VI

   Between noon and one o’clock the rubbish-littered streets swarmed with people. He chose that time, the busiest part of the day, to make his call. Selecting a phonebooth in a patron-teeming super drugstore, he dialed the familiar police number and stood holding the cold receiver to his ear. Deliberately, he had selected the aud, not the vid line: in spite of his second-hand clothing and seedy, unshaven appearance, he might be recognized.
   The receptionist was new to him. Cautiously, he gave Page’s extension. If Witwer were removing the regular staff and putting in his satellites, he might find himself talking to a total stranger.
   “Hello,” Page’s gruff voice came.
   Relieved, Anderton glanced around. Nobody was paying any attention to him. The shoppers wandered among the merchandise, going about their daily routines. “Can you talk?” he asked. “Or are you tied up?”
   There was a moment of silence. He could picture Page’s mild face torn with uncertainty as he wildly tried to decide what to do. At last came halting words. “Why—are you calling here?”
   Ignoring the question, Anderton said, “I didn’t recognize the receptionist. New personnel?”
   “Brand-new,” Page agreed, in a thin, strangled voice. “Big turnovers, these days.”
   “So I hear.” Tensely, Anderton asked, “How’s your job? Still safe?”
   “Wait a minute.” The receiver was put down and the muffled sound of steps came in Anderton’s ear. It was followed by the quick slam of a door being hastily shut. Page returned. “We can talk better now,” he said hoarsely.
   “How much better?”
   “Not a great deal. Where are you?”
   “Strolling through Central Park,” Anderton said. “Enjoying the sunlight.” For all he knew, Page had gone to make sure the line-tap was in place. Right now, an airborne police team was probably on its way. But he had to take the chance. “I’m in a new field,” he said curtly. “I’m an electrician these days.”
   “Oh?” Page said, baffled.
   “I thought maybe you had some work for me. If it can be arranged, I’d like to drop by and examine your basic computing equipment. Especially the data and analytical banks in the monkey block.”
   After a pause, Page said: “It—might be arranged. If it’s really important.”
   “It is,” Anderton assured him. “When would be best for you?”
   “Well,” Page said, struggling. “I’m having a repair team come in to look at the intercom equipment. The acting-Commissioner wants it improved, so he can operate quicker. You might trail along.”
   “I’ll do that. About when?”
   “Say four o’clock. Entrance B, level 6. I’ll meet you.”
   “Fine,” Anderton agreed, already starting to hang up. “I hope you’re still in charge, when I get there.”
   He hung up and rapidly left the booth. A moment later he was pushing through the dense pack of people crammed into the nearby cafeteria. Nobody would locate him there.
   He had three and a half hours to wait. And it was going to seem a lot longer. It proved to be the longest wait of his life before he finally met Page as arranged.
   The first thing Page said was: “You’re out of your mind. Why in hell did you come back?”
   “I’m not back for long.” Tautly, Anderton prowled around the monkey block, systematically locking one door after another. “Don’t let anybody in. I can’t take chances.”
   “You should have quit when you were ahead.” In an agony of apprehension, Page followed after him. “Witwer is making hay, hand over fist. He’s got the whole country screaming for your blood.”
   Ignoring him, Anderton snapped open the main control bank of the analytical machinery. “Which of the three monkeys gave the minority report?”
   “Don’t question me—I’m getting out.” On his way to the door Page halted briefly, pointed to the middle figure, and then disappeared. The door closed; Anderton was alone.
   The middle one. He knew that one well. The dwarfed, hunched-over figure had sat buried in its wiring and relays for fifteen years. As Anderton approached, it didn’t look up. With eyes glazed and blank, it contemplated a world that did not yet exist, blind to the physical reality that lay around it.
   “Jerry” was twenty-four years old. Originally, he had been classified as a hydrocephalic idiot but when he reached the age of six the psych testers had identified the precog talent, buried under the layers of tissue corrosion. Placed in a government-operated training school, the latent talent had been cultivated. By the time he was nine the talent had advanced to a useful stage. “Jerry,” however, remained in the aimless chaos of idiocy; the burgeoning faculty had absorbed the totality of his personality.
   Squatting down, Anderton began disassembling the protective shields that guarded the tape-reels stored in the analytical machinery. Using schematics, he traced the leads back from the final stages of the integrated computers, to the point where “Jerry’s” individual equipment branched off. Within minutes he was shakily lifting out two half-hour tapes: recent rejected data not fused with majority reports. Consulting the code chart, he selected the section of tape which referred to his particular card.
   A tape scanner was mounted nearby. Holding his breath, he inserted the tape, activated the transport, and listened. It took only a second. From the first statement of the report it was clear what had happened. He had what he wanted; he could stop looking.
   “Jerry’s” vision was misphased. Because of the erratic nature of precog-nition, he was examining a time-area slightly different from that of his companions. For him, the report that Anderton would commit a murder was an event to be integrated along with everything else. That assertion—and Anderton’s reaction—was one more piece of datum.
   Obviously, “Jerry’s” report superseded the majority report. Having been informed that he would commit a murder, Anderton would change his mind and not do so. The preview of the murder had cancelled out the murder; prophylaxis had occurred simply in his being informed. Already, a new time-path had been created. But “Jerry” was outvoted.
   Trembling, Anderton rewound the tape and clicked on the recording head. At high speed he made a copy of the report, restored the original, and removed the duplicate from the transport. Here was the proof that the card was invalid: obsolete. All he had to do was show it to Witwer....
   His own stupidity amazed him. Undoubtedly, Witwer had seen the report; and in spite of it, had assumed the job of Commissioner, had kept the police teams out. Witwer didn’t intend to back down; he wasn’t concerned with Anderton’s innocence.
   What, then, could he do? Who else would be interested?
   “You damn fool!” a voice behind him grated, wild with anxiety.
   Quickly, he turned. His wife stood at one of the doors, in her police uniform, her eyes frantic with dismay. “Don’t worry,” he told her briefly, displaying the reel of tape. “I’m leaving.”
   Her face distorted, Lisa rushed frantically up to him. “Page said you were here, but I couldn’t believe it. He shouldn’t have let you in. He just doesn’t understand what you are.”
   “What am I?” Anderton inquired caustically. “Before you answer, maybe you better listen to this tape.”
   “I don’t want to listen to it! I just want you to get out of here! Ed Witwer knows somebody’s down here. Page is trying to keep him occupied, but—“ She broke off, her head turned stiffly to one side. “He’s here now! He’s going to force his way in.”
   “Haven’t you got any influence? Be gracious and charming. He’ll probably forget about me.”
   Lisa looked at him in bitter reproach. “There’s a ship parked on the roof. If you want to get away....” Her voice choked and for an instant she was silent. Then she said, “I’ll be taking off in a minute or so. If you want to come—“
   “I’ll come,” Anderton said. He had no other choice. He had secured his tape, his proof, but he hadn’t worked out any method of leaving. Gladly, he hurried after the slim figure of his wife as she strode from the block, through a side door and down a supply corridor, her heels clicking loudly in the deserted gloom.
   “It’s a good fast ship,” she told him over her shoulder. “It’s emergency-fueled—ready to go. I was going to supervise some of the teams.”

