Frowning, Dr. Ito Yasumi said, “I have now made my examination, Hada.” He began putting away his battery of cards. “This Rags Park is neither telepath or precog; he neither reads my mind nor cognates what is to be and, frankly, Hada, although I still sense psi power about him, I have no idea what it might be.”
   Hada listened in silence. Now Rags Park, this time with a guitar over his shoulder, wandered in from the other room. It seemed to amuse him that Dr. Yasumi could make nothing of him; he grinned at both of them and then seated himself. “I’m a puzzle,” he said to Hada. “Either you got too much when you hired me or not enough… but you don’t know which and neither does Dr. Yasumi or me.”
   “I want you to start at once over CULTURE,” Hada told him impatiently. “Make up and sing folk ballads that depict the unfair imprisonment and harassment of Jim-Jam Briskin by Leon Lait and his FBI. Make Lait appear a monster; make Fischer appear a scheming, greedy boob. Understand?”
   “Sure,” Rags Park said, nodding. “We got to get public opinion aroused. I knew that when I signed; I ain’t just entertaining no more.”
   Dr. Yasumi said to Rags, “Listen, I have favor to ask. Make up folk-style ballad telling how Jim-Jam Briskin get out of jail.”
   Both Hada and Rags Park glanced at him.
   “Not about what is,” Yasumi explained, “but about that which we want to be.”
   Shrugging, Park said, “Okay.”
   The door to Hada’s office burst open and the chief of his bodyguards, Dieter Saxton, put his head excitedly in. “Mr. Hada, we just gunned down a woman who was trying to get through to you with a homemade bomb. Do you have a moment to identify her? We think maybe it’s—I mean it was—one of your wives.”
   “God in heaven,” Hada said, and hurried along with Saxton from the office and down the corridor.
   There on the floor, near the front entrance of the demesne, lay a woman he knew. Zoe, he thought. He knelt down, touched her.
   “Sorry,” Saxton mumbled. “We had to, Mr. Hada.”
   “All right,” he said. “I believe you if you say so.” He greatly trusted Saxton; after all, he had to.
   Saxton said, “I think from now on you better have one of us close by you at all times. I don’t mean outside your office; I mean within physical touch.”
   “I wonder if Max Fischer sent her here,” Hada said.
   “The chances are good,” Saxton said. “I’d make book on it.”
   “Just because I’m trying to get Jim-Jam Briskin released.” Hada was thoroughly shaken. “It really amazes me.” He rose to his feet unsteadily.
   “Let me go after Fischer,” Saxton urged in a low voice. “For your protection. He has no right to be President; Unicephalon 40-D is our only legal President and we all know Fischer put it out of commission.”
   “No,” Hada murmured. “I don’t like murder.”
   “It’s not murder,” Saxton said. “It’s protection for you and your wives and children.”
   “Maybe so,” Hada said, “but I still can’t do it. At least not yet.” He left Saxton and made his way with difficulty back to his office, where Rags Park and Dr. Yasumi waited.

   “We heard,” Yasumi said to him. “Bear up, Hada. The woman was a paranoid schizophrenic with delusions of persecution; without psychotherapy it was inevitable that she would meet a violent death. Do not blame yourself or Mr. Saxton.”
   Hada said, “And at one time I loved that woman.”
   Dolefully strumming on his guitar, Rags Park sang to himself; the words were not audible. Perhaps he was practicing on his ballad of Jim Briskin’s escape from jail.
   “Take Mr. Saxton’s advice,” Dr. Yasumi said. “Protect yourself at all times.” He patted Hada on the shoulder.
   Rags spoke up, “Mr. Hada, I think I’ve got my ballad now. About—”
   “I don’t want to hear it,” Hada said harshly. “Not now.” He wished the two of them would leave; he wanted to be by himself.
   Maybe I should fight back, he thought. Dr. Yasumi recommends it; now Dieter Saxton recommends it. What would Jim-Jam recommend? He has a sound mind… he would say, Don’t employ murder. I know that would be his answer; I know him.
   And if he says not to, I won’t.
   Dr. Yasumi was instructing Rags Park, “A ballad, please, about that vase of gladioli over there on the bookcase. Tell how it rise up straight in the air and hover; all right?”
   “What kind of ballad is that?” Rags said. “Anyhow, I got my work cut out for me; you heard what Mr. Hada said.”
   “But I’m still testing you,” Dr. Yasumi grumbled.

   To his cousin the Attorney General, Max Fischer said disgustedly, “Well, we didn’t get him.”
   “No, Max,” Leon Lait agreed. “He’s got good men in his employ; he’s not an individual like Briskin, he’s a whole corporation.”
   Moodily, Max said, “I read a book once that said if three people are competing, eventually two of them will join together and gang up on the third one. It’s inevitable. That’s exactly what’s happened; Hada and Briskin are buddies, and I’m alone. We have to split them apart, Leon, and get one of them on our side against the other. Once Briskin liked me. Only he disapproved of my methods.”
   Leon said, “Wait’ll he hears about Zoe Hada trying to kill her ex-husband; then Briskin’ll really disapprove of you.”
   “You think it’s impossible to win him over now?”
   “I sure do, Max. You’re in a worse position than ever, regarding him. Forget about winning him over.”
   “There’s some idea in my mind, though,” Max said. “I can’t quite make out what it is yet, but it has to do with freeing Jim-Jam in the hopes that he’ll feel gratitude.”
   “You’re out of your mind,” Leon said. “How come you ever thought of an idea like that? It isn’t like you.”
   “I don’t know,” Max groaned. “But there it is.”

   To Sebastian Hada, Rags Park said, “Uh, I think maybe I got me a ballad now, Mr. Hada. Like Dr. Yasumi suggested. It has to do with telling how Jim-Jam Briskin gets out of jail. You want to hear it?”
   Dully, Hada nodded. “Go ahead.” After all, he was paying the folksinger; he might as well get something for his money.
   Twanging away, Rags sang:


“Jim-Jam Briskin languished in jail,
Couldn’t find no one to put up his bail.
Blame Max Fischer! Blame Max Fischer!”


   Rags explained, “That’s the chorus, ‘Blame Max Fischer!’ Okay?”
   “All right,” Hada said, nodding.


“The Lord came along, said, Max, I’m mad.
Casting that man in jail, that was bad.
Blame Max Fischer! the good Lord cried.
Poor Jim Briskin, his rights denied.
Blame Max Fischer! I’m here to tell;
Good Lord say, Him go straight to hell.
Repent, Max Fischer! There’s only one route:
Get on my good side; let Jim-Jam out.”


   Rags explained to Hada, “Now here’s what’s going to happen.” He cleared his throat:


“Bad Max Fischer, he saw the light,
Told Leon Lait, We got to do right.
Sent a message down to turn that key,
Open that door and let Jim-Jam free.
Old Jim Briskin saw an end to his plight;
Jail door open now, lets in the light.


   “That’s all,” Rags informed Hada. “It’s a sort of holler type of folk song, a spiritual where you tap your foot. Do you like it?”
   Hada managed to nod. “Oh sure. Anything’s fine.”
   “Shall I tell Mr. Kaminsky you want me to air it over CULTURE?”
   “Air away,” Hada said. He did not care; the death of Zoe still weighed on his mind—he felt responsible, because after all it had been his bodyguards who had done it, and the fact that Zoe had been insane, had been trying to destroy him, did not seem to matter. It was still a human life; it was still murder. “Listen,” he said to Rags on impulse, “I want you to make up another song, now.”
   With sympathy, Rags said, “I know, Mr. Hada. A ballad about the sad death of your former wife Zoe. I been thinking about that and I have a ballad all ready. Listen:


“There once was a lady fair to see and hear;
Wander, spirit, over field and star,
Sorrowful, but forgiving from afar.
That spirit knows who did her in.
It was a stranger, not her kin.
It was Max Fischer who knew her not—”


   Hada interrupted, “Don’t whitewash me, Rags; I’m to blame. Don’t put everything on Max as if he’s a whipping boy.”
   Seated in the corner of the office, listening quietly, Dr. Yasumi now spoke up. “And also too much credit to President Fischer in your ballads, Rags. In ballad of Jim-Jam’s release from jail, you specifically give credit to Max Fischer for ethical change of heart. This will not do. The credit for Jim-Jam’s release must go to Hada. Listen, Rags; I have composed a poem for this occasion.”
   Dr. Yasumi chanted:


“News clown nestles not in jail.
A friend, Sebastian Hada, got him free.
He loves that friend, regards him well.
Knows whom to honor, and to seek.”


   “Exactly thirty-two syllables,” Dr. Yasumi explained modestly. “Old-style Japanese-type haiku poetry does not have to rhyme as do U.S.-English ballads, however must get right to the point, which in this matter is all-important.” To Rags he said, “You make my haiku into ballad, okay? In your typical fashion, in rhythmic, rhyming couplets, et cetera, and so on.”
   “I counted thirty-three syllables,” Rags said. “Anyhow, I’m a creative artist; I’m not used to being told what to compose.” He turned to Hada. “Who’m I working for, you or him? Not him, as far as I know.”
   “Do as he says,” Hada told Rags. “He’s a brilliant man.”
   Sullenly, Rags murmured, “Okay, but I didn’t expect this sort of job when I signed the contract.” He retired to a far corner of the office to brood, think, and compose.
   “What are you involved with, here, Doctor?” Hada asked.
   “We’ll see,” Dr. Yasumi said mysteriously. “Theory about psi power of this balladeer, here. May pay off, may not.”
   “You seem to feel that the exact wording of Rags’s ballads is very important,” Hada said.
   “That’s right,” Dr. Yasumi agreed. “As in legal document. You wait, Hada; you find out—if I right—eventually. If I wrong, doesn’t matter anyhow.” He smiled encouragingly at Hada.

   The phone in President Max Fischer’s office rang. It was the Attorney General, his cousin, calling in agitation. “Max, I went over to the federal pen where Jim-Jam is, to see about quashing the charges against him like you were talking about—” Leon hesitated. “He’s gone, Max. He’s not in there anymore.” Leon sounded wildly nervous.
   “How’d he get out?” Max said, more baffled than angry.
   “Art Heaviside, Hada’s attorney, found a way; I don’t know yet what it is—I have to see Circuit Court Judge Dale Winthrop, about it; he signed the release order an hour or so ago. I have an appointment with Winthrop… as soon as I’ve seen him, I’ll call you back.”
   “I’ll be darned,” Max said slowly. “Well, we were too late.” He hung up the phone reflexively and then stood deep in thought. What has Hada got going for him? he asked himself. Something I don’t understand.
   And now the thing to watch for, he realized, is Jim Briskin showing up on TV. On CULTURE’s network.
   With relief he saw on the screen—not Jim Briskin but a folksinger plucking away on a banjo.
   And then he realized that the folksinger was singing about him.


“Bad Max Fischer, he saw the light,
Told Leon Lait, We got to do right.
Sent a message down to turn that key.”


   Listening, Max Fischer said aloud, “My God, that’s exactly what happened! That’s exactly what I did!” Eerie, he thought. What’s it mean, this ballad singer on CULTURE who sings about what I’m doing—secret matters that he couldn’t possibly know about!
   Telepathic maybe, Max thought. That must be it.
   Now the folksinger was narrating and plucking about Sebastian Hada, how Hada had been personally responsible for getting Jim-Jam Briskin out of jail. And it’s true, Max said to himself. When Leon Lait got there to the federal pen, he found Briskin gone because of Art Heaviside’s activity… I better listen pretty carefully to this singer, because for some reason he seems to know more than I do.
   But the singer now had finished.
   The CULTURE announcer was saying, “That was a brief interlude of political ballads by the world-renowned Ragland Park. Mr. Park, you’ll be pleased to hear, will appear on this channel every hour for five minutes of new ballads, composed here in culture’s studios for the occasion. Mr. Park will be watching the teletypers and will compose his ballads to—”
   Max switched the set off then.
   Like calypso, Max realized. New ballads. God, he thought dismally. Suppose Parks sings about Unicephalon 40-D coming back.
   I have a feeling, he thought, that what Ragland Park sings turns out to be true. It’s one of those psionic talents.
   And they, the opposition, are making use of this.
   On the other hand, he thought, I might have a few psionic talents of my own. Because if I didn’t, I wouldn’t have gotten as far as I have.
   Seated before the TV set, he switched it on once again and waited, chewing his lower lip and pondering what he should do. As yet he could come up with nothing. But I will, sooner or later, he said to himself. And before they come up with the idea of bringing Unicephalon 40-D back…

   Dr. Yasumi said, “I have solved what Ragland Park’s psi talent is, Hada. You care to know?”
   “I’m more interested in the fact that Jim-Jam is out of jail,” Hada answered. He put down the receiver of the telephone, almost unable to believe the news. “He’ll be here right away,” he said to Dr. Yasumi. “He’s on his way direct, by monorail. We’ll see that he gets to Callisto, where Max has no jurisdiction, so they can’t possibly rearrest him.” His mind swirled with plans. Rubbing his hands together, he said rapidly, “Jim-Jam can broadcast from our transmitter on Callisto. And he can live at my demesne there—that’ll be beer and skittles for him—I know he’ll agree.”
   “He is out,” Dr. Yasumi said dryly, “because of Rags’s psi talent, so you had better listen. Because this psi talent is not understood even by Rags and, honestly to God, it could rebound on you any time.”
   Reluctantly, Hada said, “Okay, give me your opinion.”
   “Relationship between Rags’s made-up ballads and reality is one of cause and effect. What Rags describes then takes place. The ballad precedes the event and not by much. You see? This could be dangerous, if Rags understood it and made use of it for own advantage.”
   “If this is true,” Hada said, “then we want him to compose a ballad about Unicephalon 40-D returning to action.” That was obvious to him instantly. Max Fischer would be merely the standby President once more, as he had originally been. Without authority of any kind.
   “Correct,” Dr. Yasumi said. “But problem is, now that he is making up these political-type ballads, Ragland Park is apt to discover this fact, too. For if he makes up song about Unicephalon and then it actually—”
   “You’re right,” Hada said. “Even Park couldn’t miss that.” He was silent then, deep in thought. Ragland Park was potentially even more dangerous than Max Fischer. On the other hand, Ragland seemed like a good egg; there was no reason to assume that he would misuse his power, as Max Fischer had his.
   But it was a great deal of power for one human being to have. Much too much.
   Dr. Yasumi said, “Care must be taken as to exactly what sort of ballads Ragland makes up. Contents must be edited in advance, maybe by you.”
   “I want as little as possible—” Hada began, and then ceased. The receptionist had buzzed him; he switched on the intercom.
   “Mr. James Briskin is here.”
   “Send him right in,” Hada said, delighted. “He’s here already, Ito.” Hada opened the door to the office—and there stood Jim-Jam, his face lined and sober.
   “Mr. Hada got you out,” Dr Yasumi informed Jim-Jam.
   “I know. I appreciate it, Hada.” Briskin entered the office and Hada at once closed and locked the door.
   “Listen, Jim-Jam,” Hada said without preamble, “we’ve got greater problems than ever. Max Fischer as a threat is nothing. Now we have to deal with an ultimate form of power, an absolute rather than a relative form. I wish I had never gotten into this; whose idea was it to hire Rags Park?”
   Dr. Yasumi said, “Yours, Hada, and I warned you at the time.”
   “I’d better instruct Rags not to make up any more new ballads,” Hada decided. “That’s the first step to take. I’ll call the studio. My God, he might make up one about us all going to the bottom of the Atlantic, or twenty AUs out into deep space.”
   “Avoid panic,” Dr. Yasumi told him firmly. “There you go ahead with panic, Hada. Volatile as ever. Be calm and think first.”
   “How can I be calm,” Hada said, “when that rustic has the power to move us around like toys? Why, he can command the entire universe.”
   “Not necessarily,” Dr. Yasumi disagreed. “There may be limit. Psi power not well understood, even yet. Hard to test out in laboratory condition; hard to
   subject to rigorous, repeatable scrutiny.” He pondered.
   Jim Briskin said, “As I understand what you’re saying—”
   “You were sprung by a made-up ballad,” Hada told him. “Done at my command. It worked, but now we’re stuck with the ballad singer.” He paced back and forth, hands in his pockets.
   What’ll we do with Ragland Park? he asked himself desperately.

