Chapter Seven

   The acquisition of money corrupted Granny. She disappeared for days at a time, and he gathered from her disjointed conversation afterwards that she was at last frequenting the pleasure resorts she had always longed to go to. When she was at home, her bottle was her almost inseparable companion. Because he needed to have her around, Jommy prepared meals for her, and so kept her alive despite her excesses. It was necessary – when she ran out of money – to make occasional forays with her, but otherwise he kept effectively out of her way.
   He used his considerable spare time to gain an education – something which was not easy to do. The area was poverty-stricken in the extreme, and most of its inhabitants were uneducated, even illiterate, but there was a scattering of people with alert minds in it Jommy discovered who they were and what they did and how much they knew by asking them and by asking about them. To them, he was Granny's grandson. Once that was accepted as fact, many difficulties were resolved.
   There were people, of course, who were wary of a junk dealer's relative, considering him untrustworthy. A few individuals, who had felt the sting of Granny's sharp tongue, were quite antagonistic; but their reaction was to ignore him. Others were too busy to bother with either Granny or himself.
   From some he aggressively, though as unobtrusively as possible, compelled attention. A young engineering student called him "a damned nuisance," but explained the science of engineering to him. Jommy read in his mind that the student felt that he was clarifying his own thoughts and understanding of his subject, and that he occasionally boasted that he knew engineering so well that he could make the principles clear to a boy of ten.
   He never guessed how precocious this boy was.
   A woman who had traveled widely before her marriage – but was now in poor circumstances – lived half a block down the street, and fed him cookies one at a time while she talked eagerly of the world and its people as she had seen them.
   It was necessary to accept the bribes because she would have misunderstood if he refused the cookies. But no teller of tales actually ever had a more attentive pair of ears to talk to than Mrs. Hardy. A thin-faced, bitter woman whose husband had gambled away her possessions, she had wandered over Europe, and Asia, and her sharp eyes had recorded an immense amount of detail. More vaguely, she knew about the past of those countries.
   At one time – so she had heard – China had been heavily populated. The story was that a series of bloody wars had long ago decimated the more densely inhabited areas. These wars, it seemed, were definitely not of slan origin. It was only in the last hundred years that the slans had turned their attention to babies of Chinese and other Eastern origin – and so turned against them people who had hitherto tolerated the slans' existence.
   As explained by Mrs. Hardy, it seemed like one more senseless action of the slans. Jommy listened and recorded the information, convinced that the explanation could not be as stated, wondering what the truth was, and determined that someday he would bring all these deadly lies out into the open.
   The engineering student, Mrs. Hardy, a grocer who had been a rocket pilot, a radio and TV repairman, and Old Man Darrett – these were the people who educated him, unknowingly, during the first two years he spent with Granny. Of the group, Darrett was Jommy's prize. A big, stocky, lonely, cynical man of seventy-odd years, he had once been a professor of history – but that was merely one of the many subjects about which he had an almost inexhaustible fund of information.
   It was obvious that sooner or later the old man would bring up the subject of the slan wars. It was so obvious that Jommy allowed the first few casual mentions of it pass, just as if he weren't interested. But early one winter afternoon, there it was again, as he had expected. And this time he said:
   "You keep talking about wars. There couldn't have been wars. Those people are just outlaws. You don't fight wars with outlaws; you just exterminate them."
   Darrett stiffened. "Outlaws," he said. "Young fellow, those were great days. I tell you a hundred thousand slans practically took over the world. It was a beautiful job of planning, carried out with the utmost boldness. What you have to realize is that men as a mass always play somebody else's game – not their own. They're caught in traps from which they cannot escape. They belong to groups; they're members of organizations; they're loyal to ideas, individuals, geographical areas. If you can get hold of the institutions they support – there's the method."
   "And the slans did that?" Jommy asked the question with an intensity that startled him; it was a little too revealing of his own feelings. He added quickly in a subdued tone: "It sounds like a story. It's just propaganda to scare us – like you've said so often about other things."
   "Propaganda!" said Darrett explosively. And then he was silent His large, expressive black eyes were half hidden by his long, dark eyelashes, He said at last slowly, "I want you to visualize this. Jommy. The world was confused and bewildered. Everywhere human babies were being subjected to the tremendous campaign of the slans to make more slans. Civilization began to break down. There was an immense increase in insanity. Suicide, murder, crime – the graph of chaos rose to new heights. And, one morning, without knowing quite how it was done, the human race woke up to discover that overnight the enemy had taken control. Working from within, the slans had managed to take over innumerable key organizations. When you learn to understand the rigidity of institutional structures in our society, you'll realize how helpless human beings were at first. My own private opinion is that the slans could have gotten away with it except for one thing."
   Jommy waited, silent. He had an unhappy premonition of what was coming. Old Man Darrett went on:
   "They continued ruthlessly trying to make slans out of human babies. It seems a little stupid in retrospect"
   Darrett and the others were only the beginning. He followed learned men around the streets, picking at the surface of their minds. He lay in concealment on campus grounds, telepathically following lectures. Books he had in plenty, but books were not enough. They had to be interpreted, explained. There were mathematics, physics, chemistry, astronomy – all the sciences. His desire had no limit.
   In the six years between his ninth and fifteenth birthdays, he acquired the beginning of what his mother had prescribed as basic knowledge for an adult slan.
   During those years, he watched the tendrilless slans cautiously from a distance. Nightly, at ten, their spaceships leaped into the sky; and the service was maintained on precision time. Every night at two-thirty, another shark-shaped monster plunged down from space, silent and dark, and dropped like a ghost into the top of the same building.
   Only twice during those years was the traffic suspended, each time for a month, and each time when Mars, following her eccentric orbit, teetered on the farthest side of the Sun.
   He stayed away from the Air Center, because almost every day his respect for the might of the tendrilless slans grew. And it seemed increasingly clear that only an accident had saved him that day when he revealed himself to the two adults. An accident and surprise.
   Of the basic mysteries of the slans he learned nothing. To pass the time he indulged in orgies of physical activity. First of all, he must have a secret way of escape, just in case – secret from Granny as well as the world; and second, he couldn't possibly live in this shack as it was. It required months to build hundreds of yards of tunnel, months also to rebuild the interior of their home with fine, paneled walls, shining ceilings and plastic floors.
   Granny sneaked the furniture in at night, past the junk-laden yard and the unchanged, unpainted exterior. But that required nearly a year in itself – because of Granny and her bottle.
   His fifteenth birthday... At two in the afternoon, Jommy laid down the book he had been reading, took off his slippers and put on his shoes. The hour for decisive action had come. Today, he must go into the catacombs, and take possession of his father's secret. Because he did not know the secret slan passageways, he would have to risk going in through a public entrance.
   He gave scarcely more than a surface thought to the possibility of danger. This was the day – long ago, it had been planted in his mind, hypnotically set by his father. It did seem important, however, that he slip out of the house without the old woman's hearing him.
   Briefly, he let his mind contact hers, and without the slightest sense of disgust sampled the stream of her thought. She was wide awake and tossing on her bed. And through her brain poured freely and furiously a welter of astoundingly wicked thoughts. Jommy Cross frowned abruptly. Into the veritable hell of the old woman's recollection (for she lived almost completely in her amazing past when she was drunk) had come a swift, cunning thought: "Got to get rid of that slan... dangerous for Granny now that she's got money. Mustn't let him suspect... keep it out of my mind so..'."
   Jommy Cross smiled mirthlessly. It was not the first time he had caught the thought of treachery in her brain. With sudden purposefulness he finished tying the shoelace, stood up and went into her room.
   Granny lay, a sprawling shape under the sheets that were stained brown with liquor. Her deeply sunken black eyes stared dully out of the wrinkled parchment of her face. Gazing down at her, Jommy Cross felt a quiver of pity. Terrible and vicious as had been the old Granny, he preferred her as she had been then to this weak old soak who lay like some medieval witch miraculously deposited in a blue and silver bed of the future.
   Her eyes seemed to see him for the first time, clearly. A string of bloodthirsty curses reeled from her lips. Then, "Waddya want? Granny wants to be alone."
   The pity drained out of him. He gazed at her coldly: "I just wanted to give you a little warning. I'm leaving soon, so you won't have to spend any more time thinking of ways to betray me. There aren't any safe ways. That treasured old hide of yours wouldn't be worth a nickel if they caught me."
   The black eyes gleamed up at him slyly. "Think you're smart, eh," she mumbled. The word seemed to start a new trend of thought that it was impossible for him to follow mentally. "Smart," she repeated gloatingly, "smartest thing Granny ever did, catching a young slan. Dangerous now though... got to get rid of him..."
   "You old fool," Jommy Cross said dispassionately. "Don't forget that a person who harbors a slan is automatically subject to death. You've kept that mud-turtle-complexioned neck of yours well oiled, so it probably won't squeal when they hang you, but you'll do plenty of kicking with those scrawny legs."
   The brutal words spoken, he turned abruptly and went out of the room, out of the house. On the bus, he thought: "I've got to watch her, and as soon as possible leave her. Nobody who thinks in probabilities could trust anything valuable to her"
   Even downtown, the streets were deserted. Jommy Cross climbed off the bus, conscious of the silence where usually there was bedlam. The city was too quiet; there was a very absence of life and movement He stood uncertainly at the curb, all thought of Granny draining from him. He opened his mind wide. At first there was nothing there but a wisp from the half-blank mind of the driver of the bus which was disappearing now down the otherwise earless road. The sun glared down on the pavement. A few people scuttled hurriedly past, in their minds simply a blank terror so continuous and unvarying that he could not penetrate beyond it.
   The silence deepened, and alarm crept into Jommy Cross. He explored the buildings around him, but no clamor of minds came from them, nothing whatever. The clatter of an engine burst abruptly from a side street Two blocks away a tractor emerged, pulling a tremendous gun that pointed menacingly into the sky. The tractor clattered into the center of the street, was unhooked from the gun, and bellowed off into the side street from which it had come. Men swarmed around the gun, preparing it, and then stood by, looking up at the sky, waiting tensely.
   Jommy Cross wanted to walk closer, to read their minds, but he didn't dare. The sense of being in an exposed and dangerous position grew into a sick conviction within him. Any minute a military or police car might roll past and its occupants ask him what he was doing in the street He might be arrested, or told to take off his cap and show his hair and the golden threads that were his tendrils.
   Something big was definitely up, and the best place for him was the catacombs, where he'd be out of sight, though in a different kind of danger. He started hurriedly toward the catacomb entrance that had been his goal ever since leaving the house. He was turning into a side street when the loud-speaker at the corner blared into life. A man's voice roared hoarsely:
   "Final warning – get off the street! Get out of sight. The mysterious airship of the slans is now approaching the city at terrific speed. It is believed the ship is heading toward the palace. Interference has been set up on all radio waves, to prevent any of the slan lies from being broadcast Get off the streets! Here comes the ship!"
   Jommy froze. There was a silver flash in the sky, and then a long, winged torpedo of glittering metal hurtled by straight above. He heard a staccato roar from the gun down the street, and the echo of other guns, and then the ship was a distant sparkling point, heading toward the palace.
   Curiously, the sun's glare hurt his eyes now. He was conscious of confusion. A winged ship! Scores of nights during these past six years he had watched the spaceships soar up from the building in the tendrilless slan Air Center. Wingless rocket ships, and something more. Something that made great metal machines lighter than air. The rocket part seemed to be used only for propulsion. The weightlessness, the way they were flung up as if by centrifugal force, must be antigravity! And here was a winged ship, with all that that implied; jet engines, rigid confinement to Earth's atmosphere, ordinariness. If this was the best the true slans could do, then – Sharply disappointed, he turned and walked down the long flight of stairs that led to the public washroom. The place was as empty and silent as the streets above. And it was a simple matter for him who had passed through so many locked doors to pick the lock of the steel-barred door leading to the catacombs.
   He was conscious of the tenseness of his mind as he stared through tile bars of the door. There was a vague foreground of concrete beyond, then a blur of darkness that meant more stairs. The muscles of his throat tightened, his breath became deep and slow. He hunched his slim length forward, like a runner getting ready for a sprint He opened the door, darted inside, and down the long reach of dark, dank steps at top speed.
   Somewhere ahead, a bell began ringing monotonously, set off by the photoelectric cells whose barrier Jommy had crossed on entering the door – a protection put up years ago against slans and other interlopers.
   The bell was just a short distance away now, and still there was no mind stirring out of the corridor that yawned before him. Apparently none of the men working or on guard in the catacombs was within hearing range. He saw the bell, high up on the wall, a glimmering piece of metal, brrring noisily. The wall was smooth as glass, impossible to climb, the bell more than twelve feet from the floor. On and on it clanged, and still there was no clamor of approaching minds, not the faintest wisp of thought.
   "No proof that they're not coming," Jommy thought tensely. "These stone walls would quickly diffuse thought waves."
   He took a run at the wall, and leaped with desperate strength, up, up, toward the instrument His arm strained, his fingers scraped the marble wall, a full foot below the bell. He fell back, knowing his defeat. It was still ringing as he rounded a bend in the corridor. He heard it grow fainter and fainter, fading into the distance behind him. But even after the sound was gone, the ghost of it went on ringing in his mind, an insistent warning of danger.
   Queerly, the sense of a warning buzz in his brain grew stronger, until suddenly it seemed to him that the bell was actually there again, faint with distance. The feeling grew stronger, until abruptly he realized that there was another bell, clanging as noisily as the first one. That meant (he felt appalled) there must be a long line of such bells sending out their alarms, and somewhere in that vast network of tunnels there must be ears to hear them, men stiffening and looking at each other with narrowed eyes.
   Jommy Cross hurried on. He had no conscious knowledge of his route. He knew only that his father had hypnotized a picture of it into his mind, and that he need but follow the promptings of his subconscious. It came abruptly, a sharp mental command: "To the right!"
   He took the narrower of the two forks – and came at last to the hiding place. It was all simple enough, a cleverly loosened slab in the marble wall that slid out under the pressure of his strength, revealing a dark space beyond. He reached in; his groping fingers touched a metal box. He pulled it to him. He was shaking now, his fingers trembling. For a moment he stood very still, fighting for self-control; striving to picture his father standing here before this slab hiding his secrets for his son to find if anything went wrong with his own personal plans.
   It seemed to Jommy that this might be a cosmic moment in the history of slans, this moment when the work of a dead father was passed on to a fifteen-year-old boy who had waited so many thousands of minutes and hours and days for this second to come.
   The nostalgia fled from him abruptly as a mist of outside thought whispered into his mind. "Damn that bell!" somebody was thinking. "It's probably someone who ran down when the slan ship came, trying to get away from expected bombs."
   "Yeah, but don't count on it. You know how strict they are about these catacombs. Whoever started that bell is still inside. We'd better turn in the alarm to police headquarters."
   A third vibration came: "Maybe the guy's lost"
   "Let him explain that," said the first man. "Let's head toward the first bell and keep our guns ready. Never know what it might be. With slans flying around in the sky these days, there could be some of them coming down here, for all we know."
   Frantically. Jommy examined the metal box for the secret of its opening. His hypnotic command was to take out the contents and put the empty box back in the hole. In the face of that order, the thought of grabbing up the box and running never even entered his head.
   There seemed to be no lock and no catch. And yet, there must be something to fasten the lid down – Hurry, hurry! In a few minutes the approaching men would be passing directly by the spot where he was now standing.
   The dimness of the long concrete and marble corridors, the dank odors, the consciousness of the thick cords of electric wires that ran by overhead feeding millions of volts to the city above, the whole world of the catacombs around, and even memories of his past – these were the thoughts that raced through Jommy's mind, as he stared down at the metal box. There was a thought of drunken Granny, and of the mystery of the slans, and it all mixed together with the approaching footsteps of the men. He could hear them plainly now, three pairs of them, clumping toward him. Silently, Jommy Cross tore at the cover of the box, his muscles tensed for the effort He nearly lost his balance, so easily did the unfastened cover lift up.
   He found himself staring down at a thick rod of metal that lay on top of a pile of papers. He felt no surprise at its being there. There was, instead, a faint relief at discovering intact something he had known was there. Obviously, more of his father's hypnotism.
   The metal rod was a bulbous thing about two inches wide at the center but narrowing down at the ends. One of the ends was roughened, unmistakably meant to give the hand a good grip. There was a little button at the foot of the bulb part, convenient for the thumb to press it. The whole instrument glowed ever so faintly with a light of its own. That glow and the diffused light from the corridor were just bright enough for him to read on the sheet of paper beneath.
   This is the weapon. Use it only in case of absolute necessity.
   For a moment, Jommy Cross was so intent that he didn't realize the men were upon him. A flashlight glared.
   "What the – " one of the men roared. "Hands up, you!"
   It was his first real, personal danger in six long years, and it felt unreal. The slow thought crept into him that human beings were not very quick in then' reflexes. And then he was reaching for the weapon in the box before him. Without conscious haste, he pressed the button.
   If any of the men fired, the action was lost in the roar of white flame that flashed with inconceivable violence from the mouth of the tube of force. One moment they were alive, rough-built, looming shapes, threatening him; the next, they were gone, snuffed out by that burst of virulent fire.
   Jommy looked down at his hand. It was trembling. And there was a sickness in him at the way he had smashed three lives out of existence. The blur before his vision straightened slowly, as his eyes recovered from the fiery dazzlement. As his gaze reached farther out from him, he saw that the corridor was completely empty. Not a bone, not a piece of flesh or clothing remained to show that there had ever been living beings in the vicinity. Part of the floor was hollowed out, where that scorching incandescence had seared a concavity. But the slight, smooth depression it made would never be noticed.
   He forced his fingers to stop trembling; slowly the sick feeling crept out of him. There was no use feeling badly. Killing was a tough business, but these men would have dealt death to him without compunction, as men already had to his father and mother – and to countless other slans who had died miserably because of the lies these people kept feeding to each other, and swallowing without the slightest resistance. Damn them all!
   For a moment, his emotions were violent. He thought: Was it possible that all slans grew bitter as they became older, and ceased feeling compunctions about the killing of human beings, just as human beings had no compunctions about murdering slans?
   His gaze fell on the sheet upon which his father had written:
   ... the weapon. Use it only in case of absolute necessity.
   Memory flooded him, of a thousand other instances of his parents' noble quality of understanding. He could still remember the night his father had said, "Remember this: no matter how strong the slans become, the problem of what to do with human beings remains a barrier to occupation of the world. Until that problem is settled with justice and psychological sanity, the use of force would be a black crime."
   Jommy felt better. There was proof. His father hadn't even carried with him a replica of this weapon that might have saved him from his enemies. He had taken death before he would deal it.
   Jommy Cross frowned. Nobility was all very well, and perhaps he had lived too long with human beings to be a true slan, but he couldn't escape the conviction that fighting was better than dying.
   The thought stopped, alarm replacing it There was no time to waste. He had to get out of here, and quickly! He slipped the gun into his coat pocket, swiftly caught up the papers in the box, jammed them into his pockets. Then tossing the now empty, useless box back into its hole, slid the stone into place. He raced down the corridor, along the way he had come, up the steps, and stopped short within sight of the washroom. A little while before, it had been empty and silent. Now, it was packed with men. He waited, poised yet indecisive, hoping their numbers would dwindle.
   But men came in, and men went out, and there was no lessening of the crowd, no diminishing of the bedlam of noise and thought. Excitement, fear, worry; here were little men in whose brains thundered the realization that big things were happening. And the echo of that realization poured through the iron bars of the door to where Jommy waited in the dimness. In the distance, the bell was still ringing. Its unrelenting brrr of warning finally dictated the action he must take. Clutching the weapon in his pocket with one hand, Jommy stepped forward gingerly, and pushed the door open. He shut it behind him softly, tensed for the slightest sign of alarm.
   But the packed mass of men paid him not the least attention as he shoved his way through them and went up to the street. The pavement level was alive with people. Crowds pressed along the sidewalks and on the thoroughfares. Police whistles shrilled, loud-speakers blared, but nothing could stem the anarchism of the mob. All transport was at a standstill. Sweating, cursing drivers left their cars standing in the middle of the street and joined listeners before the street radios that kept up a machine-gun barrage.
   "Nothing is known for certain. No one knows exactly whether the slan ship landed at the palace or dropped a message and then disappeared. No one saw it land; no one saw it disappear. It is possible that it was shot down. Then again it is possible that at this moment the slans are in conference with Kier Gray at the palace. Rumor to that effect has already spread, in spite of the noncommittal statement issued a few minutes ago by Kier Gray himself. For the benefit of those who did not hear that statement, I will repeat it. Ladies and gentlemen, the statement of Kier Gray was as follows: " 'Do not be excited or alarmed. The extraordinary appearance of the slan ship has not altered the respective positions of slans and human beings in the slightest degree. We control the situation absolutely. They can do nothing anywhere except what they have been doing, and that within rigid limitations. Human beings out-number slans probably millions to one; and, under such circumstances, they will never dare come out in an open, organized campaign against us. So be easy in your hearts – '
   "That, ladies and gentlemen, was the statement issued by Kier Gray after the momentous event of today. The Council has been in continuous session since that statement was issued. I repeat, nothing more is known for certain. It is not known whether the slan ship landed. No one from the city saw it disappear. No one except the authorities know exactly what happened, and you have just heard the only statement on the matter, given out by Kier Gray himself. Whether the slan ship was shot down or – "
   The chatter went on and on. Over and over the statement of Kier Gray was repeated, the same accompanying rumors were given. It became a drone in the back of Jommy's head, a senseless roar from loud-speaker after loudspeaker, a monotony of noise. But he stayed on, waiting for some additional information, eager with the burning eagerness of fifteen long years of wanting to know about other slans.
   Only slowly did the flame of his excitement die. Nothing new was reported, and at last he climbed aboard a bus and headed for home. Darkness was settling over the hot spring day, A tower clock showed seventeen minutes past seven.
   He approached the little junk-laden yard with his usual caution. His mind reached inside the deceptive, tumbledown-looking cottage, and touched Granny's mind. He sighed. Still drunk! How the devil did that wrecked caricature of a body stand it? So much liquor should have dehydrated her system before this. He pushed open the door, entered and shut it behind him – and then stopped short!
   His mind, still in casual contact with Granny's mind, was receiving a thought. The old woman had heard the door open and shut, and the sound had jogged her mind briefly.
   "Mustn't let him know I phoned the police. Keep it out of my mind... can't have a slan around... dangerous to have a slan... police'll have the streets barred..."