VII

   Behind the wheel of the high-velocity police cruiser, Anderton outlined what the minority report tape contained. Lisa listened without comment, her face pinched and strained, her hands clasped tensely in her lap. Below the ship, the war-ravaged rural countryside spread out like a relief map, the vacant regions between cities crater-pitted and dotted with the ruins of farms and small industrial plants.
   “I wonder,” she said, when he had finished, “how many times this has happened before.”
   “A minority report? A great many times.”
   “I mean, one precog misphased. Using the report of the others as data—superseding them.” Her eyes dark and serious, she added, “Perhaps a lot of the people in the camps are like you.”
   “No,” Anderton insisted. But he was beginning to feel uneasy about it, too. “I was in a position to see the card, to get a look at the report. That’s what did it.”
   “But—” Lisa gestured significantly. “Perhaps all of them would have reacted that way. We could have told them the truth.”
   “It would have been too great a risk,” he answered stubbornly.
   Lisa laughed sharply. “Risk? Chance? Uncertainty? With precogs around?”
   Anderton concentrated on steering the fast little ship. “This is a unique case,” he repeated. “And we have an immediate problem. We can tackle the theoretical aspects later on. I have to get this tape to the proper people—before your bright young friend demolishes it.”
   “You’re taking it to Kaplan?”
   “I certainly am.” He tapped the reel of tape which lay on the seat between them. “He’ll be interested. Proof that his life isn’t in danger ought to be of vital concern to him.”
   From her purse, Lisa shakily got out her cigarette case. “And you think he’ll help you.”
   “He may—or he may not. It’s a chance worth taking.”
   “How did you manage to go underground so quickly?” Lisa asked. “A completely effective disguise is difficult to obtain.”
   “All it takes is money,” he answered evasively.
   As she smoked, Lisa pondered. “Probably Kaplan will protect you,” she said. “He’s quite powerful.”
   “I thought he was only a retired general.”
   “Technically—that’s what he is. But Witwer got out the dossier on him. Kaplan heads an unusual kind of exclusive veterans’ organization. It’s actually a kind of club, with a few restricted members. High officers only—an international class from both sides of the war. Here in New York they maintain a great mansion of a house, three glossy-paper publications, and occasional TV coverage that costs them a small fortune.”
   “What are you trying to say?”
   “Only this. You’ve convinced me that you’re innocent. I mean, it’s obvious that you won’t commit a murder. But you must realize now that the original report, the majority report, was not a fake. Nobody falsified it. Ed Witwer didn’t create it. There’s no plot against you, and there never was. If you’re going to accept this minority report as genuine you’ll have to accept the majority one, also.”
   Reluctantly, he agreed. “I suppose so.”
   “Ed Witwer,” Lisa continued, “is acting in complete good faith. He really believes you’re a potential criminal—and why not? He’s got the majority report sitting on his desk, but you have that card folded up in your pocket.”
   “I destroyed it,” Anderton said, quietly.
   Lisa leaned earnestly toward him. “Ed Witwer isn’t motivated by any desire to get your job,” she said. “He’s motivated by the same desire that has always dominated you. He believes in Precrime. He wants the system to continue. I’ve talked to him and I’m convinced he’s telling the truth.”
   Anderton asked, “Do you want me to take this reel to Witwer? If I do—he’ll destroy it.”
   “Nonsense,” Lisa retorted. “The originals have been in his hands from the start. He could have destroyed them any time he wished.”
   “That’s true.” Anderton conceded. “Quite possibly he didn’t know.”
   “Of course he didn’t. Look at it this way. If Kaplan gets hold of that tape, the police will be discredited. Can’t you see why? It would prove that the majority report was an error. Ed Witwer is absolutely right. You have to be taken in—if Precrime is to survive. You’re thinking of your own safety. But think, for a moment, about the system.” Leaning over, she stubbed out her cigarette and fumbled in her purse for another. “Which means more to you—your own personal safety or the existence of the system?”
   “My safety,” Anderton answered, without hesitation.
   “You’re positive?”
   “If the system can survive only by imprisoning innocent people, then it deserves to be destroyed. My personal safety is important because I’m a human being. And furthermore—“
   From her purse, Lisa got out an incredibly tiny pistol. “I believe,” she told him huskily, “that I have my finger on the firing release. I’ve never used a weapon like this before. But I’m willing to try.”
   After a pause, Anderton asked: “You want me to turn the ship around? Is that it?”
   “Yes, back to the police building. I’m sorry. If you could put the good of the system above your own selfish—“
   “Keep your sermon,” Anderton told her. “I’ll take the ship back. But I’m not going to listen to your defense of a code of behavior no intelligent man could subscribe to.”
   Lisa’s lips pressed into a thin, bloodless line. Holding the pistol tightly, she sat facing him, her eyes fixed intently on him as he swung the ship in a broad arc. A few loose articles rattled from the glove compartment as the little craft turned on a radical slant, one wing rising majestically until it pointed straight up.
   Both Anderton and his wife were supported by the constraining metal arms of their seats. But not so the third member of the party.
   Out of the corner of his eye, Anderton saw a flash of motion. A sound came simultaneously, the clawing struggle of a large man as he abruptly lost his footing and plunged into the reinforced wall of the ship. What followed happened quickly. Fleming scrambled instantly to his feet, lurching and wary, one arm lashing out for the woman’s pistol. Anderton was too startled to cry out. Lisa turned, saw the man—and screamed. Fleming knocked the gun from her hand, sending it clattering to the floor.
   Grunting, Fleming shoved her aside and retrieved the gun. “Sorry,” he gasped, straightening up as best he could. “I thought she might talk more. That’s why I waited.”
   “You were here when—“ Anderton began—and stopped. It was obvious that Fleming and his men had kept him under surveillance. The existence of Lisa’s ship had been duly noted and factored in, and while Lisa had debated whether it would be wise to fly him to safety, Fleming had crept into the storage compartment of the ship.
   “Perhaps,” Fleming said, “you’d better give me that reel of tape.” His moist, clumsy fingers groped for it. “You’re right—Witwer would have melted it down to a puddle.”
   “Kaplan, too?” Anderton asked numbly, still dazed by the appearance of the man.
   “Kaplan is working directly with Witwer. That’s why his name showed on line five of the card. Which one of them is the actual boss, we can’t tell. Possibly neither.” Fleming tossed the tiny pistol away and got out his own heavy-duty military weapon. “You pulled a real flub in taking off with this woman. I told you she was back of the whole thing.”
   “I can’t believe that,” Anderton protested. “If she—“
   “You’ve got no sense. This ship was warmed up by Witwer’s order. They wanted to fly you out of the building so that we couldn’t get to you. With you on your own, separated from us, you didn’t stand a chance.”
   A strange look passed over Lisa’s stricken features. “It’s not true,” she whispered. “Witwer never saw this ship. I was going to supervise—“
   “You almost got away with it,” Fleming interrupted inexorably. “We’ll be lucky if a police patrol ship isn’t hanging on us. There wasn’t time to check.” He squatted down as he spoke, directly behind the woman’s chair. “The first thing is to get this woman out of the way. We’ll have to drag you completely out of this area. Page tipped off Witwer on your new disguise, and you can be sure it has been widely broadcast.”
   Still crouching, Fleming seized hold of Lisa. Tossing his heavy gun to Anderton, he expertly tilted her chin up until her temple was shoved back against the seat. Lisa clawed frantically at him; a thin, terrified wail rose in her throat. Ignoring her, Fleming closed his great hands around her neck and began relentlessly to squeeze.
   “No bullet wound,” he explained, gasping. “She’s going to fall out—natural accident. It happens all the time. But in this case, her neck will be broken first.”
   It seemed strange that Anderton waited so long. As it was, Fleming’s thick ringers were cruelly embedded in the woman’s pale flesh before he lifted the butt of the heavyduty pistol and brought it down on the back of Fleming’s skull. The monstrous hands relaxed. Staggered, Fleming’s head fell forward and he sagged against the wall of the ship. Trying feebly to collect himself, he began dragging his body upward. Anderton hit him again, this time above the left eye. He fell back, and lay still.
   Struggling to breathe, Lisa remained for a moment huddled over, her body swaying back and forth. Then, gradually, the color crept back into her face.
   “Can you take the controls?” Anderton asked, shaking her, his voice urgent.
   “Yes, I think so.” Almost mechanically she reached for the wheel. “I’ll be all right. Don’t worry about me.”
   “This pistol,” Anderton said, “is Army ordnance issue. But it’s not from the war. It’s one of the useful new ones they’ve developed. I could be a long way off but there’s just a chance—“
   He climbed back to where Fleming lay spread out on the deck. Trying not to touch the man’s head, he tore open his coat and rummaged in his pockets. A moment later Fleming’s sweat-sodden wallet rested in his hands.
   Tod Fleming, according to his identification, was an Army Major attached to the Internal Intelligence Department of Military Information. Among the various papers was a document signed by General Leopold Kaplan, stating that Fleming was under the special protection of his own group—the International Veterans’ League.
   Fleming and his men were operating under Kaplan’s orders. The bread truck, the accident, had been deliberately rigged.
   It meant that Kaplan had deliberately kept him out of police hands. The plan went back to the original contact in his home, when Kaplan’s men had picked him up as he was packing. Incredulous, he realized what had really happened. Even then, they were making sure they got him before the police. From the start, it had been an elaborate strategy to make certain that Witwer would fail to arrest him.
   “You were telling the truth,” Anderton said to his wife, as he climbed back in the seat. “Can we get hold of Witwer?”
   Mutely, she nodded. Indicating the communications circuit of the dashboard, she asked: “What—did you find?”
   “Get Witwer for me. I want to talk to him as soon as I can. It’s very urgent.”
   Jerkily, she dialed, got the closed-channel mechanical circuit, and raised police headquarters in New York. A visual panorama of petty police officials flashed by before a tiny replica of Ed Witwer’s features appeared on the screen.
   “Remember me?” Anderton asked him.
   Witwer blanched. “Good God. What happened? Lisa, are you bringing him in?” Abruptly his eyes fastened on the gun in Anderton’s hands. “Look,” he said savagely, “don’t do anything to her. Whatever you may think, she’s not responsible.”
   “I’ve already found that out,” Anderton answered. “Can you get a fix on us? We may need protection getting back.”
   “Back!” Witwer gazed at him unbelievingly. “You’re coming in? You’re giving yourself up?”
   “I am, yes.” Speaking rapidly, urgently, Anderton added, “There’s something you must do immediately. Close off the monkey block. Make certain nobody gets it—Page or anyone else. Especially Army people.”
   “Kaplan,” the miniature image said.
   “What about him?”
   “He was here. He—he just left.”
   Anderton’s heart stopped beating. “What was he doing?”
   “Picking up data. Transcribing duplicates of our precog reports on you. He insisted he wanted them solely for his protection.”
   “Then he’s already got it,” Anderton said. “It’s too late.”
   Alarmed, Witwer almost shouted: “Just what do you mean? What’s happening?”
   “I’ll tell you,” Anderton said heavily, “when I get back to my office.”

VIII

   Witwer met him on the roof on the police building. As the small ship came to rest, a cloud of escort ships dipped their fins and sped off. Anderton immediately approached the blond-haired young man.
   “You’ve got what you wanted,” he told him. “You can lock me up, and send me to the detention camp. But that won’t be enough.”
   Witwer’s blue eyes were pale with uncertainty. “I’m afraid I don’t understand—“
   “It’s not my fault. I should never have left the police building. Where’s Wally Page?”
   “We’ve already clamped down on him,” Witwer replied. “He won’t give us any trouble.”
   Anderton’s face was grim.
   “You’re holding him for the wrong reason,” he said. “Letting me into the monkey block was no crime. But passing information to Army is. You’ve had an Army plant working here.” He corrected himself, a little lamely, “I mean, I have.”
   “I’ve called back the order on you. Now the teams are looking for Kaplan.”
   “Any luck?”
   “He left here in an Army truck. We followed him, but the truck got into a militarized Barracks. Now they’ve got a big wartime R-3 tank blocking the street. It would be civil war to move it aside.”
   Slowly, hesitantly, Lisa made her way from the ship. She was still pale and shaken and on her throat an ugly bruise was forming.
   “What happened to you?” Witwer demanded. Then he caught sight of Fleming’s inert form lying spread out inside. Facing Anderton squarely, he said: “Then you’ve finally stopped pretending this is some conspiracy of mine.”
   “I have.”
   “You don’t think I’m—“ He made a disgusted face. “Plotting to get your job.”
   “Sure you are. Everybody is guilty of that sort of thing. And I’m plotting to keep it. But this is something else—and you’re not responsible.”
   “Why do you assert,” Witwer inquired, “that it’s too late to turn yourself in? My God, we’ll put you in the camp. The week will pass and Kaplan will still be alive.”
   “He’ll be alive, yes,” Anderton conceded. “But he can prove he’d be just as alive if I were walking the streets. He has the information that proves the majority report obsolete. He can break the Precrime system.” He finished, “Heads or tails, he wins—and we lose. The Army discredits us; their strategy paid off.”
   “But why are they risking so much? What exactly do they want?”
   “After the Anglo-Chinese War, the Army lost out. It isn’t what it was in the good old AFWA days. They ran the complete show, both military and domestic. And they did their own police work.”
   “Like Fleming,” Lisa said faintly.
   “After the war, the Westbloc was demilitarized. Officers like Kaplan were retired and discarded. Nobody likes that.” Anderton grimaced. “I can sympathize with him. He’s not the only one. But we couldn’t keep on running things that way. We had to divide up the authority.”
   “You say Kaplan has won,” Witwer said. “Isn’t there anything we can do?”
   “I’m not going to kill him. We know it and he knows it. Probably he’ll come around and offer us some kind of deal. We’ll continue to function, but the Senate will abolish our real pull. You wouldn’t like that, would you?”
   “I should say not,” Witwer answered emphatically. “One of these days I’m going to be running this agency.” He flushed. “Not immediately, of course.”
   Anderton’s expression was somber. “It’s too bad you publicized the majority report. If you had kept it quiet, we could cautiously draw it back in. But everybody’s heard about it. We can’t retract it now.”
   “I guess not,” Witwer admitted awkwardly. “Maybe I—don’t have this job down as neatly as I imagined.”
   “You will, in time. You’ll be a good police officer. You believe in the status quo. But learn to take it easy.” Anderton moved away from them. “I’m going to study the data tapes of the majority report. I want to find out exactly how I was supposed to kill Kaplan.” Reflectively, he finished: “It might give me some ideas.”
   The data tapes of the precogs “Donna” and “Mike” were separately stored. Choosing the machinery responsible for the analysis of “Donna,” he opened the protective shield and laid out the contents. As before, the code informed him which reels were relevant and in a moment he had the tape-transport mechanism in operation.
   It was approximately what he had suspected. This was the material utilized by “Jerry”—the superseded time-path. In it Kaplan’s Military Intelligence agents kidnapped Anderton as he drove home from work. Taken to Kaplan’s villa, the organization GHQ of the International Veterans’ League. Anderton was given an ultimatum: voluntarily disband the Precrime system or face open hostilities with Army.
   In this discarded time-path, Anderton, as Police Commissioner, had turned to the Senate for support. No support was forthcoming. To avoid civil war, the Senate had ratified the dismemberment of the police system, and decreed a return to military law “to cope with the emergency.” Taking a corps of fanatic police, Anderton had located Kaplan and shot him, along with other officials of the Veterans’ League. Only Kaplan had died. The others had been patched up. And the coup had been successful.
   This was “Donna.” He rewound the tape and turned to the material previewed by “Mike.” It would be identical; both precogs had combined to present a unified picture. “Mike” began as “Donna” had begun: Anderton had become aware of Kaplan’s plot against the police. But something was wrong. Puzzled, he ran the tape back to the beginning. Incomprehensibly, it didn’t jibe. Again he relayed the tape, listening intently.
   The “Mike” report was quite different from the “Donna” report. An hour later, he had finished his examination, put away the tapes, and left the monkey block. As soon as he emerged, Witwer asked. “What’s the matter? I can see something’s wrong.”
   “No,” Anderton answered slowly, still deep in thought. “Not exactly wrong.” A sound came to his ears. He walked vaguely over to the window and
   peered out.
   The street was crammed with people. Moving down the center lane was a four-column line of uniformed troops. Rifles, helmets ... marching soldiers in their dingy wartime uniforms, carrying the cherished pennants of AFWA flapping in the cold afternoon wind.
   “An Army rally,” Witwer explained bleakly. “I was wrong. They’re not going to make a deal with us. Why should they? Kaplan’s going to make it public.”
   Anderton felt no surprise. “He’s going to read the minority report?”
   “Apparently. They’re going to demand the Senate disband us, and take away our authority. They’re going to claim we’ve been arresting innocent men—nocturnal police raids, that sort of thing. Rule by terror.”
   “You suppose the Senate will yield?”
   Witwer hesitated. “I wouldn’t want to guess.”
   “I’ll guess,” Anderton said. “They will. That business out there fits with what I learned downstairs. We’ve got ourselves boxed in and there’s only one direction we can go. Whether we like it or not, we’ll have to take it.” His eyes had a steely glint.
   Apprehensively, Witwer asked: “What is it?”
   “Once I say it, you’ll wonder why you didn’t invent it. Very obviously, I’m going to have to fulfill the publicized report. I’m going to have to kill Kaplan. That’s the only way we can keep them from discrediting us.”
   “But,” Witwer said, astonished, “the majority report has been superseded.”
   “I can do it,” Anderton informed him, “but it’s going to cost. You’re familiar with the statutes governing first-degree murder?”
   “Life imprisonment.”
   “At least. Probably, you could pull a few wires and get it commuted to exile. I could be sent to one of the colony planets, the good old frontier.”
   “Would you—prefer that?”
   “Hell, no,” Anderton said heartily. “But it would be the lesser of the two evils. And it’s got to be done.”
   “I don’t see how you can kill Kaplan.”
   Anderton got out the heavy-duty military weapon Fleming had tossed to him. “I’ll use this.”
   “They won’t stop you?”
   “Why should they? They’ve got that minority report that says I’ve changed my mind.”
   “Then the minority report is incorrect?”
   “No,” Anderton said, “it’s absolutely correct. But I’m going to murder Kaplan anyhow.”