   At the main studios of CULTURE in the Earth satellite Culone, Ragland Park sat with his banjo and guitar, examining the news dispatches coming in over the teletype and preparing ballads for his next appearance.
   Jim-Jam Briskin, he saw, had been released from jail by order of a federal judge. Pleased, Ragland considered a ballad on that topic, then remembered that he had already composed—and sung—several. What he needed was a new topic entirely. He had done that one to death.
   From the control booth, Nat Kaminsky’s voice boomed over the loudspeaker, “You about ready to go on again, Mr. Park?”
   “Oh sure,” Ragland replied, nodding. Actually he was not, but he would be in a moment or two.
   What about a ballad, he thought, concerning a man named Pete Robinson of Chicago, Illinois, whose springer spaniel was attacked one fine day in broad daylight on a city street by an enraged eagle?
   No, that’s not political enough, he decided.
   What about one dealing with the end of the world? A comet hitting Earth, or maybe the aliens swarming in and taking over… a real scary ballad with people getting blown up and cut in half by ray guns?
   But that was too unintellectual for CULTURE; that wouldn’t do either.
   Well, he thought, then a song about the FBI. I’ve never done one on the subject; Leon Lait’s men in gray business suits with fat red necks… college graduates carrying briefcases…
   To himself, he sang, while strumming his guitar:


“Our department chief says, Hark;
Go and bring back Ragland Park.
He’s a menace to conformity;
His crimes are an enormity.”


   Chuckling, Ragland pondered how to go on with the ballad. A ballad about himself; interesting idea… how had he happened to think of that?
   He was so busy concocting the ballad, in fact, that he did not notice the three men in gray business suits with fat red necks who had entered the studio and were coming toward him, each man carrying a briefcase in a way that made it clear he was a college graduate and used to carrying it.
   I really have a good ballad going, Ragland said to himself. The best one of my career. Strumming, he went on:


“Yes, they sneaked up in the dark
Aimed their guns and shot poor Park.
Stilled freedom’s clarion cry
When they doomed this man to die;
But a crime not soon forgotten
Even in a culture rotten.”


   That was as far as Ragland got in his ballad. The leader of the group of FBI men lowered his smoking pistol, nodded to his companions, and then spoke into his wrist transmitter. “Inform Mr. Lait that we have been successful.”
   The tinny voice from his wrist answered, “Good. Return to headquarters at once. He orders it.”
   He, of course, was Maximilian Fischer. The FBI men knew that, knew who had sent them on their mission.

   In his office at the White House, Maximilian Fischer breathed a sigh of relief when informed that Ragland Park was dead. A close call, he said to himself. That man might have finished me off—me and everybody else in the world.
   Amazing, he thought, that we were able to get him. The breaks certainly went our way. I wonder why.
   Could be one of my psionic talents has to do with putting an end to folk-singers, he said to himself, and grinned with sleek satisfaction.
   Specifically, he thought, a psi talent for getting folksingers to compose ballads on the theme of their own destruction…
   And now, he realized, the real problem. Of getting Jim Briskin back into jail. And it will be hard; Hada is probably smart enough to think of transporting him immediately to an outlying moon where I have no authority. It will be a long struggle, me against those two… and they could well beat me in the end.
   He sighed. A lot of hard work, he said to himself. But I guess I got to do it. Picking up the phone, he dialed Leon Lait…

Oh, To Be A Blobel!

   He put a twenty-dollar platinum coin into the slot and the analyst, after a pause, lit up. Its eyes shone with sociability and it swiveled about in its chair, picked up a pen and pad of long yellow paper from its desk and said, “Good morning, sir. You may begin.”
   “Hello, Dr. Jones. I guess you’re not the same Dr. Jones who did the definitive biography of Freud; that was a century ago.” He laughed nervously; being a rather poverty-stricken man he was not accustomed to dealing with the new fully homeostatic psychoanalysts. “Um,” he said, “should I free-associate or give you background material or just what?”
   Dr. Jones said, “Perhaps you could begin by telling me who you are und warum mich—why you have selected me.”
   “I’m George Munster of catwalk 4, building WEF-395, San Francisco condominium established 1996.”
   “How do you do, Mr. Munster.” Dr. Jones held out its hand, and George Munster shook it. He found the hand to be of a pleasant body-temperature and decidedly soft. The grip, however, was manly.
   “You see,” Munster said, “I’m an ex-GI, a war veteran. That’s how I got my condominium apartment at WEF-395; veterans’ preference.”
   “Ah yes,” Dr. Jones said, ticking faintly as it measured the passage of time. “The war with the Blobels.”
   “I fought three years in that war,” Munster said, nervously smoothing his long, black, thinning hair. “I hated the Blobels and I volunteered; I was only nineteen and I had a good job—but the crusade to clear the Sol System of Blobels came first in my mind.”
   “Um,” Dr. Jones said, ticking and nodding.
   George Munster continued, “I fought well. In fact I got two decorations and a battlefield citation. Corporal. That’s because I single-handedly wiped out an observation satellite full of Blobels; we’ll never know exactly how many because of course, being Blobels, they tend to fuse together and unfuse confusingly.” He broke off, then, feeling emotional. Even remembering and talking about the war was too much for him… he lay back on the couch, lit a cigarette and tried to become calm.
   The Blobels had emigrated originally from another star system, probably Proxima. Several thousand years ago they had settled on Mars and on Titan, doing very well at agrarian pursuits. They were developments of the original unicellular amoeba, quite large and with a highly-organized nervous system, but still amoeba, with pseudopodia, reproducing by binary fission, and in the main offensive to Terran settlers.
   The war itself had broken out over ecological considerations. It had been the desire of the Foreign Aid Department of the UN to change the atmosphere on Mars, making it more usable for Terran settlers. This change, however, had made it unpalatable for the Blobel colonies already there; hence the squabble.
   And, Munster reflected, it was not possible to change half the atmosphere of a planet, the Brownian movement being what it was. Within a period of ten years the altered atmosphere had diffused throughout the planet, bringing suffering—at least so they alleged—to the Blobels. In retaliation, a Blobel armada had approached Terra and had put into orbit a series of technically sophisticated satellites designed eventually to alter the atmosphere of Terra. This alteration had never come about because of course the War Office of the UN had gone into action; the satellites had been detonated by self-instructing missiles… and the war was on.
   Dr. Jones said, “Are you married, Mr. Munster?”
   “No sir,” Munster said. “And—” He shuddered. “You’ll see why when I’ve finished telling you. See, Doctor—” He stubbed out his cigarette. “I’ll be frank. I was a Terran spy. That was my task; they gave the job to me because of my bravery in the field… I didn’t ask for it.”
   “I see,” Dr. Jones said.
   “Do you?” Munster’s voice broke. “Do you know what was necessary in those days in order to make a Terran into a successful spy among the Blobels?”
   Nodding, Dr. Jones said, “Yes, Mr. Munster. You had to relinquish your human form and assume the repellent form of a Blobel.”
   Munster said nothing; he clenched and unclenched his fist, bitterly. Across from him Dr. Jones ticked.

   That evening, back in his small apartment at WEF-395, Munster opened a fifth of Teacher’s scotch, sat by himself sipping from a cup, lacking even the energy to get a glass down from the cupboard over the sink.
   What had he gotten out of the session with Dr. Jones today? Nothing, as nearly as he could tell. And it had eaten deep into his meager financial resources… meager because—
   Because for almost twelve hours out of the day he reverted, despite all the efforts of himself and the Veterans’ Hospitalization Agency of the UN, to his old war-time Blobel shape. To a formless unicellular-like blob, right in the middle of his own apartment at WEF-395.
   His financial resources consisted of a small pension from the War Office; finding a job was impossible, because as soon as he was hired the strain caused him to revert there on the spot, in plain sight of his new employer and fellow workers.
   It did not assist in forming successful work-relationships.
   Sure enough, now, at eight in the evening, he felt himself once more beginning to revert; it was an old and familiar experience to him, and he loathed it. Hurriedly, he sipped the last of the cup of scotch, put the cup down on a table… and felt himself slide together into a homogenous puddle.
   The telephone rang.
   “I can’t answer,” he called to it. The phone’s relay picked up his anguished message and conveyed it to the calling party. Now Munster had become a single transparent gelatinous mass in the middle of the rug; he undulated toward the phone—it was still ringing, despite his statement to it, and he felt furious resentment; didn’t he have enough troubles already, without having to deal with a ringing phone?
   Reaching it, he extended a pseudopodium and snatched the receiver from the hook. With great effort he formed his plastic substance into the semblance of a vocal apparatus, resonating dully. “I’m busy,” he resonated in a low booming fashion into the mouthpiece of the phone. “Call later.” Call, he thought as he hung up, tomorrow morning. When I’ve been able to regain my human form.
   The apartment was quiet, now.
   Sighing, Munster flowed back across the carpet, to the window, where he rose into a high pillar in order to see the view beyond; there was a light-sensitive spot on his outer surface, and although he did not possess a true lens he was able to appreciate—nostalgically—the sight of San Francisco Bay, the Golden Gate Bridge, the playground for small children which was Alcatraz Island.
   Dammit, he thought bitterly. I can’t marry; I can’t live a genuine human existence, reverting this way to the form the War Office bigshots forced me into back in the war times…
   He had not known then, when he accepted the mission, that it would leave this permanent effect. They had assured him it was “only temporary, for the duration,” or some such glib phrase. Duration my ass, Munster thought with furious, impotent resentment. It’s been eleven years, now.
   The psychological problems created for him, the pressure on his psyche, were immense. Hence his visit to Dr. Jones.
   Once more the phone rang.
   “Okay,” Munster said aloud, and flowed laboriously back across the room to it. “You want to talk to me?” he said as he came closer and closer; the trip, for someone in Blobel form, was a long one. “I’ll talk to you. You can even turn on the vidscreen and look at me.” At the phone he snapped the switch which would permit visual communication as well as auditory. “Have a good look,” he said, and displayed his amorphous form before the scanning tube of the video.
   Dr. Jones’ voice came: “I’m sorry to bother you at your home, Mr. Munster, especially when you’re in this, um, awkward condition…” The homeostatic analyst paused. “But I’ve been devoting time to problem-solving vis-a-vis your condition. I may have at least a partial solution.”
   “What?” Munster said, taken by surprise. “You mean to imply that medical science can now—”
   “No, no,” Dr. Jones said hurriedly. “The physical aspects lie out of my domain; you must keep that in mind, Munster. When you consulted me about your problems it was the psychological adjustment that—”
   “I’ll come right down to your office and talk to you,” Munster said. And then he realized that he could not; in his Blobel form it would take him days to undulate all the way across town to Dr. Jones’ office. “Jones,” he said desperately, “you see the problems I face. I’m stuck here in this apartment every night beginning about eight o’clock and lasting through until almost seven in the morning… I can’t even visit you and consult you and get help—”
   “Be quiet, Mr. Munster,” Dr. Jones interrupted. “I’m trying to tell you something. You’re not the only one in this condition. Did you know that?”
   Heavily, Munster said, “Sure. In all, eighty-three Terrans were made over into Blobels at one time or another during the war. Of the eighty-three—” He knew the facts by heart. “Sixty-one survived and now there’s an organization called Veterans of Unnatural Wars of which fifty are members. I’m a member. We meet twice a month, revert in unison…” He started to hang up the phone. So this was what he had gotten for his money, this stale news. “Goodbye, Doctor,” he murmured.
   Dr. Jones whirred in agitation. “Mr. Munster, I don’t mean other Terrans. I’ve researched this in your behalf, and I discover that according to captured records at the Library of Congress fifteen Blobels were formed into pseudo-Terrans to act as spies for their side. Do you understand?”
   After a moment Munster said, “Not exactly.”
   “You have a mental block against being helped,” Dr. Jones said. “But here’s what I want, Munster; you be at my office at eleven in the morning tomorrow. We’ll take up the solution to your problem then. Goodnight.”
   Wearily, Munster said, “When I’m in my Blobel form my wits aren’t too keen, Doctor. You’ll have to forgive me.” He hung up, still puzzled. So there were fifteen Blobels walking around on Titan this moment, doomed to occupy human forms—so what? How did that help him? Maybe he would find out at eleven tomorrow.