Chapter Eight

   As seventeen-year-old Davy Dinsmore approached her, Kathleen Layton caught the thought that was in his mind. Instantly, she realized how great a decision it was that she would have to make. Somberly, she watched him come toward the marble parapet where she stood staring out at the city, which was wrapped in the soft mists of the humid, hot, spring afternoon.
   The mists shifted in ever-changing design. They became like fleecy clouds that half hid buildings, then smeared into a haze that held locked within its flimsy texture the faintest tinge of sky-blue.
   Queerly, the looking hurt her eyes without actually being unpleasant. The coolness of the palace breathed out at her from all the open doors, and beat back the heat of the sun. The glare remained, however.
   She turned to face Davy as he came up. His bright eyes searched her face eagerly. "Have you read my mind?" he asked.
   That was something he had long since insisted that she always do. "It's good for me," he had said years ago. "I really believe it keeps me honest, which is pretty hard to be around this place."
   She had known only too well what he meant then. And the reality of it was there now, also. She felt surprised that he was not embarrassed by his purpose. But it also pleased her, for it was a credit to her training of him. She nodded her head in answer to his question, and said, "Yes, I caught the thought."
   He smiled shyly, then braced himself, and said, "I can't hide from you that you're the only girl I would want And I can't even say that I think my father is wrong."
   Kathleen made no immediate answer to that. William Dinsmore was one of the great career administrators of the government. Although not a politician, he was a man of iron will, and he had his own ideas of how older boys should be brought up. He had now decided it was time Davy had a mistress.
   Davy wanted her. And that was too bad. The truth was that, although she looked to be no more than a girl, slim and lissome, she was mentally as intelligent and understanding as an unaberrated human woman of thirty. With the passing years, she had been compelled to make one adjustment after another to Davy. He grew into an above average human youth, but still a youth, while she bounded to intellectual maturity, by human standards.
   In the early years, she was his friend. Then she took to guiding him subtly away from false values and evaluations. And then she became in her own mind a teacher-parent to him. For her, it was a fascinating opportunity to realize to what degree a slan could educate a human being. But for long now she had pretended to be a girl of his own age, when in fact they were a world apart. In the light of that reality, his dream of having her as his sweetheart was an unfortunate fantasy.
   She decided against rejecting him instantly. She said, instead, "So your father wants to make a man of you?"
   Davy said, "He wanted it to be an older woman, but I said I couldn't imagine it being anyone else but you. And he finally stopped arguing with me."
   She guessed the fight he had put up, and respected him for it. Because it was, on his part, an expression of true emotion.
   She also understood the older man's philosophy. Ever since recorded history began, youths of rank had been precipitated into the emotional turmoil of early love affairs. The purpose was to give them control of women in a world where – allowed an equal start – the majority of women could gain ascendancy over their men by the power of their relentless emotion. In due course, Davy's father would withdraw him forcibly from the first woman, and select another woman for him. And this procedure would be continued until, like some fine metal, he was tempered to a hardness that might bend but never break.
   Actually, it was a wholly unwise thought on his part. And for her it would be like a grown woman copulating with a child. There were neurotic human females who could have a teen-ager for a lover. But for a slan it was impossible. Nevertheless, all she said was, "I'll talk to Mr. Gray about it."
   She was watching him closely as she spoke those chilling words. A momentary flash of fear brought a tremor to his thinking, and some of the color drained from his face. The anxiety passed, and he shook his head. Then he laughed, and he said, "I'm against you doing that. But if he wants to talk to me, I'll confront him, shaking knees and all."
   Kathleen echoed his laughter. She was pleased with his courage, although still a little astonished at his lack of good sense. But, then, he would not be the first human male to have lost his head over a woman. She felt suddenly very affectionate toward him, and there was also sadness at the realization that she would very likely now lose him as a friend. Impulsively, she stepped forward and started to kiss him lightly on the cheek. He grabbed at her, and boldly placed a kiss on her mouth.
   She tried to draw back. But it was a half-hearted pulling away, reflecting as it did her desire not to hurt him. And so, the thought that suddenly impinged on her mind brought a confused awareness that an onlooker might consider that she was being embraced against her will. The next second a man's sharp, commanding voice rapped out in surprise and rage from behind her: "What's the meaning of this?"
   It was to Davy's credit, then, that he held her a few moments longer before he stepped away. His calmness shattered a little the next instant, and his eyes widened. Kathleen turned and met the furious gaze of the man who stood there.
   Beside her, Davy said: "Meaning? I don't understand, Mr. Lorry." But his voice was not normal, and he was clearly not at ease in the presence of the most powerful councilor in the cabinet of Kier Gray.
   Kathleen caught just enough of the thought on the surface of the man's mind to realize that he was nonplussed by Davy's lack of guilty reaction. Jem Lorry hesitated, and then he said as if undecided, "You're the son of William Dinsmore?"
   "Yes, sir."
   Pause. Lorry visibly came to the decision not to pursue a policy of censure. "I wish to speak to Miss Layton," he said quietly. "Privately."
   "Very well, sir," said Davy. He walked off without a backward glance. But his thought came to Kathleen: "See you later, Kathleen."
   She thought not. Not really. And if they did see each other, it would always be different.
   As soon as they were alone, Jem Lorry said sarcastically, "I thought a slan girl in her teens was much too old mentally for a human of her own age."
   He was jealous. She turned her back on him, and gazed out over the great city. She had often thought of Lorry as one of the more attractive men in the government hierarchy. But his philosophy was so twisted by the intrigues of his ascent to power that every contact she had with him was offensive in some way. Ignoring his comment, she said now, "I sense you're still planning to rape me one of these days."
   Silence from behind her. Finally: "Yes," he said quietly.
   "I don't understand it," said Kathleen looking at him. "You are probably, next to Mr. Gray, the most honest and decent man in the cabinet, yet you can have a plan like that."
   "The words, honesty, and decency," said Jem Lorry, "are meaningless words. I'm surprised that you use them. There is no significance to the universe. Therefore, we have man's will functioning in an environment where the only danger is the superstition and emotional reaction of less aware human beings. My will, my desire, is that you become my mistress. As soon as I can figure out how to overcome certain superstitions people might have about that, then – your situation and mine being what it is – I shall possess you." His fingers grabbed at her shoulder, pressed tightly. "Do you deny the truth of what I have said? Do you maintain that there is significance?"
   Kathleen said, "Remember what Newton said about the law of gravitation?"
   Jem Lorry let go of her shoulder. "Newton is dead," he said good-naturedly.
   "He said," Kathleen went on, "and I quote: 'I have not been able,' he said, 'to discover those properties of gravitation from phaenomena, and (therefore) I frame no hypothesis.' Paraphrasing, Mr. Lorry, I have not been able to discover the properties of life from phenomena, and I frame no hypothesis. But I do observe that people act as if life is significant. Even you, as you talk no significance act significance."
   "You can quote Newton?" asked Jem Lorry. He sounded troubled.
   "Word for word, page for page, book for book."
   "And you understand it?"
   "Better than he ever could."
   Behind her, Jem Lorry drew a deep breath. "You can see why a woman who can do such things, and who is besides showing all the signs of becoming a great beauty, is desirable."
   "I can't see that," said Kathleen. "After all, I have no physical attraction other than what human women have. You could only achieve the same kind of intercourse with me as you already have with three women who are as beautiful as I ever will be. And they love you."
   "They do?" He seemed surprised. "All of them?"
   She had to smile at that. "If you mean, why are they giving you such a hard time, if they love you, the answer is, each knows about the others, and that puts them in grief and jealousy. But each keeps hoping that you will make her your exclusive sweetheart."
   "Women don't understand a man like me," said Jem Lorry. "I have a strong desire to make love to all the beautiful and desirable women in the world before I die. I can only guess that that is one of the properties of life in the human male, and I don't have to have an hypothesis about it either. For me, what could be more desirable than a slan girl who is already possessed of a mind superior to that of any human being."
   For just a moment, then, his guard was down. She caught a kaleidoscope of pictures from his mind. For that moment the barriers were down, and she saw... a little boy unloved, insatiable for an unobtainable parental love... Parents absorbed in their own intense feelings. Too late they tried to win the child. He had turned. He no longer wanted anything from them. But presently in his teens, the inverted desire inverted again, and found its love satisfaction from sex victories with one girl, then woman, after another. Indiscriminate at first, it became more selective. Soon, he made love only to women who could help his rise to power, and in a way that was still the situation. One of his mistresses was the wife of the general commanding the armed forces of the planet. Another was the wife of one of the other cabinet ministers. He used both of these women as spies on their husbands. The third woman was a young widow, and he was trying to persuade her to marry an important government figure, but she was reluctant, indeed downright rebellious, because she wanted to marry him.
   She had been so intent on reading his mind, that she turned to face him. She said now, earnestly, "I don't see what happiness you could expect from having a cold, antagonistic woman."
   Jem Lorry smiled, and it made his face light up, in a way that was extremely attractive. He said, "Kathleen, you astonish me. I can't imagine a man having a greater sense of triumph in a conquest of a woman than possession of a slan woman. It's like a beggar having a queen."
   Kathleen said, "I thought human beings hate slans."
   'The rabble," he said contemptuously. "They don't dare not to; we see to that. But you're missing the point of this slan-human conflict. If slans were allowed freedom, human beings would become nothing. It's a no-solution situation, so we keep killing them off because – " he, shrugged – "there's nothing else to do."
   It was time to end this futile conversation. Kathleen said firmly, 'The one thing any woman, slan or human, has to have is choice as to who makes love to her. Since I am the one woman to whom you do not intend to allow choice, you become a man who is totally barred from any consideration by me in terms of an intimate relationship. Meanwhile, Kier Gray is my protector. Even you don't dare go against him."
   Jem Lorry pondered that. Finally: "Your protector, yes. But he has no morals in the matter of a woman's virtue. I don't think he'll object if you become my mistress, but he will insist on my finding a propaganda-proof reason. He's become quite antislan these last few years. I used to think he was proslan. But now he's almost fanatic on the subject of having nothing to do with them. He and John Petty are closer on the subject now than they ever were. Funny!"
   He mused on that for a moment; then: "But don't worry, I'll find a formula. I – "
   A roar from a radio loud-speaker cut off Lorry's voice: "General warning! An unidentified aircraft was seen a few minutes ago, crossing the Rocky Mountains, headed eastward. Pursuing machines were rapidly outdistanced, and the ship seems to be taking a straight-line course toward Centropolis. People are ordered to go home immediately, as the ship – believed now to be of slan origin – will be here in one hour, according to present indications. The streets are needed for military purposes. Go home!"
   The speaker clicked off; and Jem Lorry turned to Kathleen, a smile on his handsome face. "Don't let that arouse any hopes of rescue. One ship cannot carry important armaments, unless it has a mass of factories behind it. The old-style atomic bomb, for instance, could not possibly be manufactured in a cave, and besides, to be quite frank, the slans did not use it in the slan-human war. The disasters of that century, and earlier, were caused by slans, but not in that way."
   He was silent for a minute, then: "Everybody thought those first bombs had solved the secret of atomic energy – " He stopped. Then: "It looks to me as if this trip was designed to give the more simple-minded human beings a scare, preliminary to an attempt to open negotiations."
   An hour later, Kathleen stood beside Jem Lorry as the silver ship slanted toward the palace. Closer it came, traveling at enormous speed. Her mind reached out toward it, striving to contact the slans who must be inside.
   The ship zoomed lower, nearer, but still there was no answering thought from the occupants. Suddenly a metallic capsule dropped from it. The capsule struck the garden path half a mile distant, and lay glinting like a jewel in the afternoon sun.
   She looked up, and the ship was gone. No, there it was. Briefly she saw a silvery brilliance in the remote heights almost straight above the palace. It twinkled for a moment like a star. And was gone. Her straining eyes retreated from their violent effort; her mind came back from the sky; and she grew aware of Jem Lorry again. He exulted:
   "Whatever else this means, it's what I've been waiting for – an opportunity to present an argument that will enable me to take you to my apartment this very night. There'll be a council meeting immediately, I imagine."
   Kathleen drew a deep breath. She could see just how he might manage it, and the time had, therefore, come to fight with every weapon at her command. She spoke with dignity, her head flung back, her eyes flashing:
   "I shall ask to be present at the council meeting on the grounds that I was in mental communication with the captain of the slans aboard the ship." She finished the lie calmly: "I can clarify certain things in the message that will be found in the capsule."
   She thought desperately. Somehow she'd read in their minds what the message was, and from that she could build up a semi-reasonable story of what the slan leader had told her. If she was caught in the lie, there might be some dangerous reactions from these slan haters. But she had to prevent them from consenting to give her to Jem Lorry.
   As she entered the council room, a conviction of defeat came to Kathleen. There were only seven men present, including Kier Gray. She stared at them one by one, reading as much of their minds as she could, and there was no help for her.
   The four younger men were personal friends of Jem Lorry. The sixth man, John Petty, gave her one brief glance of icy hostility, then turned away indifferently.
   Her gaze fastened finally on Kier Gray. A little anxious tremor of surprise whipped along her nerves, as she saw that he was staring at her with a laconic lifting of his eyebrows, and the faintest sneer on his lips. He caught her gaze and broke the silence.
   "So you were in mental communication with the slan leader, were you?" He laughed harshly. "We'll let that pass for the moment"
   There was so much incredulity in his voice and expression, so much hostility in his very attitude, that Kathleen was relieved when his cold eyes flicked away from her. He went on addressing the others:
   "It's unfortunate that five councilors should be in the far corners of the world. I do not personally believe in roaming too far from headquarters; let subordinates do the traveling. However, we cannot delay discussion on a problem as urgent as this one. If the seven of us agree on a solution, we won't need their assistance. If we're deadlocked, we shall have to do a considerable amount of radio telephoning.
   "Here is the gist of the contents of the metal capsule dropped by the slan ship. They claim that there are a million slans organized throughout the world – "
   Jem Lorry interrupted sardonically, "Seems to me that our chief of secret police has been falling down on the job, despite his much-vaunted hatred of the slans."
   Petty sat up and flashed him a cold glance. He snapped, "Perhaps you would exchange jobs with me for a year, and see what you can do. I wouldn't mind having the soft job of minister of state for a change."
   Kier Gray's voice cut across the silence that followed Petty's freezing words. "Let me finish. They go on to say that not only does this organized million exist but there is, in addition, a vast total of unorganized men and women slans, estimated at ten millions more. What about that, Petty?"
   "Undoubtedly there are some unorganized slans," the secret-police chief admitted cautiously. "We catch about a hundred a month all over the world, who have apparently never been part of any organization. In vast areas of the more primitive parts of the Earth, the people cannot be roused to antipathy to slans; in fact, they accept them as human beings. And there are no doubt large colonies in some of these remote places, particularly in Asia, Africa, South America and Australia. It is years now since such colonies have actually been found, but we assume that some still exist, and that over the years they have developed self-protection to a high degree. I am prepared, however, to discount any activity from these remote sources. Civilization and science are built-up organisms, broadly based on the achievements, physical and mental, of hundreds of millions of beings. The moment these slans retreat to outlying sections of the Earth they defeat themselves, for they are cut off from books, and from that contact with civilized minds which is the only possible basis for a greater development.
   "The danger is not, and never has been, from these remote slans but from those living in the big cities, where they are enabled to contact the greatest human minds and have, in spite of our precautions, some access to books. Obviously, this airship we saw today was built by slans who are living dangerously in the civilized centers."
   Kier Gray nodded. "Much of what you surmise is probably true. But to get back to the letter, it goes on to say that these several million slans are only too anxious to end the period of strain which has existed between them and the human race. They denounce the ambition for world rule which actuated the first slans, explaining that ambition as due to a false conception of superiority, unleavened by the later experience that convinced them that they are not superior but merely different. They also accuse Samuel Lann, the human being and biological scientist who first created slans, and after whom slans are named – Samuel Lann: S. Lann: Slan – of fostering in his children the belief that they must rule the world. And that this belief, not any innate desire for domination, was the root of the disastrous ambitions of the early slans.
   "Developing this idea, they go on to point out that the early inventions of the slans were simply minor improvements of already existing ideas. There has been, they claim, no really creative work done by the slans in physical science. They also state that their philosophers have come to the conclusion that the slans are not scientifically minded in any true sense of the word, differing from present-day human beings in that respect as widely as the ancient Greeks and Romans, who never developed science, as we know it, at all."
   His words went on, but for a moment Kathleen heard with only half her mind. Could that be true? Slans not scientifically minded? Impossible. Science was simply an accumulation of facts, and the deduction of conclusions from those facts. And who better could bring divine order from intricate reality than the mighty-brained, full-grown, mature slan? She saw that Kier Gray was picking up a sheet of gray paper from his desk, and she brought her mind back to what he was saying.
   "I'm going to read you the last page," he said in a colorless voice. " 'We cannot emphasize too strongly the importance of this. It means that slans can never seriously challenge the military might of human beings. Whatever improvements we may make on existing machinery and weapons will not decisively affect the outcome of a war, should such a disaster ever take place again.
   " 'To our minds, there is nothing more futile than the present stalemate which, solving nothing, succeeds only in keeping the world in an unsettled condition and is gradually creating economic havoc from which human beings suffer to an ever-increasing degree.
   " 'We offer peace with honor, the only basis of negotiation to be that slans must hereafter have the legal right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.' "
   Kier Gray laid the paper back on his desk, coldly flicked his gaze from face to face, and said in a flat, harsh voice:
   "I'm absolutely against any compromise whatever. I used to think that something could be done, but no longer! Every slan out there" – he waved his hand significantly to cover half the globe – "must be exterminated."
   The room, with its subdued lights and paneled walls, seemed dimmer to Kathleen, as if a shadow had fallen across her vision. In the silence even the pulsation of thoughts from the men was a quiet vibration in her brain, like the beat of waves on a remote, primeval shore. A whole world of shock separated her mind from the sense made by those thoughts – shock at the realization of the change that had taken place in Kier Gray. Or was it change? Was it not possible that this man was as remorseless in his outlook as John Petty? His reason for keeping her alive must be exactly as he had said, for study purposes. And, of course, there was the time when he had believed, rightly or wrongly, that his political future was bound up in her continued existence. But nothing else. No feeling of compassion or pity, no interest in a helpless young creature for the sake of that creature. Nothing but the most materialistic outlook on life. This was the ruler of men whom she had admired, almost worshiped, for years. This was her protector!
   It was true, of course, that the slans were lying. But what else could they do in dealing with people who knew only hate and lies? At least it was peace they offered, not war; and here was this man rejecting, without any consideration, an offer that would end four hundred or more years of criminal persecution of her race.
   With a start, she grew aware that Kier Gray's eyes were fixed on her. His lips curled in sarcastic mirth as he said, "And now, let us hear the so-called message you received in your... er... mental communication with the slan commander."
   Kathleen looked at him desperately. He didn't believe a word of her claim, and in the face of his scathing skepticism she knew better than to offer anything but the most carefully thought out statement to the mercilessly logical brain of this man. She needed time.
   "I – " she began. "It was – "
   She suddenly realized that Jem Lorry was on his feet. He was frowning. "Kier," he said, "that was pretty sharp tactics, offering your unqualified opposition to a matter as important as this, without giving the council a chance to discuss it. In view of your action, I am left no alternative but to state – with qualifications, however – that I am in favor of accepting this offer. My main qualification is this: the slans must agree to be assimilated into the human race. To that end, slans cannot marry each other, but must always many human beings."
   Kier Gray stared at him without hostility. "What makes you think there can be issue from a slan-human mating?"
   "That's something I am going to find out," said Jem Lorry in a voice so casual that only Kathleen caught the intensity in it. She leaned forward, holding her breath. "I've decided to take Kathleen here as my mistress, and we shall see what we shall see. Nobody objects, I hope."
   The younger men shrugged. Kathleen didn't need to read their minds to see that they hadn't the slightest objection. She noticed that John Petty was paying no attention to the conversation at all, and Kier Gray seemed lost in thought, as if he hadn't heard either.
   With a gasp, she parted her lips to speak. Then shut them. A thought was suddenly in her brain. Suppose that intermarriage was the only solution to the slan problem. Suppose the council accepted Jem Lorry's solution! Even though she knew it to be based entirely on his passion for her, could she dare defend herself from him if there was the slightest possibility of those other slans out there agreeing to the plan, and thus ending hundreds of years of misery and murder?
   She sank back in her chair, vaguely conscious of the irony of her position. She had come to the council chamber to fight for herself, and now she didn't dare utter a word. Kier Gray was speaking again:
   "There is nothing new in this solution offered by Jem. Samuel Lann himself was intrigued by the possible result of such a mating and persuaded one of his granddaughters to marry a human being. No children were born of the union.
   "I've got to prove that for myself!" said Jem Lorry doggedly. "This thing is too big to depend on one mating."
   "There was more than one," Kier Gray said mildly.
   Another man cut in impatiently: "The important thing is that assimilation does offer a solution, and there is no doubt that the human race will dominate the result. We're more than three and a half billion to, say five million, which is probably a closer estimate than theirs. And even if no children can result, our ends are served in that, within two hundred years – figuring their normal life span at a hundred and fifty – there would be no slans alive."
   It struck Kathleen with a shock that Jem Lorry had won his point. She saw in the vague, surface part of his mind that he had no intention of bringing the matter up again. Tonight he would send soldiers for her; and no one could say afterward that there had been any disagreement in the council. Their silence was consent.
   For several minutes she was conscious only of a blur of voices, and of even more blurred thought. Finally, a phrase caught her mind. With an effort she turned her attention back to the men. The phrase "could exterminate them that way!" brought an electrifying awareness of how far they had gone from the original plan during those few minutes.
   "Let us clarify this situation," said Kier Gray briskly. "The introduction of the idea of using some apparent agreement with the slans for exterminating them seems to have struck a responsive chord which – again – apparently seems to have eliminated from our various minds all thought of a true and honest agreement based on, for instance, the idea of assimilation.
   "The schemes are, briefly, as follows. Number one: To allow them to intermingle with human beings until everyone has been thoroughly identified, then clamp down, catch most of them by surprise and track the others down within a short time.
   "Plan number two: Force all slans to settle on an island, say Hawaii, and once we've got them there surround the place with battleships and planes and annihilate them.
   "Plan number three: Treat them harshly from the beginning; insist on fingerprinting and photographing them, and on a plan for reporting to police at intervals, which will have both an element of strictness and fairness in it This third idea may appeal to the slans because, if carried out over a period of time, it will seem to safeguard all except a small percentage which will be calling at police headquarters on any particular day. Its strictness will have the further psychological value of making them feel that we're being hard and careful, and will therefore, paradoxically, gradually ease their minds."
   The cold voice went on, but somehow the whole scene lacked reality. They couldn't be sitting there discussing betrayal and murder on such a vast scale – seven men deciding for all the human race on a matter of more than life and death.
   "What fools you are," Kathleen said bitingly. "Do you imagine for one minute that slans would be taken in by your silly schemes? Slans can read minds, and besides the whole thing is so transparent and ridiculous, every one of the schemes so open and barefaced, that I wonder how I could ever have thought any of you intelligent and clever."
   They turned to stare at her silently, coldly. A faint, amused smile crinkled the lips of Kier Gray.
   "I'm afraid you are at fault, not we. We assume that they are intelligent and suspicious, and therefore we do not offer any complicated idea; and that, of course, is the first element of successful propaganda. As for the reading of minds, we here shall never meet the slan leaders. We shall transmit our majority opinion to the other five councilors, who will conduct negotiations under the firm conviction that we mean fair play. No subordinate will have any instructions except that the matter is to be fairly conducted. So you see – "
   "Just a minute," said John Petty, and there was so much satisfaction in his voice, such an exultant ring, that Kathleen turned toward him with a start "Our main danger is not from ourselves but from the fact that this slan girl has overheard our plans. She has said that she was in mental communication with the commander of the slans on board the ship which approached the palace. In other words, they now know she is here. Suppose another ship comes near; she would then be in a position to inform our enemies of our plans. Naturally, she must be killed at once."
   A mind– shattering dismay burned through Kathleen. The logic of the argument could not be gainsaid. She saw the gathering realization of it in the minds of the men. By trying so desperately to escape the attentions of Jem Lorry, she had walked into a trap that could end only in death.
   Kathleen's gaze continued in fascination upon John Petty's face. The man was aglow with a deep-rooted pleasure that he could not hide. There was no doubt that he had not expected such a victory. Surprise made the thrill all the greater.
   It was with reluctance that she turned from him and concentrated on the other men. The vague thoughts that had already come from them came now in a more concentrated form from each in turn. And there was no doubt about what they thought. Their decision gave no particular pleasure to the younger men who, unlike Jem Lorry, had no personal interest in her. But their conviction was an unalterable thing. Death.
   It seemed to Kathleen that the finality of the verdict was written in the face of Jem Lorry. The man's manner, as he turned on her, showed his dismay.
   "You damned little fool!" he said.
   With that he started to chew viciously on his lower lip, and sank back in his chair, staring moodily at the floor.
   She was dazed now. She stared for a long moment at Kier Gray before she even saw him. With horror she watched the startled frown that creased his forehead, the unconcealed, thunderstruck expression in his eyes. That gave her an instant of courage. He didn't want her dead, or he wouldn't be so alarmed.
   The courage, and the hope that came with it' vanished like a star behind a black cloud. His very dismay showed that he had no solution to the problem that had dropped into the room like a bombshell. Slowly, his expression changed to impassivity, but she felt no hope until he said:
   "Death would perhaps be the necessary solution if it were true that she was in communication with a slan aboard that ship. Fortunately for her, she was telling a lie. There were no slans on the plane. The ship was robot-propelled."
   A man said, "I thought robot-propelled ships could be captured by radio interference with then– mechanism."
   "So they can," said Kier Gray. "You may remember how the slan ship darted straight upward when it disappeared. The slan controllers shot it off like that when they suddenly realized we were tampering successfully with their ship."
   The leader smiled grimly. "We fought the ship down into the swampland a hundred miles south of here. It was pretty badly wrecked, from all reports, and they haven't got it out yet; but it will be taken in due course to the great Cugden machine works, where, no doubt, its mechanism will be analyzed." He added, "The reason it took so long was that the robot mechanism was on a slightly different principle, requiring a new combination of radio waves to dominate it."
   "All that is unimportant;" John Petty said impatiently. "What counts is that this slan has been here in the room, has heard our plans to annihilate her people, and may therefore be dangerous to us in that she will do her best to inform other slans of what we contemplate. She must be killed."
   Kier Gray stood up slowly, and the face he turned to John Petty was grim. His voice, when he spoke, held a metallic note. "I have told you, sir, that I am making a sociological study of this slan, and I will thank you to refrain from further attempts to execute her. You have said some hundred slans are caught and executed every month, and the slans claim that some eleven million others still exist I hope" – and his voice was edged with sarcasm – "I hope I shall be permitted the privilege of keeping alive one slan for scientific purposes, one slan whom, apparently, you hate more than all the others put together – "
   John Petty cut in sharply, "That's all very well, Kier. What I'd like to know is, why did Kathleen Layton lie about being in communication with the slans?"
   Kathleen drew a deep breath. The chill of those few minutes of deadly danger was oozing out of her, but there was still a choked-up sensation of emotion. She said shakily, "Because I knew Jem Lorry was going to try to make me his mistress, and I wanted you to know that I objected."
   She felt the tremor of thoughts that swept out from the men, and saw their facial expressions: understanding, then impatience.
   "For heaven's sake, Jem," one exclaimed, "can't you keep your love affairs out of our council meetings?"
   Another said, "With all due respect to Kier Gray, there is something intolerable about a slan objecting to anything that a human being with authority may plan for her. I am curious to see what the issue would be from such a mating. Your objections are overruled; and now, Jem, have your guard take her up to your apartment. And I hope that ends this discussion!"
   For the first time in her seventeen years, it struck Kathleen that there was a limit to the nervous tension that a slan could endure. There was a tautness inside her, as if somewhere something vital was at the breaking point. She was conscious of no thought of her own. She just sat there, painfully gripping the plastic smoothness of the arms of her chair. Abruptly, she grew aware of a thought inside her brain, a sharp, lashing thought from Kier Gray.
   "You little fool! How did you get yourself into this mess?"
   She looked at him then, miserably, seeing for the first time that he was leaning back in his chair, eyes half closed, lips drawn tight. He said finally:
   "All this would be very well if such matings needed testing. They don't. Case histories of more than a hundred slan-human attempts to reproduce children are available in the file library under the heading 'Abnormal Marriages.'
   'The reasons for the sterility are difficult to define because men and slans do not appear to differ from each other to any marked degree. The amazingly tough musculature of the slan is due, not to a new type of muscle, but to a speeding up of the electro-explosions that actuate the muscles. There is also an increase in the number of nerves to every part of the body, making it tremendously more sensitive.
   "The two hearts are not really two hearts, but a combination, each section of which can operate independent of the other. Nor are the two together very much larger than the one original. They're simply finer pumps.
   "Again, the tendrils that send and receive thoughts are growths from formerly little-known formations at the top of the brain, which, obviously, must have been the source of all the vague mental telepathy known to earlier human beings and still practiced by people everywhere.
   "So you see that what Samuel Lann did with his mutation machine to his wife, who bore him the first three slan babies – one boy and two girls – over six hundred years ago, has not added anything new to the human body, but changed or mutated what already existed."
   It seemed to Kathleen that he was talking to gain time. In that one brief mental flash from him, there had been overtones of a complete understanding of the situation. He must know that no amount of reasonable argument could dissuade the passions of a man like Jem Lorry. She heard his voice go on.
   "I am giving you this information because apparently none of you has ever bothered to investigate the true situation as compared to popular beliefs. Take, for instance, the so-called superior intelligence of the slan, referred to in the letter received from them today. There is an old illustration on that point which has been buried by the years; an experiment in which Samuel Lann, that extraordinary man, brought up a monkey baby, a human baby and a slan baby under rigidly scientific conditions. The monkey was the most precocious, learning within a few months what the slan and the human baby required considerably longer to assimilate. Then the human and slan learned to talk, and the monkey was hopelessly outdistanced. The slan and the human continued at a fairly even pace until, at the age of four, the slan's powers of mental telepathy began painfully to operate. At this point, the slan baby forged into the lead.
   "However, Dr. Lann later discovered that by intensification of the human baby's education, it was possible for the latter to catch up to, and remain reasonably level with, the slan, particularly in quickness of mind. The slan's great advantage was the ability to read minds, which gave him an unsurpassable insight into psychology and readier access to the education which the human child could grasp only through the medium of ears and eyes – "
   John Petty interrupted in a voice that was thick and harsh: "What you're saying is only what I've known all along, and is the main reason why we can't begin to consider peace negotiations with these... these damned artificial beings. In order for a human being to equal a slan, he must strain for years to acquire what comes with the greatest of ease to the slan. In other words, all except the minutest fraction of humanity is incapable of ever being more than a slave in comparison to a slan. Gentlemen, there can be no peace, but rather an intensification of extermination methods. We can't risk one of the Machiavellian plans already discussed, because the danger of something going wrong is too great."
   A councilor said, "He's right!" Several voices echoed the conviction; and there was suddenly no doubt which way the verdict would go. Kathleen saw Kier Gray glance keenly from face to face. He said:
   "If that is to be our decision, then I should consider it a grave mistake for any one of us at the present time to take this slan as mistress. It might give a wrong impression."
   The silence that followed was the silence of agreement, and Kathleen's gaze leaped to Jem Lorry's face. He met her eyes coolly, rose languidly to his feet, walked over and bent toward her. "I'm remembering what you said about choice." He spoke in a low tone. "If I were to pursue my suit more humbly, would you consider me?"
   Kathleen said, "You're not a humble man, Mr. Lorry."
   "You don't want a weakling, surely?"
   "There's a difference between strength and hardness."
   He said earnestly. "In comparison with human beings, you're already a woman. Do you plan to spend a loveless life here in the palace?"
   "Are you offering me love?" she asked simply.
   He hesitated, and there were suddenly overtones in his mind that indicated emotional disturbance. He said at last, reluctantly, "I suppose you'd require me to give up the others."
   The conversation was threatening to undo the result of the dangerous and deadly fight she had put up this past hour to escape him. She said, "Isn't this talk impractical? What I would, or would not require scarcely matters. You cannot afford to be associated with a slan. Isn't that the important fact."
   Except for Kier Gray, the other ministers had departed. The dictator glanced at them, and then walked off to a window out of ear shot. Jem Lorry seemed almost unaware of his surroundings. He had straightened, and he stared over her head. Finally, he said in a husky voice, "I had just a glimpse there of what it might be like to have a slan woman in love with me. The impulse came to take every risk, gamble my position and my life. But that would be madness, wouldn't it?" He brought his gaze down to her face. His eyes searched hers hungrily. When she did not reply, he shook himself, as if he had exposed himself to an icy wind. It seemed to sober him. Abruptly, the mocking manner came back. He said, "I see that I must return to my earlier philosophy. I shall never possess the spirit but perhaps I can still obtain the body. So don't build up any false hopes." He smiled confidently, and went out.
   Kathleen went over to Kier Gray, and told him of William Dinsmore's plan for his son, and of her objection to being a part of it. "But I don't want to hurt Davy," she finished, "so the refusal should not come from me."
   The dictator did not make a direct reply. He walked over to a desk intercom, activated it, and said, "Connect me with William Dinsmore." Kathleen started for the door. As she opened it, Kier Gray was saying, "... Very unwise... your son's future compromised..." Softly, she closed the door.
   It was over. The danger was over... for one more day.

