn.
And I will even learn the things you do not wish to teach."

He smiled mockingly. "A master has come," he said, half-laughing. "A
master of Guru."

That was how I learned his name. And that night he taught me a word
which would do little things, like spoiling food.

From that day, to the time I saw him last night he has not changed at
all, though now I am as tall as he is. His skin is still as dry and
shiny as ever it was, and his face is still bony, crowned by a head of
very coarse, black hair.

       *       *       *       *       *

When I was ten years old I went to bed one night only long enough to
make Joe and Clara suppose I was fast asleep. I left in my place
something which appears when you say one of the words of Guru and went
down the drainpipe outside my window. It always was easy to climb down
and up, ever since I was eight years old.

I met Guru in Inwood Hill Park. "You're late," he said.

"Not too late," I answered. "I know it's never too late for one of these
things."

"How do you know?" he asked sharply. "This is your first."

"And maybe my last," I replied. "I don't like the idea of it. If I have
nothing more to learn from my second than my first I shan't go to
another."

"You don't know," he said. "You don't know what it's like--the voices,
and the bodies slick with unguent, leaping flames; mind-filling ritual!
You can have no idea at all until you've taken part."

"We'll see," I said. "Can we leave from here?"

"Yes," he said. Then he taught me the word I would need to know, and we
both said it together.

The place we were in next was lit with red lights, and I think that the
walls were of rock. Though of course there was no real seeing there, and
so the lights only seemed to be red, and it was not real rock.

As we were going to the fire one of them stopped us. "Who's with you?"
she asked, calling Guru by another name. I did not know that he was also
the person bearing that name, for it was a very powerful one.

He cast a hasty, sidewise glance at me and then said: "This is Peter of
whom I have often told you."

She looked at me then and smiled, stretching out her oily arms. "Ah,"
she said, softly, like the cats when they talk at night to me. "Ah, this
is Peter. Will you come to me when I call you, Peter? And sometimes call
for me--in the dark--when you are alone?"

"Don't do that!" said Guru, angrily pushing past her. "He's very
young--you might spoil him for his work."

She screeched at our backs: "Guru and his pupil--fine pair! Boy, he's no
more real than I am--you're the only real thing here!"

"Don't listen to her," said Guru. "She's wild and raving. They're always
tight-strung when this time comes around."

We came near the fires then, and sat down on rocks. They were killing
animals and birds and doing things with their bodies. The blood was
being collected in a basin of stone, which passed through the crowd. The
one to my left handed it to me. "Drink," she said, grinning to show me
her fine, white teeth. I swallowed twice from it and passed it to Guru.

When the bowl had passed all around we took off our clothes. Some, like
Guru, did not wear them, but many did. The one to my left sat closer to
me, breathing heavily at my face. I moved away. "Tell her to stop,
Guru," I said. "This isn't part of it, I know."

Guru spoke to her sharply in their own language, and she changed her
seat, snarling.

Then we all began to chant, clapping our hands and beating our thighs.
One of them rose slowly and circled about the fires in a slow pace, her
eyes rolling wildly. She worked her jaws and flung her arms about so
sharply that I could hear the elbows crack. Still shuffling her feet
against the rock floor she bent her body backwards down to her feet.
Her belly-muscles were bands nearly standing out from her skin, and the
oil rolled down her body and legs. As the palms of her hands touched the
ground, she collapsed in a twitching heap and began to set up a thin
wailing noise against the steady chant and hand beat that the rest of us
were keeping up. Another of them did the same as the first, and we
chanted louder for her and still louder for the third. Then, while we
still beat our hands and thighs, one of them took up the third, laid her
across the altar and made her ready with a stone knife. The fire's light
gleamed off the chipped edge of obsidian. As her blood drained down the
groove, cut as a gutter into the rock of the altar, we stopped our chant
and the fires were snuffed out.

But still we could see what was going on, for these things were, of
course, not happening at all--only seeming to happen, really, just as
all the people and things there only seemed to be what they were. Only I
was real. That must be why they desired me so.

As the last of the fires died Guru excitedly whispered: "The Presence!"
He was very deeply moved.

From the pool of blood from the third dancer's body there issued the
Presence. It was the tallest one there, and when it spoke its voice was
deeper, and when it commanded its commands were obeyed.

"Let blood!" it commanded, and we gashed ourselves with flints. It
smiled and showed teeth bigger and sharper and whiter than any of the
others.

"Make water!" it commanded, and we all spat on each other. It flapped
its wings and rolled its eyes, which were bigger and redder than any of
the others.

"Pass flame!" it commanded, and we breathed smoke and fire on our limbs.
It stamped its feet, let blue flames roar from its mouth, and they were
bigger and wilder than any of the others.

Then it returned to the pool of blood and we lit the fires again. Guru
was staring straight before him; I tugged his arm. He bowed as though we
were meeting for the first time that night.

"What are you thinking of?" I asked. "We shall go now."

"Yes," he said heavily. "Now we shall go." Then we said the word that
had brought us there.

The first man I killed was Brother Paul, at the school where I went to
learn the things that Guru did not teach me.

It was less than a year ago, but it seems like a very long time. I have
killed so many times since then.

"You're a very bright boy, Peter," said the brother.

"Thank you, brother."

"But there are things about you that I don't understand. Normally I'd
ask your parents but--I feel that they don't understand either. You were
an infant prodigy, weren't you?"

"Yes, brother."

"There's nothing very unusual about that--glands, I'm told. You know
what glands are?"

Then I was alarmed. I had heard of them, but I was not certain whether
they were the short, thick green men who wear only metal or the things
with many legs with whom I talked in the woods.

"How did you find out?" I asked him.

"But Peter! You look positively frightened, lad! I don't know a thing
about them myself, but Father Frederick does. He has whole books about
them, though I sometimes doubt whether he believes them himself."

"They aren't good books, brother," I said. "They ought to be burned."

"That's a savage thought, my son. But to return to your own problem--"

I could not let him go any further knowing what he did about me. I said
one of the words Guru taught me and he looked at first very surprised
and then seemed to be in great pain. He dropped across his desk and I
felt his wrist to make sure, for I had not used that word before. But he
was dead.

There was a heavy step outside and I made myself invisible. Stout Father
Frederick entered, and I nearly killed him too with the word, but I knew
that that would be very curious. I decided to wait, and went through the
door as Father Frederick bent over the dead monk. He thought he was
asleep.

I went down the corridor to the book-lined office of the stout priest
and, working quickly, piled all his books in the center of the room and
lit them with my breath. Then I went down to the schoolyard and made
myself visible again when there was nobody looking. It was very easy. I
killed a man I passed on the street the next day.

There was a girl named Mary who lived near us. She was fourteen then,
and I desired her as those in the Cavern out of Time and Space had
desired me.

So when I saw Guru and he had bowed, I told him of it, and he looked at
me in great surprise. "You are growing older, Peter," he said.

"I am, Guru. And there will come a time when your words will not be
strong enough for me."

He laughed. "Come, Peter," he said. "Follow me if you wish. There is
something that is going to be done--" He licked his thin, purple lips
and said: "I have told you what it will be like."

"I shall come," I said. "Teach me the word." So he taught me the word
and we said it together.

The place we were in next was not like any of the other places I had
been to before with Guru. It was No-place. Always before there had been
the seeming passage of time and matter, but here there was not even
that. Here Guru and the others cast off their forms and were what they
were, and No-place was the only place where they could do this.

It was not like the Cavern, for the Cavern had been out of Time and
Space, and this place was not enough of a place even for that. It was
No-place.

What happened there does not bear telling, but I was made known to
certain ones who never departed from there. All came to them as they
existed. They had not color or the seeming of color, or any seeming of
shape.

There I learned that eventually I would join with them; that I had been
selected as the one of my planet who was to dwell without being forever
in that No-place.

Guru and I left, having said the word.

"Well?" demanded Guru, staring me in the eye.

"I am willing," I said. "But teach me one word now--"

"Ah," he said grinning. "The girl?"

"Yes," I said. "The word that will mean much to her."

Still grinning, he taught me the word.

Mary, who had been fourteen, is now fifteen and what they call incurably
mad.

       *       *       *       *       *

Last night I saw Guru again and for the last time. He bowed as I
approached him. "Peter," he said warmly.

"Teach me the word," said I.

"It is not too late."

"Teach me the word."

"You can withdraw--with what you master you can master also this world.
Gold without reckoning; sardonyx and gems, Peter! Rich crushed
velvet--stiff, scraping, embroidered tapestries!"

"Teach me the word."

"Think, Peter, of the house you could build. It could be of white
marble, and every slab centered by a winking ruby. Its gate could be of
beaten gold within and without and it could be built about one slender
tower of carven ivory, rising mile after mile into the turquoise sky.
You could see the clouds float underneath your eyes."

"Teach me the word."

"Your tongue could crush the grapes that taste like melted silver. You
could hear always the song of the bulbul and the lark that sounds like
the dawnstar made musical. Spikenard that will bloom a thousand thousand
years could be ever in your nostrils. Your hands could feel the down of
purple Himalayan swans that is softer than a sunset cloud."

"Teach me the word."

"You could have women whose skin would be from the black of ebony to the
white of snow. You could have women who would be as hard as flints or as
soft as a sunset cloud."

"Teach me the word."