   When he strode into Dr. Jones’ waiting room he saw, seated in a deep chair in a corner by a lamp, reading a copy of Fortune, an exceedingly attractive young woman.
   Automatically, Munster found a place to sit from which he could eye her. Stylish dyed-white hair braided down the back of her neck… he took in the sight of her with delight, pretending to read his own copy of Fortune. Slender legs, small and delicate elbows. And her sharp, clearly-featured face. The intelligent eyes, the thin, tapered nostrils—a truly lovely girl, he thought. He drank in the sight of her… until all at once she raised her head and stared coolly back at him.
   “Dull, having to wait,” Munster mumbled.
   The girl said, “Do you come to Dr. Jones often?”
   “No,” he admitted. “This is just the second time.”
   “I’ve never been here before,” the girl said. “I was going to another electronic fully-homeostatic psychoanalyst in Los Angeles and then late yesterday Dr. Bing, my analyst, called me and told me to fly up here and see Dr. Jones this morning. Is this one good?”
   “Um,” Munster said. “I guess so.” We’ll see, he thought. That’s precisely what we don’t know, at this point.
   The inner office door opened and there stood Dr. Jones. “Miss Arrasmith,” it said, nodding to the girl. “Mr. Munster.” It nodded to George. “Won’t you both come in?”
   Rising to her feet, Miss Arrasmith said, “Who pays the twenty dollars then?”
   But the analyst had become silent; it had turned off.
   “I’ll pay,” Miss Arrasmith said, reaching into her purse.
   “No, no,” Munster said. “Let me.” He got out a twenty-dollar piece and dropped it into the analyst’s slot.
   At once, Dr. Jones said, “You’re a gentleman, Mr. Munster.” Smiling, it ushered the two of them into its office. “Be seated, please. Miss Arrasmith, without preamble please allow me to explain your—condition to Mr. Munster.” To Munster it said, “Miss Arrasmith is a Blobel.”
   Munster could only stare at the girl.
   “Obviously,” Dr. Jones continued, “presently in human form. This, for her, is the state of involuntary reversion. During the war she operated behind Terran lines, acting for the Blobel War League. She was captured and held, but then the war ended and she was neither tried nor sentenced.”
   “They released me,” Miss Arrasmith said in a low, carefully-controlled voice. “Still in human form. I stayed here out of shame. I just couldn’t go back to Titan and—” Her voice wavered.
   “There is great shame attached to this condition,” Dr. Jones said, “for any high-caste Blobel.”
   Nodding, Miss Arrasmith sat, clutching a tiny Irish linen handkerchief and trying to look poised. “Correct, Doctor. I did visit Titan to discuss my condition with medical authorities there. After expensive and prolonged therapy with me they were able to induce a return to my natural form for a period of—” She hesitated. “About one-fourth of the time. But the other three-fourths… I am as you perceive me now.” She ducked her head and touched the handkerchief to her right eye.
   “Jeez,” Munster protested, “you’re lucky; a human form is infinitely superior to a Blobel form—I ought to know. As a Blobel you have to creep along… you’re like a big jellyfish, no skeleton to keep you erect. And binary fission—it’s lousy, I say really lousy, compared to the Terran form of—you know. Reproduction.” He colored.
   Dr. Jones ticked and stated, “For a period of about six hours your human forms overlap. And then for about one hour your Blobel forms overlap. So all in all, the two of you possess seven hours out of twenty-four in which you both possess identical forms. In my opinion—” It toyed with its pen and paper. “Seven hours is not too bad. If you follow my meaning.”
   After a moment Miss Arrasmith said, “But Mr. Munster and I are natural enemies.”
   “That was years ago,” Munster said.
   “Correct,” Dr. Jones agreed. “True, Miss Arrasmith is basically a Blobel and you, Munster, are a Terran, but—” It gestured. “Both of you are outcasts in either civilization; both of you are stateless and hence gradually suffering a loss of ego-identity. I predict for both of you a gradual deterioration ending finally in severe mental illness. Unless you two can develop a rapprochement.” The analyst was silent, then.
   Miss Arrasmith said softly, “I think we’re very lucky, Mr. Munster. As Dr. Jones said, we do overlap for seven hours a day… we can enjoy that time together, no longer in wretched isolation.” She smiled up hopefully at him, rearranging her coat. Certainly, she had a nice figure; the somewhat low-cut dress gave an ideal clue to that.
   Studying her, Munster pondered.
   “Give him time,” Dr. Jones told Miss Arrasmith. “My analysis of him is that he will see this correctly and do the right thing.”
   Still rearranging her coat and dabbing at her large, dark eyes, Miss Arrasmith waited.

   The phone in Dr. Jones’ office rang, a number of years later. He answered it in his customary way. “Please, sir or madam, deposit twenty dollars if you wish to speak to me.”
   A tough male voice on the other end of the line said, “Listen, this is the UN Legal Office and we don’t deposit twenty dollars to talk to anybody. So trip that mechanism inside you, Jones.”
   “Yes, sir,” Dr. Jones said, and with his right hand tripped the lever behind his ear that caused him to come on free.
   “Back in 2037,” the UN legal expert said, “did you advise a couple to marry? A George Munster and a Vivian Arrasmith, now Mrs. Munster?”
   “Why yes,” Dr. Jones said, after consulting his built-in memory banks.
   “Had you investigated the legal ramifications of their issue?”
   “Um well,” Dr. Jones said, “that’s not my worry.”
   “You can be arraigned for advising any action contrary to UN law.”
   “There’s no law prohibiting a Blobel and a Terran from marrying.”
   The UN legal expert said, “All right, Doctor, I’ll settle for a look at their case histories.”
   “Absolutely not,” Dr. Jones said. “That would be a breach of ethics.”
   “We’ll get a writ and sequester them, then.”
   “Go ahead.” Dr. Jones reached behind his ear to shut himself off.
   “Wait. It may interest you to know that the Munsters now have four children. And, following the Mendelian Law, the offspring comprise a strict one, two, one ratio. One Blobel girl, one hybrid boy, one hybrid girl, one Terran girl. The legal problem arises in that the Blobel Supreme Council claims the pure-blooded Blobel girl as a citizen of Titan and also suggests that one of the two hybrids be donated to the Council’s jurisdiction.” The UN legal expert explained, “You see, the Munsters’ marriage is breaking up; they’re getting divorced and it’s sticky finding which laws obtain regarding them and their issue.”
   “Yes,” Dr. Jones admitted, “I would think so. What has caused their marriage to break up?”
   “I don’t know and don’t care. Possibly the fact that both adults and two of the four children rotate daily between being Blobels and Terrans; maybe the strain got to be too much. If you want to give them psychological advice, consult them. Goodbye.” The UN legal expert rang off.
   Did I make a mistake, advising them to marry? Dr. Jones asked itself. I wonder if I shouldn ‘t look them up; I owe at least that to them.
   Opening the Los Angeles phone book, it began thumbing through the Ms.

   These had been six difficult years for the Munsters.
   First, George had moved from San Francisco to Los Angeles; he and Vivian had set up a household in a condominium apartment with three instead of two rooms. Vivian, being in Terran form three-fourths of the time, had been able to obtain a job; right out in public she gave jet flight information at the Fifth Los Angeles Airport. George, however—
   His pension comprised an amount only one-fourth that of his wife’s salary and he felt it keenly. To augment it, he had searched for a way of earning money at home. Finally in a magazine he had found this valuable ad:


Make Swift Profits in Your Own Condo!
Raise Giant Bullfrogs From Jupiter, Capable of Eighty-Foot Leaps.
Can Be Used in Frog-Racing (where legal) and…

   So in 2038 he had bought his first pair of frogs imported from Jupiter and had begun raising them for swift profits, right in his own condominium apartment building, in a corner of the basement that Leopold, the partially-homeostatic janitor, let him use gratis.
   But in the relatively feeble Terran gravity the frogs were capable of enormous leaps, and the basement proved too small for them; they ricocheted from wall to wall like green ping pong balls and soon died. Obviously it took more than a portion of the basement at QEK-604 Apartments to house a crop of the damned things, George realized.
   And then, too, their first child had been born. It had turned out to be a pure-blooded Blobel; for twenty-four hours a day it consisted of a gelatinous mass and George found himself waiting in vain for it to switch over to a human form, even for a moment.
   He faced Vivian defiantly in this matter, during a period when both of them were in human form.
   “How can I consider it my child?” he asked her. “It’s—an alien life form to me.” He was discouraged and even horrified. “Dr. Jones should have foreseen this; maybe it’s your child—it looks just like you.”
   Tears filled Vivian’s eyes. “You mean that insultingly.”
   “Damn right I do. We fought you creatures—we used to consider you no better than Portuguese sting-rays.” Gloomily, he put on his coat. “I’m going down to Veterans of Unnatural Wars Headquarters,” he informed his wife. “Have a beer with the boys.” Shortly, he was on his way to join with his old war-time buddies, glad to get out of the apartment house.
   VUW Headquarters was a decrepit cement building in downtown Los Angeles left over from the twentieth century and sadly in need of paint. The VUW had little funds because most of its members were, like George Munster, living on UN pensions. However, there was a pool table and an old 3-D television set and a few dozen tapes of popular music and also a chess set. George generally drank his beer and played chess with his fellow members, either in human form or in Blobel form; this was one place in which both were accepted.
   This particular evening he sat with Pete Ruggles, a fellow veteran who also had married a Blobel female, reverting, as Vivian did, to human form.
   “Pete, I can’t go on. I’ve got a gelatinous blob for a child. My whole life I’ve wanted a kid, and now what have I got? Something that looks like it washed up on the beach.”
   Sipping his beer—he too was in human form at the moment—Pete answered, “Criminy, George, I admit it’s a mess. But you must have known what you were getting into when you married her. And my God, according to Mendel’s Law, the next kid—”
   “I mean,” George broke in, “I don’t respect my own wife; that’s the basis of it. I think of her as a thing. And myself, too. We’re both things.” He drank down his beer in one gulp.
   Pete said meditatively, “But from the Blobel standpoint—”
   “Listen, whose side are you on?” George demanded.
   “Don’t yell at me,” Pete said, “or I’ll deck you.”
   A moment later they were swinging wildly at each other. Fortunately Pete reverted to Blobel form in the nick of time; no harm was done. Now George sat alone, in human shape, while Pete oozed off somewhere else, probably to join a group of the boys who had also assumed Blobel form.
   Maybe we can find a new society somewhere on a remote moon, George said to himself moodily. Neither Terran nor Blobel.
   I’ve got to go back to Vivian, George resolved. What else is there for me? I’m lucky to find her; I’d be nothing but a war veteran guzzling beer here at VUW Headquarters every damn day and night, with no future, no hope, no real life…
   He had a new money-making scheme going now. It was a home mail-order business; he had placed an ad in the Saturday Evening Post for MAGIC LODE-STONES REPUTED TO BRING YOU LUCK. FROM ANOTHER STAR-SYSTEM entirely! The stones had come from Proxima and were obtainable on Titan; it was Vivian who had made the commercial contact for him with her people. But so far, few people had sent in the dollar-fifty.
   I’m a failure, George said to himself.

   Fortunately the next child, born in the winter of 2039, showed itself to be a hybrid; it took human form fifty percent of the time, and so at last George had a child who was—occasionally, anyhow—a member of his own species.
   He was still in the process of celebrating the birth of Maurice when a delegation of their neighbors at QEK-604 Apartments came and rapped on their door.
   “We’ve got a petition here,” the chairman of the delegation said, shuffling his feet in embarrassment, “asking that you and Mrs. Munster leave QEK-604.”
   “But why?” George asked, bewildered. “You haven’t objected to us up until now.”
   “The reason is that now you’ve got a hybrid youngster who will want to play with ours, and we feel it’s unhealthy for our kids to—”
   George slammed the door in their faces.
   But still, he felt the pressure, the hostility from the people on all sides of them. And to think, he thought bitterly, that I fought in the war to save these people. It sure wasn ‘t worth it.
   An hour later he was down at VUW Headquarters once more, drinking beer and talking with his buddy Sherman Downs, also married to a Blobel.
   “Sherman, it’s no good. We’re not wanted; we’ve got to emigrate. Maybe we’ll try it on Titan, in Viv’s world.”
   “Chrissakes,” Sherman protested, “I hate to see you fold up, George. Isn’t your electromagnetic reducing belt beginning to sell, finally?”
   For the last few months, George had been making and selling a complex electronic reducing gadget which Vivian had helped him design; it was based in principle on a Blobel device popular on Titan but unknown on Terra. And this had gone over well; George had more orders than he could fill. But—
   “I had a terrible experience, Sherm,” George confided. “I was in a drugstore the other day, and they gave me a big order for my reducing belt, and I got so excited—” He broke off. “You can guess what happened. I reverted. Right in plain sight of a hundred customers. And when the buyer saw that he canceled the order for the belts. It was what we all fear… you should have seen how their attitude toward me changed.”
   Sherm said, “Hire someone to do your selling for you. A full-blooded Terran.”
   Thickly, George said, “I’m a full-blooded Terran, and don’t you forget it. Ever.”
   “I just mean—”
   “I know what you meant,” George said. And took a swing at Sherman. Fortunately he missed and in the excitement both of them reverted to Blobel form. They oozed angrily into each other for a time, but at last fellow veterans managed to separate them.
   “I’m as much Terran as anyone,” George thought-radiated in the Blobel manner to Sherman. “And I’ll flatten anyone who says otherwise.”
   In Blobel form he was unable to get home; he had to phone Vivian to come and get him. It was humiliating.
   Suicide, he decided. That’s the answer.
   How best to do it? In Blobel form he was unable to feel pain; best to do it then. Several substances would dissolve him… he could for instance drop himself into a heavily-chlorinated swimming pool, such as QEK-604 maintained in its recreation room.
   Vivian, in human form, found him as he reposed hesitantly at the edge of the swimming pool, late one night.
   “George, I beg you—go back to Dr. Jones.”
   “Naw,” he boomed dully, forming a quasi-vocal apparatus with a portion of his body. “It’s no use, Viv. I don’t want to go on.” Even the belts; they had been Viv’s idea, rather than his. He was second even there… behind her, falling constantly farther behind each passing day.
   Viv said, “You have so much to offer the children.”
   That was true. “Maybe I’ll drop over to the UN War Office,” he decided. “Talk to them, see if there’s anything new that medical science has come up with that might stabilize me.”
   “But if you stabilize as a Terran,” Vivian said, “what would become of me?”
   “We’d have eighteen entire hours together a day. All the hours you take human form!”
   “But you wouldn’t want to stay married to me. Because, George, then you could meet a Terran woman.”
   It wasn’t fair to her, he realized. So he abandoned the idea.
   In the spring of 2041 their third child was born, also a girl, and like Maurice a hybrid. It was Blobel at night and Terran by day.
   Meanwhile, George found a solution to some of his problems.
   He got himself a mistress.