Chapter Nine

   Jommy Cross stared urgently yet thoughtfully down at the human wreck that was Granny. There was no rage in him at her betrayal of him. The result was disaster, his future abruptly blank, unplanned, homeless.
   His first problem was what to do with the old woman.
   She sat blithely in a chair, an extravagantly rich and colorful dressing gown swaddled jauntily around her ungainly form. She giggled up at him. "Granny knows something, yes, Granny knows – " Her words trailed into nonsense, then, "Money, oh, good Lord, yes. Granny's got plenty of money for her old age. See!"
   With the trusting innocence of a drink-sodden old soak, she slid a bulging black bag from inside her dressing gown, then with ostrich-like common sense jerked it back into hiding.
   Jommy Cross was conscious of shock. It was the first time he had actually seen her money, although he had always known her various hiding places. But to have the stuff out here now, with a raid actually in progress – such stupidity deserved the furthest limits of punishment.
   But still he stood undecided, becoming tenser as the first faint pressure of men's thoughts from outside the shack made an almost impalpable weight against his brain. Dozens of men, edging closer, the snub noses of their submachine guns protruding ahead of them. He frowned blackly. By all rights, he should leave the betrayer to face the rage of the baffled hunters, to face the law which said that every human being, without exception, who was convicted of harboring a slan must be hanged by the neck until dead.
   Through his mind ran the nightmare picture of Granny on the way to the gallows, Granny shrieking for mercy, Granny fighting to prevent the rope from being placed around her neck, kicking, scratching, slobbering at her captors.
   He reached down and grabbed her naked shoulders where the dressing gown was loosely drawn. He shook her with a cold, deadly violence until her teeth rattled, until, she sobbed with a dry, horrible pain, and a modicum of sanity came into her eyes. He said harshly:
   "It's death for you if you stay here. Don't you know the law?"
   "Huh!" She sat up, briefly startled, then abruptly slipped off again into the cesspool of her mind.
   Hurry, hurry, he thought, and forced his brain into that squalor of thought to see if his words had brought any basic balance. Just as he was about to give up he found a startled, dismayed, alert little section of sanity almost buried in the dissolving, incoherent mass that was her thoughts.
   " 'S all right," she mumbled. "Granny's got plenty of money. Rich people don't get hung. Stands to reason."
   Jommy stepped back from her, indecisive. The weight of the men's minds was a heavy, dragging thing on his brain. They were drawing ever nearer, drawing an ever-tighter circle. Their number appalled him. Even the great weapon in his pocket might be useless if a hail of bullets swept the flimsy walls of the shack. And only one bullet was needed to destroy all his father's dreams.
   "By God," he said aloud. "I'm a fool! What will I do with you even if I get you out? All highways out of the city will be blocked. There's only one real hope, and that will be almost hopelessly difficult even without a drunken old woman to hinder me. I don't fancy climbing a thirty-story building with you on my back."
   Logic said he should abandon her. He half turned away; and then, once more, the thought of Granny being hanged came in all its horror. Whatever her faults, her very existence had made it possible for him to remain alive. That was a debt which must be paid. With a single snatching movement he tore the black bag from its hiding place under Granny's dressing gown. She grunted drunkenly, and then awareness seeped into her as he held the bag tantalizingly before her eyes.
   "Look," he taunted, "all your money, your whole future. You'll starve. They'll have you scrubbing floors in the poorhouse. They'll whip you."
   In fifteen seconds she was sober, a hot, burning soberness that grasped essentials with all the clarity of the hardened criminal.
   "Granny'll hang!" she gasped.
   "Now we're getting somewhere," Jommy Cross said. "Here, take your money." He smiled grimly as she grabbed it from him. "We've got a tunnel to go through. It leads from my bedroom to a private garage at the corner of 470th street. I've got a key to the car. We'll drive down near the Air Center and steal one of – "
   He stopped, conscious of the flimsiness of that final part of his plan. It seemed incredible that the tendrilless slans would be so poorly organized that he would actually be able to get one of those marvelous spaceships which they launched nightly into the sky. True, he had escaped from them once with absurd ease, but...
   With a gasp, Jommy set the old woman down on the flat roof of the spaceship building. He collapsed, beside her heavily and lay there panting. For the first time in his life he was conscious of muscular weariness contracted from exertion at the full of vibrant health.
   "Good heaven," he breathed, "who'd have thought an old woman would weigh so much?"
   She was snarling in retrospective terror from that frightful climb. His brain caught the first warning of the burst of vituperation that was rising to her lips. His weary muscles galvanized instantly. One swift hand clamped over her mouth.
   "Shut up," he said, "or I'll drop you over the edge like a sack of potatoes. You're the cause of this situation, and you've got to bear the consequences."
   His words acted like cold water. He had to admire the way she recuperated from the terror that had racked her. The old creature certainly had staying powers. She pulled his hand from her mouth and asked sullenly, "What now?"
   "We've got to find a way into the building in as short a time as possible and – " He glanced at his wrist watch and, dismayed, leaped to his feet. Twelve minutes of ten! Twelve minutes before the rocketship took off. Twelve minutes to take control of that ship!
   He snatched Granny up, flung her lightly over his shoulder and raced off toward the center of the roof. Not only was there no time to search for doors but such doors would obviously be wired, and there was even less time to study and nullify the alarm system. There was only one way. Somewhere there must be the runway up which the ships were projected when they were launched toward the remote regions of interplanetary space.
   He felt the difference beneath his feet, a vague rise, a gentle bulbousness. He stopped short, teetering on his toes, unbalanced by the violent ending of his racing flight. Carefully, he felt his way back to the beginning of the bulbous section. That would be the edge of the runway. Swiftly, he tore his father's atomic gun from his pocket. Its disintegrating fire flamed downward.
   He peered through the four-foot diameter hole into a tunnel that sloped to depths at an angle that must have been a tight sixty degrees. A hundred, two hundred, three hundred yards of glittering metallic wall, and then the ship gradually took on outline as Jommy's eyes grew accustomed to the dim light. He saw a torpedo-pointed nose, with forward blast tubes distorting the smooth, streamlined effect. It seemed a deadly thing, silent and motionless now, yet menacing. He had the illusion of staring down the barrel of a vast gun, at the shell that was about to be fired. The comparison struck him so sharply that for a long moment his mind refused to hold the thought of what he must do. Doubt came. Did he dare slide down that glass-smooth slipway when any second a rocketship would come smashing up toward the sky?
   His body felt cold. With an effort, he lifted his gaze from the paralyzing depth of a tunnel and fixed his eyes, at first unseeing, then with gathering fascination, on the distant, looming splendor of the palace. His thought paused abruptly; slowly his body lost its tension. For long seconds he just stood there, drinking in the glory of the immense, exquisite jewel that was the palace by night.
   It was plainly visible from this height between and beyond two great skyscrapers; and it glowed brilliantly. There was no mind-staggering, eye-dazzling glare to it. It glowed with a soft, living, wonderful flame that was never the same color for more than an instant: glorious, lambent fire that flickered and flashed a thousand combinations, and each combination was subtly, sometimes startlingly, different Not once was there an exact repetition.
   On and on it sparkled, and lived! Once, for a long moment, chance turned the tower, that translucent five-hundred-foot fairy tower, a glowing turquoise blue. And for that instant the visible part of the palace below was nearly all a deeply glowing ruby red. For one moment – and then the combination shattered into a million bursting fragments of color: blue, red, green, yellow. No color, no possible shade of color, was missing from that silent, flaming explosion.
   A thousand nights he had fed his soul on its beauty, and now he felt again the wonder of it. Strength poured from it into him. His courage came back like the unbreakable, indestructible force it was. His teeth clenched, grimly he stared down into the depths so sharply angled, so smooth in the promise of madly swift passage to the distant, steel-hard bottom.
   The danger of it was like a symbol of his future. Blank future, less predictable now than it had ever been. It was only good sense to believe that the tendrilless slans were aware that he was here on this roof. There must be alarm systems – there must be.
   "What do you keep staring down that hole for?" Granny whined. "Where's the door we want? Time is – "
   "Time!" said Jommy Cross. His watch said four minutes to ten, and that seemed to shock every nerve in his body. Eight minutes actually gone, four minutes left in which to conquer a fortress. He caught Granny's thought then, her abrupt awareness of his intention. Just in time his hand slapped at her mouth, and her shriek of dismay was stifled against his palm. The next second they were falling, committed irrevocably.
   They struck the tunnel surface almost gently, as if they had suddenly entered a world of slow motion. The slipway felt, not hard, but yielding beneath his body, and there was only the vaguest sense of motion. But his eyes and mind were not fooled. The blunt nose of the spaceship plunged up at them. The illusion of the ship roaring toward them in full blast was so real that he had to fight a wild impulse to panic.
   "Quick!" he hissed at Granny. "Use the flat of your hands – slow down!"
   The old woman needed no urging. Of all the instincts in her misused body, that of survival was strongest. She couldn't have screamed now to save her soul, but her lips blubbered with fear even as she fought for life. Her beadlike eyes glistened with a moist terror – but she fought! She clung at the gleaming metal, bony hands spread out flat and hard, her legs squeezed against the metal surface; and pitiful though the result was, it helped.
   Abruptly, the nose of the ship loomed above Jommy Cross, higher than he had expected. With a desperate strength, he reached up at the first thick ring of rocket chambers. His fingers touched the corded, seared metal, skidded – and instantly lost their hold.
   He fell back, and only then did he realize that he had risen to the full stretched-out height of his body. He fell hard, almost stunningly, but instantly, with the special strength of slan muscles, he was up again. His fingers caught one of the big tubes of the second ring of fire chambers with such unbreakable hold that the uncontrollable part of the journey ended. Sick from the strain of over-effort, he let go, and it was as he half sat there shaking the dizziness out of his head that he grew aware of the patch of light farther under the immense body of the machine.
   The ship was curving so sharply now toward the tunnel floor on which it rested that he had to bend double as he made his way painfully toward it. He was thinking: An open door, here, now, a few short seconds before the great ship is due to leave. It is a door! An opening, two feet in diameter, in a foot-thick metal hull, with the hinged door leaning inward. He pushed up into the opening unhesitatingly, his terrible gun alert for the slightest movement. But there was no one.
   In that first glance he saw that this was the control room. There were some chairs, an intricate-looking instrument board, and some great, curved, glowing plates on either side of it. And there was an open door leading to the second section of the ship. It took but a moment to leap inside and pull the panicky old woman after him. And then, lightly, he jumped for the connecting door.
   At the threshold he paused cautiously and peered in. This second room was partly furnished with chairs, the same deep, comfortable chairs as were in the control room. But more than half the space was filled with chained-down packing cases. There were two doors. One led to what was obviously a third section of the long ship. It was partly open, with more packing cases visible beyond and, vaguely, a door leading into a fourth compartment. But it was the second door in the second room that made Jommy Cross freeze motionless where he was.
   It was on the side beyond the chairs and led outside. A blaze of light poured from the great room there into the ship, and there were figures of men. He opened his mind wide. Instantly a thought wash from many brains came to him, so many of them that the combined leakage from behind their defective shields brought dozens of half thoughts, menacingly alert thoughts, as if scores of tendrilless slans out there were waiting for something. He cut the thought off, whirled toward the instrument board that dominated the whole front part of the control room. The board itself was about a yard wide, two yards long, a metal-mounted bank of glowing tubes and shining mechanisms. There were more than a dozen control levers of various kinds, all within reach of the finely built chair facing them.
   On either side of the instrument board were the great, curved, glossy, semi-metallic plates he had already noticed. The concave surface of each towering section glowed with a subdued light of its own. It would be impossible to solve the alien control system in the few moments at his disposal. Tight-lipped, he sprang forward into the control chair. With swift, deliberately crude purpose, he activated every switch and lever on the panel. A door clanged metallically. There was an abrupt, wonderful sense of lightness; swift, almost body-crushing forward movement, and then a faint, throbbing bass roar. Instantly the purpose of the great curved plates became apparent. On the one to the right appeared a picture of the sky ahead. Jommy could see lights and land far below, but the ship was mounting too steeply for the Earth to be more than a distortion at the bottom of the plate.
   It was the left visiplate that showed the glory, a picture of a city of lights, so vast that it staggered the imagination, falling away behind the ship. Far to one side he caught the night splendor of the palace.
   And then the city was gone into distance behind them. Carefully, he shut off the mechanisms he had actuated, watching for the effect of each in turn. In two minutes the complicated board was solved and the simple machinery under control. The purpose of four of the switches was not clear, but that could wait.
   He leveled off, for it was no part of his intention to go out into airless space. That demanded intimate knowledge of every screw and plate in the machine, and his first purpose must be to establish a new, safe base of operations. Then, with his ship to take him where he willed to go...
   His brain soared. There was in him suddenly an extravagant sense of power. A thousand things remained to be done, but at last he was out of his cage, old enough and strong enough, mentally and physically, to live a secure, defensive existence. There were years to be passed, long years that separated him from maturity. All his father's science must be learned, and used. Above all, his first real plan for finding the true slans must be carefully thought out and the first exploratory moves made.
   The thought ended as he grew abruptly aware of Granny. The old woman's thought had been a gentle beat against his mind all these minutes. He was aware of her going into the next room, and deep in his mind was a developing picture of what she was seeing. And now – just like that – the picture went dead slow, as if she had suddenly closed her eyes.
   Jommy Cross snatched his gun and simultaneously whirled and leaped to one side. There was a flash of fire from the doorway that seared across the place where his head had been. The flame touched the instrument board, then winked out. The tall, full-grown, tendrilless slan woman standing in the doorway whipped the muzzle of her little silver gun toward him – then her whole body went rigid as she saw his weapon pointing at her. They stood tike that for a long, frozen moment. The woman's eyes became glittering pools.
   "You damned snake!"
   In spite of anger, almost because of it, her voice was golden in its vibrant beauty, and abruptly Jommy Cross felt beaten. The sight of her and the sound of her brought sudden poignant memory of his glorious mother, and he knew with a sense of helplessness that he could no more blast this marvelous creature out of existence than he could have destroyed his own mother. In spite of his mighty gun threatening her as her weapon threatened him, he was actually at her mercy. And the way she had fired at his back showed the hot determination that burned behind those gleaming gray eyes. Murder! The mad hatred of the tendrilless slan against the true slan.
   Dismayed though he was, Jommy studied her with growing fascination. Slimly, strongly, lithely built, she stood there, poised, alert, leaning forward on one foot a little breathlessly, like a runner tense for the race. Her right hand, holding the weapon, was a slender, finely shaped thing, beautifully tanned and supple-looking. Her left hand was half hidden behind her back, as if she had been walking briskly along, arms swinging freely, and then had frozen in mid-stride, one arm up and one swung back.
   Her dress was a simple tunic, drawn in snugly at her waist; and what a proudly tilted head she had, hair gleaming dark brown, bobbed and curled. Her face, below that crown of brown, was the epitome of sensitive loveliness, lips not too full, nose lean and shapely, cheeks delicately molded. Yet it was the subtle shaping of her cheeks that gave her face the power, the sheer intellectual forcefulness. Her skin looked soft and clear, the purest of unblemished complexions, and the gray of her eyes was darkly luminous.
   No, he couldn't shoot; he couldn't blast this exquisitely beautiful woman out of existence. And yet – yet he must make her think that he could. He stood there, watching the surface of her mind, the little half thoughts that flicked across it There was in her shield the same quality of incomplete coverage that he had already noticed in the tendrilless slans, due probably to their inability to read minds and therefore to realize what complete coverage actually meant.
   For the moment he could not allow himself to follow the little memory vibrations that pulsed from her. All that counted was that he was standing here facing this tremendously dangerous woman, his weapon and her weapon leveled, every nerve and muscle in their two bodies pitched to the ultimate key of alertness.
   The woman spoke first. "This is very foolish," she said. "We should sit down, put our weapons on the floor in front of us and talk this thing over. That would relieve the intolerable strain, but our positions would remain materially the same."
   Jommy Cross felt startled. The suggestion showed a weakness in the face of danger that was not indicated anywhere in that highly courageous head and face. The fact that she had made it added instantly to the psychological strength of his position, but he was conscious of suspicion, a conviction that her offer must be examined for special dangers. He said slowly, "The advantage would be yours. You're a grown-up slan, your muscles are better coordinated. You could reach your gun faster than I could reach mine."
   She nodded matter-of-factly. 'That's true. But actually you have the advantage in your ability to watch at least part of my mind."
   "On the contrary" – he spoke the lie smoothly – "when your mind shield is up the coverage is so complete that I could not possibly divine your purpose before it was too late."
   The uttering of the words brought him awareness of how incomplete her coverage really was. In spite of his having kept his mind concentrated on danger and out of the trickling stream of her thought, enough had come through to give him a brief but coherent history of the woman.
   Her name was Joanna Hillory. She was a regular pilot on the Martian Way, but this was to be her last trip for many months. The reason was that she had recently married an engineer stationed on Mars, and now she was going to have a baby – so she was being assigned to duties that put less strain on her system than the constant pressure of acceleration to which she was subjected in space travel.
   Jommy Cross began to feel easier. A newlywed expecting a child was not likely to take desperate chances. He said, "'Very well, let us put our guns down simultaneously and sit down."
   When the guns were on the floor, Jommy Cross glanced across at the slan woman, puzzled by the faintly amused smile mat twisted her lips. The smile became broader, more distinctly ironic. "And now that you have disarmed yourself," she said softly, "you will prepare to die!"
   In utter dismay, Jommy Cross stared at the tiny gun that glittered in her left hand. She must have held the toy-sized weapon concealed there all those tense moments, awaiting with a mocking certainty the opportunity of. using it Her golden-rich voice, beautiful as music, went on:
   "So you swallowed all that about my being a poor little bride, with a baby coming and an anxious husband waiting! A full-grown snake wouldn't have been so credulous. As it is, the young snake I'm looking at will die for his incredible stupidity."