Guru grinned and said the word.

Now, I do not know whether I will say that word, which was the last that
Guru taught me, today or tomorrow or until a year has passed.

It is a word that will explode this planet like a stick of dynamite in a
rotten apple.




_Shark Ship_

Copyright 1958 by Vanguard Science Fiction, Inc.


It was the spring swarming of the plankton; every man and woman and most
of the children aboard Grenville's Convoy had a job to do. As the
seventy-five gigantic sailing ships ploughed their two degrees of the
South Atlantic, the fluid that foamed beneath their cutwaters seethed
also with life. In the few weeks of the swarming, in the few meters of
surface water where sunlight penetrated in sufficient strength to
trigger photosynthesis, microscopic spores burst into microscopic
plants, were devoured by minute animals which in turn were swept into
the maws of barely visible sea monsters almost a tenth of an inch from
head to tail; these in turn were fiercely pursued and gobbled in shoals
by the fierce little brit, the tiny herring and shrimp that could turn a
hundred miles of green water to molten silver before your eyes.

Through the silver ocean of the swarming the Convoy scudded and tacked
in great controlled zigs and zags, reaping the silver of the sea in the
endlessly reeling bronze nets each ship payed out behind.

The Commodore in _Grenville_ did not sleep during the swarming; he and
his staff dispatched cutters to scout the swarms, hung on the
meteorologists' words, digested the endless reports from the scout
vessels and toiled through the night to prepare the dawn signal. The
mainmast flags might tell the captains "Convoy course five degrees
right," or "Two degrees left," or only "Convoy course: no change." On
those dawn signals depended the life for the next six months of the
million and a quarter souls of the Convoy. It had not happened often,
but it had happened that a succession of blunders reduced a Convoy's
harvest below the minimum necessary to sustain life. Derelicts were
sometimes sighted and salvaged from such convoys; strong-stomached men
and women were needed for the first boarding and clearing away of human
debris. Cannibalism occurred, an obscene thing one had nightmares about.

The seventy-five captains had their own particular purgatory to endure
throughout the harvest, the Sail-Seine Equation. It was their job to
balance the push on the sails and the drag of the ballooning seines so
that push exceeded drag by just the number of pounds that would keep the
ship on course and in station, given every conceivable variation of wind
force and direction, temperature of water, consistency of brit, and
smoothness of hull. Once the catch was salted down it was customary for
the captains to converge on _Grenville_ for a roaring feast by way of
letdown.

Rank had its privileges. There was no such relief for the captains' Net
Officers or their underlings in Operations and Maintenance, or for their
Food Officers under whom served the Processing and Stowage people. They
merely worked, streaming the nets twenty-four hours a day, keeping them
bellied out with lines from mast and outriding gigs, keeping them
spooling over the great drum amidships, tending the blades that had to
scrape the brit from the nets without damaging the nets, repairing the
damage when it did occur; and without interruption of the harvest,
flash-cooking the part of the harvest to be cooked, drying the part to
be dried, pressing oil from the harvest as required, and stowing what
was cooked and dried and pressed where it would not spoil, where it
would not alter the trim of the ship, where it would not be pilfered by
children. This went on for weeks after the silver had gone thin and
patchy against the green, and after the silver had altogether vanished.

The routines of many were not changed at all by the swarming season. The
blacksmiths, the sailmakers, the carpenters, the watertenders, to a
degree the storekeepers, functioned as before, tending to the fabric of
the ship, renewing, replacing, reworking. The ships were things of
brass, bronze and unrusting steel. Phosphor-bronze strands were woven
into net, lines, and cables; cordage, masts and hull were metal; all
were inspected daily by the First Officer and his men and women for the
smallest pinhead of corrosion. The smallest pinhead of corrosion could
spread; it could send a ship to the bottom before it had done spreading,
as the chaplains were fond of reminding worshippers when the ships
rigged for church on Sundays. To keep the hellish red of iron rust and
the sinister blue of copper rust from invading, the squads of oilers
were always on the move, with oil distilled from the catch. The sails
and the clothes alone could not be preserved; they wore out. It was for
this that the felting machines down below chopped wornout sails and
clothing into new fibers and twisted and rolled them with kelp and with
glue from the catch into new felt for new sails and clothing.

While the plankton continued to swarm twice a year, Grenville's Convoy
could continue to sail the South Atlantic, from ten-mile limit to
ten-mile limit. Not one of the seventy-five ships in the Convoy had an
anchor.

The Captain's Party that followed the end of Swarming 283 was slow
getting under way. McBee, whose ship was Port Squadron 19, said to
Salter of Starboard Squadron 30: "To be frank, I'm too damned exhausted
to care whether I ever go to another party, but I didn't want to
disappoint the Old Man."

The Commodore, trim and bronzed, not showing his eighty years, was
across the great cabin from them greeting new arrivals.

Salter said: "You'll feel differently after a good sleep. It was a great
harvest, wasn't it? Enough weather to make it tricky and interesting.
Remember 276? _That_ was the one that wore me out. A grind, going by the
book. But this time, on the fifteenth day my foretopsail was going to go
about noon, big rip in her, but I needed her for my S-S balance. What to
do? I broke out a balloon spinnaker--now wait a minute, let me tell it
first before you throw the book at me--and pumped my fore trim tank out.
Presto! No trouble; foretopsail replaced in fifteen minutes."

McBee was horrified. "You could have lost your net!"

"My weatherman absolutely ruled out any sudden squalls."

"Weatherman. You could have lost your net!"

Salter studied him. "Saying that once was thoughtless, McBee. Saying it
twice is insulting. Do you think I'd gamble with twenty thousand lives?"

McBee passed his hands over his tired face. "I'm sorry," he said. "I
told you I was exhausted. Of course under special circumstances it can
be a safe maneuver." He walked to a porthole for a glance at his own
ship, the nineteenth in the long echelon behind _Grenville_. Salter
stared after him. "Losing one's net" was a phrase that occurred in
several proverbs; it stood for abysmal folly. In actuality a ship that
lost its phosphor-bronze wire mesh was doomed, and quickly. One could
improvise with sails or try to juryrig a net out of the remaining
rigging, but not well enough to feed twenty thousand hands, and no fewer
than that were needed for maintenance. Grenville's Convoy had met a
derelict which lost its net Back before 240; children still told horror
stories about it, how the remnants of port and starboard watches, mad to
a man, were at war, a war of vicious night forays with knives and clubs.

Salter went to the bar and accepted from the Commodore's steward his
first drink of the evening, a steel tumbler of colorless fluid distilled
from a fermented mash of sargassum weed. It was about forty per cent
alcohol and tasted pleasantly of iodides.

He looked up from his sip and his eyes widened. There was a man in
captain's uniform talking with the Commodore and he did not recognize
his face. But there had been no promotions lately!

The Commodore saw him looking and beckoned him over. He saluted and then
accepted the old man's hand-clasp. "Captain Salter," the Commodore said,
"my youngest and rashest, and my best harvester. Salter, this is Captain
Degerand of the White Fleet."

Salter frankly gawked. He knew perfectly well that Grenville's Convoy
was far from sailing alone upon the seas. On watch he had beheld distant
sails from time to time. He was aware that cruising the two-degree belt
north of theirs was another convoy and that in the belt south of theirs
was still another, in fact that the seaborne population of the world was
a constant one billion, eighty million. But never had he expected to
meet face to face any of them except the one and a quarter million who
sailed under Grenville's flag.

Degerand was younger than he, all deeply tanned skin and flashing
pointed teeth. His uniform was perfectly ordinary and very queer. He
understood Salter's puzzled look. "It's woven cloth," he said. "The
White Fleet was launched several decades after Grenville's. By then they
had machinery to reconstitute fibers suitable for spinning and they
equipped us with it. It's six of one and half a dozen of the other. I
think our sails may last longer than yours, but the looms require a lot
of skilled labor when they break down."

The Commodore had left them.

"Are we very different from you?" Salter asked.

Degerand said: "Our differences are nothing. Against the dirt men we are
brothers--blood brothers."

The term "dirt men" was discomforting; the juxtaposition with "blood"
more so. Apparently he was referring to whoever it was that lived on the
continents and islands--a shocking breach of manners, of honor, of
faith. The words of the Charter circled through Salter's head. "...
return for the sea and its bounty ... renounce and abjure the land from
which we ..." Salter had been ten years old before he knew that there
_were_ continents and islands. His dismay must have shown on his face.

"They have doomed us," the foreign captain said. "We cannot refit. They
have sent us out, each upon our two degrees of ocean in larger or
smaller convoys as the richness of the brit dictated, and they have cut
us off. To each of us will come the catastrophic storm, the bad harvest,
the lost net, and death."

It was Salter's impression that Degerand had said the same words many
times before, usually to large audiences.

The Commodore's talker boomed out: "Now hear this!" His huge voice
filled the stateroom easily; his usual job was to roar through a
megaphone across a league of ocean, supplementing flag and lamp signals.
"Now hear this!" he boomed. "There's tuna on the table--big fish for big
sailors!"

A grinning steward whisked a felt from the sideboard, and there by
Heaven it lay! A great baked fish as long as your leg, smoking hot and
trimmed with kelp! A hungry roar greeted it; the captains made for the
stack of trays and began to file past the steward, busy with knife and
steel.