   He and Nina arranged to meet each other at the Hotel Elysium, a rundown wooden building in the heart of Los Angeles.
   “Nina,” George said, sipping Teacher’s scotch and seated beside her on the shabby sofa which the hotel provided, “you’ve made my life worth living again.” He fooled with the buttons of her blouse.
   “I respect you,” Nina Glaubman said, assisting him with the buttons. “In spite of the fact—well, you are a former enemy of our people.”
   “God,” George protested, “we must not think about the old days—we have to close our minds to our pasts.” Nothing but our future, he thought.
   His reducing belt enterprise had developed so well that now he employed fifteen full-time Terran employees and owned a small, modern factory on the outskirts of San Fernando. If UN taxes had been reasonable he would by now be a wealthy man… brooding on that, George wondered what the tax rate was in Blobel-run lands, on Io, for instance. Maybe he ought to look into it.
   One night at VUW Headquarters he discussed the subject with Reinholt, Nina’s husband, who of course was ignorant of the modus vivendi between George and Nina.
   “Reinholt,” George said with difficulty, as he drank his beer, “I’ve got big plans. This cradle-to-grave socialism the UN operates… it’s not for me. It’s cramping me. The Munster Magic Magnetic Belt is—” He gestured. “More than Terran civilization can support. You get me?”
   Coldly, Reinholt said, “But George, you are a Terran; if you emigrate to Blobel-run territory with your factory you’ll be betraying your—”

   “Listen,” George told him, “I’ve got one authentic Blobel child, two half-Blobel children, and a fourth on the way. I’ve got strong emotional ties with those people out there on Titan and Io.”
   “You’re a traitor,” Reinholt said, and punched him in the mouth. “And not only that,” he continued, punching George in the stomach, “you’re running around with my wife. I’m going to kill you.”
   To escape, George reverted to Blobel form; Reinholt’s blows passed harmlessly deep into his moist, jelly-like substance. Reinholt then reverted too, and flowed into him murderously, trying to consume and absorb George’s nucleus.
   Fortunately fellow veterans pried their two bodies apart before any permanent harm was done.
   Later that night, still trembling, George sat with Vivian in the living room of their eight-room suite at the great new condominium apartment building ZGF-900. It had been a close call, and now of course Reinholt would tell Viv; it was only a question of time. The marriage, as far as George could see, was over. This perhaps was their last moment together.
   “Viv,” he said urgently, “you have to believe me; I love you. You and the children—plus the belt business, naturally—are my complete life.” A desperate idea came to him. “Let’s emigrate now, tonight. Pack up the kids and go to Titan, right this minute.”
   “I can’t go,” Vivian said. “I know how my people would treat me, and treat you and the children, too. George, you go. Move the factory to Io. I’ll stay here.” Tears filled her dark eyes.
   “Hell,” George said, “what kind of life is that? With you on Terra and me on Io—that’s no marriage. And who’ll get the kids?” Probably Viv would get them… but his firm employed top legal talent—perhaps he could use it to solve his domestic problems.
   The next morning Vivian found out about Nina. And hired an attorney of her own.

   “Listen,” George said, on the phone talking to his top legal talent, Henry Ramarau. “Get me custody of the fourth child; it’ll be a Terran. And we’ll compromise on the two hybrids; I’ll take Maurice and she can have Kathy. And naturally she gets that blob, the first so-called child. As far as I’m concerned it’s hers anyhow.” He slammed the receiver down and then turned to the board of directors of his company. “Now where were we?” he demanded. “In our analysis of Io tax laws.”
   During the next weeks the idea of a move to Io appeared more and more feasible from a profit and loss standpoint.
   “Go ahead and buy land on Io,” George instructed his business agent in the field, Tom Hendricks. “And get it cheap; we want to start right.” To his secretary, Miss Nolan, he said, “Now keep everyone out of my office until further notice. I feel a attack coming on. From anxiety over this major move off Terra to Io.” He added, “And personal worries.”
   “Yes, Mr. Munster,” Miss Nolan said, ushering Tom Hendricks out of George’s private office. “No one will disturb you.” She could be counted on to keep everyone out while George reverted to his war-time Blobel shape, as he often did, these days; the pressure on him was immense.
   When, later in the day, he resumed human form, George learned from Miss Nolan that a Doctor Jones had called.
   “I’ll be damned,” George said, thinking back to six years ago. “I thought it’d be in the junk pile by now.” To Miss Nolan he said, “Call Doctor Jones, notify me when you have it; I’ll take a minute off to talk to it.” It was like old times, back in San Francisco.
   Shortly, Miss Nolan had Dr. Jones on the line.
   “Doctor,” George said, leaning back in his chair and swiveling from side to side and poking at an orchid on his desk. “Good to hear from you.”
   The voice of the homeostatic analyst came in his ear, “Mr. Munster, I note that you now have a secretary.”
   “Yes,” George said, “I’m a tycoon. I’m in the reducing belt game; it’s somewhat like the flea-collar that cats wear. Well, what can I do for you?”
   “I understand you have four children now—”
   “Actually three, plus a fourth on the way. Listen, that fourth, Doctor, is vital to me; according to Mendel’s Law it’s a full-blooded Terran and by God I’m doing everything in my power to get custody of it.” He added, “Vivian—you remember her—is now back on Titan. Among her own people, where she belongs. And I’m putting some of the finest doctors I can get on my payroll to stabilize me; I’m tired of this constant reverting, night and day; I’ve got too much to do for such nonsense.”
   Dr. Jones said, “From your tone I can see you’re an important, busy man, Mr. Munster. You’ve certainly risen in the world, since I saw you last.”
   “Get to the point,” George said impatiently. “Why’d you call?”
   “I, um, thought perhaps I could bring you and Vivian together again.”
   “Bah,” George said contemptuously. “That woman? Never. Listen, Doctor, I have to ring off; we’re in the process of finalizing on some basic business strategy, here at Munster, Incorporated.”
   “Mr. Munster,” Dr. Jones asked, “is there another woman?”
   “There’s another Blobel,” George said, “if that’s what you mean.” And he hung up the phone. Two Blobels are better than none, he said to himself. And now back to business… He pressed a button on his desk and at once Miss Nolan put her head into the office. “Miss Nolan,” George said, “get me Hank Ramarau; I want to find out—”
   “Mr. Ramarau is waiting on the other line,” Miss Nolan said. “He says it’s urgent.”
   Switching to the other line, George said, “Hi, Hank. What’s up?”
   “I’ve just discovered,” his top legal advisor said, “that to operate your factory on Io you must be a citizen of Titan.”
   “We ought to be able to fix that up,” George said.
   “But to be a citizen of Titan—” Ramarau hesitated. “I’ll break it to you easy as I can, George. You have to be a Blobel.”
   “Dammit, I am a Blobel,” George said. “At least part of the time. Won’t that do?”
   “No,” Ramarau said, “I checked into that, knowing of your affliction, and it’s got to be one hundred percent of the time. Night and day.”
   “Hmmm,” George said. “This is bad. But we’ll overcome it, somehow. Listen, Hank, I’ve got an appointment with Eddy Fullbright, my medical coordinator; I’ll talk to you after, okay?” He rang off and then sat scowling and rubbing his jaw. Well, he decided, if it has to be it has to be. Facts are facts, and we can’t let them stand in our way.
   Picking up the phone he dialed his doctor, Eddy Fullbright.

   The twenty-dollar platinum coin rolled down the chute and tripped the circuit. Dr. Jones came on, glanced up and saw a stunning, sharp-breasted young woman whom it recognized—by means of a quick scan of its memory banks—as Mrs. George Munster, the former Vivian Arrasmith.
   “Good day, Vivian,” Dr. Jones said cordially. “But I understood you were on Titan.” It rose to its feet, offering her a chair.
   Dabbing at her large, dark eyes, Vivian sniffled, “Doctor, everything is collapsing around me. My husband is having an affair with another woman… all I know is that her name is Nina and all the boys down at VUW Headquarters are talking about it. Presumably she’s a Terran. We’re both filing for divorce. And we’re having a dreadful legal battle over the children.” She arranged her coat modestly. “I’m expecting. Our fourth.”
   “This I know,” Dr. Jones said. “A full-blooded Terran this time, if Mendel’s Law holds… although it only applied to litters.”
   Mrs. Munster said miserably, “I’ve been on Titan talking to legal and medical experts, gynecologists, and especially marital guidance counselors; I’ve had all sorts of advice during the past month. Now I’m back on Terra but I can’t find George—he’s gone!”
   “I wish I could help you, Vivian,” Dr. Jones said. “I talked to your husband briefly, the other day, but he spoke only in generalities… evidently he’s such a big tycoon now that it’s hard to approach him.”
   “And to think,” Vivian sniffled, “that he achieved it all because of an idea I gave him. A Blobel idea.”
   “The ironies of fate,” Dr. Jones said. “Now, if you want to keep your husband, Vivian—”
   “I’m determined to keep him, Doctor Jones. Frankly I’ve undergone therapy on Titan, the latest and most expensive… it’s because I love George so much, even more than I love my own people or my planet.”
   “Eh?” Dr. Jones said.
   “Through the most modern developments in medical science in the Sol System,” Vivian said, “I’ve been stabilized, Doctor Jones. Now I am in human form twenty-four hours a day instead of eighteen. I’ve renounced my natural form in order to keep my marriage with George.”
   “The supreme sacrifice,” Dr. Jones said, touched.
   “Now, if I can only find him, Doctor—”

   At the ground-breaking ceremonies on Io, George Munster flowed gradually to the shovel, extended a pseudopodium, seized the shovel, and with it managed to dig a symbolic amount of soil. “This is a great day,” he boomed hollowly, by means of the semblance of a vocal apparatus into which he had fashioned the slimy, plastic substance which made up his unicellular body.
   “Right, George,” Hank Ramarau agreed, standing nearby with the legal documents.
   The Ionan official, like George a great transparent blob, oozed across to Ramarau, took the documents and boomed, “These will be transmitted to my government. I’m sure they’re in order, Mr. Ramarau.”
   “I guarantee you,” Ramarau said to the official, “Mr. Munster does not revert to human form at any time; he’s made use of some of the most advanced techniques in medical science to achieve this stability at the unicellular phase of his former rotation. Munster would never cheat.”
   “This historic moment,” the great blob that was George Munster thought-radiated to the throng of local Blobels attending the ceremonies, “means a higher standard of living for Ionans who will be employed; it will bring prosperity to this area, plus a proud sense of national achievement in the manufacture of what we recognize to be a native invention, the Munster Magic Magnetic Belt.”
   The throng of Blobels thought-radiated cheers.
   “This is a proud day in my life,” George Munster informed them, and began to ooze by degrees back to his car, where his chauffeur waited to drive him to his permanent hotel room at Io City.
   Someday he would own the hotel. He was putting the profits from his business in local real estate; it was the patriotic—and the profitable—thing to do, other Ionans, other Blobels, had told him.
   “I’m finally a successful man,” George Munster thought-radiated to all close enough to pick up his emanations.
   Amid frenzied cheers he oozed up the ramp and into his Titan-made car.

Notes

   All notes in italics are by Philip K. Dick. The year when the note was written appears in parentheses following the note. Most of these notes were written as story notes for the collections THE BEST OF PHILIP K. DICK (published 1977) and THE GOLDEN MAN (published 1980). A few were written at the request of editors publishing or reprinting a PKD story in a book or magazine.
   When there is a date following the name of a story, it is the date the manuscript of that story was first received by Dick’s agent, per the records of the Scott Meredith Literary Agency. Absence of a date means no record is available. The name of a magazine followed by a month and year indicates the first published appearance of a story. An alternate name following a story indicates Dick’s original name for the story, as shown in the agency records.
   These five volumes include all of Philip K. Dick’s short fiction, with the exception of short novels later published as or included in novels, childhood writings, and unpublished writings for which manuscripts have not been found. The stories are arranged as closely as possible in chronological order of composition; research for this chronology was done by Gregg Rickman and Paul Williams.
 
   AUTOFAC 10/11/54. Galaxy, Nov 1955.
   Tom Disch said of this story that it was one of the earliest ecology warnings in sf. What I had in mind in writing it, however, was the thought that if factories became fully automated, they might begin to show the instinct for survival which organic living entities have… and perhaps develop similar solutions. (1976)
 
   SERVICE CALL 10/11/54. Science Fiction Stories, July 1955.
   When this story appeared many fans objected to it because of the negative attitude I expressed in it. But I was already beginning to suppose in my head the growing domination of machines over man, especially the machines we voluntarily surround ourselves with, which should, by logic, be the most harmless. I never assumed that some huge clanking monster would stride down Fifth Avenue, devouring New York; I always feared that my own TV set or iron or toaster would, in the privacy of my apartment, when no one else was around to help me, announce to me that they had taken over, and here was a list of rules I was to obey. I never like the idea of doing what a machine says. I hate having to salute something built in a factory. (Do you suppose all those White House tapes came out of the back of the President’s head? And programmed him as to what he was to say and do?) (1976)
 
   CAPTIVE MARKET 10/18/54. If, April 1955.
 
   THE MOLD OF YANCY 10/18/54. If, Aug 1955.
   Obviously, Yancy is based on President Eisenhower. During his reign we all were worrying about the man-in-the-gray-flannel-suit problem; we feared that the entire country was turning into one person and a whole lot of clones. (Although in those days the word “clone” was unknown to us.) I liked this story enough to use it as the basis for my novel THE PENULTIMATE TRUTH; in particular the part where everything the government tells you is a lie. I still like that part; I mean, I still believe it’s so. Watergate, of course, bore the basic idea of this story out. (1978)
 
   THE MINORITY REPORT 12/22/54. Fantastic Universe, Jan 1956.
 
   RECALL MECHANISM. If, July 1959.
 
   THE UNRECONSTRUCTED M 6/2/55. Science Fiction Stories, Jan 1957.
   If the main theme throughout my writing is, “Can we consider the universe real, and if so, in what way?” my secondary theme would be, “Are we all humans?”Here a machine does not imitate a human being, but instead fakes evidence of a human being, a given human being. Fakery is a topic which absolutely fascinates me; I am convinced that anything can be faked, or anyhow evidence pointing to any given thing. Spurious clues can lead us to believe anything they want us to believe. There is really no theoretical upper limit to this. Once you have mentally opened the door to the reception of the notion of fake, you are ready to think yourself into another kind of reality entirely. It’s a trip from which you never return. And, I think, a healthy trip… unless you take it too seriously. (1978)
 
   EXPLORERS WE 5/6/58. Fantasy & Science Fiction, Jan 1959.
 
   WAR GAME (“Diversion”) 10/31/58. Galaxy, Dec 1959.
 