Chapter Ten

   Jommy Cross stared at the little gun held so firmly, so unwaveringly by the tendrilless slan woman. Through his shock and dismay he became suddenly aware of a background to his chagrin, the smooth-flowing enormously swift movement of the ship. There was no acceleration, simply that tireless, hurtling pace, the mile on mile of headlong flight with no indication whether they were still in Earth's atmosphere or in free space.
   He stood there dismayed. His mind was free of terror, but it was also totally empty of any plan. All thought of action had been driven from his mind for the moment by the startling realization that he had been completely outwitted. The woman had used her very defects to defeat him.
   She must have known her thought shield was faulty, and so, with almost animal cunning, she had allowed that pathetic little story to leak through, designed to show him that she would never, oh, never, have the courage for a fight to the finish. It was easy to see now that her courage was a chilled-steel quality that he could not hope to equal for years.
   He moved obediently to one side as she gestured menacingly, and then watched her alertly as she bent to pick up the two weapons on the floor, first her own, then his. But not for the barest instant did her eyes shift from him, and there was not a quiver of weakness in the way her gun pointed at him.
   She put away the small weapon that had tricked him, kept her larger gun in her right hand, and, without a glance at his gun, locked it in a drawer beneath the glowing instrument board.
   Her alertness left no hope that he might trick her into turning her weapon aside. The fact that she had not shot him immediately must mean that she wanted to talk to him first. But he could not leave that possibility to chance. He said huskily:
   "Do you mind if I ask a few questions before you kill me?"
   "I'll ask the questions," she replied coolly. "There can be no purpose in your satisfying any curiosity you may have. How old are you?"
   "Fifteen."
   She nodded. "Then you are at a stage of mental and emotional development where you will appreciate even a few minutes' reprieve from death; and, like an adult human being, you will probably be pleased to know that so long as you answer my questions I will not pull the trigger of this electric-energy gun, though the final result will be death just the same."
   Jommy Cross wasted no time in even thinking about her words. He said, "How do you know I'll tell the truth?"
   Her smile was confident. "Truth is implicit in the cleverest lies. We tendrilless slans, lacking the ability to read minds, have been forced by necessity to develop psychology to the utmost limits. But never mind that. Were you sent to steal this ship?"
   "No."
   "Then who are you?"
   Quietly he gave her a brief history of his life. As his story developed, he grew conscious that the woman's eyes were narrowing, lines of surprise gathering on her forehead.
   "Are you trying to tell me," she cut in sharply, "that you are the little boy who came into the main offices of Air Center six years ago?"
   He nodded. "It was a shock to find a crew so murderous that even a child must be destroyed forthwith. It – "
   He stopped because the woman's eyes were aflame. "So it's come at last," she said slowly. "For six long years we've discussed and analyzed, uncertain whether we were right in letting you escape."
   "You... let... me... escape!" gasped Jommy Cross.
   She ignored him, went on as if she hadn't heard. "And ever since we've waited anxiously for a follow-up from the snakes. We were pretty sure they wouldn't betray us because they wouldn't want our greatest invention, the spaceships, to fall into the hands of human beings. The main question in our minds was, what was behind that first exploratory maneuver? Now, in your attempted theft of a rocketship, we have the answer."
   Startled into silence, Jommy Cross listened to the mistaken analysis. Dismay grew in him. Dismay that had nothing to do with his personal danger. It was the incredible insanity of this slan-versus-slan war. The deadliness of it was almost beyond imagination. Joanna Hillory went on in her vibrant voice, tinged now with triumph.
   "It's good to know for sure what we have so long suspected, and the evidence is almost overwhelming now. We have explored the Moon, Mars and Venus. We have gone as far afield as the moons of Jupiter, and not once have we seen an alien spaceship or the faintest sign of a snake.
   "The conclusion is inescapable. For some reason, perhaps because their revealing tendrils make it necessary for them to be ever on the move, they have never developed the antigravity screens that make the rocketship possible. Whatever the reason, the chain of logic points inexorably to the fact that they do lack space travel."
   "You and your logic," said Jommy Cross, "are beginning to be very tiresome. It seems unbelievable that a slan could be so wrong. For just one second, take a reasonable altitude and assume, just assume, that my story is true?'
   She smiled, a thin smile that barely touched her lips, "From the beginning, there were only two possibilities. The first one I have already outlined. The other – that you actually have had no contact with slans – has worried us for years.
   "You see, if you were sent by the slans, then they already knew we controlled Airways. But if you were an independent slan, then you had a secret that sooner or later, when you did contact the snakes, would be dangerous to us. In short, if your story is true, we must kill you to prevent you at some future-date from apprising them of your special knowledge, and because it is our policy to take no chances whatsoever with snakes. In any case, you are as good as dead."
   Her words were harsh, her tone icy. But far more menacing than her tone, Jommy realized, was the fact that neither right nor wrong, truth nor untruth, mattered to this slan woman. His world was shattering before the thought that if this immorality was slan justice, then slans had nothing to offer the world that could begin to match the sympathy, kindliness and pervading gentleness of spirit that he had seen so often in the minds of the lowly human beings. If all adult slans were like this, then there was no hope.
   His mind hovered over the fearful, dizzying gulf of the senseless feud between slan, human being and tendrilless slan, and a thought more dark and terrible than night swept him. Was it really possible that his father's great dreams and greater works were to be blotted out in a solitary waste of nothingness, destroyed and ruined by these insane fratricides? The papers of his father's secret science, which he had removed from the catacombs such a short tune before, were in his pockets; they would be used and abused by the cruel, merciless tendrilless slans if this woman carried out her desire to kill him. In spite of logic, in spite of the certainty that he could not hope to catch a full-grown slan off guard, he must stay alive in order to prevent that from happening.
   His gaze narrowed on her face, conscious of the shadowy lines of thought in her forehead, a thoughtfulness that yet did not interfere with her alertness. The lines smoothed as she said:
   "I have been considering your special case. I have, of course, authority to destroy you without consulting our council. The question is, does the problem you present merit their attention? Or will a brief report be sufficient? It is not a question of mercy, so allow yourself no hope."
   But hope did come. It would take time to take him before the council, and time was life. He said urgently, yet conscious of the need for calm words, "I must admit my own reason is paralyzed by the feud between slan and tendrilless slan. Don't your people realize how tremendously the entire slan position would improve if you would cooperate with the 'snakes,' as you call them? Snakes! The very word is a proof of intellectual bankruptcy, suggestive of a propaganda campaign, replete with slogans and emotion words."
   The gray fire came back into her eyes, but there was scathing mockery in her voice: "A little history may enlighten you on the matter of slan co-operation. For nearly four hundred years there have been tendrilless slans. Like the true slans, they're a distinct race, being born without tendrils, which is the only differentiation from the snakes. For security's sake, they formed communities in remote districts where the danger of discovery was reduced to a minimum. They were prepared to be completely friendly with the true slans against the common enemy – human beings!
   "What was their horror, then, to find themselves attacked and murdered, their carefully built up, isolated civilization destroyed by fire and weapon – by the true slans! They made desperate efforts to establish contact, to become friends, but it was useless. They finally discovered that only in the highly dangerous, human-controlled cities could they find any safety. There the true slans, because of their revealing tendrils, dared not venture.
   "Snakes!" The mockery was gone from her voice. Only a hard bitterness remained. "What other word can possibly fit? We don't hate them, but we have a sense of utter frustration and distrust. Our policy of destroying them is pure self-defense, but it has become a ruthless, unyielding attitude."
   "But surely your leaders could talk things over with them?"
   "Talk things over with whom? In the last three hundred years we have never located a single hiding place of the true slan. We've captured some that attacked us. We've killed a few in running fights. But we've never discovered anything about them. They exist, but where and how and what their purpose is we haven't the faintest idea. There is no greater mystery on the face of the Earth."
   Jommy Cross interrupted tensely: "If this is true, if you're not lying, please, madam, let your shield down for a moment so that I can be sure that your words are true! I, too, have thought this feud insane ever since I first discovered that there were two kinds of slans, and that they were at war. If I could become absolutely convinced that the madness is one-sided, why, I could – "
   Her voice, sharp as a slap in the face, cut across his words. "What would you do? Help us? Are you under the impression that we would ever believe such an intention, and allow you to go free? The more you talk, the more dangerous I consider you. We have always made the assumption that a snake, by reason of his ability to read minds, is our superior, and therefore must not be given time to effect an escape. Your youth has saved you for ten minutes, but now that I know your story I can see no purpose in keeping you alive. Furthermore, there seems no reason why your case should be brought before the council. One more question – then you die!"
   Jommy Cross stared angrily at the woman. There was no friendliness in him now, no sense of any kinship between this woman and his mother. If she were telling the truth, then it was the tendrilless slans he should sympathize with, not the mysterious, elusive true slans who were acting with such incomprehensible ruthlessness. But sympathy or no, every word she had spoken showed more clearly how dangerous it would be to allow the mightiest weapon the world would ever know to fall into this seething hell's brew of hatred. He must defeat this woman, must save himself. Must. He said swiftly:
   "Before you ask that last question, consider seriously what an unprecedented opportunity has come to you. Is it possible that you are going to allow hatred to distort your reason? According to your statement, for the first time in the history of tendrilless slans you have caught a tendrilled slan who is absolutely convinced that the two types of slans should co-operate instead of fight."
   "Don't be silly," she said. "Every slan we've ever caught was willing to promise anything."
   The words were like so many blows, and Jommy Cross shrank from them, feeling beaten, his argument smashed. In his deepest thoughts, he had always pictured adult slans as noble creatures, dignified, contemptuous of captors, conscious of their marvelous superiority. But – willing to promise anything! He hurried on, desperately anxious to retrieve his position.
   "That doesn't change this particular situation. You can verify practically everything I've said about myself. About my mother and father being killed. The fact that I had to flee the home of the old junk woman in the next room, whom you hit over the head, after I had lived with her ever since I was a child. Everything will fit in to prove that I am what I claim to be: a true slan who has never had any relationship with the secret slan organization. Can you lightly ignore the opportunity offered here? First, you and your people must help me find the slans, then I shall act as liaison officer, establish contact for you for the first time in your history. Tell me, have you ever learned why the true slans hate your people?"
   "No." She spoke doubtfully. "We've had ridiculous statements from captured slans to the effect that they are simply not tolerating the existence of any variation of slan. Only the perfect result of Samuel Lann's machine must survive."
   "Samuel... Lann's... machine!" Jommy Cross felt abruptly almost physically torn, his thread of thought ripped out by the roots. "Are you actually – do you mean it's true that slans were originally machine-made?"
   He saw that the woman was staring at him, frowning, her brows sharply knit. She said slowly, "I'm almost beginning to believe your story. I thought every slan knew of Samuel Lann's use of a mutation machine on his wife. Later, during the nameless period that followed the slan war, use of the mutation machine produced a new species: the tendrilless slans. Didn't your parents find out anything about such things?"
   "That was supposed to be my job," Jommy Cross said unhappily. "I was to do the exploring, the contacting, while Dad and Mother prepared the – "
   He stopped in angry self-annoyance. This was no time to make an admission that his father had devoted his life to science and wouldn't waste a single day on a search he had believed would be long and difficult. The first mention of science might lead this acutely intelligent woman to an examination of his gun. She obviously believed the instrument to be a variation of her own electric-energy weapon. He went on:
   "If those machines are still in existence, then all these human accusations that slans are making monsters out of human babies are true."
   "I've seen some of the monsters," Joanna Hillory nodded. "Failures, of course. There are so many failures."
   It seemed to Jommy Cross that he was past shock. All the things that he had believed for so long, believed with passion and pride, were tumbling like so many card houses. The ugly lies were not lies. Human beings were fighting a Machiavellian scourge almost inconceivable in its inhumanity. He grew aware that Joanna Hillory was talking.
   "I must admit that, in spite of my conviction that the council will destroy you, the points you have raised do constitute a very particular situation. I have decided to take you before them."
   It required a long moment for the meaning of her words to penetrate; and then – a wild, surging relief leaped along his nerves. It was like an intolerable weight lifting, lifting. There came an extravagant sense of buoyancy. At last he had what he needed so desperately: time, precious time! Given time, pure chance might aid him to escape.
   He watched the woman as she moved cautiously over to the great instrument board. There was a click as her finger pressed a button. Her first words reached up, to the heights where his hopes poised, and dragged them to the uttermost low. She said:
   "Calling the members of the council... Urgent... Please tune in at once to 7431 for immediate judgment on a special slan case."
   Immediate judgment! He felt angry at himself for having had hope at all. He should have known that it wouldn't be necessary to take him physically before the council, when their radio science canceled all dangers from such delay. Unless the council members understood a different logic than Joanna Hillory, he was through.
   The waiting silence that followed was more apparent than real. There was the continuous thin, beating roar of the rockets, the fainter hiss of air against the outer shell which meant that the ship was still flying through the thick sheaf of Earth's atmosphere. And there was the insistent thought stream of Granny – the whole combining into anything but silence.
   The impression smashed into fragments. Granny. Granny's active, conscious thought stream. Joanna Hillory, in meeting first his resistance, then pausing to question him instead of killing him instantly, had given Granny time to recuperate from the blow, which the slan woman had – obviously now – designed for temporary purposes only, to gain a silent approach on his rear. A killing blow might have made a distinct thud for ears as sensitive as his. The light one had not been effective for long. The old scoundrel was awake. Jommy opened his mind wide to the flood of Granny's thought.
   "Jommy, she'll kill us both. But Granny's got a plan. Make some sign that you've heard her. Tap your feet. Jommy, Granny's got a plan to stop her from killing us."
   Over and over came the insistent message, never quite the same, always accompanied by extraneous thought and uncontrollable digressions. No human brain as ill trained as Granny's could hold a completely straight-forward thought. But the main theme was there. Granny was alive. Granny was aware of danger. And Granny was prepared to co-operate to desperate lengths to avert that danger.
   Casually, Jommy Cross began to tap his feet on the floor, harder, louder, until – "Granny hears." He stopped his tapping. Her excited thought went on: "Granny really has two plans. The first is for Granny to make a loud noise. That will startle the woman and give you a chance to leap on her. Then Granny will rush in to help. The second plan is for Granny to get up from the floor where she's lying, sneak over to your door, and then jump in at the woman when she passes near the door. She'll be startled, and instantly you can leap for her. Granny will call 'One,' then 'Two!' Tap your feet after the plan number you think best. Think them over for a moment."
   No thought was required. Plan One he instantly rejected. No loud noise would really distract the calm nerves of a slan. A physical attack, something concrete, was the only hope.
   "One!" said Granny into his mind. He waited, ironically aware of the anxious overtones in her thought, the forlorn hope that he would find Plan One satisfactory and so lessen the danger to her own precious skin. But she was a practical old wretch, and deep in her brain was the conviction that Plan One was weak. At last her mind reluctantly pumped out the word "Two!"
   Jommy Cross tapped his feet. Simultaneously, he grew aware that Joanna Hillory was talking into her radio, giving his history and his proposal of co-operation, finally offering her own opinion that he must be destroyed.
   The remote thought came to Jommy Cross that a few minutes before he would have been sitting almost with bated breath following the discourse, and the answers that began to come in one by one from the hidden loud-speaker. Deep-toned voices of men; the rich, vibrant tones of women! But now he scarcely more than followed the thread of their arguments. He was aware of some disagreement One of the women wanted to know his name. For a long moment it didn't strike him that he was being directly addressed:
   "Your name?" said the radio voice.
   Joanna Hillory moved away from the radio toward the door. She said sharply: "Are you deaf? She wants to know your name."
   "Name!" said Jommy Cross, and a portion of his mind registered surprise at the question. But nothing could really distract him at this supreme moment. It was now or never. As he tapped his feet, every extraneous thought was gone out of his brain. He was only aware of Granny standing behind the door, and of the vibrations that poured from her. The tensing of her body, the poising for action and, at the last moment, terror. He waited helplessly while she stood there, her ravaged body threatened with paralysis.
   It was the thousand illegal forays she had made in her black career that rose up to give her strength. She launched into the room. Eyes glittering, teeth bared, she lunged against the back of Joanna Hillory. Her thin arms embraced the arms and shoulders of the slan woman.
   Flame sparkled as the weapon in Joanna Hillory's fingers discharged in futile fury at the floor. Then, like an animal, the young woman spun with irresistible strength. For one desperate moment Granny clung to her shoulders. It was the one all-necessary moment. In that instant, Jommy Cross sprang.
   In that instant, too, came a shrill squawk from Granny. Her claw-like hands were torn from their holds, and the gaunt, dark body skidded along the floor.
   Jommy Cross wasted no time trying to match a strength he felt sure was beyond his present powers to equal. As Joanna Hillory whirled toward him like a tigress, he struck one hard, swift blow across her neck with the edge of his hand. It was a dangerous blow; and it required perfect coordination of muscles and nerves. It could easily have broken her neck; instead, it skillfully and efficiently knocked her unconscious. He caught her as she fell, and even as he lowered her to the floor, his brain was reaching into hers, past the broken shield, searching swiftly. But the pulse of her unconscious brain was too slow, the kaleidoscope of pictures too frozen.
   He began to shake her gently, watching the shifting pattern of her thoughts, as the steady physical movement brought quick, subtle chemical changes in her body, which in turn changed the very shape of her thoughts. Still, there was no time for detail; and, as the outline of pictures grew more terrible in its menace, he abruptly deserted her and rushed to the radio. In as normal a voice as he could manage, he called:
   "I'm still willing to discuss friendly terms. I could be a great help to the tendrilless slans." No answer. More urgently, he repeated his words, and added, "I'm anxious to come to an arrangement with an organization as powerful as yours. I'll even return the ship if you can show me logically how I can escape without putting myself in a trap."
   Silence! He clicked off the radio, and turning, stared grimly at Granny, who was half sitting, half lying on the floor.
   "No dice," he said. "All this, this ship, this slan woman, is only part of a trap in which nothing has been left to chance. There are seven heavily armed hundred-thousand-ton cruisers trailing us at this very moment. Their finder instruments react to our antigravity plates, so even the darkness is no protection. We're finished."
   The hours of night dragged, and with each passing moment the problem of what to do grew more desperate. Of the four living things up there in that blue-black sky, only Granny sprawled in one of the pneumatic chairs in uneasy sleep. The two slans, and that tireless, throbbing, hurtling ship, remained awake.
   Fantastic night! On the one hand was the knowledge of the destroying power that might strike at any minute; and on the other hand – Fascinated, Jommy Cross stared into the visiplate at the wondrous picture that sped beneath him. It was a world of lights, shining in every direction as far as the eye could see – lights and more lights. Splashes, pools, ponds, lakes, oceans of light – farm communities, villages, towns and cities, and, every little while, mile on mile of megalopolitan colossus. At last his gaze lifted from the visiplate and he turned to where Joanna Hillory sat, her hands and feet tied. Her gray eyes met his brown ones questioningly. Before he could speak, she said:
   "Well, have you decided yet?"
   "Decided what?"
   "When you're going to kill me, of course."
   Jommy Cross shook his head slowly, gravely. "To me," he said quietly, "the appalling thing about your words is the mental attitude that assumes that one must either deliver or receive death. I'm not going to kill you. I'm going to release you."
   She was silent for a moment, then: "There's nothing surprising about my attitude. For a hundred years the true slans killed my people at sight; for hundreds of years now we have retaliated. What could be more natural?"
   Jommy Cross shrugged impatiently. There was too much uncertainty in him about the true slans to permit him to discuss them now when his whole mind must be concentrated on escape. He said:
   "My interest is not in this futile, miserable, three-cornered war among human beings and slans. The important thing is the seven warships that are trailing us at this minute."
   "It's too bad you found out about them," the slan woman said quietly. "Now you will spend the time in useless worry and planning. It would have been so much less cruel for you to have considered yourself safe and, then, the very moment you discovered you were not, to die."
   'I'm not dead yet!" Jommy Cross said, and impatience was suddenly sharp in his tone. "I have no doubt it is presumptuous of a half-grown slan to assume, as I am beginning to, that there must be a way out of this trap. I have the greatest respect for adult slan intelligence, but I do not forget that your people have now suffered several preliminary defeats. Why, for instance, if my destruction is so certain, are those ships waiting? Why wait?"
   Joanna Hillory was smiling, her fine, strong face relaxed. "You don't really expect me to answer your questions, do you?"
   "Yes." Jommy Cross smiled, but without humor. He went on in a tight, clipped voice, "You see, I've grown somewhat older during the past few hours. Until last night I was really very innocent, very idealistic. For instance, during those first few minutes when we were pointing our guns at each other, you could have destroyed me without resistance on my part. To me, you were a member of the slan race, and all slans must be united. I couldn't have pulled the trigger to save my soul. You delayed, of course, because you wanted to question me, but the opportunity was there. That situation exists no longer."
   The woman's perfect lips pursed in sudden, frowning thought "I think I'm beginning to see what you're getting at"
   "It's really very simple," Jommy Cross nodded grimly. "You either answer my questions or I'll knock you over the head and obtain the information from your unconscious mind."
   The woman began: "How do you know I'll tell the tru – " She stopped, her gray eyes widening with apprehension as she glared at Jommy. "Do you expect – "
   ll0
   "I do!" He stared ironically into her glowing, hostile eyes. "You will lower your mind shield. Of. course, I don't expect absolutely free access to your brain, I have no objection to your controlling your thoughts on a narrow range all around the subject. But your shield must go down – now!"
   She sat very still, body rigid, gray eyes agleam with repugnance. Jommy Cross' gaze was curious.
   "I'm amazed," he said. "What strange complexes develop in minds that have no direct contact with other minds. Is it possible that tendrilless slans have built up little sacred, secret worlds within themselves and, like any sensitive human being, feel shame at letting outsiders see that world? There is material here for psychological study that may reveal the basic cause of the slan-versus-slan war. However, let that go."
   He finished, "Remember that I have already been in your mind. Remember, also, that according to your own logic, in a few hours I will be blotted out forever in a blaze of electric projectors."
   "Of course," she said quickly, "that is true. You will be dead, won't you? Very well, I'll answer your questions."
   Joanna Hillory's mind was like a book whose thickness could not be measured, with almost an infinity of pages to examine, an incredibly rich, incredibly complex structure embroidered with a billion billion impressions garnered through the years by an acutely observant intellect. Jommy Cross caught swift, tantalizing glimpses of her recent experiences. There was, briefly, the picture of an unutterably bleak planet, low-mountained, sandy, frozen, everything frozen – Mars! There were pictures of a gorgeous, glass-enclosed city, of great machines digging under a blazing battery of lights. Somewhere it was snowing with a bitter, unearthly fury – and a black spaceship, glittering like a dark jewel in the sun, was briefly visible through a thick plate-glass window.
   The confusion of thoughts cleared as she began to talk. She spoke slowly, and he made no attempt to hurry her, in spite of his conviction that every second counted, that at any minute now death would blast from the sky at his defenseless ship. Her words and the thoughts that verified them were as bright-cut as so many gems, and as fascinating.
   The tendrilless slans had known from the moment he started to climb the wall that an interloper was coming. Interested primarily in his purpose, they made no effort to stop him when he could have been destroyed without difficulty. They left several ways open for him to get to the ship, and he had used one of them, although – and here was an unknown, unexpected factor – the particular alarms of that way had not gone off.
   The reason the warships were slow in destroying him was that they hesitated to use their searchlights over a continent so densely inhabited. If he should climb high enough or go out to sea, the ship' would be quickly destroyed. On the other hand, if he chose to circle around on the continent, his fuel would waste away in a dozen hours or so, and before that, dawn would come and enable the electric projectors to be used with brief, deadly effect.
   "Suppose," said Jommy Cross, "I should land in the downtown section of a great city. I could very possibly escape among so many houses, buildings, and people."
   Joanna Hillory shook her head. "If this ship's speed falls below two hundred miles per hour, it will be destroyed, regardless of the risk involved, regardless of the fact that they hope to save my life by capturing the ship intact. You can see I'm being very frank with you."
   Jommy Cross was silent. He was convinced, overwhelmed by the totality of the danger. There was nothing clever about the plan. Here was simply a crude reliance on big guns and plenty of them. "All this." he marveled at last, "for one poor slan, one ship. How mighty the fear must be that prompts so much effort, so much expense, for so little return!"
   "We have put the snake outside our law,"' came the cool reply. Her gray eyes glowed with a quiet fire. Her mind concentrated on the single track of her words. "Human courts do not release prisoners because it will cost more to convict them than the amount of the theft. Besides, what you have stolen is so precious that it would be the greatest disaster in our history if you escaped."
   He felt abruptly impatient "You assume far too readily that the true slans are not already in possession of the antigravity secret My purpose during the coming years is to analyze the true slans to their hiding place; and I can tell you now that practically everything you have told me I shall not use as evidence. The very fact that they are so completely hidden is an indication of their immense resourcefulness."
   Joanna Hillory said, "Our logic is very simple. We have not seen them in rocketships – so they have no rocketships. Even yesterday, in that ridiculous flight to the palace, their craft, while very pretty, was powered by multiple-pulse jet motors, a type of engine we discarded a hundred years ago. Logic, like science, is deduction on the basis of observation, so – "
   Jommy Cross frowned unhappily. Everything about the slans was wrong. They were fools and murderers. They had started a stupid, ruthless, fratricidal war against the tendrilless slans. They sneaked around the country, using their diabolical mutation machines on human mothers – and the monstrosities that resulted were destroyed by medical authorities. Mad, purposeless destruction! And it simply didn't fit!
   It didn't fit with the noble character of his father and his mother. It didn't fit with his father's genius, or with the fact that for six years he himself had lived under the influence of Granny's squalid mind and remained untouched, un-soiled. And, finally, it didn't fit with the fact that he, a half-grown true slan, had braved a trap he did not even suspect and because of one loophole in their net, one unknown factor, had so far escaped their vengeance.
   His atomic gun! The one factor that they still didn't suspect. It would be useless, of course, against the battle cruisers coasting along in the blackness behind him. It would take a year or more to build a projector with a beam big enough to reach out and tear those ships to pieces. But one thing it could do. What it could touch, its shattering fire would disintegrate into component atoms. And, by God! he had the answer, given time and a little luck.
   The glare of a searchlight splashed against his visiplates. Simultaneously, the ship jumped like some toy that had been struck an intolerable blow. Metal squeaked, walls shook, tights blinked, and then, as the sounds of violence died into little menacing whispers, he bounded from the deeps of the chair into which he had been flung and snatched at the rocket activator.
   The machine leaped forward in dizzy acceleration. Against the pressure of plunging fury, he reached forward and clicked on the radio.
   The battle was on, and unless he could persuade them to desist, the chance to put his one lone plan into action would never come. The rich, vibrant voice of Joanna Hillory echoed the thought that beat in his mind.
   "What are you going to do – talk them out of what they plan to do? Don't be so silly. If they finally decided to sacrifice me, you don't think they'd give your welfare any consideration, do you?"