IX

   He had never killed a man. He had never even seen a man killed. And he had been Police Commissioner for thirty years. For this generation, deliberate murder had died out. It simply didn’t happen.
   A police car carried him to within a block of the Army rally. There, in the shadows of the back seat, he painstakingly examined the pistol Fleming had provided him. It seemed to be intact. Actually, there was no doubt of the outcome. He was absolutely certain of what would happen within the next half hour. Putting the pistol back together, he opened the door of the parked car and stepped warily out.
   Nobody paid the slightest attention to him. Surging masses of people pushed eagerly forward, trying to get within hearing distance of the rally. Army uniforms predominated and at the perimeter of the cleared area, a line of tanks and major weapons was displayed—formidable armament still in production.
   Army had erected a metal speaker’s stand and ascending steps. Behind the stand hung the vast AFWA banner, emblem of the combined powers that had fought in the war. By a curious corrosion of time, the AFWA Veterans’ League included officers from the wartime enemy. But a general was a general and fine distinctions had faded over the years.
   Occupying the first rows of seats sat the high brass of the AFWA command. Behind them came junior commissioned officers. Regimental banners swirled in a variety of colors and symbols. In fact, the occasion had taken on the aspect of a festive pageant. On the raised stand itself sat stern-faced dignitaries of the Veterans’ League, all of them tense with expectancy. At the extreme edges, almost unnoticed, waited a few police units, ostensibly to keep order. Actually, they were informants making observations. If order were kept, the Army would maintain it.
   The late-afternoon wind carried the muffled booming of many people packed tightly together. As Anderton made his way through the dense mob he was engulfed by the solid presence of humanity. An eager sense of anticipation held everybody rigid. The crowd seemed to sense that something spectacular was on the way. With difficulty, Anderton forced his way past the rows of seats and over to the tight knot of Army officials at the edge of the platform. Kaplan was among them. But he was now General Kaplan. The vest, the gold pocket watch, the cane, the conservative business suit—all were gone. For this event, Kaplan had got his old uniform from its mothballs. Straight and impressive, he stood surrounded by what had been his general staff. He wore his service bars, his medals, his boots, his decorative short-sword, and his visored cap. It was amazing how transformed a bald man became under the stark potency of an officer’s peaked and visored cap.
   Noticing Anderton, General Kaplan broke away from the group and strode to where the younger man was standing. The expression on his thin, mobile countenance showed how incredulously glad he was to see the Commissioner of Police.
   “This is a surprise,” he informed Anderton, holding out his small gray-gloved hand. “It was my impression you had been taken in by the acting Commissioner.”
   “I’m still out,” Anderton answered shortly, shaking hands. “After all, Witwer has that same reel of tape.” He indicated the package Kaplan clutched in his steely fingers and met the man’s gaze confidently.
   In spite of his nervousness, General Kaplan was in good humor. “This is a great occasion for the Army,” he revealed. “You’ll be glad to hear I’m going to give the public a full account of the spurious charge brought against you.”
   “Fine,” Anderton answered noncommittally.
   “It will be made clear that you were unjustly accused.” General Kaplan was trying to discover what Anderton knew. “Did Fleming have an opportunity to acquaint you with the situation?”
   “To some degree,” Anderton replied. “You’re going to read only the minority report? That’s all you’ve got there?”
   “I’m going to compare it to the majority report.” General Kaplan signalled an aide and a leather briefcase was produced. “Everything is here—all the evidence we need,” he said. “You don’t mind being an example, do you? Your case symbolizes the unjust arrests of countless individuals.” Stiffly, General Kaplan examined his wristwatch. “I must begin. Will you join me on the platform?”
   “Why?”
   Coldly, but with a kind of repressed vehemence, General Kaplan said: “So they can see the living proof. You and I together—the killer and his victim. Standing side by side, exposing the whole sinister fraud which the police have been operating.”
   “Gladly,” Anderton agreed. “What are we waiting for?”
   Disconcerted, General Kaplan moved toward the platform. Again, he glanced uneasily at Anderton, as if visibly wondering why he had appeared and what he really knew. His uncertainty grew as Anderton willingly mounted the steps of the platform and found himself a seat directly beside the speaker’s podium.
   “You fully comprehend what I’m going to be saying?” General Kaplan demanded. “The exposure will have considerable repercussions. It may cause the Senate to reconsider the basic validity of the Precrime system.”
   “I understand,” Anderton answered, arms folded. “Let’s go.”
   A hush had descended on the crowd. But there was a restless, eager stirring when General Kaplan obtained the briefcase and began arranging his material in front of him.
   “The man sitting at my side,” he began, in a clean, clipped voice, “is familiar to you all. You may be surprised to see him, for until recently he was described by the police as a dangerous killer.”
   The eyes of the crowd focused on Anderton. Avidly, they peered at the only potential killer they had ever been privileged to see at close range.
   “Within the last few hours, however,” General Kaplan continued, “the police order for his arrest has been cancelled; because former Commissioner Anderton voluntarily gave himself up? No, that is not strictly accurate. He is sitting here. He has not given himself up, but the police are no longer interested in him. John Allison Anderton is innocent of any crime in the past, present, and future. The allegations against him were patent frauds, diabolical distortions of a contaminated penal system based on a false premise—a vast, impersonal engine of destruction grinding men and women to their doom.”
   Fascinated, the crowd glanced from Kaplan to Anderton. Everyone was familiar with the basic situation.
   “Many men have been seized and imprisoned under the so-called prophylactic Precrime structure,” General Kaplan continued, his voice gaining feeling and strength. “Accused not of crimes they have committed, but of crimes they will commit. It is asserted that these men, if allowed to remain free, will at some future time commit felonies.”
   “But there can be no valid knowledge about the future. As soon as precog-nitive information is obtained, it cancels itself out. The assertion that this man will commit a future crime is paradoxical. The very act of possessing this data renders it spurious. In every case, without exception, the report of the three police precogs has invalidated their own data. If no arrests had been made, there would still have been no crimes committed.”
   Anderton listened idly, only half-hearing the words. The crowd, however, listened with great interest. General Kaplan was now gathering up a summary made from the minority report. He explained what it was and how it had come into existence.
   From his coat pocket, Anderton slipped out his gun and held it in his lap. Already, Kaplan was laying aside the minority report, the precognitive material obtained from “Jerry.” His lean, bony fingers groped for the summary of first, “Donna,” and after that, “Mike.”
   “This was the original majority report,” he explained. “The assertion, made by the first two precogs, that Anderton would commit a murder. Now here is the automatically invalidated material. I shall read it to you.” He whipped out his rimless glasses, fitted them to his nose, and started slowly to read.
   A queer expression appeared on his face. He halted, stammered, and abruptly broke off. The papers fluttered from his hands. Like a cornered animal, he spun, crouched, and dashed from the speaker’s stand.
   For an instant his distorted face flashed past Anderton. On his feet now, Anderton raised the gun, stepped quickly forward, and fired. Tangled up in the rows of feet projecting from the chairs that filled the platform, Kaplan gave a single shrill shriek of agony and fright. Like a ruined bird, he tumbled, fluttering and flailing, from the platform to the ground below. Anderton stepped to the railing, but it was already over.
   Kaplan, as the majority report had asserted, was dead. His thin chest was a smoking cavity of darkness, crumbling ash that broke loose as the body lay twitching. Sickened, Anderton turned away, and moved quickly between the rising figures of stunned Army officers. The gun, which he still held, guaranteed that he would not be interfered with. He leaped from the platform and edged into the chaotic mass of people at its base. Stricken, horrified, they struggled to see what had happened. The incident, occurring before their very eyes, was incomprehensible. It would take time for acceptance to replace blind terror.
   At the periphery of the crowd, Anderton was seized by the waiting police. “You’re lucky to get out,” one of them whispered to him as the car crept cautiously ahead.
   “I guess I am,” Anderton replied remotely. He settled back and tried to compose himself. He was trembling and dizzy. Abruptly, he leaned forward and was violently sick.
   “The poor devil,” one the cops murmured sympathetically.
   Through the swirls of misery and nausea, Anderton was unable to tell whether the cop was referring to Kaplan or to himself.
   Four burly policemen assisted Lisa and John Anderton in the packing and loading of their possessions. In fifty years, the ex-Commissioner of Police had accumulated a vast collection of material goods. Somber and pensive, he stood watching the procession of crates on their way to the waiting trucks.
   By truck they would go directly to the field—and from there to Centaurus X by inter-system transport. A long trip for an old man. But he wouldn’t have to make it back.
   “There goes the second from the last crate,” Lisa declared, absorbed and preoccupied by the task. In sweater and slacks, she roamed through the barren rooms, checking on last-minute details. “I suppose we won’t be able to use these new atronic appliances. They’re still using electricity on Centten.”
   “I hope you don’t care too much,” Anderton said.
   “We’ll get used to it,” Lisa replied, and gave him a fleeting smile. “Won’t we?”
   “I hope so. You’re positive you’ll have no regrets. If I thought—“ “No regrets,” Lisa assured him. “Now suppose you help me with this crate.”
   As they boarded the lead truck, Witwer drove up in a patrol car. He leaped out and hurried up to them, his face looking strangely haggard. “Before you take off,” he said to Anderton, “you’ll have to give me a break-down on the situation with the precogs. I’m getting inquiries from the Senate. They want to find out if the middle report, the retraction, was an error—or what.” Confusedly, he finished: “I still can’t explain it. The minority report was wrong, wasn’t it?”
   “Which minority report?” Anderton inquired, amused.
   Witwer blinked. “Then that is it. I might have known.” Seated in the cabin of the truck, Anderton got out his pipe and shook tobacco into it. With Lisa’s lighter he ignited the tobacco and began operations. Lisa had gone back to the house, wanting to be sure nothing vital had been overlooked.
   “There were three minority reports,” he told Witwer, enjoying the young man’s confusion. Someday, Witwer would learn not to wade into situations he didn’t fully understand. Satisfaction was Anderton’s final emotion. Old and worn-out as he was, he had been the only one to grasp the real nature of the problem.
   “The three reports were consecutive,” he explained. “The first was ‘Donna.’ In that time-path, Kaplan told me of the plot, and I promptly murdered him. ‘Jerry,’ phased slightly ahead of ‘Donna,’ used her report as data. He factored in my knowledge of the report. In that, the second time-path, all I wanted to do was to keep my job. It wasn’t Kaplan I wanted to kill. It was my own position and life I was interested in.”
   “And ‘Mike’ was the third report? That came after the minority report?” Witwer corrected himself. “I mean, it came last?”
   “ ‘Mike’ was the last of the three, yes. Faced with the knowledge of the first report, I had decided not to kill Kaplan. That produced report two. But faced with that report, I changed my mind back. Report two, situation two, was the situation Kaplan wanted to create. It was to the advantage of the police to recreate position one. And by that time I was thinking of the police. I had figured out what Kaplan was doing. The third report invalidated the second one in the same way the second one invalidated the first. That brought us back where we started from.”
   Lisa came over, breathless and gasping. “Let’s go—we’re all finished here.” Lithe and agile, she ascended the metal rungs of the truck and squeezed in beside her husband and the driver. The latter obediently started up his truck and the others followed.
   “Each report was different,” Anderton concluded. “Each was unique. But two of them agreed on one point. If left free, I mould kill Kaplan. That created the illusion of a majority report. Actually, that’s all it was—an illusion. ‘Donna’ and ‘Mike’ previewed the same event—but in two totally different time-paths, occurring under totally different situations. ‘Donna’ and ‘Jerry,’ the so-called minority report and half of the majority report, were incorrect. Of the three, ‘Mike’ was correct—since no report came after his, to invalidate him. That sums it up.”
   Anxiously, Witwer trotted along beside the truck, his smooth, blond face creased with worry. “Will it happen again? Should we overhaul the set-up?”
   “It can happen in only one circumstance,” Anderton said. “My case was unique, since I had access to the data. It could happen again—but only to the next Police Commissioner. So watch your step.” Briefly, he grinned, deriving no inconsiderable comfort from Witwer’s strained expression. Beside him, Lisa’s red lips twitched and her hand reached out and closed over his. “Better keep your eyes open,” he informed young Witwer. “It might happen to you at any time.”