   IF THERE WERE NO BENNY CEMOLI (“Had There Never Been A Benny Cemoli”) 2/27/63. Galaxy, Dec 1963.
   I have always believed that at least half the famous people in history never existed. You invent what you need to invent. Perhaps even Karl Marx was invented, the product of some hack writer. In which case—(1976)
 
   NOVELTY ACT (“At Second Jug”) 3/23/63. Fantastic, Feb 1964. [Included in PKD’s novel THE SIMULACRA.]
 
   WATERSPIDER 4/10/63. If, Jan 1964.
 
   WHAT THE DEAD MEN SAY (“Man With a Broken Match”) 4/15/63. Worlds of Tomorrow, June 1964.
 
   ORPHEUS WITH CLAY FEET 4/16/63 [published in Escapade circa 1964 under the pseudonym Jack Dowland].
 
   THE DAYS OF PERKY PAT (“In the Days of Perky Pat”) 4/18/63. Amazing, Dec 1963.
   The Days of Perky Pat came to me in one lightning-swift flash when I saw my children playing with Barbie dolls. Obviously these anatomically super-developed dolls were not intended for the use of children, or, more accurately, should not have been. Barbie and Ken consisted of two adults in miniature. The idea was that the purchase of countless new clothes for these dolls was necessary if Barbie and Ken were to live in the style to which they were accustomed. I had visions of Barbie coming into my bedroom at night and saying, “I need a mink coat.” Or, even worse, “Hey, big fellow… want to take a drive to Vegas in my Jaguar XKE?” I was afraid my wife would find me and Barbie together and my wife would shoot me.
   The sale of The Days of Perky Pat to Amazing was a good one because in those days Cele Goldsmith edited Amazing and she was one of the best editors in the field. Avram Davidson at Fantasy & Science Fiction had turned it down, but later he told me that had he known about Barbie dolls he probably would have bought it. I could not imagine anyone not knowing about Barbie. I had to deal with her and her expensive purchases constantly. It was as bad as keeping my TV set working; the TV set always needed something and so did Barbie. I always felt that Ken should buy his own clothes.
   In those days—the early Sixties—I wrote a great deal, and some of my best stories and novels emanated from that period. My wife wouldn’t let me work in the house, so I rented a little shack for $25 a month and walked over to it each morning. This was out in the country. All I saw on my walk to my shack were a few cows in their pastures and my own flock of sheep who never did anything but trudge along after the bell-sheep. I was terribly lonely, shut up by myself in my shack all day. Maybe I missed Barbie, who was back at the big house with the children. So perhaps The Days of Perky Pat is a wishful fantasy on my part; I would have loved to see Barbie—or Perky Pat or Connie Companion—show up at the door of my shack.
   What did show up was something awful: my vision of the face of Palmer Eldritch which became the basis of the novel THE THREE STIGMATA OF PALMER ELDRITCH which the Perky Pat story generated.
   There I went, one day, walking down the country road to my shack, looking forward to eight hours of writing, in total isolation from all other humans, and I looked up at the sky and saw a face. I didn’t really see it, but the face was there, and it was not a human face; it was a vast visage of perfect evil. I realize now (and I think I dimly realized at the time) what caused me to see it: the months of isolation, of deprivation of human contact, in fact sensory deprivation as such… anyhow the visage could not be denied. It was immense; it filled a quarter of the sky. It had empty slots for eyes—it was metal and cruel and, worst of all, it was God.
   I drove over to my church, Saint Columbia’s Episcopal Church, and talked to my priest. He came to the conclusion that I had had a glimpse of Satan and gave me unction—not supreme unction; just healing unction. It didn’t do any good; the metal face in the sky remained. I had to walk along every day as it gazed down at me.
   Years later—after I had long since written THE THREE STIGMATA OF PALMER ELDRITCH and sold it to Doubleday, my first sale to Doubleday—I came across a picture of the face in an issue of Life magazine. It was, very simply, a World War One observation cupola on the Marne, built by the French. My father had fought in the Second Battle of the Marne; he had been with the Fifth Marines, about the first group of American soldiers to go over to Europe and fight in that ghastly war. When I was a very small child he had showed me his uniform and gasmask, the entire gas-filtration equipment, and told me how the soldiers became panic-stricken during gas attacks as the charcoal in their filtration systems became saturated, and how sometimes a soldier would freak and tear off his mask and run. As a child I felt a lot of anxiety listening to my father’s war stories and looking at and playing with the gasmask and helmet; but what scared me the most was when my father would put on the gasmask. His face would disappear. This was not my father any longer. This was not a human being at all. I was only four years old. After that my mother and father got divorced and I did not see my father for years. But the sight of him wearing his gasmask, blending as it did with his accounts of men with their guts hanging from them, men destroyed by shrapnel—decades later, in 1963, as I walked alone day after day along that country road with no one to talk to, no one to be with, that metal, blind, inhuman visage appeared to me again, but now transcendent and vast, and absolutely evil.
   I decided to exorcise it by writing about it, and I did write about it, and it did go away. But I had seen the evil one himself, and I said then and say now, “The evil one wears a metal face.” If you want to see this yourself, look at a picture of the war masks of the Attic Greeks. When men wish to inspire terror and kill they put on such metal faces. The invading Christian knights that Alexander Nevsky fought wore such masks; if you saw Eisenstein’s film you know what I am talking about. They all looked alike. I had not seen Nevsky when I wrote THE THREE STIGMATA, but I saw it later and saw again the thing that had hung in the sky back in 1963, the thing into which my own father had been transformed when I was a child.
   So THE THREE STIGMATA is a novel that came out of powerful atavistic fears in me, fears dating back to my early childhood and no doubt connected with my grief and loneliness when my father left my mother and me. In the novel my father appears as both Palmer Eldritch (the evil father, the diabolic mask-father) and as Leo Bulero, the tender, gruff, warm, human, loving man. The novel which emerged came out of the most intense anguish possible; in 1963 I was reliving the original isolation I had experienced upon the loss of my father, and the horror and fear expressed in the novel are not fictional sentiments ground out to interest the reader; they come from the deepest part of me: yearning for the good father and fear of the evil father, the father who left me.
   I found in the story The Days of Perky Pat a vehicle that I could translate into a thematic basis for the novel I wanted to write. Now, you see, Perky Pat is the eternally beckoning fair one, das ewige Weiblichkeit—“the eternally feminine,” as Goethe put it. Isolation generated the novel and yearning generated the story; so the novel is a mixture of the fear of being abandoned and the fantasy of the beautiful woman who waits for you—somewhere, but God only knows where; I have still to figure it out. But if you are sitting alone day after day at your typewriter, turning out one story after another and having no one to talk to, no one to be with, and yet pro forma having a wife and four daughters from whose house you have been expelled, banished to a little single-walled shack that is so cold in winter that, literally, the ink would freeze in my typewriter ribbon, well, you are going to write about iron slot-eyed faces and warm young women. And thus I did. And thus I still do.
   Reaction to THE THREE STIGMATA was mixed. In England some reviewers described it as blasphemy. Terry Carr, who was my agent at Scott Meredith at the time, told me later, “That novel is crazy,” although subsequent to that he reversed his opinion. Some reviewers found it a profound novel. I only find it frightening. I was unable to proofread the galleys because the novel frightened me so. It is a dark journey into the mystical and the supernatural and the absolutely evil as I understood it at the time. Let us say, I would like Perky Pat to show up at my door, but I dread the possibility that, when I hear the knock, it will be Palmer Eldritch waiting outside and not Perky Pat. Actually, to be honest, neither has shown up in the seventeen or so years since I wrote the novel. I guess that is the story of life: what you most fear never happens, but what you most yearn for never happens either. This is the difference between life and fiction. I suppose it’s a good trade-off. But I’m not sure. (1979)
 
   STAND-BY (“Top Stand-By Job”) 4/18/63. Amazing, Oct 1963.
 
   WHAT’LL WE DO WITH RAGLAND PARK? (“No Ordinary Guy”) 4/29/63. Amazing, Nov 1963.
 
   OH, TO BE A BLOBEL! (“Well, See, There Were These Blobels…”) 5/6/63. Galaxy, Feb 1964.
   At the beginning of my writing career in the early Fifties, Galaxy was my economic mainstay. Horace Gold at Galaxy liked my writing whereas John W Campbell, Jr. at Astounding considered my writing not only worthless but as he put it, “Nuts.” By and large I liked reading Galaxy because it had the broadest range of ideas, venturing into the soft sciences such as sociology and psychology, at a time when Campbell (as he once wrote me!) considered psionics a necessary premise for science fiction. Also, Campbell said, the psionic character in the story had to be in charge of what was going on. So Galaxy provided a latitude which Astounding did not. However, I was to get into an awful quarrel with Horace Gold; he had the habit of changing your stories without telling you: adding scenes, adding characters, removing downbeat endings in favor of upbeat endings. Many writers resented this. I did more than resent this; despite the fact that Galaxy was my main source of income I told Gold that I would not sell to him unless he stopped altering my stories—after which he bought nothing from me at all.
   It was not, then, until Fred Pohl became editor of Galaxy that I began to appear there again. Oh, To Be A Blobel! is a story which Fred Pohl bought. In this story my enormous anti-war bias is evident, a bias which had, ironically, pleased Gold. I wasn’t thinking of the Viet Nam War but war in general; in particular, how a war forces you to become like your enemy. Hitler had once said that the true victory of the Nazis would be to force its enemies, the United States in particular, to become like the Third Reich—i.e. a totalitarian society—in order to win. Hitler, then, expected to win even in losing. As I watched the American military-industrial complex grow after World War Two I kept remembering Hitler’s analysis, and I kept thinking how right the son of a bitch was. We had beaten Germany, but both the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. were getting more and more like the Nazis with their huge police systems every day. Well, it seemed to me there was a little wry humor in this (but not much). Maybe I could write about it without getting too deep into polemics. But the issue presented in this story is real. Look what we had to become in Viet Nam just to lose, let alone to win; can you imagine what we’d have had to become to win? Hitler would have gotten a lot of laughs out of it, and the laughs would have been on us… and to a very great extent in fact were. And they were hollow and grim laughs, without humor of any kind. (1979)
   Here I nailed down the ultimate meaningless irony of war; the human turns into a Blobel, and the Blobel, his enemy, turns into a human, and there it all is, the futility, the black humor, the stupidity. And in the story they all wind up happy. (1976)

The Eye of the Sibyl and Other Classic Strories

Philip Kindred Dick


The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick

Introduction
The Little Black Box
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
The War with the Fnools
Precious Artifact
Retreat Syndrome
A Tehran Odyssey
Your Appointment Will Be Yesterday
Holy Quarrel
I
II
III
IV
V
A Game of Unchance
Not by its Cover
Return Match
Faith of Our Fathers
The Story to End All Stories for Harlan Ellison’s Anthology Dangerous Visions
The Electric Ant
Cadbury, the Beaver Who Lacked
A Little Something for Us Tempunauts
The Pre-Persons
The Eye of the Sibyl
The Day Mr. Computer Fell out of its Tree
The Exit Door Leads In
Chains of Air, Web of Aether
Strange Memories of Death
I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon
Rautavaara’s Case
The Alien Mind
Notes

The Eye of the Sibyl
and Other Classic Stories
by Philip K. Dick

Introduction
by Thomas M. Disch

   The conventional wisdom has it that there are writers’ writers and readers’ writers. The latter are those happy few whose books, by some pheromonic chemistry the former can never quite duplicate in their own laboratories, appear year after year on the best seller lists. They may or (more usually) may not satisfy the up-market tastes of “literary” critics but their books sell. Writers’ writers get great reviews, especially from their admiring colleagues, but their books don’t attract readers, who can recognize, even at the distance of a review, the signs of a book by a writers’ writer. The prose style comes in for high praise (a true readers’ writer, by contrast, would not want to be accused of anything so elitist as “style”); the characters have “depth”; above all, such a book is “serious.”
   Many writers’ writers aspire to the wider fame and higher advances of readers’ writers, and occasionally a readers’ writer will covet such laurels as royalties cannot buy. Henry James, the writers’ writer par excellence wrote one of his drollest tales, The Next Time, about just such a pair of cross-purposed writers, and James’s conclusion is entirely true to life. The literary writer does his best to write a blockbuster—and it wins him more laurels but no more readers. The successful hack does her damnedest to produce a Work of Art: the critics sneer, but it is her greatest commercial success.
   Philip K. Dick was, in his time, both a writers’ writer and a readers’ writer; and neither; and another kind altogether—a science fiction writers’ science fiction writer. The proof of the last contention is to be found blazoned on the covers of a multitude of his paperback books, where his colleagues have vied to lavish superlatives on him. John Brunner called him “the most consistently brilliant science fiction writer in the world.” Norman Spinrad trumps this with “the greatest American novelist of the second half of the twentieth century.” Ursula LeGuin anoints him as America’s Borges, which Harlan Ellison tops by hailing him as SF’s “Pirandello, its Beckett and its Pinter.” Brian Aldiss, Michael Bishop, myself—and many others—have all written encomia as extravagant, but all these praises had very little effect on the sales of the books they garlanded during the years those books were being written. Dick managed to survive as a full-time free-lance writer only by virtue of his immense productivity. Witness, the sheer expanse of these COLLECTED STORIES, and consider that most of his readers didn’t consider Dick a short story writer at all but knew him chiefly by his novels.
   It is significant, I think, that all the praise heaped on Dick was exclusively from other SF writers, not from the reputation makers of the Literary Establishment, for he was not like writers’ writers outside genre fiction. It’s not for his exquisite style he’s applauded, or his depth of characterization. Dick’s prose seldom soars, and often is lame as any Quasimodo. The characters in even some of his most memorable tales have all the “depth” of a 50s sitcom. (A more kindly way to think of it: he writes for the traditional complement of America’s indigenous commedia dell-arte.) Even stories that one remembers as exceptions to this rule can prove, on re-reading, to have more in common with Bradbury and van Vogt than with Borges and Pinter. Dick is content, most of the time, with a narrative surface as simple—even simple-minded—as a comic book. One need go no further than the first story in this book, The Little Black Box, for proof of this—and it was done in 1963, when Dick was at the height of his powers, writing such classic novels as THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE and MARTIAN TIME-SLIP. Further, Box contains the embryo for another of his best novels of later years, DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP?
   Why, then, such paeans? For any aficionado of SF the answer is self-evident: he had great ideas. Fans of genre writing have usually been able to tolerate sloppiness of execution for the sake of genuine novelty, since the bane of genre fiction has been the constant recycling of old plots and premises. And Dick’s great ideas occupied a unique wave-band on the imaginative spectrum. Not for him the conquest of space. In Dick the colonization of the solar system simply results in new and more dismal suburbs being built. Not for him the Halloween mummeries of inventing new breeds of Alien Monsters. Dick was always too conscious of the human face behind the Halloween mask to bother with elaborate masquerades. Dick’s great ideas sprang up from the world around him, from the neighborhoods he lived in, the newspapers he read, the stores he shopped in, the ads on TV. His novels and stories taken all together comprise one of the most accurate and comprehensive pictures of American culture in the Populuxe and Viet Nam eras that exists in contemporary fiction—not because of his accuracy in the matter of inventorying the trivia of those times, but because he discovered metaphors that uncovered the meaning of the way we lived. He made of our common places worlds of wonder. What more can we ask of art?
   Well, the answer is obvious: polish, execution, economy of means, and other esthetic niceties. Most SF writers, however, have been able to get along without table linen and crystal so long as the protein of a meaty metaphor was there on the plate. Indeed, Dick’s esthetic failings could become virtues for his fellow SF writers, since it is so often possible for us to take the ball he fumbled and continue for a touchdown. Ursula LeGuin’s THE LATHE OF HEAVEN is one of the best novels Dick ever wrote—except that he didn’t. My own 334 would surely not have been the same book without the example of his own accounts of Future Drabness. The list of his conscious debtors is long, and of his unconscious debtors undoubtedly even longer.
   Phil’s own note at the back of this book to his story The Pre-Persons provides an illuminating example of the kind of reaction he could have on a fellow writer. In this case Joanna Russ allegedly offered to beat him up for his tale of a young boy’s apprehension by the driver of a local “abortion truck,” who operates like a dog catcher in rounding up Pre-Persons (children under 12 no longer wanted by their parents) and taking them into “abortion” centers to be gassed. It’s an inspired piece of propaganda (Phil calls it “special pleading”), to which the only adequate response is surely not a threat to beat up the author but a story that dramatizes the same issue as forcefully and that does not shirk the interesting but trouble-making question: If abortion, why not infanticide? Dick’s raising of this question in the current polarized climate of debate was a coup de theatre but scarcely the last word on the subject. One could easily extrapolate an entire novel from the essential premise of The Pre-Persons, and it wouldn’t necessarily be an anti-abortion tract. Dick’s stories often flowered into novels when he re-considered his first good idea, and the reason he is a science fiction writers’ science fiction writer is because his stories so often have had the same effect on his colleagues. Reading a story by Dick isn’t like “contemplating” a finished work of art. Much more it’s like becoming involved in a conversation. I’m glad to be a part, here, of that continuing conversation.
   Thomas M. Disch
   October, 1986