Chapter Eleven

   Outside, the night sky was dark. A sprinkling of stars glittered coldly in the moonless night. There was no sign of an enemy ship, not a shadow, not a movement against the immensity of turgid, deep, deep blue ceiling.
   Inside, the tense silence was shattered by a hoarse choking cry from the next room. An angry barrage of vituperation followed. Granny was awake.
   "What's the matter? What's happened?"
   Brief silence, and then abrupt end of anger and mad beginning of fear. Instantly, her terrified thought poured out in frantic flood. Obscene curses, born of fear, assailed the air. Granny didn't want to die. Kill all slans, but not Granny. Granny had money to – She was drunk. The sleep had allowed the liquor to take control of her again. Jommy Cross shut her thoughts and her voice out of his mind. Urgently he spoke into the radio.
   "Calling the commander of the warships! Calling the commander! Joanna Hillory is alive. I am willing to release her at dawn, the only condition being that I be allowed to get up into the air again."
   There was silence, then a woman's quiet voice entered the room. "Joanna, are you there?"
   "Yes, Marian."
   "Very well," the calm voice of the other went on, "we accept on the following conditions: You will inform us an hour before the actual landing where it will be. The point of landing must be at least thirty miles – that is, five minutes allowing for acceleration and deceleration – from the nearest large city. We assume, of course, that you believe you can escape. Very well. You will have two hours more of opportunity. We shall have Joanna Hillory. A fair exchange!"
   "I accept," said Jommy Cross.
   "Wait!" cried Joanna Hillory. But Jommy Cross was too quick for her. A second before the word jerked from her lips, his finger flicked off the radio switch.
   He whirled on her. "You shouldn't have put up your mind shield. It was all the warning I needed. But, of course, I had you either way. If you hadn't put up the shield, I would have caught the thought in your brain." His eyes glinted at her suspiciously. "What is this sudden mad passion to sacrifice yourself simply to deny me two hours more of life?"
   She was silent. Her gray eyes were more thoughtful than he had seen them all night He mocked gently:
   "Can it be that you actually grant me the possibility of escape?"
   "I've been wondering," she said, "why the alarms back in the spaceship building didn't warn us of the exact way you approached this ship. There is a factor here that apparently we did not take into account If you should really escape with this ship – "
   "I shall escape," Jommy Cross said quietly, "and I shall live in spite of human beings, in spite of Kier Gray and John Petty and the ghoulish crew of murderers that live in the palace. I shall live in spite of the vastness of the tendrilless slan organization and their murderous intentions. And someday I shall find the true slans. Not now, for no youth can hope to succeed where the tendrilless slans in their thousands have failed. But I shall find them, and on that day – " "He stopped, then gravely: "Miss Hillory, I want to assure you that neither this nor any other ship will ever be turned against your people."
   "You speak very rashly," she replied with sudden bitterness. "How can you assure anything in the name of those ruthless creatures who dominate the councils of the snakes?"
   Jommy Cross gazed down at the woman. There was truth in her words. And yet, something of the greatness that was to be his came to him in that moment as he sat there in that finely built control room, with its glittering instrument board, the shining visiplates, Ms body deep in the beautifully constructed chair. He was' his father's son, heir to the products of his father's genius. Given time, he would be lord of irresistible power. The soft flame of those thoughts was in his voice as he said:
   "Madam, in all modesty I can say that, of all the slans in the world today, there is none more important than the son of Peter Cross. Wherever I go my words and my will shall have influence. The day that I find the true slans, the war against your people will end forever. You have said that my escape would be disaster for the tendrilless slans; rather, it will be their greatest victory. Someday you and they will realize that."
   "Meanwhile," the slan woman smiled grimly, "you have two hours to escape seven heavy cruisers owned by the real rulers of the Earth. What you do not seem to realize is that we actually fear neither human being nor snake, that our organization is vast beyond imagination. Every village, every town, every city has its quota of tendrilless slans. We know our power, and one of these days we shall come out into the open, take control and – "
   "It would mean war!" Jommy Cross flared.
   Her answer was cold. "We'll smash everything they've got within two months."
   ll6
   And then what? What about human beings in that afterworld? Do you contemplate four billion slaves in perpetuity?"
   "We are immeasurably their superiors. Shall we live in endless hiding, endure privation on the colder planets when we long for the green Earth and freedom from this eternal fight against nature – and against the men whom you defend so valiantly? We owe them nothing but pain. Circumstances force us to repay with interest!"
   Jommy Cross said, "I foresee disaster for everyone."
   The woman shrugged and went on: "The factor that worked in your favor back at the Air Center, when our attitude was the negative one of waiting for events, cannot possibly help you now, when our attitude is the utterly positive one of destroying you with our heaviest weapons. One minute of fire will burn this machine to ashes that will fall to earth in a fine sprinkling of dust."
   "One minute!" Jommy Cross exclaimed.
   He stopped short. He hadn't dreamed the time limit would be so short, and that now he had to depend on a flimsy psychological hope that the speed of his ship would lull their suspicions. He said harshly:
   "Enough of this damn talk. And I'll have to carry you into the next room. I've got to rig up a vise at the inside of the nose of the ship, and I can't let you see what I put in that vise."
   For a moment before Jommy Cross landed he saw the lights of the city to the west. Then the wall of a valley blotted the flashing sea of brilliance from his view. Soft as thistledown, the rocketship touched the ground and floated there with an unearthly buoyance as Jommy Cross set the antigravity plates at balancing power. He clicked open the door and then untied the slan woman.
   Her electric gun in hand (his own weapon was fastened in the vise he had set up), he watched Joanna Hillory poised for a moment in the doorway. Dawn was breaking over the hills to the east, and the light, still a sickly gray, made a queer silhouette of her strong, shapely figure. Without a word, she jumped to the ground below. As he stepped forward to the threshold he could see her head on a level now with the bottom of the doorway, reflecting the flood of light from inside the ship.
   Her head turned, and the face that looked up at him was marked by deep, thoughtful lines. She said, "How do you feel?"
   He shrugged. "A little shaky, but death seems remote and not applicable to me."
   "It's more than that," Was the earnest reply. "The nervous system of a slan is an almost impregnable fortress. It cannot really be touched by insanity or 'nerves' or fear. When we kill, it is because of policy arrived at through logic. When death approaches our personal lives, we accept the situation, fight to the last in the hope of an unpredictable factor turning up to save us, and finally, reluctantly, give up the ghost, conscious that we have not lived in vain."
   He stared at her curiously, his mind projecting against hers, feeling of the gentle pulsing of overtones, the strange half friendliness that was in her voice and over-flowed from her mind. His eyes narrowed. What purpose was forming in her alert, sensitive, unsentimental brain? She went on:
   "Jommy Cross, it may surprise you to know that I have come to believe your story, and that you are not only what you say you are, but that you actually hold the ideals you have professed. You are the first true slan I have ever met and, for the first time in my life, I have a sense of tension eased, as if, after all these centuries, the deadly darkness is lifting. If you escape our guns, I beg you to keep your ideals as you grow older, and please don't betray us. Don't become a tool of creatures who have used only murder and destruction for so many, many years. You have been in my mind, and you know that I have not lied to you about them. Whatever the logic of their philosophy, it's wrong because it's inhuman. It must be wrong because its result has been unending misery."
   If he escaped! So that was it! If he escaped, they would be dependent on his good will, and she was playing that angle now for all she was worth.
   "But remember one thing," Joanna Hillory went on; "you can expect no help from us. We must, in the name of security, consider you as an enemy. Too much depends upon it, the fate of too many people is involved. So do not expect at some future date to obtain mercy, Jommy Cross, because of what I have said or because you have released me. Do not come into our midst, because, I warn you, it means swift death.
   "You see, we credit true slans with superior intelligence, or rather, superior development of intelligence, owing to their mind-reading ability. There is no cunning of which we would not believe them capable, no ruthlessness they have not already equaled. A plan requiring thirty or a hundred years to mature is not beyond them. Therefore, even though I believe what you have told me, the uncertainty of how you may develop as you grow older would make me kill you this instant were it in my power. Do not ever test our good will. It is suspicion, not tolerance, that rules us. But now, good-by and, paradoxical as this may sound, good luck!"
   He watched her as she walked lightly, swiftly, into the darkness that lay heavily on the valley to the west, the way that led to the city – his way, also. Her form became a shadow in the clinging mist of night. She was gone over a hill. Swiftly, he closed the door, rushed into the storeroom and snatched a couple of space suits from the wall. The old woman babbled in feeble protest as he stuffed her forcibly into one of them. He crowded into his own as he scrambled into the control room.
   He closed the door on the sobering leer that twisted Granny's face behind the transparent headpiece, and in a second was sitting tensely staring into the "sky" visiplate. His fingers reached for the activator of the antigravity plates; and then came the hesitation, the doubt that had been growing in him each second that brought the inexorable moment of action nearer. Was it possible that his simple plan would actually work?
   Jommy Cross could see the ships, little dark spots in the sky above him. The sun was shining up there, a spray of brilliance that picked out the tiny torpedo shapes like so many fly spots on an immense blue ceiling. The clouds and the haze of the valley were clearing with magical speed, and if the clarity with which he could see them through his visiplates was any criterion, then even the weather was against him. He was still in the shadows of this sweet, clean little valley, but in a few minutes now the very perfection of the day would begin to damage his chances of escape.
   His brain was so tensely concentrated that for a moment the distorted thought that flowed into his mind seemed to come from himself:
   "... needn't worry. Old Granny'll get rid of the slan. Get some make-up and change her face. What's the good of having been an actress if you can't change your looks? Granny'll make a white, lovely body like she used to have, and change this old face. Ugh!"
   She seemed to spit in convulsions at the thought of her face, and Jommy Cross eased the picture out of his mind. But her words remained with him. His parents had used false hair, but the necessary mutilation of natural hair and the constant recutting had proved very unsatisfactory. Nevertheless, true slans must be doing it all the time, and now that he was old enough to be able to make a reasonably efficient job of it, with Granny's help and experience it might be the answer.
   Strangely, now that a plan for the future had come, his hesitation vanished. Light as a dust mote, the ship fell away from Earth, and then jerked into enormous speed as the rockets kicked into life. Five minutes to accelerate and decelerate, the slan commander had said. Jommy Cross smiled grimly. He wasn't going to decelerate. At undiminished speed, he dived for the river that made a wide black swath at the outskirts of the city, the city he had picked because the river was there. At the very last moment he put on full deceleration.
   And at that final moment, when it was already too late, the confidence of the slan commanders must have been shaken. They forgot their reluctance to use their guns and show their ships so near a human city. They swooped like great birds of prey; fire sparkled from all seven cruisers... Jommy Cross pulled gently on the wire that pressed the trigger on his own weapon, mounted in the vise at the nose of the ship.
   From outside, a violent blow added speed to the three-hundred-miles-an-hour clip of his machine. But he scarcely noticed it, the only effect of the enemy fire. His attention was concentrated on his own weapon. As he pulled the wire there was a flare of white. Instantly a two-foot circle in the thick nose of the craft vanished. The white, malignant ray leaped forth fanwise, dissolving the water of the river in front of the torpedo-shaped craft, and into the tunnel thus created slid the spaceship, decelerating at full, frightful blast of the forward tubes.
   The visiplates went black with the water above and the water below, then blacker as the water ended and the inconceivable ferocity of the atom smasher bored on irresistibly into the ground beyond, deeper, deeper.
   It was like flying through air, only there was no resistance except the pressure of rocket blasts. The atoms of earth, broken into their component elements, instantly lost their mathematically unreal solidity and assumed their actuality of a space tenuously occupied by matter. Ten million million years of built-up cohesion collapsed into the lowest state of primeval matter.
   With rigid gaze, Jommy Cross stared at the second hand of his watch: ten, twenty, thirty... one minute. He began to ease the nose of the ship upward, but the enormous pressure of deceleration made no physical easing possible. It was thirty seconds before he cut the number of rocket blasts and the end was in sight.
   After two minutes and twenty seconds of underground flight the ship stopped. He must be near the center of the city, and there was approximately eight miles of tunnel behind him, into which water would be pouring from the tortured river. The water would close up the hole, but the frustrated tendrilless slans would need no interpreter to tell them what had happened. Besides, their instruments would this very second be pointing directly at the location of his ship.
   Jommy Cross laughed joyously. Let them know. What could they hope to do to him now? There was danger ahead, of course – immense danger, especially when he and Granny reached the surface. The entire tendrilless slan organization must be warned by this time. Nevertheless, that was of the future. For the moment, victory was his, and it was sweet, after so many desperate, tiring hours. Now there was Granny's plan, which involved his separating from her, and disguise.
   The laughter faded from his lips. He sat thoughtful, then stalked into the adjoining compartment. The black moneybag he wanted lay on the old woman's lap under the protection of one claw-like hand. Before she could even realize his intention, he had snatched it up. Granny shrieked and jumped at him. Coolly he held her off.
   "Don't get excited. I've decided to adopt your plan. I'll try to get by disguised as a human being, and we'll separate. I'm going to give you five thousand of this. The rest you'll get back about a year from now. Here's what you're to do:
   "I need a place to live, and so you're going to go up into the mountains and buy a ranch or something. When you're located, put an ad in the local paper. I'll put an answering ad in, and we'll get together. I'll keep the money just in case you decide to double-cross me. Sorry, but you captured me in the first place, and so you'll just have to bear with me. But now I've got to go back and block that tunnel. Someday I'm going to fit this ship with atomic energy, and I don't want them coming here meanwhile."
   He'd have to leave this city swiftly, of course, for the time being, the beginning of a continental tour. There must be other tendrilled slans out there. Just as his mother and father had met accidentally, pure chance alone should enable him to meet at least one slan. And besides, there was the first investigation to be made on the still vague though great plan that was taking form in his brain. The plan to think his way to the true slans.