Recall Mechanism

   The analyst said: “I’m Humphrys, the man you came to see.” There were fear and hostility on the patient’s face, so Humphrys said: “I could tell a joke about analysts. Would that make you feel better? Or I could remind you that the National Health Trust is paying my fee; it’s not going to cost you a cent. Or I could cite the case of Psychoanalyst Y, who committed suicide last year because of overburdening anxiety resulting from a fraudulently filled out income tax.”
   Grudgingly, the patient smiled. “I heard about that. So psychologists are fallible.” He got to his feet and held out his hand. “My name is Paul Sharp. My secretary made the arrangements with you. I have a little problem, nothing important, but I’d like to clear it up.”
   The expression on his face showed that it was no small problem, and that, if he didn’t clear it up, it would probably destroy him.
   “Come inside,” Humphrys said genially, opening the door to his office, “so we can both sit down.”
   Sinking down in a soft easy chair, Sharp stretched his legs out in front of him. “No couch,” he observed.
   “The couch vanished back around 1980,” Humphrys said. “Post-war analysts feel enough confidence to face their patients on an equal level.” He offered a pack of cigarettes to Sharp and then lit up himself. “Your secretary gave me no details; she just said you wanted a conference.”
   Sharp said: “I can talk frankly?”
   “I’m bonded,” Humphrys said, with pride. “If any of the material you tell me gets into the hands of security organizations, I forfeit approximately ten thousand dollars in Westbloc silver—hard cash, not paper stuff.”
   “That’s good enough for me,” Sharp said, and began. “I’m an economist, working for the Department of Agriculture—the Division of War Destruction Salvage. I poke around H-bomb craters seeing what’s worth rebuilding.” He corrected himself. “Actually, I analyze reports on H-bomb craters and make recommendations. It was my recommendation to reclaim the farm lands around Sacramento and the industrial ring here at Los Angeles.”
   In spite of himself, Humphrys was impressed. Here was a man in the policy-planning level of the Government. It gave him an odd feeling to realize that Sharp, like any other anxiety-ridden citizen, had come to the Psych Front for therapy.
   “My sister-in-law got a nice advantage from the Sacramento reclamation,” Humphrys commented. “She had a small walnut orchard up there. The Government hauled off the ash, rebuilt the house and outbuildings, even staked her to a few dozen new trees. Except for her leg injury, she’s as well off as before the war.”
   “We’re pleased with our Sacramento project,” Sharp said. He had begun to perspire; his smooth, pale forehead was streaked, and his hands, as he held his cigarette, shook. “Of course, I have a personal interest in Northern California. I was born there myself, up around Petaluma, where they used to turn out hens’ eggs by the million …” His voice trailed off huskily. “Humphrys,” he muttered, “what am I going to do?”
   “First,” Humphrys said, “give me more information.”
   “I—” Sharp grinned inanely. “I have some kind of hallucination. I’ve had it for years, but it’s getting worse. I’ve tried to shake it, but—” he gestured—“it comes back, stronger, bigger, more often.”
   Beside Humphrys’ desk the vid and aud recorders were scanning covertly. “Tell me what the hallucination is,” he instructed. “Then maybe I can tell you why you have it.”

   He was tired. In the privacy of his living room, he sat dully examining a series of reports on carrot mutation. A variety, externally indistinguishable from the norm, was sending people in Oregon and Mississippi to the hospital with convulsions, fever and partial blindness. Why Oregon and Mississippi? Here with the report were photographs of the feral mutation; it did look like an ordinary carrot. And with the report came an exhaustive analysis of the toxic agent and recommendation for a neutralizing antidote.
   Sharp wearily tossed the report aside and selected the next in order.
   According to the second report, the notorious Detroit rat had shown up in St. Louis and Chicago, infesting the industrial and agricultural settlements replacing the destroyed cities. The Detroit rat—he had seen one once. That was three years ago; coming home one night, he had unlocked the door and seen, in the darkness, something scuttle away to safety. Arming himself with a hammer, he had pushed furniture around until he found it. The rat, huge and gray, had been in the process of building itself a wall-to-wall web. As it leaped up, he killed it with the hammer. A rat that spun webs …
   He called an official exterminator and reported its presence.
   A Special Talents Agency had been set up by the Government to utilize parabilities of wartime mutants evolved from the various radiation-saturated areas. But, he reflected, the Agency was equipped to handle only human mutants and their telepathic, precog, parakinetic and related abilities. There should have been a Special Talents Agency for vegetables and rodents, too.
   From behind his chair came a stealthy sound. Turning quickly, Sharp found himself facing a tall, thin man wearing a drab raincoat and smoking a cigar.
   “Did I scare you?” Giller asked, and snickered. “Take it easy, Paul. You look as if you’re going to pass out.”
   “I was working,” Sharp said defensively, partially recovering his equilibrium.
   “So I see,” said Giller.
   “And thinking about rats.” Sharp pushed his work to one side. “How’d you get in?”
   “Your door was unlocked.” Giller removed his raincoat and tossed it on the couch. “That’s right—you killed a Detroit. Right here in this room.” He gazed around the neat, unostentatious living room. “Are those things fatal?”
   “Depends where they get you.” Going into the kitchen, Sharp found two beers in the refrigerator. As he poured, he said: “They shouldn’t waste grain making this stuff… but as long as they do, it’s a shame not to drink it.”
   Giller accepted his beer greedily. “Must be nice to be a big wheel and have luxuries like this.” His small, dark eyes roved speculatively around the kitchen. “Your own stove, and your own refrigerator.” Smacking his lips, he added: “And beer. I haven’t had a beer since last August.”
   “You’ll live,” Sharp said, without compassion. “Is this a business call? If so, get to the point; I’ve got plenty of work to do.”
   Giller said: “I just wanted to say hello to a fellow Petaluman.”
   Wincing, Sharp answered: “It sounds like some sort of synthetic fuel.”
   Giller wasn’t amused. “Are you ashamed to have come from the very section that was once—”
   “I know. The egg-laying capital of the universe. Sometimes I wonder—how many chicken feathers do you suppose were drifting around, the day the first H-bomb hit our town?”
   “Billions,” Giller said morosely. “And some of them were mine. My chickens, I mean. Your family had a farm, didn’t they?”
   “No,” Sharp said, refusing to be identified with Giller. “My family operated a drug store facing on Highway 101. A block from the park, near the sporting goods shop.” And, he added under his breath: You can go to hell. Because I’m not going to change my mind. You can camp on my doorstep the rest of your life and it still won’t do any good. Petaluma isn’t that important. And anyhow, the chickens are dead.
   “How’s the Sac rebuild coming?” Giller inquired.
   “Fine.”
   “Plenty of those walnuts again?”
   “Walnuts coming out of people’s ears.”
   “Mice getting in the shell heaps?”
   “Thousands of them,” Sharp sipped his beer; it was good quality, probably as good as pre-war. He wouldn’t know, because in 1961, the year the war broke out, he had been only six years old. But the beer tasted the way he remembered the old days: opulent and carefree and satisfying.
   “We figure,” Giller said hoarsely, an avid gleam in his face, “that the Petaluma-Sonoma area can be built up again for about seven billion Westbloc. That’s nothing compared to what you’ve been doling out.”
   “And the Petaluma-Sonoma area is nothing compared with the areas we’ve been rebuilding,” Sharp said. “You think we need eggs and wine? What we need is machinery. It’s Chicago and Pittsburgh and Los Angeles and St. Louis and—”
   “You’ve forgotten,” Giller droned on, “that you’re a Petaluman. You’re turning your back on your origin—and on your duty.”
   “Duty! You suppose the Government hired me to be a lobbyist for one trivial farm area?” Sharp flushed with outrage. “As far as I’m concerned—”
   “We’re your people,” Giller said inflexibly. “And your people come first.”
   When he had got rid of the man, Sharp stood for a time in the night darkness, gazing down the road after Giller’s receding car. Well, he said to himself, there goes the way of the world—me first and to hell with everybody else.
   Sighing, he turned and made his way up the path toward the front porch of his house. Lights gleamed friendlily in the window. Shivering, he put his hand out and groped for the railing.
   And then, as he clumsily mounted the stairs, the terrible thing happened.
   With a rush, the lights of the window winked out. The porch railing dissolved under his fingers. In his ears a shrill screaming whine rose up and deafened him. He was falling. Struggling frantically, he tried to get hold of something, but there was only empty darkness around him, no substance, no reality, only the depth beneath him and the din of his own terrified shrieks.
   “Help!” he shouted, and the sound beat futilely back at him. “I’m falling!”
   And then, gasping, he was outstretched on the damp lawn, clutching handfuls of grass and dirt. Two feet from the porch—he had missed the first step in the darkness and had slipped and fallen. An ordinary event: the window lights had been blocked by the concrete railing. The whole thing had happened in a split second and he had fallen only the length of his own body. There was blood on his forehead; he had cut himself as he struck.
   Silly. A childish, infuriating event.
   Shakily, he climbed to his feet and mounted the steps. Inside the house, he stood leaning against the wall, shuddering and panting. Gradually the fear faded out and rationality returned.
   Why was he so afraid of falling?
   Something had to be done. This was worse than ever before, even worse than the time he had stumbled coming out of the elevator at the office—and had instantly been reduced to screaming terror in front of a lobbyful of people.
   What would happen to him if he really fell? If, for example, he were to step off one of the overhead ramps connecting the major Los Angeles office buildings? The fall would be stopped by safety screens; no physical harm was ever done, though people fell all the time. But for him—the psychological shock might be fatal. Would befatal; to his mind, at least.
   He made a mental note: no more going out on the ramps. Under no circumstances. He had been avoiding them for years, but from now on, ramps were in the same class as air travel. Since 1982 he hadn’t left the surface of the planet. And, in the last few years, he seldom visited offices more than ten flights up.
   But if he stopped using the ramps, how was he going to get into his own research files? The file room was accessibly only by ramp: the narrow metallic path leading up from the office area.
   Perspiring, terrified, he sank down on the couch and sat huddled over, wondering how he was going to keep his job, do his work.
   And how he was going to stay alive.