   How does one fashion a book of resistance, a book of truth in an empire of falsehood, or a book of rectitude in an empire of vicious lies? How does one do this right in front of the enemy?
   Not through the old-fashioned ways of writing while you’re in the bathroom, but how does one do that in a truly future technological state? Is it possible for freedom and independence to arise in new ways under new conditions? That is, will new tyrannies abolish these protests? Or will there be new responses by the spirit that we can’t anticipate?

Philip K. Dick in an interview, 1974.
(from “Only Apparently Real”)

The Little Black Box

I

   Bogart Crofts of the State Department said, “Miss Hiashi, we want to send you to Cuba to give religious instruction to the Chinese population there. It’s your Oriental background. It will help.”
   With a faint moan, Joan Hiashi reflected that her Oriental background consisted of having been born in Los Angeles and having attended courses at UCSB, the University of Santa Barbara. But she was technically, from the standpoint of training, an Asian scholar, and she had properly listed this on her job-application form.
   “Let’s consider the word caritas,” Crofts was saying. “In your estimation, what actually does it mean, as Jerome used it? Charity? Hardly. But then what? Friendliness? Love?”
   Joan said, “My field is Zen Buddhism.”
   “But everybody,” Crofts protested in dismay, “knows what caritas means in late Roman usage. The esteem of good people for one another; that’s what it means.” His gray, dignified eyebrows raised. “Do you want this job, Miss Hiashi? And if so, why?”
   “I want to disseminate Zen Buddhist propaganda to the Communist Chinese in Cuba,” Joan said, “because—” She hesitated. The truth was simply that it meant a good salary for her, the first truly high-paying job she had ever held. From a career standpoint, it was a plum. “Aw, hell,” she said. “What is the nature of the One Way? I don’t have any answer.”
   “It’s evident that your field has taught you a method of avoiding giving honest answers,” Crofts said sourly. “And being evasive. However—” He shrugged. “Possibly that only goes to prove that you’re well trained and the proper person for the job. In Cuba you’ll be running up against some rather worldly and sophisticated individuals, who in addition are quite well off even from the U.S. standpoint. I hope you can cope with them as well as you’ve coped with me.”
   Joan said, “Thank you, Mr. Crofts.” She rose. “I’ll expect to hear from you, then.”
   “I am impressed by you,” Crofts said, half to himself. “After all, you’re the young lady who first had the idea of feeding Zen Buddhist riddles to UCSB’s big computers.”
   “I was the first to do it,” Joan corrected. “But the idea came from a friend of mine, Ray Meritan. The gray-green jazz harpist.”
   “Jazz and Zen Buddhism,” Crofts said. “State may be able to make use of you in Cuba.”

   To Ray Meritan she said, “I have to get out of Los Angeles, Ray. I really can’t stand the way we’re living here.” She walked to the window of his apartment and looked out at the monorail gleaming far off. The silver car made its way at enormous speed, and Joan hurriedly looked away.
   If we only could suffer, she thought. That’s what we lack, any real experience of suffering, because we can escape anything. Even this.
   “But you are getting out,” Ray said. “You’re going to Cuba and convert wealthy merchants and bankers into becoming ascetics. And it’s a genuine Zen paradox; you’ll be paid for it.” He chuckled. “Fed into a computer, a thought like that would do harm. Anyhow, you won’t have to sit in the Crystal Hall every night listening to me play—if that’s what you’re anxious to get away from.”
   “No,” Joan said, “I expect to keep on listening to you on TV. I may even be able to use your music in my teaching.” From a rosewood chest in the far corner of the room she lifted out a .32 pistol. It had belonged to Ray Meritan’s second wife, Edna, who had used it to kill herself, the previous February, late one rainy afternoon. “May I take this along?” she asked.
   “For sentiment?” Ray said. “Because she did it on your account?”
   “Edna did nothing on my account. Edna liked me. I’m not taking any responsibility for your wife’s suicide, even though she did find out about us—seeing each other, so to speak.”
   Ray said meditatively, “And you’re the girl always telling people to accept blame and not to project it out on the world. What do you call your principle, dear? Ah.” He grinned. “The Anti-paranoia Prinzip. Doctor Joan Hiashi’s cure for mental illness; absorb all blame, take it all upon yourself.” He glanced up at her and said acutely, “I’m surprised you’re not a follower of Wilbur Mercer.”
   “That clown,” Joan said.
   “But that’s part of his appeal. Here, I’ll show you.” Ray switched on the TV set across the room from them, the legless black Oriental-style set with its ornamentation of Sung dynasty dragons.
   “Odd you would know when Mercer is on,” Joan said.
   Ray, shrugging murmured, “I’m interested. A new religion, replacing Zen Buddhism, sweeping out of the Middle West to engulf California. You ought to pay attention, too, since you claim religion as your profession. You’re getting a job because of it. Religion is paying your bills, my dear girl, so don’t knock it.”
   The TV had come on, and there was Wilbur Mercer.
   “Why isn’t he saying anything?” Joan said.
   “Why, Mercer has taken a vow this week. Complete silence.” Ray lit a cigarette. “State ought to be sending me, not you. You’re a fake.”
   “At least I’m not a clown,” Joan said, “or a follower of a clown.”
   Ray reminded her softly, “There’s a Zen saying, ‘The Buddha is a piece of toilet paper.’ And another. ‘The Buddha often—’ ”
   “Be still,” she said sharply. “I want to watch Mercer.”
   “You want to watch,” Ray’s voice was heavy with irony. “Is that what you want, for God’s sake? No one watches Mercer; that’s the whole point.” Tossing his cigarette into the fireplace, he strode to the TV set; there, before it, Joan saw a metal box with two handles, attached by a lead of twin-cable wire to the TV set. Ray seized the two handles, and at once a grimace of pain shot across his face.
   “What is it?” she asked, in anxiety.
   “N-nothing.” Ray continued to grip the handles. On the screen, Wilbur Mercer walked slowly over the barren, jagged surface of a desolate hillside, his face lifted, an expression of serenity—or vacuity—on his thin, middle-aged features. Gasping, Ray released the handles. “I could only hold them for forty-five seconds this time.” To Joan, he explained, “This is the empathy box, my dear. I can’t tell you how I got it—to be truthful I don’t really know. They brought it by, the organization that distributes it—Wilcer, Incorporated. But I can tell you that when you take hold of these handles you’re no longer watching Wilbur Mercer. You’re actually participating in his apotheosis. Why, you’re feeling what he feels.”
   Joan said, “It looks like it hurts.”
   Quietly, Ray Meritan said, “Yes. Because Wilbur Mercer is being killed. He’s walking to the place where he’s going to die.”
   In horror, Joan moved away from the box.
   “You said that was what we needed,” Ray said. “Remember, I’m a rather adequate telepath; I don’t have to bestir myself very much to read your thoughts. ‘If only we could suffer.’ That’s what you were thinking, just a little while ago. Well, here’s your chance, Joan.”
   “It’s—morbid!”
   “Was your thought morbid?”
   “Yes!” she said.
   Ray Meritan said, “Twenty million people are followers of Wilbur Mercer now. All over the world. And they’re suffering with him, as he walks along toward Pueblo, Colorado. At least that’s where they’re told he’s going. Personally I have my doubts. Anyhow, Mercerism is now what Zen Buddhism was once; you’re going to Cuba to teach the wealthy Chinese bankers a form of asceticism that’s already obsolete, already seen its day.”
   Silently, Joan turned away from him and watched Mercer walking.
   “You know I’m right,” Ray said. “I can pick up your emotions. You may not be aware of them, but they’re there.”
   On the screen, a rock was thrown at Mercer. It struck him on the shoulder.
   Everyone who’s holding onto his empathy box, Joan realized, felt that along with Mercer.
   Ray nodded. “You’re right.”
   “And—what about when he’s actually killed?” She shuddered.
   “We’ll see what happens then,” Ray said quietly. “We don’t know.”

II

   To Bogart Crofts, Secretary of State Douglas Herrick said, “I think you’re wrong, Boge. The girl may be Meritan’s mistress but that doesn’t mean she knows.”
   “We’ll wait for Mr. Lee to tell us,” Crofts said irritably. “When she gets to Havana he’ll be waiting to meet her.”
   “Mr. Lee can’t scan Meritan direct?”
   “One telepath scan another?” Bogart Crofts smiled at the thought. It conjured up a nonsensical situation: Mr. Lee reading Meritan’s mind, and Meritan, also being a telepath, would read Mr. Lee’s mind and discover that Mr. Lee was reading his mind, and Lee, reading Meritan’s mind, would discover that Meritan knew—and so forth. Endless regression, winding up with a fusion of minds, within which Meritan carefully guarded his thoughts so that he did not think about Wilbur Mercer.
   “It’s the similarity of names that convinces me,” Herrick said. “Meritan, Mercer. The first three letters—?”
   Crofts said, “Ray Meritan is not Wilbur Mercer. I’ll tell you how we know. Over at CIA, we made an Ampex video tape from Mercer’s telecast, had it enlarged and analyzed. Mercer was shown against the usual dismal background of cactus plants and sand and rock… you know.”
   “Yes,” Herrick said, nodding. “The Wilderness, as they call it.”
   “In the enlargement something showed up in the sky. It was studied. It’s not Luna. It’s a moon, but too small to be Luna. Mercer is not on Earth. I would guess that he is not a terrestrial at all.”
   Bending down, Crofts picked up a small metal box, carefully avoiding the two handles. “And these were not designed and built on Earth. The entire Mercer Movement is null-T all the way, and that’s the fact we’ve got to contend with.”
   Herrick said, “If Mercer is not a Terran, then he may have suffered and even died before, on other planets.”
   “Oh, yes,” Crofts said. “Mercer—or whatever his or its real name is—may be highly experienced in this. But we still don’t know what we want to know.” And that of course was, What happens to those people holding onto the handles of their empathy boxes?
   Crofts seated himself at his desk and scrutinized the box resting directly before him, with its two inviting handles. He had never touched them, and he never intended to. But—
   “How soon will Mercer die?” Herrick asked.
   “They’re expecting it some time late next week.”
   “And Mr. Lee will have gotten something from the girl’s mind by then, you think? Some clue as to where Mercer really is?”
   “I hope so,” Crofts said, still seated at the empathy box but still not touching it. It must be a strange experience, he thought, to place your hands on two ordinary-looking metal handles and find, all at once, that you’re no longer yourself; you’re another man entirely, in another place, laboring up a long, dreary inclined plain toward certain extinction. At least, so they say. But hearing about it… what does that actually convey? Suppose I tried it for myself.
   The sense of absolute pain… that was what appalled him, held him back.
   It was unbelievable that people could deliberately seek it out, rather than avoiding it. Gripping the handles of the empathy box was certainly not the act of a person seeking escape. It was not the avoidance of something but the seeking of something. And not the pain as such; Crofts knew better than to suppose that the Mercerites were simple masochists who desired discomfort. It was, he knew, the meaning of the pain which attracted Mercer’s followers.
   The followers were suffering from something.
   Aloud, he said to his superior, “They want to suffer as a means of denying their private, personal existences. It’s a communion in which they all suffer and experience Mercer’s ordeal together.” Like the Last Supper, he thought. That’s the real key: the communion, the participation that is behind all religion. Or ought to be. Religion binds men together in a sharing, corporate body, and leaves everyone else on the outside.
   Herrick said, “But primarily it’s a political movement, or must be treated as such.”
   “From our standpoint,” Crofts agreed. “Not theirs.”
   The intercom on the desk buzzed and his secretary said, “Sir, Mr. John Lee is here.”
   “Tell him to come in.”
   The tall, slender young Chinese entered, smiling, his hand out. He wore an old-fashioned single-breasted suit and pointed black shoes. As they shook hands, Mr. Lee said, “She has not left for Havana, has she?”
   “No,” Crofts said.
   “Is she pretty?” Mr. Lee said.
   “Yes,” Crofts said, with a smile at Herrick. “But—difficult. The snappish kind of woman. Emancipated, if you follow me.”
   “Oh, the suffragette type,” Mr. Lee said, smiling. “I detest that type of female. It will be hard going, Mr. Crofts.”
   “Remember,” Crofts said, “your job is simply to be converted. All you have to do is listen to her propaganda about Zen Buddhism, learn to ask a few questions such as, ‘Is this stick the Buddha?’ and expect a few inexplicable blows on the head—a Zen practice, I understand, supposed to instill sense.”
   With a broad grin, Mr. Lee said, “Or to instill nonsense. You see, I am prepared. Sense, nonsense; in Zen it’s the same thing.” He became sober, now. “Of course, I myself am a Communist,” he said. “The only reason I’m doing this is because the Party at Havana has taken the official stand that Mercerism is dangerous and must be wiped out.” He looked gloomy. “I must say, these Mercerites are fanatics.”
   “True,” Crofts agreed. “And we must work for their extinction.” He pointed to the empathy box. “Have you ever—?”
   “Yes,” Mr. Lee said. “It’s a form of punishment. Self-imposed, no doubt for reasons of guilt. Leisure gleans such emotions from people if it is properly utilized; otherwise not.”
   Crofts thought, This man has no understanding of the issues at all. He’s a simple materialist. Typical of a person born in a Communist family, raised in a Communist society. Everything is either black or white.
   “You’re mistaken,” Mr. Lee said; he had picked up Crofts’ thought.
   Flushing, Crofts said, “Sorry, I forgot. No offense.”
   “I see in your mind,” Mr. Lee said, “that you believe Wilbur Mercer, as he calls himself, may be non-T. Do you know the Party’s position on this question? It was debated just a few days ago. The Party takes the stand that there are no non-T races in the solar system, that to believe remnants of once-superior races still exist is a form of morbid mysticism.”
   Crofts sighed. “Deciding an empirical issue by vote—deciding it on a strictly political basis. I can’t understand that.”
   At that point, Secretary Herrick spoke up, soothing both men. “Please, let’s not become sidetracked by theoretical issues on which we don’t all agree. Let’s stick to basics—the Mercerite Party and its rapid growth all over the planet.”
   Mr. Lee said, “You are right, of course.”