Chapter Twelve

   He searched – and he worked. In the quiet fastness of his laboratory on Granny's valley ranch, the plans and projects that his father had impressed upon him were slowly brought to reality. In a hundred ways he learned to control the limitless energy that he held in trust for slans and human beings alike.
   He discovered that the effectiveness of his father's invention resulted from two basic facts: the source of power could be as tiny as a few grains of matter; and the output need not take the form of heat.
   It could be converted to motion and to vibration, to radiation and – directly – to electricity.
   He began to build himself an arsenal. He transformed a mountain near the ranch into a fortress, knowing that it would be inadequate against any concerted attack, but it was something. With an ever vaster protective science behind him, his search grew more determined.
   Jommy Cross seemed always to be driving along roads that gleamed toward distant horizons, or in strange cities, each with its endless swarms of human beings. The sun rose and set, and rose and set, and there were dark days of drizzling rains, and there were countless nights. Although he was always alone, loneliness did not touch him, for his expanding soul fed with an always dissatisfied eagerness at the tremendous drama that was daily enacted before his eyes. Everywhere he turned, facets of the tendrilless slan organization met his gaze, and week by week he grew more puzzled. Where were the true slans?
   The puzzle seemed a crazy, unanswerable thing that never left him. It followed him now as he walked slowly up a street of the hundredth – or was it the thousandth? – city.
   Night lay upon the city, night spattered by countless glittering shop windows and a hundred million blazing lights. He walked to a newsstand and bought all the local papers, then back to his car, that very ordinary-looking, very special battleship on wheels which he never allowed out of his sight. He stood beside the long, low-built machine. A chilling night wind caught at the sheets of the paper as he turned page after page, briefly letting his gaze skim down the columns.
   The wind grew colder as he stood there, bringing the damp-sweet smell of rain. A gust of cold air caught an edge of his paper, whipped it madly for a moment, abruptly tore it, then went screaming victoriously down the street, chasing the scrap of paper wildly. He folded the newspaper decisively against the rising clamor of wind and climbed into the car. An hour later he tossed the seven daily papers into a sidewalk wastepaper receptacle. Deep in thought, he re-entered the car and sat behind the steering wheel.
   The same old story. Two of the papers were tendrilless slan. It was easy for his mind to note the subtle difference, the special coloration of the articles, the very way the words were used, the distinct difference between the human-owned papers and those operated by the tendrilless slans. Two papers out of seven. But those two had the highest circulation. It was a normal average.
   And, once more, that was all there was. Human being and tendrilless slan. No third group, none of the difference that he knew would show him when a paper was operated by true slans, if his theory were right. It remained only to obtain all the weekly papers, and to spend the evening as he had spent the day, driving along the streets, searching, each house, each passing mind; and then, as he drove toward the distant east, the gathering tempest charged like some untamed beast through the black night.
   Behind him, the night and the storm swallowed up another city, another failure.
   The water lay dark and still around the spaceship in that third year when Jommy Cross finally returned to the tunnel. He swirled around in the mud, turning the blazing force of his atomic-powered machines on the wounded metal thing.
   Ten– point steel seared over the hole his disintegrator had carved on that day when he escaped the slan cruisers. And all through one almost endless week a snug-fitting, leech-shaped metal monstrosity hugged inch by inch over the surface of the ship, straining with its frightful power at the very structure of the atoms, till the foot-thick walls of the long, sleek machine were ten-point steel from end to end.
   It took him some weeks to analyze the antigravity plates with their electrically built-up vibrations, and to fashion a counterpart which, with grim irony, he left there in the tunnel, for it was on them that the detectors of the tendrilless slans operated. Let them think their craft still there.
   Three months he slaved and then, in the dead of one cold October night, the ship backed along six miles of tunnel on a cushion of resistless atomic drive, and plunged up through a mist of icy rain.
   The rain became sleet, then snow; then abruptly he was beyond the clouds, beyond earth's petty furies. Above him the vast canopy of the heavens glittered in a blazing array of stars that beckoned to his matchless ship. There was Sirius, the brightest jewel in that diadem, and there was Mars, the red. But it was not for Mars that he was heading today. This was only a short exploratory voyage, a cautious trip to the Moon, a test flight to provide that all-necessary experience which his logic would use as a basis for the long, dangerous journey that seemed to be becoming more inevitable with each passing month of his utterly futile search. Someday he would have to go to Mars.
   Beneath him a blur of night-enveloped globe receded. At one edge of that mass, a blaze of light grew more brilliant as he watched and then, abruptly, his contemplation of the glory of the approaching sunrise was jarred by the clanging of an alarm bell. A pointer light flashed on and off discordantly far up on his forward visiplate. Decelerating at full speed, he watched the changing position of the light. Suddenly, the light clicked off and there, at the extreme range of his vision, was a ship.
   The battleship was not coming directly toward him. It grew larger, became plainly visible just beyond the Earth's shadow, in the full glare of the Sun. It passed by him, less than a hundred miles away, a thousand-foot structure of smooth, dark metal. It plunged into the shadows and instantly vanished. In half an hour the alarm stopped ringing.
   And then, ten minutes later, it was clamoring again. The second ship was farther away, traveling at right angles to the path of the first. It was a smaller ship by far, destroyer size, and it did not follow a fixed path, but darted here and there.
   When it was gone in the distance, Jommy Cross edged his ship forward, undecided now, almost awed. A battleship and a destroyer! Why? It seemed to indicate a patrol. But against whom? Not against human beings, surely. They didn't even know the tendrilless slans and their ships existed.
   He slowed his ship, stopped. He was not prepared yet to risk running a gauntlet of well-equipped battleships. Watchfully, he swung his ship around – and in the middle of the turn he saw the small dark object, like a meteorite, rushing toward him.
   In a flash he whipped aside. The object twisted after him like a living monster out of space. It loomed far up in his rear visiplate, a dark, round metal ball, about a yard in diameter. Frantically, Jommy Cross tried to maneuver his ship out of its path, but before he could make a turn there was a deafening, mind-shattering blast.
   The explosion smashed him to the floor; the concussion kept him there, stunned, sick but still alive, and conscious that those sturdy walls had survived the almost intolerable blow. The ship was rocking in frightful acceleration. Dizzily, Jommy Cross picked himself up and climbed back into the control chair. He'd struck a mine. A floating mine! What terrifying precautions were here – and against what? Thoughtfully he maneuvered his dented, almost disabled ship into a tunnel under the river that cut through Granny's ranch, a tunnel that curved up into the heart of a mountain peak, clear of the water that swirled after it. He could" not even hazard a guess as to how long it must remain hidden there. Its outer walls were violently radioactive and therefore the ship was temporarily useless to him if only for that reason. And one other thing was certain. He was not ready yet either to oppose or to outwit the tendrilless slans. Two days later, Jommy Cross stood in the doorway of the rambling ranch house and watched their nearest neighbor, Mrs. Lanahan, come tight-lipped along the pathway that led between the two orchards. She was a plump blonde whose round baby face concealed a prying, malicious mind. Her blue eyes glowed at Granny's tall, brown-eyed, brown-haired grandson with suspicion.
   Jommy Cross eyed her with amusement as he opened the door for her and followed her into the house. In her mind was all the ignorance of those who had lived their lives in backward rural areas in a world where education had become a pale shadow, a weak, characterless reflection of official cynicism. She didn't know exactly what a slan was, but she thought he was one, and she was there to find out. She made an interesting experiment for his crystal method of hypnotism. It was fascinating to watch the way she kept glancing at the tiny crystal he had put on the table beside her chair – observing the way she talked on, completely in character, never realizing when she ceased to be a free agent and became his slave.
   She walked out finally into the glare of the late fall sunshine, apparently unchanged. But the errand that had brought her to the farmhouse was forgotten, for her mind was conditioned to a new attitude toward slans. Not hatred – that was for a possible future that Jommy Cross could envision; and not approval – that was for her own protection in a world of slan haters.
   The following day he saw her husband, a black-bearded giant of a man in a distant field. A quiet talk, a differently attuned crystal, brought him, also, under control.
   During the months that he relaxed with the hypnotically sweetened old woman that had been Granny, he gained mental control of every one of the hundreds of farm people who dwelt in the idyllic climate of the valley there in the ever-green foothills. At first he needed the crystals, but as his knowledge of the human mind grew, he found that, although it was a slower process, he could entirely dispense with that atomically unbalanced glass.
   He estimated: Even at the rate of two thousand hypnotized a year, and not allowing for new generations, he could hypnotize the four billion people in the world in two million years. Conversely, two million slans could do it in a year, provided they possessed the secret of his crystals. Two million needed, and he couldn't even find one. Somewhere there must be a true slan. And during the years that still must pass before he could logically pit his intelligence against the intellectual task involved in finding the true slan organization, he must search and search for that one.

Chapter Thirteen

   She was trapped. Briefly, Kathleen Layton grew tense. Her slim young body straightened there beside the open drawer of Kier Gray's desk, the contents of which she had been studying. Her mind reached out with startled alertness, through intervening doors, to where Kier Gray and another man were opening the door that led from her room through a corridor and another room to this, the dictator's own study.
   She was conscious of chagrin. For weeks she had waited for the council meeting that would claim Kier Gray's attendance and give her safe access to his study – and now this wild accident. For the first time in her experience, Kier Gray had gone to her room instead of summoning her to him. With all the other exits guarded, her one avenue of escape had been cut off.
   She was trapped! Yet she did not regret her action in coming. An imprisoned slan could have no purpose but escape. The seriousness of her position struck deeper instant by instant. To be caught here red-handed – Abruptly, she ceased putting the papers back into the drawer. No time. The men were just beyond the door now.
   With sudden decision she closed the drawer, jerked the papers into a rough pile at one side of the desk and, like a fleeing fawn, rushed to an easy chair. Simultaneously, the door opened, and John Petty came in, followed by Kier Gray. The two men stopped as they saw her. The police chief's handsome face took on a darker color. His eyes narrowed to slits, then his gaze flicked questioningly to the dictator. The leader's eyebrows were lifted quizzically, and there was the faintest hint of irony in the smile that came into his face.
   "Hullo," he said. "What brings you here?"
   Kathleen had come to a decision about that, but before she could speak, John Petty cut in. The man had a beautiful voice when he wanted to use it, and he used it now. He said gently:
   "She's obviously been spying on you, Kier."
   There was something about this man with his incisive logic that brought chilling alarm to the girl. It seemed to be the dark destiny, of the secret-police chief to be present at the critical moments of her life, and she knew with a stiffening of her courage that here was such a moment, and that of all the people in the world, John Petty would strive with the full passion of his hatred for her to make it deadly.
   The police head went on calmly, "Really, Kier, we come dramatically back to what we were discussing. Next week this slan girl will be twenty-one years of age, for all legal purposes an adult. Is she to live on here until she eventually dies of old age a hundred and fifty or some such fantastic term of years from now? Or what?"
   The smile on Kier Gray's face was grimmer. "Kathleen, didn't you know I was at the council meeting?"
   "You bet she knew," John Petty interjected, "and its unexpected ending came as an unpleasant surprise."
   Kathleen said coldly, "I refuse to make replies to any questioning in which that man participates. He's trying to keep his voice calm and logical but, in spite of the queer way in which he hides his thoughts, there is already a distinct glow of excitement streaming from him. And the thought has come to the surface of his mind that at last he will be able to convince you that I ought to be destroyed."
   The leader's face was oddly hostile in the thought-fullness that came into it. Her mind touched lightly at the surface of his brain, and there was a forcing thought there, a developing decision, impossible to read. He said finally:
   "Historically speaking, her charge against you is true, John. Your desire for her death is... er... proved tribute, of course, to your antislan zeal, but a queer fanaticism in so enormously capable a man."
   John Petty seemed to shake off the words in the impatient gesture he made. "The truth is, I want her dead, and I don't want her dead. To me she constitutes a grave menace to the State, located here in the palace and possessing mind-reading ability. I simply want her out of the way; and, being unsentimental about slans, I consider death the most effective method. However, I will not urge such a verdict in view of my reputation for bias in this case. But I seriously think that my suggestion at the meeting today is a good one. She should be moved to a different residence."
   There was no thought near the surface of Kier Gray's mind to suggest that he intended to speak. His gaze was on her with unnecessary steadiness. Kathleen said scathingly:
   "The moment I am removed from this palace, I will be murdered. As Mr. Gray said in effect ten years ago, after your hireling tried to murder me, once a slan is dead, inquiries into the affair are viewed with suspicion."
   She saw that Kier Gray was shaking his head at her. He spoke in the mildest, most unconvincing tone she had ever heard him use. "You assume far too readily, Kathleen, that I cannot protect you. On the whole, I think it is the best plan."
   She stared at him, stiff with dismay. He finished the virtual death sentence, his voice no longer mild, but even-toned, decisive:
   "You will gather your clothes and possessions and prepare yourself for departure in twenty-four hours."
   The shock passed. Her mind grew quite calm. The knowledge that Kier Gray had withdrawn his protection from her was too crystal-clear a realization for her to require any anticlimax of emotional disbelief.
   What astounded her was that there was as yet no evidence on which he could have based a criminal judgment. He hadn't even glanced at the papers she had arranged so hurriedly on the desk. Therefore, his decision was based on the mere fact of her presence here and on John Petty's accusations.
   Which was surprising, because he had in the past defended her from Petty under far more sinister circumstances. And she had come unpunished, unchecked into this study on at least half a dozen other occasions.
   It meant that his decision had been previously made, and therefore was beyond any argument she could hope to offer. She grew aware that there was amazement, too, in John Percy's brain. The man was frowning at his easy victory. The surface of his mind vibrated briefly a small stream of dissatisfaction, then abrupt decision to clinch the matter. His gaze flicked keenly over the room and came to rest ton the desk.
   "The point is, what did she find out while she was alone in your study? What are those papers?" He was not a shy man; and even while he asked the question he was stalking to the desk. As the leader came over behind him, Petty rippled through the sheets. "Hm-m-m, the list of all the old slan hide-outs which we still use for trapping the unorganized slans. Fortunately, there are so many hundreds of them that she couldn't have had time to memorize their names, let alone descriptions of their locations."
   The falseness of his conclusion was not what concerned Kathleen in that moment of discovery. Evidently neither man suspected that not only was the location of every one of the slan hideaways imprinted indelibly on her mind, but that she had an almost photographic record of the alarm systems which the secret police had installed in each unit to warn them when an unsuspecting slan was entering. According to the shrewd analysis of one report, there must be some kind of thought broadcaster which made it possible for strange slans to locate the hiding places. But that was unimportant just now.
   What counted was Kier Gray. The leader was staring curiously at the papers. "This is more serious than I thought," he said slowly, and Kathleen's heart sank. "She's been searching through my desk."
   Kathleen thought tensely: It wasn't necessary for him to let John Petty know that. The old Kier Gray would never have provided her worst enemy with an ounce of ammunition to use against her.
   Kier Gray's eyes were cold as he turned to her. Strangely, the surface of his brain showed as calm and cool as she had ever known it to be. He was, she realized, not angry but, with an icy finality, breaking with her.
   "You will go to your room and pack – and await further instructions."
   She was turning away as John Petty said, "You have said on various occasions, sir, that you were keeping her alive for observation purposes only. If you move her from your presence, that purpose is no longer applicable. Therefore, I hope I am safe in assuming that she will be placed under the protection of the secret police."
   Kathleen shut her mind to their two minds as she closed the door behind her and raced along the corridor to her room. She felt not the vaguest interest in the details of any hypocritical murder plan which might be worked out between the leader and his henchman. Her course was clear. She opened the door leading from her room to one of the main corridors, nodded to the guard, who acknowledged her greeting stiffly – and then she walked calmly to the nearest elevator.
   Theoretically, she was only allowed to go to the five-hundred-foot level, and not to the plane hangars, five hundred feet farther up. But the stocky young soldier who operated the elevator proved no match for the blow that struck him slantingly on the jaw. Like most of the other men, Kathleen saw in his mind, he had never accepted the idea that this tall, slender girl was dangerous to a two-hundred-pound male in the prime of strength. He was unconscious before he discovered his mistake. It was cruel, but she tied his hands and feet with wire and used wire to tie the gag she placed in his mouth.
   Arrived at the roof, she made a brief, thorough mind exploration of the immediate vicinity of the elevator. Finally she opened the door, then swiftly shut it behind her. There was a plane less than thirty feet away. Beyond it was another plane on which three mechanics were working. A soldier was talking to them.
   It took her only ten seconds to walk to the plane and climb in; and she had not picked the brains of air officers for nothing during the long years. The jets hissed, the great machine glided forward and became airborne.
   "Huh," the thoughts of a mechanic came after her, "there goes the colonel again."
   "Probably after another woman." That was the soldier.
   "Yeah," said the second mechanic. Trust that guy to – "
   It took two hours of the swiftest southwest flying to reach the slan hide-out she had selected. Then she set the plane on robot control and watched it fly off into the east. During the days that followed, she watched hungrily for a car. It was on the fifteenth day that a long, black machine purred out of a belt of trees along the ancient roadway and came toward her. Her body tensed. Somehow, she had to get that driver to stop, overpower him, and take his car. Any hour now the secret police would be swooping down – she must get away from here, and fast Eyes fixed on the car, she waited.