Salter marvelled to Degerand: "I didn't dream there were any left that
size. When you think of the tons of brit that old-timer must have
gobbled!"

The foreigner said darkly: "We slew the whales, the sharks, the perch,
the cod, the herring--everything that used the sea but us. They fed on
brit and one another and concentrated it in firm savory flesh like that,
but we were jealous of the energy squandered in the long food chain; we
decreed that the chain would stop with the link brit-to-man."

Salter by then had filled a tray. "Brit's more reliable," he said. "A
Convoy can't take chances on fisherman's luck." He happily bolted a
steaming mouthful.

"Safety is not everything," Degerand said. He ate, more slowly than
Salter. "Your Commodore said you were a rash seaman."

"He was joking. If he believed that, he would have to remove me from
command."

The Commodore walked up to them, patting his mouth with a handkerchief
and beaming. "Surprised, eh?" he demanded. "Glasgow's lookout spotted
that big fellow yesterday half a kilometer away. He signalled me and I
told him to lower and row for him. The boat crew sneaked up while he was
browsing and gaffed him clean. Very virtuous of us. By killing him we
economize on brit and provide a fitting celebration for my captains. Eat
hearty! It may be the last we'll ever see."

Degerand rudely contradicted his senior officer. "They can't be wiped
out clean, Commodore, not exterminated. The sea is deep. Its genetic
potential cannot be destroyed. We merely make temporary alterations of
the feeding balance."

"Seen any sperm whale lately?" the Commodore asked, raising his white
eyebrows. "Go get yourself another helping, captain, before it's gone."
It was a dismissal; the foreigner bowed and went to the buffet.

The Commodore asked: "What do you think of him?"

"He has some extreme ideas," Salter said.

"The White Fleet appears to have gone bad," the old man said. "That
fellow showed up on a cutter last week in the middle of harvest wanting
my immediate, personal attention. He's on the staff of the White Fleet
Commodore. I gather they're all like him. They've got slack; maybe rust
has got ahead of them, maybe they're overbreeding. A ship lost its net
and they didn't let it go. They cannibalized rigging from the whole
fleet to make a net for it."

"But--"

"But--but--but. Of course it was the wrong thing and now they're all
suffering. Now they haven't the stomach to draw lots and cut their
losses." He lowered his voice. "Their idea is some sort of raid on the
Western Continent, that America thing, for steel and bronze and whatever
else they find not welded to the deck. It's nonsense, of course, spawned
by a few silly-clever people on the staff. The crews will never go along
with it. Degerand was sent to invite us in!"

Salter said nothing for a while and then: "I certainly hope we'll have
nothing to do with it."

"I'm sending him back at dawn with my compliments, and a negative, and
my sincere advice to his Commodore that he drop the whole thing before
his own crew hears of it and has him bowspritted." The Commodore gave
him a wintry smile. "Such a reply is easy to make, of course, just after
concluding an excellent harvest. It might be more difficult to signal a
negative if we had a couple of ships unnetted and only enough catch in
salt to feed sixty per cent of the hands. Do you think you could give
the hard answer under those circumstances?"

"I think so, sir."

The Commodore walked away, his face enigmatic. Salter thought he knew
what was going on. He had been given one small foretaste of top command.
Perhaps he was being groomed for Commodore--not to succeed the old man,
surely, but his successor.

McBee approached, full of big fish and drink. "Foolish thing I said," he
stammered. "Let's have drink, forget about it, eh?"

He was glad to.

"Damn fine seaman!" McBee yelled after a couple more drinks. "Best
little captain in the Convoy! Not a scared old crock like poor old
McBee, 'fraid of every puff of wind!"

And then he had to cheer up McBee until the party began to thin out.
McBee fell asleep at last and Salter saw him to his gig before boarding
his own for the long row to the bobbing masthead lights of his ship.

Starboard Squadron Thirty was at rest in the night. Only the
slowly-moving oil lamps of the women on their ceaseless rust patrol were
alive. The brit catch, dried, came to some seven thousand tons. It was a
comfortable margin over the 5,670 tons needed for six months' full
rations before the autumnal swarming and harvest. The trim tanks along
the keel had been pumped almost dry by the ship's current prison
population as the cooked and dried and salted cubes were stored in the
glass-lined warehouse tier; the gigantic vessel rode easily on a
swelling sea before a Force One westerly breeze.

Salter was exhausted. He thought briefly of having his cox'n whistle for
a bosun's chair so that he might be hauled at his ease up the fifty-yard
cliff that was the hull before them, and dismissed the idea with regret.
Rank hath its privileges and also its obligations. He stood up in the
gig, jumped for the ladder and began the long climb. As he passed the
portholes of the cabin tiers he virtuously kept eyes front, on the
bronze plates of the hull inches from his nose. Many couples in the
privacy of their double cabins would be celebrating the end of the
back-breaking, night-and-day toil. One valued privacy aboard the ship;
one's own 648 cubic feet of cabin, one's own porthole, acquired an
almost religious meaning, particularly after the weeks of swarming
cooperative labor.

Taking care not to pant, he finished the climb with a flourish,
springing onto the flush deck. There was no audience. Feeling a little
ridiculous and forsaken, he walked aft in the dark with only the wind
and the creak of the rigging in his ears. The five great basket masts
strained silently behind their breeze-filled sails; he paused a moment
beside Wednesday mast, huge as a redwood, and put his hands on it to
feel the power that vibrated in its steel lattice-work.

Six intent women went past, their hand lamps sweeping the deck; he
jumped, though they never noticed him. They were in something like a
trance state while on their tour of duty. Normal courtesies were
suspended for them; with their work began the job of survival. One
thousand women, five per cent of the ship's company, inspected night and
day for corrosion. Sea water is a vicious solvent and the ship had to
live in it; fanaticism was the answer.

His stateroom above the rudder waited; the hatchway to it glowed a
hundred feet down the deck with the light of a wasteful lantern. After
harvest, when the tanks brimmed with oil, one type acted as though the
tanks would brim forever. The captain wearily walked around and over a
dozen stay-ropes to the hatchway and blew out the lamp. Before
descending he took a mechanical look around the deck; all was well--

Except for a patch of paleness at the fantail.

"Will this day never end?" he asked the darkened lantern and went to
the fantail. The patch was a little girl in a night dress wandering
aimlessly over the deck, her thumb in her mouth. She seemed to be about
two years old, and was more than half asleep. She could have gone over
the railing in a moment; a small wail, a small splash--

He picked her up like a feather. "Who's your daddy, princess?" he asked.

"Dunno," she grinned. The devil she didn't! It was too dark to read her
ID necklace and he was too tired to light the lantern. He trudged down
the deck to the crew of inspectors. He said to their chief: "One of you
get this child back to her parents' cabin," and held her out.

The chief was indignant. "Sir, we are on watch!"

"File a grievance with the Commodore if you wish. Take the child."

One of the rounder women did, and made cooing noises while her chief
glared. "Bye-bye, princess," the captain said. "You ought to be
keel-hauled for this, but I'll give you another chance."

"Bye-bye," the little girl said, waving, and the captain went yawning
down the hatchway to bed.

His stateroom was luxurious by the austere standards of the ship. It was
equal to six of the standard nine-by-nine cabins in volume, or to three
of the double cabins for couples. These however had something he did
not. Officers above the rank of lieutenant were celibate. Experience had
shown that this was the only answer to nepotism, and nepotism was a
luxury which no convoy could afford. It meant, sooner or later,
inefficient command. Inefficient command meant, sooner or later, death.

Because he thought he would not sleep, he did not.

Marriage. Parenthood. What a strange business it must be! To share a bed
with a wife, a cabin with two children decently behind their screen for
sixteen years ... what did one talk about in bed? His last mistress had
hardly talked at all, except with her eyes. When these showed signs that
she was falling in love with him, Heaven knew why, he broke with her as
quietly as possible and since then irritably rejected the thought of
acquiring a successor. That had been two years ago when he was 38, and
already beginning to feel like a cabin-crawler fit only to be dropped
over the fantail into the wake. An old lecher, a roué, a _user_ of
women. Of course she had talked a little; what did they have in common
to talk about? With a wife ripening beside him, with children to share,
it would have been different. That pale, tall quiet girl deserved better
than he could give; he hoped she was decently married now in a double
cabin, perhaps already heavy with the first of her two children.

A whistle squeaked above his head; somebody was blowing into one of the
dozen speaking tubes clustered against the bulkhead. Then a push-wire
popped open the steel lid of Tube Seven, Signals. He resignedly picked
up the flexible reply tube and said into it: "This is the captain. Go
ahead."

"_Grenville_ signals Force Three squall approaching from astern, sir."

"Force Three squall from astern. Turn out the fore-starboard watch. Have
them reef sail to Condition Charlie."

"Fore-Starboard watch, reef sail to Condition Charlie, aye-aye."

"Execute."

"Aye-aye, sir." The lid of Tube Seven, Signals, popped shut. At once, he
heard the distant, penetrating shrill of the pipe, the faint vibration
as one sixth of the deck crew began to stir in their cabins, awaken, hit
the deck bleary-eyed, begin to trample through the corridors and up the
hatchways to the deck. He got up himself and pulled on clothes, yawning.
Reefing from Condition Fox to Condition Charlie was no serious matter,
not even in the dark, and Walters on watch was a good officer. But he'd
better have a look.