III

   At the Havana airfield Joan Hiashi looked around her as the other passengers walked rapidly from the ship to the entrance of the number twenty concourse.
   Relatives and friends had surged cautiously out onto the field, as they always did, in defiance of field rulings. She saw among them a tall, lean young Chinese man with a smile of greeting on his face.
   Walking toward him she called, “Mr. Lee?”
   “Yes.” He hurried toward her. “It’s dinner time. Would you care to eat? I’ll take you to the Hang Far Lo restaurant. They have pressed duck and bird’s nest soup, all Canton-style… very sweet but good once in a long while.”
   Soon they were at the restaurant, in a red-leather and imitation teak booth. Cubans and Chinese chattered on all sides of them; the air smelled of frying pork and cigar smoke.
   “You are President of the Havana Institute for Asian Studies?” she asked, just to be certain there had been no slip-ups.
   “Correct. It is frowned on by the Cuban Communist Party because of the religious aspect. But many of the Chinese here on the island attend lectures or are on our mailing list. And as you know we’ve had many distinguished scholars from Europe and Southern Asia come and address us… By the way. There is a Zen parable which I do not understand. The monk who cut the kitten in half—I have studied it and thought about it, but I do not see how the Buddha could be present when cruelty was done to an animal.” He hastened to add, “I’m not disputing with you. I am merely seeking information.”
   Joan said, “Of all the Zen parables that has caused the most difficulty. The question to ask is, Where is the kitten now?”
   “That recalls the opening of the Bhagavad-Gita,” Mr. Lee said, with a quick nod.


   “I recall Arjura saying,
   The bow Gandiva slips from
   my hand…
   Omens of evil!
   What can we hope from this killing of kinsmen?


   “Correct,” Joan said, “And of course you remember Krishna’s answer. It is the most profound statement in all pre-Buddhistic religion of the issue of death and of action.”
   The waiter came for their order. He was a Cuban, in khaki and a beret.
   “Try the fried won ton,” Mr. Lee advised. “And the chow yuk, and of course the egg roll. You have egg roll today?” he asked the waiter.
   “Si, Senor Lee.” The waiter picked at his teeth with a toothpick.
   Mr. Lee ordered for both of them, and the waiter departed.
   “You know,” Joan said, “when you’ve been around a telepath as much as I have, you become conscious of intensive scanning going on… I could always tell when Ray was trying to dig at something in me. You’re a telepath. And you’re very intensively scanning me right now.”
   Smiling, Mr. Lee said, “I wish I was, Miss Hiashi.”
   “I have nothing to hide,” Joan said. “But I wonder why you are so interested in what I’m thinking. You know I’m an employee of the United States Department of State; there’s nothing secret about that. Are you afraid I’ve come to Cuba as a spy? To study military installations? Is it something like that?” She felt depressed. “This is not a good beginning,” she said. “You haven’t been honest with me.”
   “You are a very attractive woman, Miss Hiashi,” Mr. Lee said, losing none of his poise. “I was merely curious to see—shall I be blunt? Your attitude toward sex.”
   “You’re lying,” Joan said quietly.
   Now the bland smile departed; he stared at her.
   “Bird’s nest soup, senor.” The waiter had returned; he set the hot steaming bowl in the center of the table. “Tea.” He laid out a teapot and two small white handleless cups. “Senorita, you want chopsticks?”
   “No,” she said absently.
   From outside the booth came a cry of anguish. Both Joan and Mr. Lee leaped up. Mr. Lee pulled the curtain aside; the waiter was staring, too, and laughing.
   At a table in the opposite corner of the restaurant sat an elderly Cuban gentleman with his hands gripping the handles of an empathy box.
   “Here, too,” Joan said.
   “They are pests,” Mr. Lee said. “Disturbing our meal.”
   The waiter said, “Loco.” He shook his head, still chuckling.
   “Yes,” Joan said. “Mr. Lee, I will continue here, trying to do my job, despite what’s occurred between us. I don’t know why they deliberately sent a telepath to meet me—possibly it’s Communist paranoid suspicions of outsiders—but in any case I have a job to do here and I mean to do it. So shall we discuss the dismembered kitten?”
   “At meal time?” Mr. Lee said faintly.
   “You brought it up,” Joan said, and proceeded, despite the expression of acute misery on Mr. Lee’s face as he sat spooning up his bird’s nest soup.

   At the Los Angeles studio of television station KKHF, Ray Meritan sat at his harp, waiting for his cue. How High the Moon, he had decided, would be his first number. He yawned, kept his eye on the control booth.
   Beside him, at the blackboard, jazz commentator Glen Goldstream polished his rimless glasses with a fine linen handkerchief and said, “I think I’ll tie in with Gustav Mahler tonight.”
   “Who the hell is he?”
   “A great late nineteenth century composer. Very romantic. Wrote long peculiar symphonies and folk-type songs. I’m thinking, however, of the rhythmic patterns in The Drunkard in Springtime from Song of the Earth. You’ve never heard it?”
   “Nope,” Meritan said restlessly.
   “Very gray-green.”
   Ray Meritan did not feel very gray-green tonight. His head still ached from the rock thrown at Wilbur Mercer. Meritan had tried to let go of the empathy box when he saw the rock coming, but he had not been quick enough. It had struck Mercer on the right temple, drawing blood.
   “I’ve run into three Mercerites this evening,” Glen said. “And all of them looked terrible. What happened to Mercer today?”
   “How would I know?”
   “You’re carrying yourself the way they did today. It’s your head, isn’t it? I know you well enough, Ray. You’d be mixed up in anything new and odd—what do I care if you’re a Mercerite? I just thought maybe you’d like a pain pill.”
   Brusquely, Ray Meritan said, “That would defeat the entire idea wouldn’t it? A pain pill. Here, Mr. Mercer, as you go up the hillside, how about a shot of morphine? You won’t feel a thing.” He rippled a few cadences on his harp, releasing his emotions.
   “You’re on,” the producer said from the control room.
   Their theme, That’s a Plenty, swelled from the tape deck in the control room, and the number two camera facing Goldstream lit up its red light. Arms folded, Goldstream said, “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. What is jazz?”
   That’s what I say, Meritan thought. What is jazz? What is life? He rubbed his splintered, pain-racked forehead and wondered how he could endure the next week. Wilbur Mercer was getting close to it now. Each day it would become worse…
   “And after a brief pause for an important message,” Goldstream was saying, “we’ll be back to tell you more about the world of gray-green men and women, those peculiar people, and the world of the artistry of the one and only Ray Meritan.”
   The tape of the commercial appeared on the TV monitor facing Meritan.
   Meritan said to Goldstream, “I’ll take the pain pill.”
   A yellow, flat, notched tablet was held out to him. “Paracodein,” Goldstream said. “Highly illegal, but effective. An addictive drug… I’m surprised you, of all people, don’t carry some.”
   “I used to,” Ray said, as he got a dixie cup of water and swallowed the pill.
   “And now you’re on Mercerism.”
   “Now I’m—” He glanced at Goldstream; they had known each other, in their professional capacities, for years. “I’m not a Mercerite,” he said, “so forget it, Glen. It’s just coincidence I got a headache the night Mercer was hit on the temple by a sharp rock thrown by some moronic sadist who ought to be the one dragging his way up that hillside.” He scowled at Goldstream.
   “I understand,” Goldstream said, “that the U.S. Department of Mental Health is on the verge of asking the Justice Department to pick up the Mercerites.”
   Suddenly he swung to face camera two. A faint smile touched his face and he said smoothly, “Gray-green began about four years ago, in Pinole, California, at the now justly-famous Double Shot Club where Ray Meritan played, back in 1993 and ‘4. Tonight, Ray will let us hear one of his best known and liked numbers, Once in Love with Amy.” He swung in Meritan’s direction. “Ray… Meritan!”
   Plunk-plunk, the harp went as Ray Meritan’s fingers riffled the strings.
   An object lesson, he thought as he played. That’s what the FBI would make me into for the teenagers, to show them what not to grow up to be. First on Paracodein, now on Mercer. Beware, kids!
   Off camera, Glen Goldstream held up a sign he had scribbled.


IS MERCER A NON-TERRESTRIAL?

   Underneath this, Goldstream wrote with a marking pencil:


It’s That They Want to Know.

   Invasion from outside there somewhere, Meritan thought to himself as he played. That’s what they’re afraid of. Fear of the unknown, like tiny children. That’s our ruling circles: tiny, fear-ridden children playing ritualistic games with super-powerful toys.
   A thought came to him from one of the network officials in the control room. Mercer has been injured.
   At once, Ray Meritan turned his attention that way, scanned as hard as he could. His fingers strummed the harp reflexively.
   Government outlawing so-called empathy boxes.
   He thought immediately of his own empathy box, before his TV set in the living room of his apartment.
   Organization which distributes and sells the empathy boxes declared illegal, and FBI making arrests in several major cities. Other countries expected to follow.
   How badly injured? he wondered. Dying?
   And—what about the Mercerites who had been holding onto the handles of their empathy boxes at that moment? How were they, now? Receiving medical attention?
   Should we air the news now? the network official was thinking. Or wait until the commercial?
   Ray Meritan ceased playing his harp and said clearly into the boom microphone, “Wilbur Mercer has been injured. This is what we’ve expected but it’s still a major tragedy. Mercer is a saint.”
   Wide-eyed, Glen Goldstream gawked at him.
   “I believe in Mercer,” Ray Meritan said, and all across the United States his television audience heard his confession of faith. “I believe his suffering and injury and death have meaning for each of us.”
   It was done; he had gone on record. And it hadn’t even taken much courage.
   “Pray for Wilbur Mercer,” he said and resumed playing his gray-green style of harp.
   You fool, Glen Goldstream was thinking. Giving yourself away! You’ll be in jail within a week. Your career is ruined!
   Plunk-plunk, Ray played on his harp, and smiled humorlessly at Glen.

IV

   Mr. Lee said, “Do you know the story of the Zen monk, who was playing hide and go seek with the children? Was it Basho who tells this? The monk hid in an outhouse and the children did not think of looking there, and so they forgot him. He was a very simple man. Next day—”
   “I admit that Zen is a form of stupidity,” Joan Hiashi said. “It extols the virtues of being simple and gullible. And remember, the original meaning of ‘gullible’ is one who is easily gulled, easily cheated.” She sipped a little of her tea and found it now cold.
   “Then you are a true practitioner of Zen,” Mr. Lee said. “Because you have been gulled.” He reached inside his coat and brought out a pistol, which he pointed at Joan. “You’re under arrest.”
   “By the Cuban Government?” she managed to say.
   “By the United States Government,” Mr. Lee said. “I have read your mind and I learn that you know that Ray Meritan is a prominent Mercerite and you yourself are attracted to Mercerism.”
   “But I’m not!”
   “Unconsciously you are attracted. You are about to switch over. I can pick up those thoughts, even if you deny them to yourself. We are going back to the United States, you and I, and there we will find Mr. Ray Meritan and he will lead us to Wilbur Mercer; it is as simple as that.”
   “And this is why I was sent to Cuba?”
   “I am a member of the Central Committee of the Cuban Communist Party,” Mr. Lee said. “And the sole telepath on that committee. We have voted to work in cooperation with the United States Department of State during this current Mercer crisis. Our plane, Miss Hiashi, leaves for Washington, D.C. in half an hour; let us get down to the airport at once.”
   Joan Hiashi looked helplessly about the restaurant. Other people eating, the waiters… nobody paid attention. She rose to her feet as a waiter passed with a heavily-loaded tray. “This man,” she said, pointing to Mr. Lee, “is kidnapping me. Help me, please.”
   The waiter glanced at Mr. Lee, saw who it was, smiled at Joan and shrugged. “Mr. Lee, he is an important man,” the waiter said, and went on with his tray.
   “What he says is true,” Mr. Lee said to her.
   Joan ran from the booth and across the restaurant. “Help me,” she said to the elderly Cuban Mercerite who sat with his empathy box before him. “I’m a Mercerite. They’re arresting me.”
   The lined old face lifted; the man scrutinized her.
   “Help me,” she said.
   “Praise Mercer,” the old man said.
   You can’t help me, she realized. She turned back to Mr. Lee, who had followed after her, still holding the pistol pointed at her. “This old man is not going to do a thing,” Mr. Lee said. “Not even get to his feet.”
   She sagged. “All right. I know.”
   The television set in the corner suddenly ceased its yammering of daytime trash; the image of a woman’s face and bottle of cleanser abruptly disappeared and there was only blackness. Then, in Spanish, a news announcer began to speak.
   “Hurt,” Mr. Lee said, listening. “But Mercer is not dead. How do you feel, Miss Hiashi, as a Mercerite? Does this affect you? Oh, but that’s right. One must take hold of the handles first, for it to reach you. It must be a voluntary act.”
   Joan picked up the elderly Cuban’s empathy box, held it for a moment, and then seized the handles. Mr. Lee stared at her in surprise; he moved toward her, reaching for the box…
   It was not pain that she felt. Is this how it is? she wondered as she saw around her, the restaurant dim and faded. Maybe Wilbur Mercer is unconscious; that must be it. I’m escaping from you, she thought to Mr. Lee. You can’t—or at least you won’t—follow me where I’ve gone: into the tomb world of Wilbur Mercer, who is dying somewhere on a barren plain, surrounded by his enemies. Now I’m with him. And it is an escape from something worse. From you. And you’re never going to be able to get me back.
   She saw, around her, a desolate expanse. The air smelled of harsh blossoms; this was the desert, and there was no rain.
   A man stood before her, a sorrowful light in his gray, pain-drenched eyes. “I am your friend,” he said, “but you must go on as if I did not exist. Can you understand that?” He spread empty hands.
   “No,” she said, “I can’t understand that.”
   “How can I save you,” the man said, “if I can’t save myself?” He smiled: “Don’t you see? There is no salvation.”
   “Then what’s it all for?” she asked.
   “To show you,” Wilbur Mercer said, “that you aren’t alone. I am here with you and always will be. Go back and face them. And tell them that.”
   She released the handles.
   Mr. Lee, holding his gun to her, said, “Well?”
   “Let’s go,” she said. “Back to the United States. Turn me over to the FBI. It doesn’t matter.”
   “What did you see?” Mr. Lee said, with curiosity.
   “I won’t tell you.”
   “But I can learn it anyhow. From your mind.” He was probing, now, listening with his head cocked on one side. The corners of his mouth turned down as if he was pouting.
   “I don’t call that much,” he said. “Mercer looks you in the face and says he can’t do anything for you—is this the man you’d lay down your life for, you and the others? You’re ill.”
   “In the society of the insane,” Joan said, “the sick are well.”
   “What nonsense!” Mr. Lee said.