   Humphrys waited, but his patient seemed to have finished.
   “Does it make you feel any better,” Humphrys asked, “to know that fear of falling is a common phobia?”
   “No,” Sharp answered.
   “I guess there’s no reason why it should. You say it’s shown up before? When was the first time?”
   “When I was eight. The war had been going on two years. I was on the surface, examining my vegetable garden.” Sharp smiled weakly. “Even when I was a kid, I grew things. The San Francisco network picked up exhaust trails of a Soviet missile and all the warning towers went off like Roman candles. I was almost on top of the shelter. I raced to it, lifted the lid and started down the stairs. At the bottom were my mother and father. They yelled for me to hurry. I started to run down the stairs.”
   “And fell?” Humphrys asked expectantly.
   “I didn’t fall; I suddenly got afraid. I couldn’t go any farther; I just stood there. And they were yelling up at me. They wanted to get the bottom plate screwed in place. And they couldn’t until I was down.”
   With a touch of aversion, Humphrys acknowledged: “I remember those old two-stage shelters. I wonder how many people got shut between the lid and the bottom plate.” He eyed his patient. “As a child, had you heard of that happening? People being trapped on the stairs, not able to get back up, not able to get down …”
   “I wasn’t scared of being trapped! I was scared of falling—afraid I’d pitch head-forward off the steps.” Sharp licked his dry lips. “Well, so I turned around—” His body shuddered. “I went back up and outside.”
   “During the attack?”
   “They shot down the missile. But I spent the alert tending my vegetables. Afterward, my family beat me nearly unconscious.”
   Humphrys’ mind formed the words: origin of guilt.
   “The next time,” Sharp continued, “was when I was fourteen. The war had been over a few months. We started back to see what was left of our town. Nothing was left, only a crater of radioactive slag several hundred feet deep. Work teams were creeping down into the crater. I stood on the edge watching them. The fear came.” He put out his cigarette and sat waiting until the analyst found him another. “I left the area after that. Every night I dreamed about that crater, that big dead mouth. I hitched a ride on a military truck and rode to San Francisco.”
   “When was the next time?” asked Humphrys.
   Irritably, Sharp said: “Then it happened all the time, every time I was up high, every time I had to walk up or down a flight of steps—any situation where I was high and might fall. But to be afraid to walk up the steps of my own house—” He broke off temporarily. “I can’t walk up three steps,” he said wretchedly. “Three concrete steps.”
   “Any particular bad episodes, outside of those you’ve mentioned?”
   “I was in love with a pretty brown-haired girl who lived on the top floor of the Atcheson Apartments. Probably she still lives there; I wouldn’t know. I got five or six floors up and then—I told her good night and came back down.” Ironically, he said: “She must have thought I was crazy.”
   “Others?” Humphrys asked, mentally noting the appearance of the sexual element.
   “One time I couldn’t accept a job because it involved travel by air. It had to do with inspecting agricultural projects.”
   Humphrys said: “In the old days, analysts looked for the origin of a phobia. Now we ask: what does it do? Usually it gets the individual out of situations he unconsciously dislikes.”
   A slow, disgusted flush appeared on Sharp’s face. “Can’t you do better than that?”
   Disconcerted, Humphrys murmured: “I don’t say I agree with the theory or that it’s necessarily true in your case. I’ll say this much though: it’s not falling you’re afraid of. It’s something that falling reminds you of. With luck we ought to be able to dig up the prototype experience—what they used to call the original traumatic incident.” Getting to his feet, he began to drag over a stemmed tower of electronic mirrors. “My lamp,” he explained. “It’ll melt the barriers.”
   Sharp regarded the lamp with apprehension. “Look,” he muttered nervously, “I don’t want my mind reconstructed. I may be a neurotic, but I take pride in my personality.”
   “This won’t affect your personality.” Bending down, Humphrys plugged in the lamp. “It will bring up material not accessible to your rational center. I’m going to trace your life—track back to the incident at which you were done great harm—and find out what you’re really afraid of.”

   Black shapes drifted around him. Sharp screamed and struggled wildly, trying to pry loose the fingers closing over his arms and legs. Something smashed against his face. Coughing, he slumped forward, dribbling blood and saliva and bits of broken teeth. For an instant, blinding light flashed; he was being scrutinized.
   “Is he dead?” a voice demanded.
   “Not yet.” A foot poked experimentally into Sharp’s side. Dimly, in his half-consciousness, he could hear ribs cracking. “Almost, though.”
   “Can you hear me, Sharp?” a voice rasped, close to his ear.
   He didn’t respond. He lay trying not to die, trying not to associate himself with the cracked and broken thing that had been his body.
   “You probably imagine,” the voice said, familiar, intimate, “that I’m going to say you’ve got one last chance. But you don’t, Sharp. Your chance is gone. I’m telling you what we’re going to do with you.”
   Gasping, he tried not to hear. And, futilely, he tried not to feel what they were systematically doing to him.
   “All right,” the familiar voice said finally, when it had been done. “Now throw him out.”
   What remained of Paul Sharp was lugged to a circular hatch. The nebulous outline of darkness rose up around him and then—hideously—he was pitched into it. Down he fell, but this time he didn’t scream.
   No physical apparatus remained with which to scream.

   Snapping the lamp off, Humphrys bent over and methodically roused the slumped figure.
   “Sharp!” he ordered loudly. “Wake up! Come out of it!”
   The man groaned, blinked his eyes, stirred. Over his face settled a glaze of pure, unmitigated torment.
   “God,” he whispered, eyes blank, body limp with suffering. “They—”
   “You’re back here,” Humphrys said, shaken by what had been dredged up. “There’s nothing to worry about; you’re absolutely safe. It’s over with—happened years ago.”
   “Over,” Sharp murmured pathetically.
   “You’re back in the present. Understand?”
   “Yes,” Sharp muttered. “But—what was it? They pushed me out—through and into something. And I went on down.” He trembled violently. “I fell.”
   “You fell through a hatch,” Humphrys told him calmly. “You were beaten up and badly injured—fatally, they assumed. But you did survive. You are alive. You got out of it.”
   “Why did they do it?” Sharp asked brokenly. His face, sagging and gray, twitched with despair. “Help me, Humphrys …”
   “Consciously, you don’t remember when it happened?”
   “No.”
   “Do you remember where?”
   “No.” Sharp’s face jerked spasmodically. “They tried to kill me—they did kill me!” Struggling upright, he protested: “Nothing like that happened to me. I’d remember if it had. It’s a false memory—my mind’s been tampered with!”
   “It’s been repressed,” Humphrys said firmly, “deeply buried because of the pain and shock. A form of amnesia—it’s been filtering indirectly up in the form of your phobia. But now that you recall it consciously—”
   “Do I have to go back?” Sharp’s voice rose hysterically. “Do I have to get under that damn lamp again?”
   “It’s got to come out on a conscious level,” Humphrys told him, “but not all at once. You’ve had your limit for today.”
   Sagging with relief, Sharp settled back in the chair. “Thanks,” he said weakly. Touching his face, his body, he whispered: “I’ve been carrying that in my mind all these years. Corroding, eating away—”
   “There should be some diminution of the phobia,” the analyst told him, “as you grapple with the incident itself. We’ve made progress; we now have some idea of the real fear. It involves bodily injury at the hands of professional criminals. Ex-soldiers in the early post-war years… gangs of bandits, I remember.”
   A measure of confidence returned to Sharp. “It isn’t hard to understand a falling fear, under the circumstances. Considering what happened to me … Shakily, he started to his feet. And screamed shrilly.
   “What is it?” Humphrys demanded, hastily coming over and grabbing hold of his arm. Sharp leaped violently away, staggered, and collapsed inertly in the chair. “What happened?”
   Face working, Sharp managed: “I can’t get up.”
   “What?”
   “I can’t stand up.” Imploringly, he gazed up at the analyst, stricken and terrified. “I’m—afraid I’ll fall. Doctor, now I can’t even get to my feet.”
   For an interval neither man spoke. Finally, his eyes on the floor, Sharp whispered: “The reason I came to you, Humphrys, is because your office is on the ground floor. That’s a laugh, isn’t it? I couldn’t go any higher.”
   “We’re going to have to turn the lamp back on you,” Humphrys said.
   “I realize it. I’m scared.” Gripping the arms of the chair, he continued: “Go ahead. What else can we do? I can’t leave here. Humphrys, this thing is going to kill me.”
   “No, it isn’t.” Humphrys got the lamp into position. “We’ll get you out of this. Try to relax; try to think of nothing in particular.” Clicking the mechanism on, he said softly: “This time I don’t want the traumatic incident itself. I want the envelope of experience that surrounds it. I want the broader segment of which it’s a part.”

   Paul Sharp walked quietly through the snow. His breath, in front of him, billowed outward and formed a sparkling cloud of white. To his left lay the jagged ruins of what had been buildings. The ruins, covered with snow, seemed almost lovely. For a moment he paused, entranced.
   “Interesting,” a member of his research team observed, coming up. “Could be anything—absolutely anything—under there.”
   “It’s beautiful, in a way,” Sharp commented.
   “See that spire?” The young man pointed with one heavily gloved finger; he still wore his lead-shielded suit. He and his group had been poking around the still-contaminated crater. Their boring bars were lined up in an orderly row. “That was a church,” he informed Sharp. “A nice one, by the looks of it. And over there—” he indicated an indiscriminate jumble of ruin—“that was the main civic center.”
   “The city wasn’t directly hit, was it?” Sharp asked.
   “It was bracketed. Come on down and see what we’ve run into. The crater to our right—“
   “No, thanks,” Sharp said, pulling back with intense aversion. “I’ll let you do the crawling around.”
   The youthful expert glanced curiously at Sharp, then forgot the matter. “Unless we run into something unexpected, we should be able to start reclamation within a week. The first step, of course, is to clear off the slag-layer. It’s fairly well cracked—a lot of plant growth has perforated it, and natural decay has reduced a great deal of it to semi-organic ash.”
   “Fine,” Sharp said, with satisfaction. “I’ll be glad to see something here again, after all these years.”
   The expert asked: “What was it like before the war? I never saw that; I was born after the destruction began.”
   “Well,” Sharp said, surveying the fields of snow, “this was a thriving agricultural center. They grew grapefruit here. Arizona grapefruit. The Roosevelt Dam was along this way.”
   “Yes,” the expert said, nodding. “We located the remnants of it.”
   “Cotton was grown here. So was lettuce, alfalfa, grapes, olives, apricots—the thing I remember most, the time I came through Phoenix with my family, was the eucalyptus trees.”
   “We won’t have all that back,” the expert said regretfully. “What the heck—eucalyptus? I never heard of that.”
   “There aren’t any left in the United States,” Sharp said. “You’d have to go to Australia.”

   Listening, Humphrys jotted down a notation. “Okay,” he said aloud, switching off the lamp. “Come back, Sharp.”
   With a grunt, Paul Sharp blinked and opened his eyes. “What—” Struggling up, he yawned, stretched, peered blankly around the office. “Something about reclamation. I was supervising a team of recon men. A young kid.”
   “When did you reclaim Phoenix?” Humphrys asked. “That seems to be included in the vital time-space segment.”
   Sharp frowned. “We never reclaimed Phoenix. That’s still projected. We hope to get at it sometime in the next year.”
   “Are you positive?”
   “Naturally. That’s my job.”
   “I’m going to have to send you back,” Humphrys said, already reaching for the lamp.
   “What happened?”
   The lamp came on. “Relax,” Humphrys instructed briskly, a trifle too briskly for a man supposed to know exactly what he was doing. Forcing himself to slow down, he said carefully: “I want your perspective to broaden. Take in an earlier incident, one preceding the Phoenix reclamation.”

   In an inexpensive cafeteria in the business district, two men sat facing each other across a table.
   “I’m sorry,” Paul Sharp said, with impatience. “I’ve got to get back to my work.” Picking up his cup of ersatz coffee, he gulped the contents down.
   The tall, thin man carefully pushed away his empty dishes and, leaning back, lit a cigar.
   “For two years,” Giller said bluntly, “you’ve been giving us the runaround. Frankly, I’m a little tired of it.”
   “Runaround?” Sharp had started to rise. “I don’t get your drift.”
   “You’re going to reclaim an agricultural area—you’re going to tackle Phoenix. So don’t tell me you’re sticking to industrial. How long do you imagine those people are going to keep on living? Unless you reclaim their farms and lands—”
   “What people?”
   Harshly, Giller said: “The people living at Petaluma. Camped around the craters.”
   With vague dismay, Sharp murmured: “I didn’t realize there was anybody living there. I thought you all headed for the nearest reclaimed regions, San Francisco and Sacramento.”
   “You never read the petitions we presented,” Giller said softly.
   Sharp colored. “No, as a matter of fact. Why should I? If there’re people camping in the slag, it doesn’t alter the basic situation; you should leave, get out of there. That area is through.” He added: “I got out.”
   Very quietly, Giller said: “You would have stuck around if you’d farmed there. If your family had farmed there for over a century. It’s different from running a drug store. Drug stores are the same everywhere in the world.”
   “So are farms.”
   “No,” Giller said dispassionately. “Your land, your family’s land, has a unique feeling. We’ll keep on camping there until we’re dead or until you decide to reclaim.” Mechanically collecting the checks, he finished: “I’m sorry for you, Paul. You never had roots like we have. And I’m sorry you can’t be made to understand.” As he reached into his coat for his wallet, he asked: “When can you fly out there?”
   “Fly!” Sharp echoed, shuddering. “I’m not flying anywhere.”
   “You’ve got to see the town again. You can’t decide without having seen those people, seen how they’re living.”
   “No,” Sharp said emphatically. “I’m not flying out there. I can decide on the basis of reports.”
   Giller considered. “You’ll come,” he declared.
   “Over my dead body!”
   Giller nodded. “Maybe so. But you’re going to come. You can’t let us die without looking at us. You’ve got to have the courage to see what it is you’re doing.” He got out a pocket calendar and scratched a mark by one of the dates. Tossing it across the table to Sharp, he informed him: “We’ll come by your office and pick you up. We have the plane we flew down here. It’s mine. It’s a sweet ship.”
   Trembling, Sharp examined the calendar. And, standing over his mumbling, supine patient, so did Humphrys.
   He had been right. Sharp’s traumatic incident, the repressed material, didn’t lie in the past.
   Sharp was suffering from a phobia based on an event six months in the future.