Being flush-decked, the ship offered him no bridge. He conned her from
the "first top" of Friday mast, the rearmost of her five. The "first
top" was a glorified crow's nest fifty feet up the steel basketwork of
that great tower; it afforded him a view of all masts and spars in one
glance.

He climbed to his command post too far gone for fatigue. A full moon now
lit the scene, good. That much less chance of a green topman stepping on
a ratline that would prove to be a shadow and hurtling two hundred feet
to the deck. That much more snap in the reefing; that much sooner it
would be over. Suddenly he was sure he would be able to sleep if he ever
got back to bed again.

He turned for a look at the bronze, moonlit heaps of the great net on
the fantail. Within a week it would be cleaned and oiled; within two
weeks stowed below in the cable tier, safe from wind and weather.

The regiments of the fore-starboard watch swarmed up the masts from
Monday to Friday, swarmed out along the spars as bosun's whistles
squealed out the drill--

The squall struck.

Wind screamed and tore at him; the captain flung his arms around a
stanchion. Rain pounded down upon his head and the ship reeled in a
vast, slow curtsey, port to starboard. Behind him there was a metal
sound as the bronze net shifted inches sideways, back.

The sudden clouds had blotted out the moon; he could not see the men who
swarmed along the yards but with sudden terrible clarity he felt through
the soles of his feet what they were doing. They were clawing their way
through the sail-reefing drill, blinded and deafened by sleety rain and
wind. They were out of phase by now; they were no longer trying to
shorten sail equally on each mast; they were trying to get the thing
done and descend. The wind screamed in his face as he turned and clung.
Now they were ahead of the job on Monday and Tuesday masts, behind the
job on Thursday and Friday masts.

So the ship was going to pitch. The wind would catch it unequally and it
would kneel in prayer, the cutwater plunging with a great, deep stately
obeisance down into the fathoms of ocean, the stern soaring slowly,
ponderously, into the air until the topmost rudder-trunnion streamed a
hundred-foot cascade into the boiling froth of the wake.

That was half the pitch. It happened, and the captain clung, groaning
aloud. He heard above the screaming wind loose gear rattling on the
deck, clashing forward in an avalanche. He heard a heavy clink at the
stern and bit his lower lip until it ran with blood that the tearing
cold rain flooded from his chin.

The pitch reached its maximum and the second half began, after
interminable moments when she seemed frozen at a five-degree angle
forever. The cutwater rose, rose, rose, the bowsprit blocked out horizon
stars, the loose gear counter-charged astern in a crushing tide of
bales, windlass cranks, water-breakers, stilling coils, steel sun
reflectors, lashing tails of bronze rigging--

Into the heaped piles of the net, straining at its retainers on the two
great bollards that took root in the keel itself four hundred feet
below. The energy of the pitch hurled the belly of the net open
crashing, into the sea. The bollards held for a moment.

A retainer cable screamed and snapped like a man's back, and then the
second cable broke. The roaring slither of the bronze links thundering
over the fantail shook the ship.

The squall ended as it had come; the clouds scudded on and the moon
bared itself, to shine on a deck scrubbed clean. The net was lost.

Captain Salter looked down the fifty feet from the rim of the crow's
nest and thought: I should jump. It would be quicker that way.

But he did not. He slowly began to climb down the ladder to the bare
deck.

       *       *       *       *       *

Having no electrical equipment, the ship was necessarily a
representative republic rather than a democracy. Twenty thousand people
can discuss and decide only with the aid of microphones, loud-speakers
and rapid calculators to balance the ayes and noes. With lungpower the
only means of communication and an abacus in a clerk's hands the only
tallying device, certainly no more than fifty people can talk together
and make sense, and there are pessimists who say the number is closer to
five than fifty. The Ship's Council that met at dawn on the fantail
numbered fifty.

It was a beautiful dawn; it lifted the heart to see salmon sky,
iridescent sea, spread white sails of the Convoy ranged in a great
slanting line across sixty miles of oceanic blue.

It was the kind of dawn for which one lived--a full catch salted down,
the water-butts filled, the evaporators trickling from their thousand
tubes nine gallons each sunrise to sunset, wind enough for easy
steerageway and a pretty spread of sail. These were the rewards. One
hundred and forty-one years ago Grenville's Convoy had been launched at
Newport News, Virginia, to claim them.

Oh, the high adventure of the launching! The men and women who had gone
aboard thought themselves heroes, conquerors of nature, self-sacrificers
for the glory of NEMET! But NEMET meant only Northeastern Metropolitan
Area, one dense warren that stretched from Boston to Newport, built up
and dug down, sprawling westward, gulping Pittsburgh without a pause,
beginning to peter out past Cincinnati.

The first generation asea clung and sighed for the culture of NEMET,
consoled itself with its patriotic sacrifice; any relief was better than
none at all, and Grenville's Convoy had drained one and a quarter
million population from the huddle. They were immigrants into the sea;
like all immigrants they longed for the Old Country. Then the second
generation. Like all second generations they had no patience with the
old people or their tales. _This_ was real, this sea, this gale, this
rope! Then the third generation. Like all third generations it felt a
sudden desperate hollowness and lack of identity. What was real? Who are
we? What is NEMET which we have lost? But by then grandfather and
grandmother could only mumble vaguely; the cultural heritage was gone,
squandered in three generations, spent forever. As always, the fourth
generation did not care.

And those who sat in counsel on the fantail were members of the fifth
and sixth generations. They knew all there was to know about life. Life
was the hull and masts, the sail and rigging, the net and the
evaporators. Nothing more. _Nothing less._ Without masts there was no
life. Nor was there life without the net.

The Ship's Council did not command; command was reserved to the captain
and his officers. The Council governed, and on occasion tried criminal
cases. During the black Winter Without Harvest eighty years before it
had decreed euthanasia for all persons over sixty-three years of age and
for one out of twenty of the other adults aboard. It had rendered bloody
judgment on the ringleaders of Peale's Mutiny. It had sent them into the
wake and Peale himself had been bowspritted, given the maritime
equivalent of crucifixion. Since then no megalomaniacs had decided to
make life interesting for their shipmates, so Peale's long agony had
served its purpose.

The fifty of them represented every department of the ship and every
age-group. If there was wisdom aboard, it was concentrated there on the
fantail. But there was little to say.

The eldest of them, Retired Sailmaker Hodgins, presided. Venerably
bearded, still strong of voice, he told them:

"Shipmates, our accident has come. We are dead men. Decency demands that
we do not spin out the struggle and sink into--unlawful eatings. Reason
tells us that we cannot survive. What I propose is an honorable
voluntary death for us all, and the legacy of our ship's fabric to be
divided among the remainder of the Convoy at the discretion of the
Commodore."

He had little hope of his old man's viewpoint prevailing. The Chief
Inspector rose at once. She had only three words to say: "_Not my
children._"

Women's heads nodded grimly, and men's with resignation. Decency and
duty and common sense were all very well until you ran up against that
steel bulkhead. _Not my children._

A brilliant young chaplain asked: "Has the question ever been raised as
to whether a collection among the fleet might not provide cordage enough
to improvise a net?"

Captain Salter should have answered that, but he, murderer of the twenty
thousand souls in his care, could not speak. He nodded jerkily at his
signals officer.

Lieutenant Zwingli temporized by taking out his signals slate and
pretending to refresh his memory. He said: "At 0035 today a lamp signal
was made to _Grenville_ advising that our net was lost. _Grenville_
replied as follows: 'Effective now, your ship no longer part of Convoy.
Have no recommendations. Personal sympathy and regrets. Signed,
Commodore.'"

Captain Salter found his voice. "I've sent a couple of other messages to
_Grenville_ and to our neighboring vessels. They do not reply. This is
as it should be. We are no longer part of the Convoy. Through our own
lamps--we have become a drag on the Convoy.--We cannot look to it for
help. I have no word of condemnation for anybody. This is how life is."

And then a council member spoke whom Captain Salter knew in another
role. It was Jewel Flyte, the tall, pale girl who had been his mistress
two years ago. She must be serving as an alternate, he thought, looking
at her with new eyes. He did not know she was even that; he had avoided
her since then. And no, she was not married; she wore no ring. And
neither was her hair drawn back in the semi-official style of the
semi-official voluntary celibates, the super-patriots (or simply sex-shy
people, or dislikers of children) who surrendered their right to
reproduce for the good of the ship (or their own convenience). She was
simply a girl in the uniform of a--a what? He had to think hard before
he could match the badge over her breast to a department. She was Ship's
Archivist with her crossed key and quill, an obscure clerk and
shelf-duster under--far under!--the Chief of Yeomen Writers. She must
have been elected alternate by the Yeomen in a spasm of sympathy for her
blind-alley career.

"My job," she said in her calm steady voice, "is chiefly to search for
precedents in the Log when unusual events must be recorded and nobody
recollects offhand the form in which they should be recorded. It is one
of those provoking jobs which must be done by someone but which cannot
absorb the full time of a person. I have therefore had many free hours
of actual working time. I have also remained unmarried and am not
inclined to sports or games. I tell you this so you may believe me when
I say that during the past two years I have read the Ship's Log in its
entirety."