   To Bogart Crofts Mr. Lee said, “It was interesting. She became a Mercerite directly in front of me. The latency transforming itself into actuality… it proved I was correct in what I previously read in her mind.”
   “We’ll have Meritan picked up any time now,” Crofts said to his superior, Secretary Herrick. “He left the television studio in Los Angeles, where he got news of Mercer’s severe injury. After that, no one seems to know what he did. He did not return to his apartment. The local police picked up his empathy box, and he was beyond a doubt not on the premises.”
   “Where is Joan Hiashi?” Crofts asked.
   “Being held now in New York,” Mr. Lee said.
   “On what charge?” Crofts asked Secretary Herrick.
   “Political agitation inimical to the safety of the United States.”
   Smiling, Mr. Lee said, “And arrested by a Communist official in Cuba. It is a Zen paradox which no doubt fails to delight Miss Hiashi.”
   Meanwhile, Bogart Crofts reflected, empathy boxes were being collected in huge quantities. Soon their destruction would begin. Within forty-eight hours most of the empathy boxes in the United States would no longer exist, including the one here in his office.
   It still rested on his desk, untouched. It was he who originally had asked that it be brought in, and in all this time he had kept his hands off it, had never yielded. Now he walked over to it.
   “What would happen,” he asked Mr. Lee, “if I took hold of these two handles? There’s no television set here. I have no idea what Wilbur Mercer is doing right now; in fact for all that I know, now he’s finally dead.”
   Mr. Lee said, “If you grip the handles, sir, you will enter a—I hesitate to use the word but it seems to apply. A mystical communion. With Mr. Mercer, wherever he is; you will share his suffering, as you know, but that is not all. You will also participate in his—” Mr. Lee reflected. “ ‘World-view’ is not the correct term. Ideology? No.”
   Secretary Herrick suggested, “What about trance-state?”
   “Perhaps that is it,” Mr. Lee said, frowning. “No, that is not it either. No word will do, and that is the entire point. It cannot be described—it must be experienced.”
   “I’ll try,” Crofts decided.
   “No,” Mr. Lee said. “Not if you are following my advice. I would warn you away from it. I saw Miss Hiashi do it, and I saw the change in her. Would you have tried Paracodein when it was popular with rootless cosmopolite masses?” He sounded angry.
   “I have tried Paracodein,” Crofts said. “It did absolutely nothing for me.”
   “What do you want done, Boge?” Secretary Herrick asked him.
   Shrugging, Bogart Crofts said, “I mean I could see no reason for anyone liking it, wanting to become addicted to it.” And at last he took hold of the two handles of the empathy box

V

   Walking slowly in the rain, Ray Meritan said to himself, They got my empathy box and if I go back to the apartment they’ll get me.
   His telepathic talent had saved him. As he entered the building he had picked up the thoughts of the gang of city police.
   It was now past midnight. The trouble is I’m too well-known, he realized, from my damned TV show. No matter where I go I’ll be recognized.
   At least anywhere on Earth.
   Where is Wilbur Mercer? he asked himself. In this solar system or somewhere beyond it, under a different sun entirely? Maybe we’ll never know. Or at least I’ll never know.
   But did it matter? Wilbur Mercer was somewhere; that was all that was important. And there was always a way to reach him. The empathy box was always there—or at least had been, until the police raids. And Meritan had a feeling that the distribution company which had supplied the empathy boxes, and which led a shadowy existence anyhow, would find a way around the police. If he was right about them—
   Ahead in the rainy darkness he saw the red lights of a bar. He turned and entered it.
   To the bartender he said, “Look, do you have an empathy box? I’ll pay you one hundred dollars for the use of it.”
   The bartender, a big burly man with hairy arms, said, “Naw, I don’t have nuthin like that. Go on.”
   The people at the bar watched, and one of them said, “Those are illegal now.”
   “Hey, it’s Ray Meritan,” another said. “The jazz man.”
   Another man said lazily, “Play some gray-green jazz for us, jazz man.” He sipped at his mug of beer.
   Meritan started out of the bar.
   “Wait,” the bartender said. “Hold on, buddy. Go to this address.” He wrote on a match folder, then held it out to Meritan.
   “How much do I owe you?” Meritan said.
   “Oh, five dollars ought to do it.”
   Meritan paid and left the bar, the match folder in his pocket. It’s probably the address of the local police station, he said to himself. But I’ll give it a try anyhow.
   If I could get to an empathy box one more time—
   The address which the bartender had given him was an old, decaying wooden building in downtown Los Angeles. He rapped on the door and stood waiting.
   The door opened. A middle-aged heavy woman in bathrobe and furry slippers peeped out at him. “I’m not the police,” he said. “I’m a Mercerite. Can I use your empathy box?”
   The door gradually opened; the woman scrutinized him and evidently believed him, although she said nothing.
   “Sorry to bother you so late,” he apologized.
   “What happened to you, mister?” the woman said. “You look bad.”
   “It’s Wilbur Mercer,” Ray said. “He’s hurt.”
   “Turn it on,” the woman said, leading him with shuffling into a dark, cold parlor where a parrot slept in a huge, bent, brass-wire cage. There, on an old-fashioned radio cabinet, he saw the empathy box. He felt relief creep over him at the sight of it.
   “Don’t be shy,” the woman said.
   “Thanks,” he said, and took hold of the handles.
   A voice said in his ear, “We’ll use the girl. She’ll lead us to Meritan. I was right to hire her in the first place.”
   Ray Meritan did not recognize the voice. It was not that of Wilbur Mercer. But even so, bewildered, he held tightly onto the handles, listening; he remained frozen there, hands extended, clutching.
   “The non-T force has appealed to the most credulous segment of our community, but this segment—I firmly believe—is being manipulated by a cynical minority of opportunists at the top, such as Meritan. They’re cashing in on this Wilbur Mercer craze for their own pocketbooks.” The voice, self-assured, droned on.
   Ray Meritan felt fear as he heard it. For this was someone on the other side, he realized. Somehow he had gotten into empathic contact with him, and not with Wilbur Mercer.
   Or had Mercer done this deliberately, arranged this? He listened on, and now he heard:
   “…have to get the Hiashi girl out of New York and back here, where we can quiz her further.” The voice added, “As I told Herrick…”
   Herrick, the Secretary of State. This was someone in the State Department thinking, Meritan realized, thinking about Joan. Perhaps this was the official at State who had hired her.
   Then she wasn’t in Cuba. She was in New York. What had gone wrong? The whole implication was that State had merely made use of Joan to get at him.
   He released the handles and the voice faded from his presence.
   “Did you find him?” the middle-aged woman asked.
   “Y-yes,” Meritan said, disconcerted, trying to orient himself in the unfamiliar room.
   “How is he? Is he well?”
   “I—don’t know right now,” Meritan answered, truthfully. He thought, I must go to New York. And try to help Joan. She’s in this because of me; I have no choice. Even if they catch me because of it… how can I desert her?

   Bogart Crofts said, “I didn’t get Mercer.”
   He walked away from the empathy box, then turned to glare at it, balefully. “I got Meritan. But I don’t know where he is. At the moment I took hold of the handles of this box, Meritan took hold somewhere else. We were connected and now he knows everything I know. And we know everything he knows, which isn’t much.” Dazed he turned to Secretary Herrick. “He doesn’t know any more about Wilbur Mercer than we do; he was trying to reach him. He definitely is not Mercer.” Crofts was silent then.
   “There’s more,” Herrick said, turning to Mr. Lee. “What else did he get from Meritan, Mr. Lee?”
   “Meritan is coming to New York to try to find Joan Hiashi,” Mr. Lee said, obligingly reading Crofts’ mind. “He got that from Mr. Meritan during the moment their minds were fused.”
   “We’ll prepare to receive Mr. Meritan,” Secretary Herrick said, with a grimace.
   “Did I experience what you telepaths engage in all the time?” Crofts asked Mr. Lee.
   “Only when one of us comes close to another telepath,” Mr. Lee said. “It can be unpleasant. We avoid it, because if the two minds are thoroughly dissimilar and hence clash, it is psychologically harmful. I would assume you and Mr. Meritan clashed.”
   Crofts said, “Listen, how can we continue with this? I know now that Meritan is innocent. He doesn’t know a damn thing about Mercer or the organization that distributes these boxes except its name.”
   There was momentary silence.
   “But he is one of the few celebrities who has joined the Mercerites,” Secretary Herrick pointed out. He handed a teletype dispatch to Crofts. “And he has done it openly. If you’ll take the trouble to read this—”
   “I know he affirmed his loyalty to Mercer on this evening’s TV program,” Crofts said, trembling.
   “When you’re dealing with a non-T force originating from another solar system entirely,” Secretary Herrick said, “you must move with care. We will still try to take Meritan, and definitely through Miss Hiashi. We’ll release her from jail and have her followed. When Meritan makes contact with her—”
   To Crofts, Mr. Lee said, “Don’t say what you intend, Mr. Crofts. It will permanently damage your career.”
   Crofts said, “Herrick, this is wrong. Meritan is innocent and so is Joan Hiashi. If you try to trap Meritan I’ll resign from State.”
   “Write out your resignation and hand it to me,” Secretary Herrick said. His face was dark.
   “This is unfortunate,” Mr. Lee said. “I would guess that your contact with Mr. Meritan warped your judgment, Mr. Crofts. He has influenced you malignly; shake it off, for the sake of your long career and country, not to mention your family.”
   “What we’re doing is wrong,” Crofts repeated.
   Secretly Herrick stared at him angrily. “No wonder those empathy boxes have done harm! Now I’ve seen it with my own eyes. I wouldn’t turn back on any condition now.”
   He picked up the empathy box which Crofts had used. Lifting it high he dropped it to the floor. The box cracked open and then settled in a heap of irregular surfaces. “Don’t consider that a childish act,” he said. “I want any contact between us and Meritan broken. It can only be harmful.”
   “If we capture him,” Crofts said, “he may continue to exert influence over us.” He amended his statement: “Or rather, over me.”
   “Be that as it may, I intend to continue,” Secretary Herrick said. “And please present your resignation. Mr. Crofts, I intend to act on that matter as well.” He looked grim and determined.
   Mr. Lee said, “Secretary, I can read Mr. Crofts’ mind and I see that he is stunned at this moment. He is the innocent victim of a situation, arranged perhaps by Wilbur Mercer to spread confusion among us. And if you accept Mr. Crofts’ resignation, Mercer will have succeeded.”
   “It doesn’t matter whether he accepts it or not,” Crofts said. “Because in any case I’m resigning.”
   Sighing, Mr. Lee said, “The empathy box made you suddenly into an involuntary telepath and it was just too much.” He patted Mr. Crofts on the shoulder. “Telepathic power and empathy are two versions of the same thing. It should be called ‘telepathic box.’ Amazing, those non-T individuals; they can build what we can only evolve.”
   “Since you can read my mind,” Crofts said to him, “you know what I’m planning to do. I have no doubt you’ll tell Secretary Herrick.”
   Grinning blandly, Mr. Lee said, “The Secretary and I are cooperating in the interest of world peace. We both have our instructions.” To Herrick he said, “This man is so upset that he now actually considers switching over. Joining the Mercerites before all the boxes are destroyed. He liked being an involuntary telepath.”
   “If you switch,” Herrick said, “you’ll be arrested. I promise it.” Crofts said nothing.
   “He has not changed his mind,” Mr. Lee said urbanely, nodding to both men, apparently amused by the situation.
   But underneath, Mr. Lee was thinking, A brilliant bold type of stroke by the thing that calls itself Wilbur Mercer, this hooking up of Crofts with Meritan direct. It undoubtedly foresaw that Crofts would receive the strong emanations from the movement’s core. The next step is that Crofts will again consult an empathy box—if he can find one—and this time Mercer itself will address him personally. Address its new disciple.
   They have gained a man, Mr. Lee realized. They are ahead. But ultimately we will win. Because ultimately we will manage to destroy all the empathy boxes, and without them Wilbur Mercer can do nothing. This is the only way he has—or it has—of reaching and controlling people, as it has done here with unfortunate Mr. Crofts. Without the empathy boxes the movement is helpless.