Chapter Fourteen

   The flat, wintry vastness of the prairie was behind him at last. Jommy Cross turned more directly east, then south. Far south. And ran into an apparently endless series of police barricades. No effort was made to stop him, and he finally saw in the minds of several men that there was a search on for – a slan girl.
   That hit him with staggering impact Just for a moment, the hope was too big for his mind to accept. And yet, it couldn't be a tendrilless slan woman. Men, who could not recognize slans except by their tendrils, would only be searching for a true slan. Which meant... here was his dream come true.
   Deliberately, he headed for the area which they had orders to surround. He found himself presently off the main highway, following a side road that wound down among tree-filled valleys, and up over tall hills. The morning had been gray, but at noon the sun came out and shone gloriously from a sky of azure blue. His clear-cut impression of being close to the heart of the danger zone was strengthened abruptly as an outside thought touched his mind. It was a gentle pulsation yet so tremendous in its import that his brain rocked.
   "Attention, slans! This is a Porgrave thought-broadcasting machine. Please turn up the side road half a mile ahead. A further message will be given later."
   Jommy stiffened. Soft and insistent, the flowing thought wave of the message beat at him again, gentle as a summer rain: "Attention, slans!... Please turn..."
   He drove on, tense but excited. The miracle had happened. Slans, somewhere near, many of them. Such a thought machine might have been developed by an individual, but the message somehow suggested the presence of a community, and it could be true slans – or could it?
   The swift, sweet flow of his hope became a trickle as he pondered the possibility of a trap. This could easily be a device left over from an old slan settlement. There was no real danger, of course, not with this car to deflect dangerous blows, and his weapons to paralyze the striking power of an enemy. But it was just as well to take into account the possibility that human beings had left a thought-broadcasting machine here as a trap, and that they were now closing in upon it in the belief that someone was hiding there. After all, it was that possibility that had brought him.
   Under his guidance, the beautiful, streamlined car rolled forward. In a minute, Jommy Cross saw the pathway; it was little more than that. The abnormally long car whipped into it and along it. The pathway wound through heavily wooded areas, through several small valleys. It was three miles farther on that the next message brought him to an abrupt stop.
   "This is a Porgrave broadcaster. It directs you, a true slan, to the little farm ahead, which provides entrance to an underground city of factories, gardens and residences. Welcome. This is a Porgrave – "
   There was a great bouncing as the car struck a row of small ridges; and then the machine broke through a thick hedge of yielding willows and emerged into a shallow clearing. Jommy Cross found himself staring across a weed-grown yard to where a weather-beaten farmhouse drooped beside two other age-weary buildings, a barn and a garage. Windowless, unpointed, the rickety old two-story house gaped sightlessly at him. The barn tottered like the ancient hulk that it was; its roller door hooked on one roller only, and the other end edged deep into the forsaken soil.
   His gaze flashed briefly to the garage, then away, then back again thoughtfully. There was the same appearance of something long dead – and yet it was different The subtle difference grew on him, bringing interest in its wake. The garage seemed to totter, but it was by design, not through decay. There were hard metals here, rigidly set against the elements.
   The apparently broken doors leaned heavily against the ground, yet opened lightly before the pressing fingers of the tall, lithely built young woman in a gray dress who came out and gazed at him with a dazzling smile.
   She had flashing eyes, this girl, and a finely molded, delicately textured face, and because his mind was always held on a tight band of thought, she came out thinking he was a human being.
   And she was a slan!
   And he was a slan!
   For Jommy Cross, who had searched the world with caution for so many long years, his mind always alert, the shock and recovery from the shock were almost simultaneous. He had known that someday this would happen; that someday he would meet another slan. But for Kathleen, who had never had to conceal her thoughts, the surprise was devastating. She fought for control and found herself uncontrollable. The little-used shield was suddenly, briefly, unusable.
   There was a noble pride in the rich flow of thought matter that streamed from her mind in that instant when her brain was like an open, unprotected book. Pride, and a golden humility. Humility based on a deep sensitivity, an immense understanding that equaled his own, yet lacked the tempering of unending struggle and danger. There was a warm good-heartedness in her that had nevertheless known resentment and tears, and faced limitless hate.
   And then her mind closed tight, and she stood wide-eyed, looking at him. After a long moment she unlocked her mind and let a thought reach out to him:
   "We mustn't stay here. I've been here too long already. You probably saw in my mind about the police, so the best thing we can do is to drive away immediately."
   He just stood there, gazing at her with shining eyes. Each passing second, his mind expanded more, his whole body felt warm with joy. It was like an intolerable weight lifting. All these years everything had depended on him. The great weapon he held in trust for that future world he sometimes dreamed of hung suspended like a monstrous sword of Damocles over the destiny of human being and slan alike by the single, fragile thread of his life. And now, there would be two life threads to control it.
   It was not a thought, but an emotion; all sad, sweet, glorious emotion. A man and a woman, alone in the world, meeting like this, just as his father and mother had met long ago. He smiled reminiscently and opened his mind wide to her. He shook his head.
   "No, not right away. I caught a flash from your mind about the machines in the cave city, and I would like to have a look at them. Heavy machinery is my greatest lack." He smiled reassuringly. "Don't worry too much about the danger. I have some weapons that human beings cannot match, and this car is a very special means of escape. It can go practically anywhere. I hope there is room for it in the cave."
   "Oh, yes. First you go down by a series of elevators. Then you can drive anywhere. But we mustn't delay. We – "
   Jommy Cross laughed happily. "No buts!" he said.
   Later, Kathleen repeated her doubts: "I really don't think we ought to stay. I can see in your mind about your marvelous weapons, and that your car is made of a metal you call ten-point steel. But you also have a tendency to discount human beings. You mustn't! In their fight against slans, men like John Petty have had their brains keyed to a pitch of abnormal power. And John Petty will stop at nothing to destroy me. Even now his net must be tightening systematically around the various slan hiding places where I might be." Johnny Cross stared at her with troubled eyes. All around was the silence of the cave city: the once white walls that pushed bravely up to the cracking ceiling, the row on row of pillars, bent and worn more from the weight of years than from the heavy earth that pressed them down. To his left he could see the beginning of the great expanse of artificial garden and the gleaming underground stream that fed water to this little sub-world. To his right stretched the long row of apartment doors, the plastic walls still gleaming dully.
   A people had lived here and had been driven forth by their remorseless enemies, but the menacing atmosphere of the flight seemed to linger still. Looking around, Jommy guessed that the settlement had been evacuated not less than twenty-five years before; it all still seemed very near and deadly. His thought answer to Kathleen reflected the grim threat of that lowering danger.
   "By all the laws of logic, we have only to be on the alert for outside thoughts and stay within a few hundred yards of my car to be absolutely safe. Yet I'm alarmed by your intuition of danger. Please search your brain and try to discover the basis for your fear. I can't do it for you as well as you can do it for yourself."
   The girl was silent. Her eyes closed. Her shield went up. She sat there beside him in the car, looking strangely like a beautiful overgrown child fallen asleep. Finally her sensitive lips twitched. For the first time she spoke aloud.
   "Tell me, what is ten-point steel?"
   "Ah," said Jommy Cross in satisfaction, "I'm beginning to understand the psychological factors involved. Mental communication has many advantages, but it cannot convey the extent, for instance, of a weapon's power as well as a picture on a piece of paper, or not even as well as by word of mouth. Power, size, strength and similar images do not transmit well."
   "Go on."
   "Everything I've done," Jommy Cross explained, "has been based on my father's great discovery of the first law of atomic energy – concentration as opposed to the old method of diffusion. So far as I know, Father never suspected the metal-strengthening possibilities, but, like all research workers who come after the great man and his basic discovery, I concentrated on details of development, based partly on his ideas, partly on ideas that progressively suggested themselves.
   "All metals are held together by atomic tensions, which comprise the theoretical strength of that metal. In the case of steel, I called this theoretical potential one-point. As a comparison, when steel was first invented its strength was about two-thousand-point. New processes rapidly increased this to around one-thousand, then, over a period of hundreds of years, to the present human level of seven-hundred-and-fifty.
   "Tendrilless slans have made five-hundred-point steel, but even that incredibly hard stuff cannot compare with the product of my application of atomic strain, which changes the very structure of the atoms and produces the almost perfect ten-point steel. An eighth of an inch of ten-point can stop the most powerful explosive known to human beings and tendrilless slans!"
   Briefly, he described his attempted trip to the Moon and the mine that sent him scurrying home, badly smashed. He concluded: "The important tiling to remember there is that an atomic bomb obviously big enough to blow up a giant battleship did not penetrate a foot of ten-point, though the hull was badly dented and the engine room a shambles from transmitted shock."
   Kathleen was gazing at him, her eyes shining. "What a silly fool I am," she breathed. "I've met the greatest living slan and I'm trying to fill him with the fears gathered from twenty-one years of living with human beings and then' comparatively infinitesimal powers and forces."
   Jommy Cross shook his head smilingly. "The great man is not me, but my father – though he had his faults, too, the biggest one being lack of adequate self-protection. But that's true genius." The smile faded. "I'm afraid, though, that we'll have to make frequent visits, to this cave, and every one will be just as dangerous as this one. I have met John Petty very briefly, and what I've seen in your mind only adds to a picture of a ruthlessly thorough man. I know he's keeping a watch on this place, but really we cannot allow ourselves to be frightened by such a prospect. We'll stay only till dark this time – just long enough for me to examine the machinery. There's some food in the car that we can cook after I've had a little sleep. I'll sleep in the car, of course. But first, the machinery!"
   Everywhere the big machines sprawled, like corpses, silent and moldering. Blast furnaces, great stamping machines, lathes, saws, countless engined tools, a half-mile row on tight row of machines, about thirty per cent completely out of commission, twenty per cent partially useless, and the rest usuable up to a point.
   The unwinking, glareless lights made a shadowed world as they wandered along that valley of broken floor in and out among the machine hills. Jommy Cross was thoughtful.
   'There's more here than I imagined – everything I have always needed. I could build a great battleship with the scrap metal alone; and they probably use it only as a means of trapping slans." His thought narrowed on her mind: "Tell me, you're sure there are only two entrances to this city?"
   "There are only two entrances given on the list in Kier Gray's desk – and I've located no others."
   He was silent, but he did not conceal the tenor of his thoughts from her. "Foolish of me to think again of your intuition, but I don't like to let a possible menace out of my mind till I've examined every connective probability."
   "If there's a secret entrance," Kathleen volunteered, "it would take us hours to find it, and if we found one, we couldn't be sure there wouldn't be others, and so we'd feel no more secure. I still believe we should leave immediately."
   Jommy Cross shook his head decisively. "I didn't let you see this in my mind before, but the main reason I don't want to leave here is that, until your face is disguised and your tendrils are hidden by false hair – a really difficult job – this is the safest place for both of us. Every highway is being watched by the police. Most of them know they're looking for a slan, and they have your picture. I turned off the main road in the hope of being able to find you before they did."
   "Your machine goes up, doesn't it?" Kathleen asked.
   Jommy Cross smiled mirthlessly. "Seven hours yet till dark; and every other minute we'd run into a plane. Imagine what the pilots would radio to the nearest military airport when they saw an automobile flying through the air. And if we go higher, say fifty miles, well surely be seen by a tendrilless slan patrol ship.
   "The first commander will realize instantly who it is, report our position and attack. I've got the weapons to destroy him, but I won't be able to destroy the dozens of ships that follow – at least not before potent forces strike this car so hard that concussion alone will kill us. And besides, I cannot willfully put myself in a position where I may have to kill anybody. I've killed only three men in my life, and every day since then my reluctance to destroy human beings has grown until now it is one of the strongest forces in me – so strong that I have based my whole plan for finding the true slans on an analysis of that one dominant trait"
   The girl's thought brushed his mind, light as a breath of air. "You have a plan for finding the true slans?" she questioned.
   He nodded. "Yes. It's really very simple. All the true slans I have ever met – my father, my mother, myself, and now you – have been goodhearted, kindly people. This in spite of human hatred, human efforts to destroy us. I cannot believe that we four are exceptions; and therefore there must be some reasonable explanation of all the monstrous acts which true slans seem to be committing."
   He smiled briefly. "It's probably presumptuous of me even to have a thought on the subject at my age and limited development. Anyway, I'm afraid it's been an utter failure so far. And I mustn't make a major move in the game until I've taken further defensive action against the tendrilless slans."
   Kathleen's eyes were fixed on him. She nodded agreement "I can see too," she said, "why we must stay longer."
   Queerly, he wished she hadn't brought up that subject again. For the barest moment (he hid the thought from her) he had a premonition of incredible danger. So incredible that logic brushed it aside. The vague backwash of it remained – made him say: "Just stay near the car and keep your mind alert. After all, we can spot a human being a quarter of a mile away even while we're sleeping,"
   Oddly enough, it didn't sound the slightest bit reassuring.
   At first Jommy Cross only dozed. He must have been partly awake for some minutes, because though his eyes were closed he was aware of her mind near him, and that she was reading one of his books. Once, so light was his sleep, the question came into his mind:
   "The ceiling lights – do they stay on all the time?"
   She must have reached softly into his brain with the answer, for suddenly he knew that the lights had been on ever since she came, and must have been like that for hundreds of years.
   There was a question in her mind, and his brain answered: "No, I won't eat until I've had some sleep."
   Or was that just a memory of something previously spoken?
   Still he wasn't quite asleep, for a queer, glad thought welled up from deep inside him. It was wonderful to have found another slan at last, such a gorgeously beautiful girl.
   And such a fine-looking young man.
   Was that his thought, or hers, he wondered sleepily.
   It was mine, Jommy.
   What a rich joy it was to be able to entwine your mind with another sympathetic brain so intimately that the two streams of thought seemed one, and question and answer and all discussion included instantly all the subtle overtones that the cold medium of words could never transmit. Were they in love? How could two people simply meet and be in love when, for all they knew, there were millions of slans in the world, among whom might be scores of other men and women they might have chosen under other conditions?
   It's more than that, Jommy. All our lives we've been alone in a world of alien men. To find kindred at last is a special joy, and meeting all the slans in the world afterward will not be the same. We're going to share hopes and doubts, dangers and victories. Above all, we will create a child. You see, Jommy, I have already adjusted my whole being to a new way of living. Is not that true love?
   He thought it was, and was conscious of great happiness. But when he slept, the happiness seemed no longer there – only a blackness that became an abyss down which he was peering into illimitable depths.
   He awakened with a start. His narrowed, alert eyes flashed to where Kathleen had been sitting. The reclining chair was empty. His sharpened mind, still in the thrall of his dream, reached out.
   "Kathleen!"
   Kathleen came to the door of the machine "I was looking at some of this metal, trying to imagine what would be most immediately useful to you." She stopped, smiling, and corrected herself. "To us."
   Jommy Cross lay very still for a moment, reaching out with his mind, intently exploring, unhappy that she had left the car even for a moment. He divined that she came from a less tense atmosphere than himself. She had had freedom of movement and there had been, despite occasional threats, certainties that she could depend upon. In his own grim existence, an ever-present reality was that death could result from the tiniest letdown in caution. Every move had to include a calculated risk.
   It was a pattern to which Kathleen would have to accustom herself. Boldness in carrying out a purpose in the face of danger was one thing. Carelessness was quite another.
   Kathleen said cheerfully, I'll make something to eat while you quickly pick out a few things you want to take along. It must be dark outside by now."...
   Jommy Cross glanced at his chronometer, and nodded. In two hours it would be midnight. The darkness would conceal their flight. He said slowly, "Where's the nearest kitchen?"
   "Just along there." She motioned with one arm, vaguely indicating a long line of doors.
   "How far?"
   "About a hundred feet." She frowned. "Now, look, Jommy, I can sense how anxious you are. But if we're going to be a team, one of us has to do one thing while the other does something else."
   He watched her go uneasily, wondering if the acquisition of a partner would be good for his nerves. He who had hardened himself against any danger to himself must accustom himself to the idea that she also would have to take risks.
   Not that there was any danger at the moment. The hide-out was silent. Not a sound and, except for Kathleen, not a whisper of thought came from anywhere. The hunters, the searchers and the erecters of barriers that he had seen all through the day must be home by now, asleep, or about to retire.
   He watched Kathleen go through a doorway, and estimated that it was nearer a hundred and fifty feet And he was climbing out of the car when a thought came from her on a strange, high, urgent vibration:
   "Jommy – the wall's opening! Somebody – "
   Abruptly, her own thought broke off and she was transmitting a man's words:
   "Well, if it isn't Kathleen," John Petty was saying in cold satisfaction. "And only the fifty-seventh hide-out I've visited. I've been to all of them personally, of course, because few other human beings could keep their minds from warning you of their approach. And besides, nobody could be safely trusted with such an important assignment. What do you think of the psychology of building these secret entrances to the kitchen? Apparently even slans travel on their stomachs;"
   Beneath Jommy Cross' swift fingers, the car leaped forward. He caught Kathleen's reply, cool and unhurried:
   "So you've found me, Mr. Petty." Mockingly. "Am I, then, to beseech your mercy?"
   The icy answer streamed through her mind to Jommy Cross. "Mercy is not my strong point. Nor do I delay when a long-awaited opportunity offers."
   "Jommy, quick!"
   The shot echoed from her mind to his. For a terrible moment of intolerable strain, her mind held off the death that the crashing bullet in her brain had brought. "Oh, Jommy, and we could have been so happy. Goodby, my dearest – "
   In a desperate dismay, he followed the life force as it faded in a flash from her mind. The black-out wall of death suddenly barred his mind from that which had been Kathleen's.

Chapter Fifteen

   There was no thought in Jommy Cross, no haste, no grief, no hope – only his mind receiving impressions and his superlatively responsive body reacting like the perfect physical machine it was. His car braked to a stop; he saw the figure of John Petty standing just beyond Kathleen's crumpled body.
   "By heaven!" snapped from the surface of the man's mind, "another of them!"
   His gun flashed against the impregnable armor of the car. Startled by his failure, the chief of secret police drew back. His lips parted in a cry of rage. For a moment, the dark hatred of man for the encroaching slan enemy seemed personified in his grim countenance, and in the tenseness with which his body seemed to await inevitable death.
   One touch of one button, and he would have been blasted into nothingness. But Jommy Cross made no move, spoke no word. Colder, harder grew his mind as he sat there. His bleak gaze stared impersonally at the man, then at the dead body of Kathleen. And finally the measured thought came that as the sole possessor of the secret of atomic energy he could permit himself no love, no normal life. In all that world of men and slans who hated so savagely, there was for him only the relentless urgency of his high destiny.
   Other men began pouring from the secret entrance, men with machine guns that chattered futilely at his car. And among them he was abruptly aware of the shields that indicated the presence of two tendrilless slans. His searching eyes spotted one of them after a moment, as the man drew into a corner, and whispered a swift message into a wrist radio. The words ran plainly along the surface of his mind:
   " – a 7500 model, 200-inch base... general physique type 7, head 4, chin 4, mouth 3, eyes brown, type 13, eyebrows 13, nose 1, cheeks 6... cut!"
   He could have smashed them all, the whole venal, ghoulish crew. But no thought of vengeance could penetrate the chilled, transcendental region that was his brain. In this mad universe, there was only the safety of his weapon and the certainties that went with it.
   His car backed, and raced off with a speed their legs could not match. Ahead was the tunnel of the underground creek that fed the gardens. He plunged into it, his disintegrators widening nature's crude bed for half a mile. Then he turned down to let the water stream after him and hide his tunnel, then up, so that the water wouldn't have too much space to fill.
   Finally, he leveled off, and plunged on through the darkness of the underground. He couldn't head for the surface yet because the tendrilless slans would have their cruisers waiting to meet just such a possibility.
   Black clouds hid a night world when at last Jommy Cross emerged from the side of a hill. He paused and, with meticulous care, undercut his tunnel, buried it under tons of crashing earth, and soared into the sky. For the second time, he clicked on his tendrilless slan radio; and this time a man's voice broke into the car:
   " – Kier Gray has now arrived and taken possession of the body. It appears that once again the snake organization has allowed one of its own kind to be destroyed without a move to save her, without even the sign of a move. It is time that we drew the proper conclusions from their failures, and ceased to regard any opposition they might offer to our plans as an important factor. However, there is still the incalculable danger presented by the existence of this man Cross. It must be made clear at once that our military operations against Earth will have to be suspended until he is destroyed.
   "His unexpected appearance on the scene today was, therefore, one great advantage we gained from the affair. We have a description of his car and an expert's description of his physique. No matter how he disguises himself he cannot change the bony structure of his face; and even immediate destruction of his car will not destroy the record of the car itself. There were only a few hundred thousand 7500 models sold. His will have been stolen, but it can be traced.
   "Joanna Hillory, who has made a very detailed study of this snake, has been placed in charge. Under her direction, searchers will penetrate every district of every continent. There must be small areas on Earth where we have not penetrated: little valleys, stretches of prairie, particularly farming districts. Such localities must be closed, police cells set up in them.
   "There is no way the snakes can contact him, for we control every avenue of communication. And from this day onward, our watchers will stop every person with his facial physique for examination.
   "That will keep him off the road. That will prevent chance discovery of the snakes, and give us the time we need for our search. However long it may take, we must trace this dangerous slan to where he lives. We cannot fail. This is Great Headquarters signing off."
   The rushing air whined and whistled against the hurtling car there beneath the swarming black clouds. So the war against the human world was now bound up with his own fate, an indefinite reprieve for both. They would find him, of course, these thoroughgoing slans. They had failed once before because of an unknown factor – his weapon – but that was known now; and besides, it was not a factor that would influence their remorseless search. For several minutes, he contemplated the prospective invasion of his valley, and finally emerged with one fact that remained in his favor, one question. Yes, they would find him, but how long would it take?