   “Can you get up?” Humphrys inquired.
   In the chair, Paul Sharp stirred feebly. “I—” he began, and then sank into silence.
   “No more for a while,” Humphrys told him reassuringly. “You’ve had enough. But I wanted to get you away from the trauma itself.”
   “I feel better now.”
   “Try to stand.” Humphrys approached and stood waiting, as the man crept unsteadily to his feet.
   “Yes,” Sharp breathed. “It has receded. What was that last? I was in a cafe or something. With Giller.”
   From his desk Humphrys got a prescription pad. “I’m going to write you out a little comfort. Some round white pills to take every four hours.” He scribbled and then handed the slip to his patient. “So you will relax. It’ll take away some of the tension.”
   “Thanks,” Sharp said, in a weak, almost inaudible voice. Presently, he asked: “A lot of material came up, didn’t it?”
   “It certainly did,” Humphrys admitted tightly.
   There was nothing he could do for Paul Sharp. The man was very close to death now—in six short months, Giller would go to work on him. And it was too bad, because Sharp was a nice guy, a nice, conscientious, hard-working bureaucrat who was only trying to do his job as he saw it.
   “What do you think?” Sharp asked pathetically. “Can you help me?”
   “I’ll try,” Humphrys answered, not able to look directly at him. “But it goes very deep.”
   “It’s been a long time growing,” Sharp admitted humbly. Standing by the chair, he seemed small and forlorn; not an important official but only one isolated, unprotected individual. “I’d sure appreciate your help. If this phobia keeps up, no telling where it’ll end.”
   Humphrys asked suddenly, “Would you consider changing your mind and granting Giller’s demands?”
   “I can’t,” Sharp said. “It’s bad policy. I’m opposed to special pleading, and that’s what it is.”
   “Even if you come from the area? Even if the people are friends and former neighbors of yours?”
   “It’s my job,” Sharp said. “I have to do it without regard for my feelings or anybody else’s.”
   “You’re not a bad fellow,” Humphrys said involuntarily. “I’m sorry—” He broke off.
   “Sorry what?” Sharp moved mechanically toward the exit door. “I’ve taken enough of your time. I realize how busy you analysts are. When shall I come back. Can I come back?”
   “Tomorrow.” Humphrys guided him outside and into the corridor. “About this same time, if it’s convenient.”
   “Thanks a lot,” Sharp said, with relief. “I really appreciate it.”

  As soon as he was alone in his office, Humphrys closed the door and strode back to his desk. Reaching down, he grabbed the telephone and unsteadily dialed.
   “Give me somebody on your medical staff,” he ordered curtly when he had been connected with the Special Talents Agency.
   “This is Kirby,” a professional-sounding voice came presently. “Medical research.”
   Humphrys briefly identified himself. “I have a patient here,” he said, “who seems to be a latent precog.”
   Kirby was interested. “What area does he come from?”
   “Petaluma. Sonoma County, north of San Francisco Bay. It’s east of—”
   “We’re familiar with the area. A number of precogs have showed up there. That’s been a gold mine for us.”
   “Then I was right,” Humphrys said.
   “What’s the date of the patient’s birth?”
   “He was six years old when the war began.”
   “Well,” Kirby said, disappointed, “then he didn’t really get enough of a dose. He’ll never develop a full precog talent, such as we work with here.”
   “In other words, you won’t help?”
   “Latents—people with a touch of it—outnumber the real carriers. We don’t have time to fool with them. You’ll probably run into dozens like your patient, if you stir around. When it’s imperfect, the talent isn’t valuable; it’s going to be a nuisance for the man, probably nothing else.”
   “Yes, it’s a nuisance,” Humphrys agreed caustically. “The man is only months away from a violent death. Since he was a child, he’s been getting advanced phobic warnings. As the event gets closer, the reactions intensify.”
   “He’s not conscious of the future material?”
   “It operates strictly on a subrational level.”
   “Under the circumstances,” Kirby said thoughtfully, “maybe it’s just as well. These things appear to be fixed. If he knew about it, he still couldn’t change it.”

   Dr. Charles Bamberg, consulting psychiatrist, was just leaving his office when he noticed a man sitting in the waiting room.
   Odd, Bamberg thought. I have no patients left for today.
   Opening the door, he stepped into the waiting room. “Did you wish to see me?”
   The man sitting on the chair was tall and thin. He wore a wrinkled tan raincoat, and, as Bamberg appeared, he began tensely stubbing out a cigar.
   “Yes,” he said, getting clumsily to his feet.
   “Do you have an appointment?”
   “No appointment.” The man gazed at him in appeal. “I picked you—” He laughed with confusion. “Well, you’re on the top floor.”
   “The top floor?” Bamberg was intrigued. “What’s that got to do with it?”
   “I—well, Doc, I feel much more comfortable when I’m up high.”
   “I see,” Bamberg said. A compulsion, he thought to himself. Fascinating. “And,” he said aloud, “when you’re up high, how do you feel? Better?”
   “Not better,” the man answered. “Can I come in? Do you have a second to spare me?”
   Bamberg looked at his watch. “All right,” he agreed, admitting the man. “Sit down and tell me about it.”
   Gratefully, Giller seated himself. “It interferes with my life,” he said rapidly, jerkily. “Every time I see a flight of stairs, I have an irresistible compulsion to go up it. And plane flight—I’m always flying around. I have my own ship; I can’t afford it, but I’ve got to have it.”
   “I see,” Bamberg said. “Well,” he continued genially, “that’s not really so bad. After all, it isn’t exactly a fatal compulsion.”
   Helplessly, Giller replied: “When I’m up there—” He swallowed wretchedly, his dark eyes gleaming. “Doctor, when I’m up high, in an office building, or in my plane—I feel another compulsion.”
   “What is it?”
   “I—” Giller shuddered. “I have an irresistible urge to push people.”
   “To push people?”
   “Toward windows. Out.” Giller made a gesture. “What am I going to do, Doc? I’m afraid I’ll kill somebody. There was a little shrimp of a guy I pushed once—and one day a girl was standing ahead of me on an escalator—I shoved her. She was injured.”
   “I see,” Bamberg said, nodding. Repressed hostility, he thought to himself. Interwoven with sex. Not unusual.
   He reached for his lamp.

The Unreconstructed M

I

   The machine was a foot wide and two feet long; it looked like an oversized box of crackers. Silently, with great caution, it climbed the side of a concrete building; it had lowered two rubberized rollers and was now beginning the first phase of its job.
   From its rear, a flake of blue enamel was exuded. The machine pressed the flake firmly against the rough concrete and then continued on. Its upward path carried it from vertical concrete to vertical steel: it had reached a window. The machine paused and produced a microscopic fragment of cloth fabric. The cloth, with great care, was embedded in the fitting of the steel window frame.
   In the chill darkness, the machine was virtually invisible. The glow of a distant tangle of traffic briefly touched it, illuminated its polished hull, and departed. The machine resumed its work.
   It projected a plastic pseudopodium and incinerated the pane of window glass. There was no response from within the gloomy apartment: nobody was home. The machine, now dulled with particles of glass-dust, crept over the steel frame and raised an inquisitive receptor.
   While it received, it exerted precisely two hundred pounds pressure on the steel window frame; the frame obediently bent. Satisfied, the machine descended the inside of the wall to the moderately thick carpet. There it began the second phase of its job.
   One single human hair—follicle and speck of scalp included—was deposited on the hardwood floor by the lamp. Not far from the piano, two dried grains of tobacco were ceremoniously laid out. The machine waited an interval of ten seconds and then, as an internal section of magnetic tape clicked into place, it suddenly said, “Ugh! Damn it…”
   Curiously, its voice was husky and masculine.
   The machine made its way to the closet door, which was locked. Climbing the wood surface, the machine reached the lock mechanism, and, inserting a thin section of itself, caressed the tumblers back. Behind the row of coats was a small mound of batteries and wires: a self-powered video recorder. The machine destroyed the reservoir of film—which was vital—and then, as it left the closet, expelled a drop of blood on the jagged tangle that had been the lens-scanner. The drop of blood was even more vital.
   While the machine was pressing the artificial outline of a heel mark into the greasy film that covered the flooring of the closet, a sharp sound came from the hallway. The machine ceased its work and became rigid. A moment later a small, middle-aged man entered the apartment, coat over one arm, briefcase in the other.
   “Good God,” he said, stopping instantly as he saw the machine. “What are you?”
   The machine lifted the nozzle of its front section and shot an explosive pellet at the man’s half-bald head. The pellet traveled into the skull and detonated. Still clutching his coat and briefcase, bewildered expression on his face, the man collapsed to the rug. His glasses, broken, lay twisted beside his ear. His body stirred a little, twitched, and then was satisfactorily quiet.
   Only two steps remained to the job, now that the main part was done. The machine deposited a bit of burnt match in one of the spotless ashtrays resting on the mantel, and entered the kitchen to search for a water glass. It was starting up the side of the sink when the noise of human voices startled it.
   “This is the apartment,” a voice said, clear and close.
   “Get ready—he ought to still be here.” Another voice, a man’s voice, like the first. The hall door was pushed open and two individuals in heavy overcoats sprinted purposefully into the apartment. At their approach, the machine dropped to the kitchen floor, the water glass forgotten. Something had gone wrong. Its rectangular outline flowed and wavered; pulling itself into an upright package it fused its shape into that of a conventional TV unit.
   It was holding that emergency form when one of the men—tall, red-haired—peered briefly into the kitchen.
   “Nobody in here,” the man declared, and hurried on.
   “The window,” his companion said, panting. Two more figures entered the apartment, an entire crew. “The glass is gone—missing. He got in that way.”
   “But he’s gone.” The red-haired man reappeared at the kitchen door; he snapped on the light and entered, a gun visible in his hand. “Strange ... we got here right away, as soon as we picked up the rattle.” Suspiciously, he examined his wristwatch. “Rosenburg’s been dead only a few seconds … how could he have got out again so fast?”

   Standing in the street entrance, Edward Ackers listened to the voice. During the last half hour the voice had taken on a carping, nagging whine; sinking almost to inaudibility, it plodded along, mechanically turning out its message of complaint.
   “You’re tired,” Ackers said. “Go home. Take a hot bath.”
   “No,” the voice said, interrupting its tirade. The locus of the voice was a large illuminated blob on the dark sidewalk, a few yards to Acker’s right. The revolving neon sign read:


BANISH IT!

   Thirty times—he had counted—within the last few minutes the sign had captured a passerby and the man in the booth had begun his harangue. Beyond the booth were several theaters and restaurants: the booth was well-situated.
   But it wasn’t for the crowd that the booth had been erected. It was for Ackers and the offices behind him; the tirade was aimed directly at the Interior Department. The nagging racket had gone on so many months that Ackers was scarcely aware of it. Rain on the roof. Traffic noises. He yawned, folded his arms, and waited.
   “Banish it,” the voice complained peevishly. “Come on, Ackers. Say something; do something.”
   “I’m waiting,” Ackers said complacently.