There was a little buzz. Truly an astonishing, and an astonishingly
pointless, thing to do! Wind and weather, storms and calms, messages and
meetings and censuses, crimes, trials and punishments of a hundred and
forty-one years; what a bore!

"Something I read," she went on, "may have some bearing on our dilemma."
She took a slate from her pocket and read: "Extract from the Log dated
June 30th, Convoy Year 72. 'The Shakespeare-Joyce-Melville Party
returned after dark in the gig. They had not accomplished any part of
their mission. Six were dead of wounds; all bodies were recovered. The
remaining six were mentally shaken but responded to our last ataractics.
They spoke of a new religion ashore and its consequences on population.
I am persuaded that we seabornes can no longer relate to the
continentals. The clandestine shore trips will cease.' The entry is
signed 'Scolley, Captain'."

A man named Scolley smiled for a brief proud moment. His ancestor! And
then like the others he waited for the extract to make sense. Like the
others he found that it would not do so.

Captain Salter wanted to speak, and wondered how to address her. She had
been "Jewel" and they all knew it; could he call her "Yeoman Flyte"
without looking like, being, a fool? Well, if he was fool enough to lose
his net he was fool enough to be formal with an ex-mistress. "Yeoman
Flyte," he said, "where does the extract leave us?"

In her calm voice she told them all: "Penetrating the few obscure words,
it appears to mean that until Convoy Year 72 the Charter was regularly
violated, with the connivance of successive captains. I suggest that we
consider violating it once more, to survive."

The Charter. It was a sort of ground-swell of their ethical life,
learned early, paid homage every Sunday when they were rigged for
church. It was inscribed in phosphor-bronze plates on Monday mast of
every ship at sea, and the wording was always the same.

     IN RETURN FOR THE SEA AND ITS BOUNTY WE RENOUNCE AND ABJURE FOR
     OURSELVES AND OUR DESCENDANTS THE LAND FROM WHICH WE SPRUNG: FOR
     THE COMMON GOOD OF MAN WE SET SAIL FOREVER.

At least half of them were unconsciously murmuring the words.

Retired Sailmaker Hodgins rose, shaking. "Blasphemy!" he said. "The
woman should be bowspritted!"

The chaplain said thoughtfully: "I know a little more about what
constitutes blasphemy than Sailmaker Hodgins, I believe, and assure you
that he is mistaken. It is a superstitious error to believe that there
is any religious sanction for the Charter. It is no ordinance of God but
a contract between men."

"It is a Revelation!" Hodgins shouted. "A Revelation! It is the newest
testament! It is God's finger pointing the way to the clean hard life at
sea, away from the grubbing and filth, from the overbreeding and the
sickness!"

That was a common view.

"_What about my children?_" demanded the Chief Inspector. "Does God want
them to starve or be--be--" She could not finish the question, but the
last unspoken word of it rang in all their minds.

_Eaten._

Aboard some ships with an accidental preponderance of the elderly,
aboard other ships where some blazing personality generations back had
raised the Charter to a powerful cult, suicide might have been voted.
Aboard other ships where nothing extraordinary had happened in six
generations, where things had been easy and the knack and tradition of
hard decision-making had been lost, there might have been confusion and
inaction and the inevitable degeneration into savagery. Aboard Salter's
ship the Council voted to send a small party ashore to investigate. They
used every imaginable euphemism to describe the action, took six hours
to make up their minds, and sat at last on the fantail cringing a
little, as if waiting for a thunderbolt.

The shore party would consist of Salter, Captain; Flyte, Archivist;
Pemberton, Junior Chaplain; Graves, Chief Inspector.

Salter climbed to his conning top on Friday mast, consulted a chart from
the archives, and gave the order through speaking tube to the tiller
gang: "Change course red four degrees."

The repeat came back incredulously.

"Execute," he said. The ship creaked as eighty men heaved the tiller;
imperceptibly at first the wake began to curve behind them.

Ship Starboard 30 departed from its ancient station; across a mile of
sea the bosun's whistles could be heard from Starboard 31 as she put on
sail to close the gap.

"They might have signalled something," Salter thought, dropping his
glasses at last on his chest. But the masthead of Starboard 31 remained
bare of all but its commission pennant.

He whistled up his signals officer and pointed to their own pennant.
"Take that thing down," he said hoarsely, and went below to his cabin.

The new course would find them at last riding off a place the map
described as New York City.

       *       *       *       *       *

Salter issued what he expected would be his last commands to Lieutenant
Zwingli; the whaleboat was waiting in its davits; the other three were
in it.

"You'll keep your station here as well as you're able," said the
captain. "If we live, we'll be back in a couple of months. Should we not
return, that would be a potent argument against beaching the ship and
attempting to live off the continent--but it will be your problem then
and not mine."

They exchanged salutes. Salter sprang into the whaleboat, signalled the
deck hands standing by at the ropes and the long creaking descent began.

Salter, Captain; age 40; unmarried _ex offico_; parents Clayton Salter,
master instrument maintenanceman, and Eva Romano, chief dietician;
selected from dame school age 10 for A Track training; seamanship school
certificate at age 16, navigation certificate at age 20, First
Lieutenants School age 24, commissioned ensign age 24; lieutenant at 30,
commander at 32; commissioned captain and succeeded to command of Ship
Starboard 30 the same year.

Flyte, Archivist, age 25; unmarried; parents Joseph Flyte, entertainer,
and Jessie Waggoner, entertainer; completed dame school age 14, B Track
training, Yeoman's School certificate at age 16, Advanced Yeoman's
School certificate at age 18, Efficiency rating, 3.5.

Pemberton, Chaplain, age 30; married to Riva Shields, nurse; no children
by choice; parents Will Pemberton, master distiller-watertender, and
Agnes Hunt, felter-machinist's mate; completed dame school age 12,
B Track training, Divinity School Certificate at age 20; mid-starboard
watch curate, later fore-starboard chaplain.

Graves, chief inspector, age 34, married to George Omany, blacksmith
third class; two children; completed dame school age 15, Inspectors
School Certificate at age 16; inspector third class, second class, first
class, master inspector, then chief. Efficiency rating, 4.0; three
commendations.

_Versus_ the Continent of North America.

       *       *       *       *       *

They all rowed for an hour; then a shoreward breeze came up and Salter
stepped the mast. "Ship your oars," he said, and then wished he dared
countermand the order. Now they would have time to think of what they
were doing.

The very water they sailed was different in color from the deep water
they knew, and different in its way of moving. The life in it--

"Great God!" Mrs. Graves cried, pointing astern.

It was a huge fish, half the size of their boat. It surfaced lazily and
slipped beneath the water in an uninterrupted arc. They had seen
steel-grey skin, not scales, and a great slit of a mouth.

Salter said, shaken: "Unbelievable. Still, I suppose in the unfished
offshore waters a few of the large forms survive. And the intermediate
sizes to feed them--" And foot-long smaller sizes to feed _them_, and--

Was it mere arrogant presumption that Man had permanently changed the
life of the sea?

The afternoon sun slanted down and the tip of Monday mast sank below the
horizon's curve astern; the breeze that filled their sail bowled them
towards a mist which wrapped vague concretions they feared to study too
closely. A shadowed figure huge as a mast with one arm upraised; behind
it blocks and blocks of something solid.

"This is the end of the sea," said the captain.

Mrs. Graves said what she would have said if a silly under-inspector had
reported to her blue rust on steel: "Nonsense!" Then, stammering: "I beg
your pardon, captain. Of course you are correct."

"But it sounded strange," Chaplain Pemberton said helpfully. "I wonder
where they all are?"

Jewel Flyte said in her quiet way: "We should have passed over the
discharge from waste tubes before now. They used to pump their waste
through tubes under the sea and discharge it several miles out. It
colored the water and it stank. During the first voyaging years the
captains knew it was time to tack away from land by the color and the
bad smell."

"They must have improved their disposal system by now," Salter said,
"It's been centuries."

His last word hung in the air.

The chaplain studied the mist from the bow. It was impossible to deny
it; the huge thing was an Idol. Rising from the bay of a great city, an
Idol, and a female one--the worst kind! "I thought they had them only in
High Places," he muttered, discouraged.

Jewel Flyte understood. "I think it has no religious significance," she
said. "It's a sort of--huge piece of scrimshaw."

Mrs. Graves studied the vast thing and saw in her mind the glyphic arts
as practiced at sea: compacted kelp shaved and whittled into little
heirloom boxes, miniature portrait busts of children. She decided that
Yeoman Flyte had a dangerously wild imagination. Scrimshaw! Tall as a
mast!

There should be some commerce, thought the captain. Boats going to and
fro. The Place ahead was plainly an island, plainly inhabited; goods and
people should be going to it and coming from it. Gigs and cutters and
whaleboats should be plying this bay and those two rivers; at that
narrow bit they should be lined up impatiently waiting, tacking and
riding under sea anchors and furled sails. There was nothing but a few
white birds that shrilled nervously at their solitary boat.

The blocky concretions were emerging from the haze; they were sunset-red
cubes with regular black eyes dotting them; they were huge dice laid
down side by side by side, each as large as a ship, each therefore
capable of holding twenty thousand persons.

Where were they all?

The breeze and the tide drove them swiftly through the neck of water
where a hundred boats should be waiting. "Furl the sail," said Salter.
"Out oars."