Chapter Sixteen

   It took four years; and Jommy Cross had been twenty-three for two months on the day when the tendrilless slan organization struck with unexpected, unimaginable violence. He came slowly down the veranda steps on that sultry, oppressively hot day, and paused on the pathway that divided the garden. He was thinking with a quiet, gentle thought of Kathleen, and of his long-dead mother and father. It was not grief or even sadness that swayed him, but a deep, philosophical sense of the profound tragedy of life.
   But no introspection could dull his senses. With abnormal, unhuman clarity he was aware of his surroundings. Of all the developments in himself during those four years, it was this perception of anything that marked his growth toward maturity. Nothing escaped him. Heat waves danced against the lower reaches of the mountain twenty miles away, where his spaceship was hidden. But no heat mist could bar a vision that saw so many more pictures per split second than the human eye could see. Details penetrated, a hard bright pattern formed where a few years before there would have been, even for himself, a blur.
   A squadron of midges swarmed past Granny, where she knelt by a flower bed. The faint life wave of the tiny flies caressed the supersensitive receptors of his brain. As he stood there, sounds from remoteness whispered into his ears. Wisps of thought, shadowed by distance, touched his mind. And gradually, in spite of incredible complexity, a kaleidoscope of the life of his valley grew in his mind, a very symphony of impressions that rounded beautifully into a coherent whole.
   Men and women at work, children at play, laughter; tractors moving, trucks, cars – a little farm community meeting another day in the old, old fashion. He stared again at Granny. Briefly, his mind dissolved into her defenseless brain, and in that instant, so utter was his power of receiving thoughts, it was as if she were another part of his body. A crystal-clear picture of the dark earth she was looking at flashed from her mind to, his. A tall flower, directly under her gaze, loomed big in her mind, and in his. As he watched, her hand came into view, holding a small, black bug. Triumphantly, she squashed the insect, then complacently wiped her stained fingers in the dirt.
   "Granny!" Cross said, "can't you suppress your murderous instincts?"
   The old lady glanced up at him, and there was a belligerent thrust in her wrinkled, kindly face that was reminiscent of the old Granny.
   "Nonsense!" she snapped. "For ninety years now, I've killed the little devils, and my mother before me had it in for 'em too, heh, heh!"
   Her giggle sounded senile. Cross frowned faintly. Granny had thrived physically in this West Coast climate, but he was not satisfied with his hypnotic reconstruction of her mind. She was very old, of course, but her constant use of certain phrases, such as the one about what she, and her mother before her, had done, was too mechanical. He had impressed the idea upon her in the first place to fill the enormous gap left by the uprooting of her own memories, but one of these days he'd have to try again. He started to turn away; and it was at that moment that the warning tingled into his brain, a sharp pulsing of faraway outside thoughts. "Airplanes!" people were thinking. "So many planes!"
   It was years now since Jommy Cross had implanted the hypnotic suggestion that everybody who saw anything unusual in the valley was to signal through their subconscious, without themselves being aware of the act. The fruits of that precaution came now in the wave after wave of warning from dozens of minds.
   And then he saw the planes, specks diving over the mountain heading in his general direction. Like a striking mongoose, his mind lashed out toward them, reaching for the minds of the pilots. Taut-held brain shields of tendrilless slans met that one, searching glance. In full racing stride he snatched Granny from the ground; and then he was in the house. The ten-point steel door of that ten-point steel house swung shut – even as a great, glistening, jet-propelled troop carrier plane settled like a gigantic bird among the flowers of Granny's garden.
   Cross thought tensely: "A plane in every farmyard. That means they don't know exactly which one I'm in. But now the spaceships will arrive to finish the job. Thorough!"
   Well, so had he been thorough, and it was obvious, now that his hand was forced, that he must push his own plan to the limit. He felt supremely confident, and there was still not a doubt in him.
   Doubt and dismay came a minute later, as he stared into his underground visiplate. The battleships and cruisers were there all right, but something else, too – another ship. A ship! The monster filled half the visiplate, and its wheel-shaped bulk sprawled across the lower quarter of the sky. A half-mile circle of ship, ten million tons of metal, floating down fighter than air, like a buoyant flattened balloon, gigantic, immeasurably malignant in its sheer threat of unlimited power.
   It came alive! A hundred-yard beam of white fire flared from its massive wall – and the solid top of the mountain dissolved before that frightful thrust. His mountain, where his ship, his life, was hidden, destroyed by controlled atomic energy.
   Cross stood quite still there on the rug that covered the steel floor of that steel laboratory. Wisps of human in-coherency from every direction fumbled at his brain. He flung up his mind shield, and that distracting confusion of outside thought was cut off abruptly. Behind him, Granny moaned in gentle terror. In the distance above him, sledgehammer blows were lashing at his almost impregnable cottage, but the dim bedlam of noise failed to touch him. He was alone in a world of personal silence, a world of swift, quiet, uninterrupted thought.
   If they were prepared to use atomic energy, why hadn't they pulverized him with bombs? A thousand coordinating thoughts leaped up to form the simple answer. They wanted his perfect type of atomic energy. Their method was not a development of the rather superb, so-called hydrogen bomb of old times, with its heavy water and uranium base, and chain reaction. They had gone back to an even earlier stage, a crude expansion of the cyclotron principle. That alone could explain so much size. Here was a ten-million-ton cyclotron, capable of a wild and deadly spray of energy – and they undoubtedly hoped to use its mobility to force him to give them his priceless secret.
   He whirled toward the instrument board that spread across the entire end of the laboratory. A switch clicked. Pointers set rigid. And dancing needles told the story of a spaceship out there under that dissolving mountain, a ship shuddering with mechanical life, now automatically burrowing deeper into the ground, and at the same time heading unerringly toward this laboratory.
   A dial spun, and a whole bank of needles in their transparent cases danced from zero to the first fractional point, and wavered there. They, also, told a story – the story of atomic projectors rearing up from the ground where they had been hidden so long – and as he grasped the precision instrument that was his aiming device, twenty invincible guns out there swung in perfect synchronization.
   The hairline sights edged along the unmissable spread of the ship's bulk. And paused. What was his purpose against these ruthless enemies? He didn't want to bring that monster machine to earth. He didn't want to create a situation where slans and humans beings might launch into a furious struggle for the possession of the wreck. There was no doubt that the human beings would fight with a fearless ferocity. Their great mobile guns could still hurl shells capable of piercing any metal in the possession of the slans. And if any of those ships with their superior armaments ever fell into human hands, then it would be no time at all before they, also, had spaceships; and the devil's war would be on. No, he didn't want that.
   And he didn't want to destroy the ship because he didn't want to kill the tendrilless slans who were in it. For, after all, tendrilless slans did represent a law and order which he respected. And because they were a great race, and definitely kin to him, they merited mercy.
   Before that clarification, hesitation fled. Straight at the center of that immense cyclotron, Cross aimed his battery of synchronized weapons. His thumb pressed down the-fire button. Above him, the half mile of spiral-shaped ship recoiled like an elephant struck an intolerable blow. It rocked madly, like a ship in stormy seas. And briefly, as it swung sickeningly, he saw blue sky through a gaping hole – and realized his victory.
   He had cut that vast spiral from end to end. In every turn of it now was a hopelessly diffusing leak. No stream of atoms, however accelerated, could run that gauntlet un-mutilated. The power of the cyclotron was smashed. But all the implications of that ship remained. Frowning, Cross watched the ship poise for a moment, shakily. Slowly it began to recede, its antigravity plates apparently full on. Up, up it mounted, growing smaller as it withdrew into the distance.
   At fifty miles it was still bigger than the battleships that were nosing down toward that green, almost unharmed valley. And now the implications were clearer, colder, deadlier. The nature of their attack showed that they must have spotted his activities in this valley months ago.
   Clearly, they had waited until they could approach in one titanic, organized battle, with the purpose of forcing him out where they could follow him night and day by means of their instruments and so, by sheer weight of numbers and guns, destroy him and capture his equipment.
   Dispassionately, Cross turned to Granny. "I'm going to leave you here. Follow my instructions to the letter. Five minutes from now, you will go up the way we came down, closing all the metal doors behind you. You will then forget all about this laboratory. It is going to be destroyed, so you might as well forget. If men question you, you will act senile, but at other times you will be normal. I'm leaving you to face that danger because I'm no longer sure, in spite of my precautions, that I can come out of this alive."
   He felt a chill, impersonal interest in the knowledge that the day of action had arrived. The tendrilless slans might intend this attack on him to be but part of a vaster design that included their long-delayed assault on Earth. Whatever happened, his plans were as complete as he could make them; and though it was years too soon, he must now force the issue to the limit of his power. He was on the run, and there could be no turning back – for behind him was swift death!
   Cross' ship nosed out of the little river and launched toward space on a long, slanting climb. It was important that he should not become invisible until the slans actually saw that he was out of the valley, before they had razed it in futile search. But first, there was one thing he must do.
   His hand plunged home a switch. His narrowed gaze fastened on the rear visiplate, which showed the valley falling away below. At a score of points on that green floor (he counted them in lightning calculation) white flame blazed up in a strange, splotchy-looking fire. Down there, every weapon, every atomic machine, was turning on itself. Fire chambers were burning out, metal running molten in that devouring violence of energy.
   The white glow was still there as he turned away a few seconds later, grimly content Now let them search through that ravaged, twisted metal. Let their scientists labor to bring to life a secret they craved so desperately, and to obtain which they had come out where human beings could see some of their powers. In every burned-out cache in that valley, they would find exactly nothing!
   The destruction of all that was so precious to the attackers required a fraction of a minute but in that time he was seen. Four dead-black battleships turned toward him simultaneously – and then hovered uncertainly as he actuated the mechanism that made his vessel invisible.
   Abruptly, their possession of atom-energy detectors was shown. The ships fell in behind him unerringly. Alarm bells showed others ahead, closing toward him. It was only the unmatchable atomic drivers that saved him from that vast fleet. There were so many vessels that he could not even begin to count them, and all that could come near turned their deadly projectors where their instruments pointed. They missed because during the very instant they spotted him, his machine flashed out of range of their most massive guns.
   Completely invisible, traveling at many miles per second, his ship headed for Mars! He must have hurtled through mine fields, but that didn't matter now. The devouring disintegration rays that poured out from the walls of his great machine ate up mines-before they could explode, and simultaneously destroyed every light-wave that would have revealed his craft to alert eyes out there in the blaze of Sun.
   There was only one difference. The mines were smashed before they reached his ship. Light, being in a wave state as it flashed up, could be destroyed only during that fraction of instant when it touched his ship and started to bounce. At the very moment of bouncing, its speed reduced, the corpuscles that basically composed it lengthened according to the laws of the Lorentz-FitzGerald contraction theory – at that instant of almost quiescence, the fury of the Sun's rays was blotted out by the disintegrators.
   And, because light must touch the walls first, and so could be absorbed as readily as ever, his visiplates were unaffected. The full picture of everything came through even as he hurtled on, unseen, invisible. His ship seemed to stand still in the void, except that gradually Mars became larger. At a million miles, it was a great, glowing ball as big as the Moon seen from Earth; and it grew like an expanding balloon until its dark bulk filled half the sky, and lost its redness.
   Continents took form, mountains, seas, incredible gorges, rock-strewn and barren stretches of flat land. Grimmer grew the picture, deadlier every forsaken aspect of that gnarled old planet. Mars, seen through an electric telescope at thirty thousand miles, was like a too-old human being, withered, bony, ugly, cold-looking, drooling with age, enormously repellent.
   The dark area that was Mare Cimmerium showed as a fanged, terrible sea* [*The same legend that had portrayed man or slan as once having spaceships whispered the myth that huge ice or oxygen meteorites from Jupiter and Saturn – comprising thousands of cubic miles of frozen water and frozen air – had been guided toward all the potentially habitable planets, and exploded. This immense debris, falling onto the barren worlds of Mars, Venus, and some of the moons of Jupiter, created – it was said – oceans and vast atmospheres where none, or at least nothing worthwhile, had been before.] . Silent, almost tideless, the waters lay under the eternal blue-dark skies; but no ship could ever breast those placid waters. Endless miles of jagged rocks broke the surface. There were no patterns, no channels, simply the sea and the protruding rock. Finally, Cross saw the city, making a strange, shimmering picture under its vast roof of glass; then a second city, showed, and a third.
   Far, far past Mars he plunged, his motors dead, not the tiniest amount of atomic energy diffusing from any part of his ship. That was caution, pure and simple. There could be no fear of detector instruments in these vast distances. At last, the gravitational field of the planet began to check his flight. Slowly, the long machine yielded to the inexorable pull and began to fall toward the night side of the globe. It was a slow task. Earth days fled into Earth weeks. But finally he turned on, not his atomic energy, but the antigravity plates which he had not used since he had installed his atomic drives.
   For days and days then, while centrifugal action of the planet cushioned his swift fall, he sat without sleep, staring into the visiplates. Five times the ugly balls of dark metal that were mines flashed toward him. Each time he actuated for brief seconds his all-devouring wall disintegrators – and waited for the ships that might have spotted his momentary use of force. A dozen times, his alarm bells clanged, and lights flashed on his visiplates, but no ships came within range. Below him, the planet grew vast, and filled every horizon with its dark immensity. There were not many landmarks on this night portion aside from the cities. Here and there, however, splashes of light showed some kind of habitation and activity, and at last he found what he wanted. A mere dot of flame, like a candle fluttering in remote darkness.
   It turned out to be a small mine, and the light came from the little house, where the four tendrilless slans who attended the mine's completely automatic machinery lived. It was almost dark before Cross returned to his ship, satisfied that this was what he wanted.
   A mist of blackness lay like a black cloth over the planet the following night when, once again, Cross landed his ship in the ravine that led toward the mine head. Not a shadow stirred. Not a sound invaded the silence as he edged forward to the mouth of the mine. Gingerly, he took out one of the metal cases which protected his hypnotism crystals, inserted the atomically unstable, glasslike object into a crack of the rock entrance – jerked off the protective covering and raced off before his own body could affect the sluggish thing. In the black of the ravine, he waited.
   In twenty minutes, a door of the cottage opened. The flood of light from within revealed the outlines of a tall young man. Then the door closed; a torch blazed in the hand of the shadowed figure, glared along the path he was following, and brought a flash of reflected flame from the hypnotism crystal. The man walked toward it curiously, and stooped to examine it. His thoughts ran along the surface of his casually protected mind.
   "Funny! That crystal wasn't there this morning." He shrugged. "Some rock probably jarred loose, and the crystal was behind it."
   He stared at it, abruptly startled by its fascination. Suspicion leaped into his alert mind. He pondered the thing with a cold, tense logic. And dived for the shelter of the cavern as Cross' paralyzing ray flicked at him from the ravine. He fell unconscious just inside the cave.
   Cross rushed forward, and in a few minutes had the man far down the ravine, out of all possible earshot of the mine. But even during those first minutes, his mind was reaching through the other's shattered mind shield, searching. It was slow work, because moving around in an unconscious mind was like walking under water, there was so much resistance. But suddenly, he found what he was seeking, the corridor made by the man's sharp awareness of the pattern of the crystal.
   Swiftly, Cross followed the mind path to its remote end in the complex root-sources of the brain. A thousand paths streamed loosely before him, scattering in every direction. Grimly, with careful yet desperate speed, he followed them, ignoring the obviously impossible ones. And then, once more, like a burglar who opens safes by listening for the faint click that reveals he has reached another stage in the solution of the combination, once more a key corridor stretched before him.
   Eight key paths, fifteen minutes, and the combination was his, the brain was his. Under his ministrations the man, whose name was Miller, revived with a gasp. Instantly, he closed the shield tight over his mind.
   Cross said, "Don't be so illogical. Lower your shield."
   The shield went down; and in the darkness the surprised tendrilless slan stared at him, astonishment flaming through his mind.
   "Hypnotized, by heaven!" he said wonderingly. "How the devil did you do it?"
   "The method can be used only by true slans," Cross replied coolly, "so explanations would be useless."
   "A true slan!" the other said slowly. "Then you're Cross!"
   "I'm Cross."
   "I suppose you know what you're doing," Miller went on, "but I don't see how you expect to gain anything by your control of me."
   Abruptly, Miller's mind realized the strangeness, the eeriness of the conversation there in that dark ravine, under the black, mist-hidden sky. Only one of the two moons of Mars was visible, a blurred, white shape that gleamed remotely from the vast vault of heaven. He said quickly:
   "How is it that I can talk to you, reason with you? I thought hypnotism was a mind-dulling thing."
   "Hypnotism," Cross cut in without pausing in his swift exploration of the other's brain, "is a science that involves many factors. Full control permits the subject apparently complete freedom, except that his will is under absolute outside domination. But there is no time to waste." His voice grew sharper, and his brain withdrew from the other. "Tomorrow is your day off. You will go to the Bureau of Statistics and ascertain the name and present location of every man with my physical structure."
   He stopped, because Miller was laughing softly. His mind and voice said, "Good heavens, man, I can tell you that right now. They were all spotted after your description came through several years ago. They're always under observation; they're all married men and – " His voice trailed off.
   Sardonically, Cross said, "Go on!"
   Miller went on, reluctantly. "There are twenty-seven men, all together, who resemble you in very great detail, a surprisingly high average." "Go on!"
   "One of them," said Miller disconsolately, "is married to a woman whose head was badly injured in a spaceship accident last week. They're building up her brain and bone again, but – "
   "But that will take a few weeks," Cross finished for him. "The man's name is Barton Corliss. He's located at the Cimmerium spaceship factory and, like yourself, goes into the city Cimmerium every fourth day."
   "There ought to be an enforceable law," Miller said glumly, "against people who can read minds. Fortunately, the Porgrave receivers will spot you," he finished more cheerfully.
   "Eh?" Cross spoke sharply. He had already noticed about mind reading in Millers mind, but it had not seemed applicable. And there had been other, more important things to follow up.
   Coolly, Miller said, and his thoughts verified every word of it: "The Porgrave broadcaster broadcasts thoughts, and the Porgrave receiver receives them. In Cimmerium, there's one located every few feet; they're in all the buildings, houses, everywhere. They're our protection against snake spies. One indiscreet thought, and finish!"
   Cross was silent. At last he said, "One more question, and I want your mind to give off a lot of thoughts on this. I want detail."
   "Yes?"
   "How imminent is the attack on Earth?"
   "It has been decided," Miller replied precisely, "that in view of the failure to destroy you and obtain your secret, control of Earth has become essential, the purpose being to forestall any future danger from anybody. To this end vast reserves of spaceships are being turned out; the fleet is mobilizing at key points, but the date of attack, though probably decided on, has not yet been announced."
   "What have they planned to do with human beings?"
   "To hell with human beings!" Miller said coolly. "When our own existence is involved, we can't worry about them."
   The darkness all around seemed deeper, the chill of the night beginning to penetrate even his heated clothes. Instant by instant, Cross' mind grew harder as he examined the implications of Miller's words. War! In a bleak voice, he said:
   "Only with the help of the true slans can that attack be stopped. I must find them – somewhere – and I've exhausted most of the possibilities. I am now going to the most likely remaining place."
   The morning dragged. The sun gleamed like a festering sore in the blue-black vastness of the sky. And the sharp, black shadows that it cast on the land grew narrow, and then began to lengthen again as Mars turned an unfriendly afternoon face to the insistent light.
   From where Cross' ship crouched in the great chalk cliff, the horizon was a thing of blurred ridges against the shadowed sky. But even from his two-thousand-foot height, the nearness of the horizon was markedly noticeable. Twilight threatened, and then at last his patient vigil was rewarded. The small, red-striped, torpedo-shaped object drifted up from the horizon, fire pouring from its rear. The rays of the sinking sun glinted on its dull, metallic skin. It darted far to the left of where Cross waited in his machine that, like some beast of prey, lay entunneled in the swelling breast of the white cliff.
   About three miles, Cross estimated carefully. The actual bulk of the intervening distance would make no difference to the motor that lay silent in the engine room in the back of the ship, ready to give forth its noiseless, stupendous power.
   Three hundred miles, and that superb motor would vibrate on without strain, without missing a single beat – except that such titanic force could not be unleashed where its strength might touch ground, and tear a swath out of this already tortured land.
   Three miles, four, five – he made swift adjustments. Then the force of the magnetors flashed across the miles and, simultaneously, the idea he had developed during his long trip from Earth took life from a special engine. Radio waves, so similar to the vibrations of energy he was using that only an extremely sensitive instrument could have detected the difference, sprayed forth from a robot motor that he had set up five hundred miles away. For those brief minutes, the whole planet sighed with energy waves. Out there somewhere tendrilless slans must already be plotting the center of that interfering wave. Meantime, his small use of power should go unnoticed. Swiftly, yet gently, the magnetors did their work. The faraway, still receding ship slowed as if it had run into resistance. It slowed – and then was drawn inexorably back toward the chalk cliff.
   Effortlessly, using the radio waves as a screen for further use of power, Cross withdrew his own ship into the cliff's bulging belly, widening the natural tunnel with a spray of dissolving energy. Then, like a spider with a fly, he pulled the smaller machine into the lair after him.
   In a moment a door opened, and a man appeared. He leaped lightly to the tunnel floor, and stood for a moment peering against the glare of the searchlight of the other ship. With easy confidence, he walked closer. His eyes caught the gleam of the crystal in the dank wall of the cave. He glanced at it casually, then the very abnormality of a thing that could distract his attention at such a moment penetrated to his consciousness. As he plucked it out of the wall, Cross' paralyzing ray sent him sprawling.
   Instantly, Cross clicked off all power. A switch closed; and the distant robot atomic-wave broadcaster dissolved in the fire of its own energy.
   As for the man, all Cross wanted from him this time was a full-length photograph, a record of his voice, and hypnotic control. It took only twenty minutes before Corliss was flying off again toward Cimmerium, inwardly raging against his enslavement, outwardly unable to do anything about it.
   There could be no hurrying of what Cross knew he must do before he could dare enter Cimmerium. Everything had to be anticipated, an almost unlimited amount of detail painstakingly worked out. Every fourth day – his holiday – Corliss called at the cave, coming and going, and as the urgent weeks passed, his mind was drained of memory, of detail. Finally, Cross was ready, and the next, the seventh holiday, his plans came to life. One Barton Corliss remained in the cave, deep in hypnotic sleep; the other one climbed into the small, red-striped craft and sped toward the city of Cimmerium.
   It was twenty minutes later that the battleship flashed down from the sky, and loomed up beside him, a vast mass of streamlined metal ship.
   "Corliss," said a man's clipped voice in the ship's radio, "in the course of normal observation of all slans resembling the snake, Jommy Cross, we waited for you at this point, and find that you are approximately five minutes overdue.
   "You will accordingly proceed to Cimmerram under escort, where you will be taken before the military commission for examination. That is all."