   A group of middle-class citizens passed the booth and were handed leaflets. The citizens scattered the leaflets after them, and Ackers laughed.
   “Don’t laugh,” the voice muttered. “It’s not funny; it costs us money to print those.”
   “Your personal money?” Ackers inquired.
   “Partly.” Garth was lonely, tonight. “What are you waiting for? What’s happened? I saw a police team leave your roof a few minutes ago … ?
   “We may take in somebody,” Ackers said, “there’s been a killing.”
   Down the dark sidewalk the man stirred in his dreary propaganda booth. “Oh?” Harvey Garth’s voice came. He leaned forward and the two looked directly at each other: Ackers, carefully-groomed, well-fed, wearing a respectable overcoat… Garth, a thin man, much younger, with a lean, hungry face composed mostly of nose and forehead.
   “So you see,” Ackers told him, “we do need the system. Don’t be Utopian.”
   “A man is murdered; and you rectify the moral imbalance by killing the killer.” Garth’s protesting voice rose in a bleak spasm. “Banish it! Banish the system that condemns men to certain extinction!”
   “Get your leaflets here,” Ackers parodied dryly. “And your slogans. Either or both. What would you suggest in place of the system?”
   Garth’s voice was proud with conviction. “Education.”
   Amused, Ackers asked: “Is that all? You think that would stop anti-social activity? Criminals just don’t—know better?”
   “And psychotherapy, of course.” His projected face bony and intense, Garth peered out of his booth like an aroused turtle. “They’re sick … that’s why they commit crimes, healthy men don’t commit crimes. And you compound it; you create a sick society of punitive cruelty.” He waggled an accusing finger. “You’re the real culprit, you and the whole Interior Department. You and the whole Banishment System.”
   Again and again the neon sign blinked BANISH it! Meaning, of course, the system of compulsory ostracism for felons, the machinery that projected a condemned human being into some random backwater region of the sidereal universe, into some remote and out-of-the-way corner where he would be of no harm.
   “No harm to us, anyhow,” Ackers mused aloud.
   Garth spoke the familiar argument. “Yes, but what about the local inhabitants?”

   Too bad about the local inhabitants. Anyhow, the banished victim spent his energy and time trying to find a way back to the Sol System. If he got back before old age caught up with him he was readmitted by society. Quite a challenge … especially to some cosmopolite who had never set foot outside Greater New York. There were—probably—many involuntary expatriates cutting grain in odd fields with primitive sickles. The remote sections of the universe seemed composed mostly of dank rural cultures, isolated agrarian enclaves typified by small-time bartering of fruit and vegetables and handmade artifacts.
   “Did you know,” Ackers said, “that in the Age of Monarchs, a pickpocket was usually hanged?”
   “Banish it,” Garth continued monotonously, sinking back into his booth. The sign revolved; leaflets were passed out. And Ackers impatiently watched the late-evening street for sign of the hospital truck.
   He knew Heimie Rosenburg. A sweeter little guy there never was… although Heimie had been mixed up in one of the sprawling slave combines that illegally transported settlers to outsystem fertile planets. Between them, the two largest slavers had settled virtually the entire Sirius System. Four out of six emigrants were hustled out in carriers registered as “freighters.” It was hard to picture gentle little Heimie Rosenburg as a business agent for Tirol Enterprises, but there it was.
   As he waited, Ackers conjectured on Heimie’s murder. Probably one element of the incessant subterranean war going on between Paul Tirol and his major rival, David Lantano, was a brilliant and energetic newcomer … but murder was anybody’s game. It all depended on how it was done; it could be commercial hack or the purest art.
   “Here comes something,” Garth’s voice sounded, carried to his inner ear by the delicate output transformers of the booth’s equipment. “Looks like a freezer.”
   It was; the hospital truck had arrived. Ackers stepped forward as the truck halted and the back was let down.
   “How soon did you get there?” he asked the cop who jumped heavily to the pavement.
   “Right away,” the cop answered, “but no sign of the killer. I don’t think we’re going to get Heimie back … they got him dead-center, right in the cerebellum. Expert work, no amateur stuff.”
   Disappointed, Ackers clambered into the hospital truck to inspect for himself.

   Very tiny and still, Heimie Rosenburg lay on his back, arms at his sides, gazing sightlessly up at the roof of the truck. On his face remained the expression of bewildered wonder. Somebody—one of the cops—had placed his bent glasses in his clenched hand. In falling he had cut his cheek. The destroyed portion of his skull was covered by a moist plastic web.
   “Who’s back at the apartment?” Ackers asked presently.
   “The rest of my crew,” the cop answered. “And an independent researcher. Leroy Beam.”
   “Him,” Ackers said, with aversion. “How is it he showed up?”
   “Caught the rattle, too, happened to be passing with his rig. Poor Heimie had an awful big booster on that rattle … I’m surprised it wasn’t picked up here at the main offices.”
   “They say Heimie had a high anxiety level,” Ackers said. “Bugs all over his apartment. You’re starting to collect evidence?”
   “The teams are moving in,” the cop said. “We should begin getting specifications in half an hour. The killer knocked out the vid bug set up in the closet. But—” He grinned. “He cut himself breaking the circuit. A drop of blood, right on the wiring; it looks promising.”

   At the apartment, Leroy Beam watched the Interior police begin their analysis. They worked smoothly and thoroughly, but Beam was dissatisfied.
   His original impression remained: he was suspicious. Nobody could have gotten away so quickly. Heimie had died, and his death—the cessation of his neural pattern—had triggered off an automatic squawk. A rattle didn’t particularly protect its owner, but its existence ensured (or usually ensured) detection of the murderer. Why had it failed Heimie?
   Prowling moodily, Leroy Beam entered the kitchen for the second time. There, on the floor by the sink, was a small portable TV unit, the kind popular with the sporting set: a gaudy little packet of plastic and knobs and multi-tinted lenses.
   “Why this?” Beam asked, as one of the cops plodded past him. “This TV unit sitting here on the kitchen floor. It’s out of place.”
   The cop ignored him. In the living room, elaborate police detection equipment was scraping the various surfaces inch by inch. In the half hour since Heimie’s death, a number of specifications had been logged. First, the drop of blood on the damaged vid wiring. Second, a hazy heel mark where the murderer had stepped. Third, a bit of burnt match in the ashtray. More were expected; the analysis had only begun.
   It usually took nine specifications to delineate the single individual. Leroy Beam glanced cautiously around him. None of the cops was watching, so he bent down and picked up the TV unit; it felt ordinary. He clicked the on switch and waited. Nothing happened; no image formed. Strange.
   He was holding it upside down, trying to see the inner chassis, when Edward Ackers from Interior entered the apartment. Quickly, Beam stuffed the TV unit into the pocket of his heavy overcoat.
   “What are you doing here?” Ackers said.
   “Seeking,” Beam answered, wondering if Ackers noticed his tubby bulge. “I’m in business, too.”
   “Did you know Heimie?”
   “By reputation,” Beam answered vaguely. “Tied in with Tirol’s combine, I hear; some sort of front man. Had an office on Fifth Avenue.”
   “Swank place, like the rest of those Fifth Avenue feather merchants.” Ackers went on into the living room to watch detectors gather up evidence.
   There was a vast nearsightedness to the wedge grinding ponderously across the carpet. It was scrutinizing at a microscopic level, and its field was sharply curtailed. As fast as material was obtained, it was relayed to the Interior offices, to the aggregate file banks where the civil population was represented by a series of punch cards, cross-indexed infinitely.
   Lifting the telephone, Ackers called his wife. “I won’t be home,” he told her. “Business.”
   A lag and then Ellen responded. “Oh?” she said distantly. “Well, thanks for letting me know.”
   Over in the corner, two members of the police crew were delightedly examining a new discovery, valid enough to be a specification. “I’ll call you again,” he said hurriedly to Ellen, “before I leave. Goodbye.”
   “Goodbye,” Ellen said curtly, and managed to hang up before he did. The new discovery was the undamaged aud bug, which was mounted under the floor lamp. A continuous magnetic tape—still in motion—gleamed amiably; the murder episode had been recorded sound-wise in its entirety.
   “Everything,” a cop said gleefully to Ackers. “It was going before Heimie got home.”
   “You played it back?”
   “A portion. There’s a couple words spoken by the murderer, should be enough.”
   Ackers got in touch with Interior. “Have the specifications on the Rosenburg case been fed, yet?”
   “Just the first,” the attendant answered. “The file discriminates the usual massive category—about six billion names.”
   Ten minutes later the second specification was fed to the files. Persons with type O blood, with size 11 1/2 shoes, numbered slightly over a billion. The third specification brought in the element of smoker-nonsmoker. That dropped the number to less than a billion, but not much less. Most adults smoked.
   “The aud tape will drop it fast,” Leroy Beam commented, standing beside Ackers, his arms folded to conceal his bulging coat. “Ought to be able to get age, at least.”

   The aud tape, analyzed, gave thirty to forty years as the conjectured age. And—timbre analysis—a man of perhaps two hundred pounds. A little later the bent steel window frame was examined, and the warp noted. It jibed with the specification of the aud tape. There were now six specifications, including that of sex (male). The number of persons in the in-group was falling rapidly.
   “It won’t be long,” Ackers said genially. “And if he tacked one of those little buckets to the building side, we’ll have a paint scrape.”
   Beam said: “I’m leaving. Good luck.”
   “Stick around.”
   “Sorry.” Beam moved toward the hall door. “This is yours, not mine. I’ve got my own business to attend to… I’m doing research for a hot-shot nonferrous mining concern.”
   Ackers eyed his coat. “Are you pregnant?”
   “Not that I know of,” Beam said, coloring. “I’ve led a good clean life.” Awkwardly, he patted his coat. “You mean this?”
   By the window, one of the police gave a triumphant yap. The two bits of pipe tobacco had been discovered: a refinement for the third specification. “Excellent,” Ackers said, turning away from Beam and momentarily forgetting him.
   Beam left.
   Very shortly he was driving across town toward his own labs, the small and independent research outfit that he headed, unsupported by a government grant. Resting on the seat beside him was the portable TV unit; it was still silent.