With no sounds but the whisper of the oarlocks, the cries of the white
birds and the slapping of the wavelets they rowed under the shadow of
the great red dice to a dock, one of a hundred teeth projecting from the
island's rim.

"Easy the starboard oars," said Salter; "handsomely the port oars. Up
oars. Chaplain, the boat hook." He had brought them to a steel ladder;
Mrs. Graves gasped at the red rust thick on it. Salter tied the painter
to a corroded brass ring. "Come along," he said, and began to climb.

When the four of them stood on the iron-plated dock Pemberton,
naturally, prayed. Mrs. Graves followed the prayer with half her
attention or less; the rest she could not divert from the shocking
slovenliness of the prospect--rust, dust, litter, neglect. What went on
in the mind of Jewel Flyte her calm face did not betray. And the captain
scanned those black windows a hundred yards inboard--no; inland!--and
waited and wondered.

They began to walk to them at last, Salter leading. The sensation
underfoot was strange and dead, tiring to the arches and the thighs.

The huge red dice were not as insane close-up as they had appeared from
a distance. They were thousand-foot cubes of brick, the stuff that lined
ovens. They were set back within squares of green, cracked surfacing
which Jewel Flyte named "cement" or "concrete" from some queer corner of
her erudition.

There was an entrance, and written over it: THE HERBERT BROWNELL JR.
MEMORIAL HOUSES. A bronze plaque shot a pang of guilt through them all
as they thought of The Compact, but its words were different and
ignoble.

     NOTICE TO ALL TENANTS

     A project Apartment is a Privilege and not a Right. Daily
     Inspection is the Cornerstone of the Project. Attendance at Least
     Once a Week at the Church or Synagogue of your Choice is Required
     for Families wishing to remain in Good Standing; Proof of
     Attendance must be presented on Demand. Possession of Tobacco or
     Alcohol will be considered Prima Facie Evidence of Undesirability.
     Excessive Water Use, Excessive Energy Use and Food Waste will be
     Grounds for Desirability Review. The speaking of Languages other
     than American by persons over the Age of Six will be considered
     Prima Facie Evidence of Nonassimilability, though this shall not be
     construed to prohibit Religious Ritual in Languages other than
     American.

Below it stood another plaque in paler bronze, an afterthought:

     None of the foregoing shall be construed to condone the Practice of
     Depravity under the Guise of Religion by Whatever Name, and all
     Tenants are warned that any Failure to report the Practice of
     Depravity will result in summary Eviction and Denunciation.

Around this later plaque some hand had painted with crude strokes of a
tar brush a sort of anatomical frame at which they stared in wondering
disgust.

At last Pemberton said: "They were a devout people." Nobody noticed the
past tense, it sounded so right.

"Very sensible," said Mrs. Graves. "No nonsense about them."

Captain Salter privately disagreed. A ship run with such dour coercion
would founder in a month; could land people be that much different?

Jewel Flyte said nothing, but her eyes were wet. Perhaps she was
thinking of scared little human rats dodging and twisting through the
inhuman maze of great fears and minute rewards.

"After all," said Mrs. Graves, "it's nothing but a Cabin Tier. We have
cabins and so had they. Captain, might we have a look?"

"This _is_ a reconnaissance," Salter shrugged. They went into a littered
lobby and easily recognized an elevator which had long ago ceased to
operate; there were many hand-run dumbwaiters at sea.

A gust of air flapped a sheet of printed paper across the chaplain's
ankles; he stooped to pick it up with a kind of instinctive
outrage--leaving paper unsecured, perhaps to blow overboard and be lost
forever to the ship's economy! Then he flushed at his silliness. "So
much to unlearn," he said, and spread the paper to look at it. A moment
later he crumpled it in a ball and hurled it from him as hard and as far
as he could, and wiped his hands with loathing on his jacket. His face
was utterly shocked.

The others stared. It was Mrs. Graves who went for the paper.

"Don't look at it," said the chaplain.

"I think she'd better," Salter said.

The maintenancewoman spread the paper, studied it and said: "Just some
nonsense. Captain, what do you make of it?"

It was a large page torn from a book, and on it were simple polychrome
drawing and some lines of verse in the style of a child's first reader.
Salter repressed a shocked guffaw. The picture was of a little boy and a
little girl quaintly dressed locked in murderous combat, using teeth and
nails. "_Jack and Jill went up the hill_," said the text, "_to fetch a
pail of water. She threw Jack down and broke his crown; it was a lovely
slaughter._"

Jewel Flyte took the page from his hands. All she said was, after a long
pause: "I suppose they couldn't start them too young." She dropped the
page and she too wiped her hands.

"Come along," the captain said. "We'll try the stairs."

The stairs were dust, rat-dung, cobwebs and two human skeletons.
Murderous knuckledusters fitted loosely the bones of the two right
hands. Salter hardened himself to pick up one of the weapons, but could
not bring himself to try it on. Jewel Flyte said apologetically: "Please
be careful, captain. It might be poisoned. That seems to be the way they
were."

Salter froze. By God, but the girl was right! Delicately, handling the
spiked steel thing by its edges, he held it up. Yes; stains--it _would_
be stained, and perhaps with poison also. He dropped it into the
thoracic cage of one skeleton and said: "Come on." They climbed in quest
of a dusty light from above; it was a doorway onto a corridor of many
doors. There was evidence of fire and violence. A barricade of queer
pudgy chairs and divans had been built to block the corridor, and had
been breached. Behind it were sprawled three more heaps of bones.

"They have no heads," the chaplain said hoarsely. "Captain Salter, this
is not a place for human beings. We must go back to the ship, even if it
means honorable death. This is not a place for human beings."

"Thank you, chaplain," said Salter. "You've cast your vote. Is anybody
with you?"

"Kill your own children, chaplain," said Mrs. Graves. "Not mine."

Jewel Flyte gave the chaplain a sympathetic shrug and said: "No."

One door stood open, its lock shattered by blows of a fire axe. Salter
said: "We'll try that one." They entered into the home of an ordinary
middle-class death-worshipping family as it had been a century ago, in
the one hundred and thirty-first year of Merdeka the Chosen.

Merdeka the Chosen, the All-Foreigner, the Ur-Alien, had never intended
any of it. He began as a retail mail-order vendor of movie and
television stills, eight-by-ten glossies for the fan trade. It was a
hard doller; you had to keep an immense stock to cater to a tottery Mae
Bush admirer, to the pony-tailed screamer over Rip Torn, and to
everybody in between. He would have no truck with pinups. "Dirty,
lascivious pictures!" he snarled when broadly-hinting letters arrived.
"Filth! Men and women kissing, ogling, pawing each other! Orgies! Bah!"
Merdeka kept a neutered dog, a spayed cat, and a crumpled uncomplaining
housekeeper who was technically his wife. He was poor; he was very poor.
Yet he never neglected his charitable duties, contributing every year to
the Planned Parenthood Federation and the Midtown Hysterectomy Clinic.

They knew him in the Third Avenue saloons where he talked every night,
arguing with Irishmen, sometimes getting asked outside to be knocked
down. He let them knock him down, and sneered from the pavement. Was
_this_ their argument? _He_ could argue. He spewed facts and figures and
clichés in unanswerable profusion. Hell, man, the Russians'll have a
bomb base on the moon in two years and in two years the Army and the Air
Force will still be beating each other over the head with pigs'
bladders. Just a minute, let me tell you: the goddammycin's making
idiots of us all; do you know of any children born in the past two years
that're healthy? And: 'flu be go to hell; it's our own germ warfare from
Camp Crowder right outside Baltimore that got out of hand, and it
happened the week of the 24th. And: the human animal's obsolete; they've
proved at M.I.T., Steinwitz and Kohlmann _proved_ that the human animal
cannot survive the current radiation levels. And: enjoy your lung
cancer, friend; for every automobile and its stinking exhaust there will
be two-point-seven-oh-three cases of lung cancer, and we've got to have
our automobiles, don't we? And: delinquency my foot; they're insane and
it's got to the point where the economy cannot support mass insanity;
they've got to be castrated; it's the only way. And: they should dig up
the body of Metchnikoff and throw it to the dogs; he's the degenerate
who invented venereal prophylaxis and since then vice without punishment
has run hogwild through the world; what we need on the streets is a few
of those old-time locomotor ataxia cases limping and drooling to show
the kids where vice leads.

He didn't know where he came from. The delicate New York way of
establishing origins is to ask: "Merdeka, hah? What kind of a name is
that now?" And to this he would reply that he wasn't a lying Englishman
or a loudmouthed Irishman or a perverted Frenchman or a chiseling Jew or
a barbarian Russian or a toadying German or a thickheaded Scandihoovian,
and if his listener didn't like it, what did he have to say in reply?

He was from an orphanage, and the legend at the orphanage was that a
policeman had found him, two hours old, in a garbage can coincident with
the death by hemorrhage on a trolley car of a luetic young woman whose
name appeared to be Merdeka and who had certainly been recently
delivered of a child. No other facts were established, but for
generation after generation of orphanage inmates there was great solace
in having one of their number who indisputably had got off to a worse
start than they.

A watershed of his career occurred when he noticed that he was, for the
seventh time that year, re-ordering prints of scenes from Mr. Howard
Hughes' production _The Outlaw_. These were not the off-the-bust stills
of Miss Jane Russell, surprisingly, but were group scenes of Miss
Russell suspended by her wrists and about to be whipped. Merdeka studied
the scene, growled "Give it to the bitch!" and doubled the order. It
sold out. He canvassed his files for other whipping and torture stills
from _Desert Song_-type movies, made up a special assortment, and it
sold out within a week. Then he knew.

The man and the opportunity had come together, for perhaps the fiftieth
time in history. He hired a model and took the first specially posed
pictures himself. They showed her cringing from a whip, tied to a chair
with a clothesline, and herself brandishing the whip.

Within two months Merdeka had cleared six thousand dollars and he put
every cent of it back into more photographs and direct-mail advertising.
Within a year he was big enough to attract the postoffice obscenity
people. He went to Washington and screamed in their faces: "My stuff
isn't obscene and I'll sue you if you bother me, you stinking
bureaucrats! You show me one breast, you show me one behind, you show me
one human being touching another in my pictures! You can't and you know
you can't! I don't believe in sex and I don't push sex, so you leave me
the hell alone! Life is pain and suffering and being scared so people
like to look at my pictures; my pictures are about _them_, the scared
little jerks! You're just a bunch of goddam perverts if you think
there's anything dirty about my pictures!"

He had them there; Merdeka's girls always wore at least full panties,
bras and stockings; he had them there. The postoffice obscenity people
were vaguely positive that there was _something_ wrong with pictures of
beautiful women tied down to be whipped or burned with hot irons, but
what?

The next year they tried to get him on his income tax; those deductions
for the Planned Parenthood Federation and the Midtown Hysterectomy
Clinic were preposterous, but he proved them with canceled checks to the
last nickel. "In fact," he indignantly told them, "I spend a lot of time
at the Clinic and sometimes they let me watch the operations. _That's_
how highly they think of me at the Clinic."

The next year he started _DEATH: the Weekly Picture Magazine_ with the
aid of a half-dozen bright young grads from the new Harvard School of
Communicationeering. As _DEATH's_ Communicator in Chief (only yesterday
he would have been its Publisher, and only fifty years before he would
have been its Editor) he slumped biliously in a pigskin-panelled office,
peering suspiciously at the closed-circuit TV screen which had a hundred
wired eyes throughout _DEATH's_ offices, sometimes growling over the
voice circuit:

"You! What's your name? Boland? You're through, Boland. Pick up your
time at the paymaster." For any reason; for no reason. He was a living
legend in his narrow-lapel charcoal flannel suit and stringy bullfighter
neckties; the bright young men in their Victorian Revival frock coats
and pearl-pinned cravats wondered at his--not "obstinacy"; not when
there might be a mike even in the corner saloon; say, his
"timelessness."

The bright young men became bright young-old men, and the magazine which
had been conceived as a vehicle for deadheading house ads of the mail
order picture business went into the black. On the cover of every issue
of _DEATH_ was a pictured execution-of-the-week, and no price for one
was ever too high. A fifty-thousand-dollar donation to a mosque had
purchased the right to secretly snap the Bread Ordeal by which perished
a Yemenite suspected of tapping an oil pipeline. An interminable
illustrated History of Flagellation was a staple of the reading matter,
and the Medical Section (in color) was tremendously popular. So too was
the weekly Traffic Report.

When the last of the Compact Ships was launched into the Pacific the
event made _DEATH_ because of the several fatal accidents which
accompanied the launching; otherwise Merdeka ignored the ships. It was
strange that he who had unorthodoxies about everything had no opinion at
all about the Compact Ships and their crews. Perhaps it was that he
really knew he was the greatest manslayer who ever lived, and even so
could not face commanding total extinction, including that of the
seaborne leaven. The more articulate Sokei-an, who in the name of Rinzei
Zen Buddhism was at that time depopulating the immense area dominated by
China, made no bones about it: "Even I in my Hate may err; let the
celestial vessels be." The opinions of Dr. Spät, European member of the
trio, are forever beyond recovery due to his advocacy of the
"one-generation" plan.

With advancing years Merdeka's wits cooled and gelled. There came a time
when he needed a theory and was forced to stab the button of the
intercom for his young-old Managing Communicator and growl at him: "Give
me a theory!" And the M.C. reeled out: "The structural intermesh of
_DEATH: The Weekly Picture Magazine_ with Western culture is no random
point-event but a rising world-line. Predecessor attitudes such as the
Hollywood dogma 'No breasts--blood!' and the tabloid press' exploitation
of violence were floundering and empirical. It was Merdeka who
sigma-ized the convergent traits of our times and asymptotically
congruentizes with them publication-wise. Wrestling and the roller-derby
as blood sports, the routinization of femicide in the detective tale,
the standardization at one million per year of traffic fatalities, the
wholesome interest of our youth in gang rumbles, all point toward the
Age of Hate and Death. The ethic of Love and Life is obsolescent, and
who is to say that Man is the loser thereby? Life and Death compete in
the marketplace of ideas for the Mind of Man--"

Merdeka growled something and snapped off the set. Merdeka leaned back.
Two billion circulation this week, and the auto ads were beginning to
Tip. Last year only the suggestion of a dropped shopping basket as the
Dynajetic 16 roared across the page, this year a hand, limp on the
pictured pavement. Next year, blood. In February the Sylphella Salon
chain ads had Tipped, with a crash. "--and the free optional judo
course for slenderized Madame or Mademoiselle: learn how to kill a man
with your lovely bare hands, with or without mess as desired."
Applications had risen 28 per cent. By _God_ there was a structural
intermesh for you!

It was too slow; it was still too slow. He picked up a direct-line phone
and screamed into it: "Too slow! What am I paying you people for? The
world is wallowing in filth! Movies are dirtier than ever! Kissing!
Pawing! Ogling! Men and women together--obscene! Clean up the magazine
covers! Clean up the ads!"

The person at the other end of the direct line was Executive Secretary
of the Society for Purity in Communications; Merdeka had no need to
announce himself to him, for Merdeka was S.P.C.'s principal underwriter.
He began to rattle off at once: "We've got the Mothers' March on
Washington this week, sir, and a mass dummy pornographic mailing
addressed to every Middle Atlantic State female between the ages of six
and twelve next week, sir; I believe this one-two punch will put the
Federal Censorship Commission over the goal line before recess--"

Merdeka hung up. "Lewd communications," he snarled. "Breeding, breeding,
breeding, like maggots in a garbage can. Burning and breeding. But we
will make them clean."

He did not need a Theory to tell him that he could not take away Love
without providing a substitute.

He walked down Sixth Avenue that night, for the first time in years. In
this saloon he had argued; outside that saloon he had been punched in
the nose. Well, he was winning the argument, all the arguments. A mother
and daughter walked past uneasily, eyes on the shadows. The mother was
dressed Square; she wore a sheath dress that showed her neck and
clavicles at the top and her legs from mid-shin at the bottom. In some
parts of town she'd be spat on, but the daughter, never. The girl was
Hip; she was covered from neck to ankles by a loose, unbelted
sack-culotte. Her mother's hair floated; hers was hidden by a cloche.
Nevertheless the both of them were abruptly yanked into one of those
shadows they prudently had eyed, for they had not watched the well-lit
sidewalk for waiting nooses.

The familiar sounds of a Working Over came from the shadows as Merdeka
strolled on. "I mean cool!" an ecstatic young voice--boy's, girl's, what
did it matter?--breathed between crunching blows.

That year the Federal Censorship Commission was created, and the next
year the old Internment Camps in the southwest were filled to capacity
by violators, and the next year the First Church of Merdeka was founded
in Chicago. Merdeka died of an aortal aneurism five years after that,
but his soul went marching on.

       *       *       *       *       *

"The Family that Prays together Slays together," was the wall-motto in
the apartment, but there was no evidence that the implied injunction had
been observed. The bedrooms of the mother and the father were secured by
steel doors and terrific locks, but Junior had got them all the same;
somehow he had burned through the steel.

"Thermite?" Jewel Flyte asked herself softly, trying to remember. First
he had got the father, quickly and quietly with a wire garotte as he lay
sleeping, so as not to alarm his mother. To her he had taken her own
spiked knobkerry and got in a mortal stroke, but not before she reached
under her pillow for a pistol. Junior's teenage bones testified by their
arrangement to the violence of that leaden blow.

Incredulously they looked at the family library of comic books,
published in a series called "The Merdekan Five-Foot Shelf of Classics".
Jewel Flyte leafed slowly through one called _Moby Dick_ and found that
it consisted of a near-braining in a bedroom, agonizingly-depicted
deaths at sea, and for a climax the eating alive of one Ahab by a
monster. "Surely there must have been more," she whispered.

Chaplain Pendleton put down _Hamlet_ quickly and held onto a wall. He
was quite sure that he felt his sanity slipping palpably away, that he
would gibber in a moment. He prayed and after a while felt better; he
rigorously kept his eyes away from the Classics after that.

Mrs. Graves snorted at the waste of it all, at the picture of the ugly,
pop-eyed, busted-nose man labeled MERDEKA THE CHOSEN, THE PURE, THE
PURIFIER. There were two tables, which was a folly. Who needed two
tables? Then she looked closer, saw that one of them was really a
bloodstained flogging bench and felt slightly ill. Its name-plate said
_Correctional Furniture Corp. Size 6, Ages 10-14_. She had, God knew,
slapped her children more than once when they deviated from her standard
of perfection, but when she saw those stains she felt a stirring of
warmth for the parricidal bones in the next room.

Captain Salter said: "Let's get organized. Does anybody think there are
any of them left?"

"I think not," said Mrs. Graves. "People like that can't survive. The
world must have been swept clean. They, ah, killed one another but
that's not the important point. This couple had one child, age ten to
fourteen. This cabin of theirs seems to be built for one child. We
should look at a few more cabins to learn whether a one-child family
is--was--normal. If we find out that it was, we can suspect that they
are--gone. Or nearly so." She coined a happy phrase: "By race suicide."

"The arithmetic of it is quite plausible," Salter said. "If no factors
work except the single-child factor, in one century of five generations
a population of two billion will have bred itself down to 125 million.
In another century, the population is just under four million. In
another, 122 thousand ... by the thirty-second generation the last
couple descended from the original two billion will breed one child, and
that's the end. And there are the other factors. Besides those who do
not breed by choice"--his eyes avoided Jewel Flyte--"there are the
things we have seen on the stairs, and in the corridor, and in these
compartments."

"Then there's our answer," said Mrs. Graves. She smacked the obscene
table with her hand, forgetting what it was. "We beach the ship and
march the ship's company onto dry land. We clean up, we learn what we
have to to get along--" Her words trailed off. She shook her head.
"Sorry," she said gloomily. "I'm talking nonsense."

The chaplain understood her, but he said: "The land is merely another of
the many mansions. Surely they could learn!"

"It's not politically feasible," Salter said. "Not in its present form."
He thought of presenting the proposal to the Ship's Council in the
shadow of the mast that bore the Compact, and twitched his head in an
involuntary negative.

"There is a formula possible," Jewel Flyte said.

The Brownells burst in on them then, all eighteen of the Brownells. They
had been stalking the shore party since its landing. Nine sack-culotted
women in clothes and nine men in penitential black, they streamed
through the gaping door and surrounded the sea people with a ring of
spears. Other factors had indeed operated, but this was not yet the
thirty-second generation of extinction.

The leader of the Brownells, a male, said with satisfaction: "Just when
we needed--new blood." Salter understood that he was not speaking in
genetic terms.

The females, more verbal types, said critically: "Evil-doers, obviously.
Displaying their limbs without shame, brazenly flaunting the rotted
pillars of the temple of lust. Come from the accursed sea itself, abode
of infamy, to seduce us from our decent and regular lives."

"We know what to do with the women," said the male leader. The rest took
up the antiphon.

"We'll knock them down."

"And roll them on their backs."

"And pull one arm out and tie it fast."

"And pull the other arm out and tie it fast."

"And pull one limb out and tie it fast."

"And pull the other limb out and tie it fast."

"And then--"

"We'll beat them to death and Merdeka will smile."

Chaplain Pemberton stared incredulously. "You must look into your
hearts," he told them in a reasonable voice. "You must look deeper than
you have, and you will find that you have been deluded. This is not the
way for human beings to act. Somebody has misled you dreadfully. Let me
explain--"

"Blasphemy," the leader of the females said, and put her spear expertly
into the chaplain's intestines. The shock of the broad, cold blade
pulsed through him and felled him. Jewel Flyte knelt beside him
instantly, checking heart beat and breathing. He was alive.

"Get up," the male leader said. "Displaying and offering yourself to
such as we is useless. We are pure in heart."

A male child ran to the door. "Wagners!" he screamed. "Twenty Wagners
coming up the stairs!"

His father roared at him: "Stand straight and don't mumble!" and slashed
out with the butt of his spear, catching him hard in the ribs. The child
grinned, but only after the pure-hearted eighteen had run to the stairs.

Then he blasted a whistle down the corridor while the sea-people stared
with what attention they could divert from the bleeding chaplain. Six
doors popped open at the whistle and men and women emerged from them to
launch spears into the backs of the Brownells clustered to defend the
stairs. "Thanks, pop!" the boy kept screaming while the pure-hearted
Wagners swarmed over the remnants of the pure-hearted Brownells; at
last his screaming bothered one of the Wagners and the boy was himself
speared.

Jewel Flyte said: "I've had enough of this. Captain, please pick the
chaplain up and come along."

"They'll kill us."

"You'll have the chaplain," said Mrs. Graves. "One moment." She darted
into a bedroom and came back hefting the spiked knobkerry.

"Well, perhaps," the girl said. She began undoing the long row of
buttons down the front of her coveralls and shrugged out of the garment,
then unfastened and stepped out of her underwear. With the clothes over
her arm she walked into the corridor and to the stairs, the stupefied
captain and inspector following.

To the pure-hearted Merdekans she was not Phryne winning her case; she
was Evil incarnate. They screamed, broke and ran wildly, dropping their
weapons. That a human being could do such a thing was beyond their
comprehension; Merdeka alone knew what kind of monster this was that
drew them strangely and horribly, in violation of all sanity. They ran
as she had hoped they would; the other side of the coin was spearing
even more swift and thorough than would have been accorded to her fully
clothed. But they ran, gibbering with fright and covering their eyes,
into apartments and corners of the corridor, their backs turned on the
awful thing.

The sea-people picked their way over the shambles at the stairway and
went unopposed down the stairs and to the dock. It was a troublesome
piece of work for Salter to pass the chaplain down to Mrs. Graves in the
boat, but in ten minutes they had cast off, rowed out a little and set
sail to catch the land breeze generated by the differential twilight
cooling of water and brick. After playing her part in stepping the mast,
Jewel Flyte dressed.

"It won't always be that easy," she said when the last button was
fastened. Mrs. Graves had been thinking the same thing, but had not said
it to avoid the appearance of envying that superb young body.

Salter was checking the chaplain as well as he knew how. "I think he'll
be all right," he said. "Surgical repair and a long rest. He hasn't lost
much blood. This is a strange story we'll have to tell the Ship's
Council."

Mrs. Graves said: "They've no choice. We've lost our net and the land
is there waiting for us. A few maniacs oppose us--what of it?"

Again a huge fish lazily surfaced; Salter regarded it thoughtfully. He
said: "They'll propose scavenging bronze ashore and fashioning another
net and going on just as if nothing had happened. And really, we could
do that, you know."

Jewel Flyte said: "No. Not forever. This time it was the net, at the end
of harvest. What if it were three masts in midwinter, in mid-Atlantic?"

"Or," said the captain, "the rudder--any time. Anywhere. But can you
imagine telling the Council they've got to walk off the ship onto land,
take up quarters in those brick cabins, change _everything_? And fight
maniacs, and learn to _farm_?"

"There must be a way," said Jewel Flyte. "Just as Merdeka, whatever it
was, was a way. There were too many people, and Merdeka was the answer
to too many people. There's always an answer. Man is a land mammal in
spite of brief excursions at sea. We were seed stock put aside, waiting
for the land to be cleared so we could return. Just as these offshore
fish are waiting very patiently for us to stop harvesting twice a year
so they can return to deep water and multiply. What's the way, captain?"

He thought hard. "We could," he said slowly, "begin by simply sailing in
close and fishing the offshore waters for big stuff. Then tie up and
build a sort of bridge from the ship to the shore. We'd continue to live
aboard the ship but we'd go out during daylight to try farming."

"It sounds right."

"And keep improving the bridge, making it more and more solid, until
before they notice it it's really a solid part of the ship and a solid
part of the shore. It might take ... mmm ... ten years?"

"Time enough for the old shellbacks to make up their minds," Mrs. Graves
unexpectedly snorted.

"And we'd relax the one-to-one reproduction rule, and some young adults
will simply be crowded over the bridge to live on the land--" His face
suddenly fell. "And then the whole damned farce starts all over again, I
suppose. I pointed out that it takes thirty-two generations bearing one
child apiece to run a population of two billion into zero. Well, I
should have mentioned that it takes thirty-two generations bearing four
children apiece to run a population of two into two billion. Oh, what's
the use, Jewel?"

She chuckled. "There was an answer last time," she said. "There will be
an answer the next time."

"It won't be the same answer as Merdeka," he vowed. "We grew up a little
at sea. This time we can do it with brains and not with nightmares and
superstition."

"I don't know," she said. "Our ship will be the first, and then the
other ships will have their accidents one by one and come and tie up and
build their bridges hating every minute of it for the first two
generations and then not hating it, just living it ... and who will be
the greatest man who ever lived?"

The captain looked horrified.

"Yes, you! Salter, the Builder of the Bridge; Tommy, do you know an old
word for 'bridge-builder'? _Pontifex._"

"Oh, my God!" Tommy Salter said in despair.

A flicker of consciousness was passing through the wounded chaplain; he
heard the words and was pleased that somebody aboard was praying.

THE END

       *       *       *       *       *


"Eaten alive by bugs!" screamed the headlines--and the terror-stricken
panic began.

BUGGED!

by Donald F. Glut

Truth exploded in Barks' mind as he realized that the beetles were
turning him into a bloody pulp and that more of them kept attacking and
consuming him.

_The river_, he thought. _If I can get to the river._


TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES

The following change was made to the original text:
Page 164 changed:  said the test ==> said the text


[The end of _A Mile Beyond the Moon_ by Cyril M. Kornbluth]