   “First of all,” Beam’s gowned technician declared, “it has a power supply approximately seventy times that of a portable TV pack. We picked up the Gamma radiation.” He displayed the usual detector. “So you’re right, it’s not a TV set”
   Gingerly, Beam lifted the small unit from the lab bench. Five hours had passed, and still he knew nothing about it. Taking firm hold of the back he pulled with all his strength. The back refused to come off. It wasn’t stuck: there were no seams. The back was not a back; it only looked like a back.
   “Then what is it?” he asked.
   “Could be lots of things,” the technician said noncommittally; he had been roused from the privacy of his home, and it was now two-thirty in the morning. “Could be some sort of scanning equipment. A bomb. A weapon. Any kind of gadget.” Laboriously, Beam felt the unit all over, searching for a flaw in the surface. “It’s uniform,” he murmured. “A single surface.”
   “You bet. The breaks are false—it’s a poured substance. And,” the technician added, “it’s hard. I tried to chip off a representative sample but—” He gestured. “No results.”
   “Guaranteed not to shatter when dropped,” Beam said absently. “New extra-tough plastic.” He shook the unit energetically; the muted noise of metal parts in motion reached his ear. “It’s full of guts.”
   “We’ll get it open,” the technician promised, “but not tonight.”
   Beam replaced the unit on the bench. He could, with bad luck, work days on this one item—to discover, after all, that it had nothing to do with the murder of Heimie Rosenburg. On the other hand …
   “Drill me a hole in it,” he instructed. “So we can see it.”
   His technician protested: “I drilled; the drill broke. I’ve sent out for an improved density. This substance is imported; somebody hooked it from a white dwarf system. It was conceived under stupendous pressure.”
   “You’re stalling,” Beam said, irritated. “That’s how they talk in the advertising media.”
   The technician shrugged. “Anyhow, it’s extra hard. A naturally-evolved element, or an artificially-processed product from somebody’s labs. Who has funds to develop a metal like this?”
   “One of the big slavers,” Beam said. “That’s where the wealth winds up. And they hop around to various systems … they’d have access to raw materials. Special ores.”
   “Can’t I go home?” the technician asked. “What’s so important about this?”
   “This device either killed or helped kill Heimie Rosenburg. We’ll sit here, you and I, until we get it open.” Beam seated himself and began examining the check sheet showing which tests had been applied. “Sooner or later it’ll fly open like a clam—if you can remember that far back.”
   Behind them, a warning bell sounded.
   “Somebody in the anteroom,” Beam said, surprised and wary. “At two-thirty?” He got up and made his way down the dark hall to the front of the building. Probably it was Ackers. His conscience stirred guiltily: somebody had logged the absence of the TV unit.
   But it was not Ackers.
   Waiting humbly in the cold, deserted anteroom was Paul Tirol; with him was an attractive young woman unknown to Beam. Tirol’s wrinkled face broke into smiles, and he extended a hearty hand. “Beam,” he said. They shook. “Your front door said you were down here. Still working?”
   Guardedly, wondering who the woman was and what Tirol wanted, Beam said: “Catching up on some slipshod errors. Whole firm’s going broke.”
   Tirol laughed indulgently. “Always a japer.” His deep-set eyes darted; Tirol was a powerfully-built person, older than most, with a somber, intensely-creased face. “Have room for a few contracts? I thought I might slip a few jobs your way… if you’re open.”
   “I’m always open,” Beam countered, blocking Tirol’s view of the lab proper. The door, anyhow, had slid itself shut. Tirol had been Heimie’s boss … he no doubt felt entitled to all extant information on the murder. Who did it? When? How? Why? But that didn’t explain why he was here.
   “Terrible thing,” Tirol said crudely. He made no move to introduce the woman; she had retired to the couch to light a cigarette. She was slender, with mahogany-colored hair; she wore a blue coat, and a kerchief tied around her head.
   “Yes,” Beam agreed. “Terrible.”
   “You were there, I understand.”
   That explained some of it. “Well,” Beam conceded, “I showed up.”
   “But you didn’t actually see it?”
   “No,” Beam admitted, “nobody saw it. Interior is collecting specification material. They should have it down to one card before morning.”
   Visibly, Tirol relaxed. “I’m glad of that. I’d hate to see the vicious criminal escape. Banishment’s too good for him. He ought to be gassed.”
   “Barbarism,” Beam murmured dryly. “The days of the gas chamber. Medieval.”
   Tirol peered past him. “You’re working on—” Now he was overtly beginning to pry. “Come now, Leroy. Heimie Rosenburg—God bless his soul—was killed tonight and tonight I find you burning the midnight oil. You can talk openly with me; you’ve got something relevant to his death, haven’t you?”
   “That’s Ackers you’re thinking of.”
   Tirol chuckled. “Can I take a look?”
   “Not until you start paying me; I’m not on your books yet.”
   In a strained, unnatural voice, Tirol bleated: “I want it.”
   Puzzled, Beam said: “You want what?”
   With a grotesque shudder, Tirol blundered forward, shoved Beam aside, and groped for the door. The door flew open and Tirol started noisily down the dark corridor, feeling his way by instinct toward the research labs.
   “Hey!” Beam shouted, outraged. He sprinted after the older man, reached the inner door, and prepared to fight it out. He was shaking, partly with amazement, partly with anger. “What the hell?” he demanded breathlessly. “You don’t own me!”
   Behind him the door mysteriously gave way. Foolishly, he sprawled backward, half-falling into the lab. There, stricken with helpless paralysis, was his technician. And, coming across the floor of the lab was something small and metallic. It looked like an oversized box of crackers, and it was going lickety-split toward Tirol. The object—metal and gleaming—hopped up into Tirol’s arms, and the old man turned and lumbered back up the hall to the anteroom.
   “What was it?” the technician said, coming to life.
   Ignoring him, Beam hurried after Tirol. “He’s got it!” he yelled futilely.
   “It—” the technician mumbled. “It was the TV set. And it ran.”

II

   The file banks at Interior were in agitated flux.
   The process of creating a more and more restricted category was tedious, and it took time. Most of the Interior staff had gone home to bed; it was almost three in the morning, and the corridors and offices were deserted. A few mechanical cleaning devices crept here and there in the darkness. The sole source of life was the study chamber of the file banks. Edward Ackers sat patiently waiting for the results, waiting for specifications to come in, and for the file machinery to process them.
   To his right a few Interior police played a benign lottery and waited stoically to be sent out for the pick-up. The lines of communication to Heimie Rosenburg’s apartment buzzed ceaselessly. Down the street, along the bleak sidewalk, Harvey Garth was still at his propaganda booth, still flashing his BANISH it! sign and muttering in people’s ears. There were virtually no passersby, now, but Garth went on. He was tireless; he never gave up.
   “Psychopath,” Ackers said resentfully. Even where he sat, six floors up, the tinny, carping voice reached his middle ear.
   “Take him in,” one of the game-playing cops suggested. The game, intricate and devious, was a version of a Centaurian III practice. “We can revoke his vendor’s license.”

   Ackers had, when there was nothing else to do, concocted and refined an indictment of Garth, a sort of lay analysis of the man’s mental aberrations. He enjoyed playing the psychoanalytic game; it gave him a sense of power.


   Garth, Harvey
   Prominent compulsive syndrome. Has assumed role of ideological anarchist, opposing legal and social system. No rational expression, only repetition of key words and phrases. Idee fixe is Banish the banishment system. Cause dominates life. Rigid fanatic, probably of manic type, since…


   Ackers let the sentence go, since he didn’t really know what the structure of the manic type was. Anyhow, the analysis was excellent, and someday it would be resting in an official slot instead of merely drifting through his mind. And, when that happened, the annoying voice would conclude.
   “Big turmoil,” Garth droned. “Banishment system in vast upheaval… crisis moment has arrived.”
   “Why crisis?” Ackers asked aloud.

   Down below on the pavement Garth responded. “All your machines are humming. Grand excitement reigns. Somebody’s head will be in the basket before sun-up.” His voice trailed off in a weary blur. “Intrigue and murder. Corpses … the police scurry and a beautiful woman lurks.” To his analysis Ackers added an amplifying clause.


   …Garth’s talents are warped by his compulsive sense of mission. Having designed an ingenious communication device he sees only its propaganda possibility. Whereas Garth’s voice-ear mechanism could be put to work for All Humanity.


   That pleased him. Ackers got up and wandered over to the attendant operating the file. “How’s it coming?” he asked.
   “Here’s the situation,” the attendant said. There was a line of gray stubble smeared over his chin, and he was bleary-eyed. “We’re gradually paring it down.”
   Ackers, as he resumed his seat, wished he were back in the days of the almighty fingerprint. But a print hadn’t shown up in months; a thousand techniques existed for print-removal and print alteration. There was no single specification capable, in itself, of delineating the individual. A composite was needed, a gestalt of the assembled data.


   1) blood sample (type O) 6,139,481,601
   2) shoe size (11 1/2) 1,268,303,431
   3) smoker 791,992,386
   3a) smoker (pipe) 52,774,853
   4) sex (male) 26,449,094
   5) age (30-40 years) 9,221,397
   6) weight (200 lbs) 488,290
   7) fabric of clothing 17,459
    hair variety 866
   9) ownership of utilized weapon 40


   A vivid picture was emerging from the data. Ackers could see him clearly. The man was practically standing there, in front of his desk. A fairly young man, somewhat heavy, a man who smoked a pipe and wore an extremely expensive tweed suit. An individual created by nine specifications; no tenth had been listed because no more data of specification level had been found.
   Now, according to the report, the apartment had been thoroughly searched. The detection equipment was going outdoors.
   “One more should do it,” Ackers said, returning the report to the attendant. He wondered if it would come in and how long it would take.
   To waste time he telephoned his wife, but instead of getting Ellen he got the automatic response circuit. “Yes, sir,” it told him. “Mrs. Ackers has retired for the night. You may state a thirty-second message which will be transcribed for her attention tomorrow morning. Thank you.”
   Ackers raged at the mechanism futilely and then hung up. He wondered if Ellen were really in bed; maybe she had, as often before, slipped out. But, after all, it was almost three o’clock in the morning. Any sane person would be asleep: only he and Garth were still at their little stations, performing their vital duties.
   What had Garth meant by a “beautiful woman”?
   “Mr. Ackers,” the attendant said, “there’s a tenth specification coming in over the wires.”
   Hopefully, Ackers gazed up at the file bank. He could see nothing, of course; the actual mechanism occupied the underground levels of the building, and all that existed here was the input receptors and throw-out slots. But just looking at the machinery was in itself comforting. At this moment the bank was accepting the tenth piece of material. In a moment he would know how many citizens fell into the ten categories … he would know if already he had a group small enough to be sorted one by one.
   “Here it is,” the attendant said, pushing the report to him.


Type of utilized vehicle (color) 7

   “My God,” Ackers said mildly. “That’s low enough. Seven persons—we can go to work.”
   “You want the seven cards popped?”
   “Pop them,” Ackers said.
   A moment later, the throw-out slot deposited seven neat white cards in the tray. The attendant passed them to Ackers and he quickly riffled them. The next step was personal motive and proximity: items that had to be gotten from the suspects themselves.
   Of the seven names six meant nothing to him. Two lived on Venus, one in the Centaurus System, one was somewhere in Sirius, one was in the hospital, and one lived in the Soviet Union. The seventh, however, lived within a few miles, on the outskirts of New York.


Lantano, David

   That clinched it. The gestalt, in Ackers’ mind, locked clearly in place; the image hardened to reality. He had half expected, even prayed to see Lantano’s card brought up.
   “Here’s your pick-up,” he said shakily to the game-playing cops. “Better get as large a team together as possible, this one won’t be easy.” Momentously, he added: “Maybe I’d better come along.”

   Beam reached the anteroom of his lab as the ancient figure of Paul Tirol disappeared out the street door and onto the dark sidewalk. The young woman, trotting ahead of him, had climbed into a parked car and started it forward; as Tirol emerged, she swept him up and at once departed.
   Panting, Beam stood impotently collecting himself on the deserted pavement. The ersatz TV unit was gone; now he had nothing. Aimlessly, he began to run down the street. His heels echoed loudly in the cold silence. No sign of them; no sign of anything.
   “I’ll be damned,” he said, with almost religious awe. The unit—a robot device of obvious complexity—clearly belonged to Paul Tirol; as soon as it had identified his presence it had sprinted gladly to him. For… protection?
   It had killed Heimie; and it belonged to Tirol. So, by a novel and indirect method, Tirol had murdered his employee, his Fifth Avenue front man. At a rough guess, such a highly-organized robot would cost in the neighborhood of a hundred thousand dollars.
   A lot of money, considering that murder was the easiest of criminal acts. Why not hire an itinerant goon with a crowbar?
   Beam started slowly back toward his lab. Then, abruptly, he changed his mind and turned in the direction of the business area. When a free-wheeling cab came by, he hailed it and clambered in.
   “Where to, sport?” the starter at cab relay asked. City cabs were guided by remote control from one central source.
   He gave the name of a specific bar. Settling back against the seat he pondered. Anybody could commit a murder; an expensive, complicated machine wasn’t necessary.
   The machine had been built to do something else. The murder of Heimie Rosenburg was incidental.

   Against the nocturnal skyline, a huge stone residence loomed. Ackers inspected it from a distance. There were no lights burning; everything was locked up tight. Spread out before the house was an acre of grass. David Lantano was probably the last person on Earth to own an acre of grass outright; it was less expensive to buy an entire planet in some other system.
   “Let’s go,” Ackers commanded; disgusted by such opulence, he deliberately trampled through a bed of roses on his way up the wide porch steps. Behind him flowed the team of shock-police.
   “Gosh,” Lantano rumbled, when he had been roused from his bed. He was a kindly-looking, rather youthful fat man, wearing now an abundant silk dressing robe. He would have seemed more in place as director of a boys’ summer camp; there was an expression of perpetual good humor on his soft, sagging face. “What’s wrong, officer?”
   Ackers loathed being called officer. “You’re under arrest,” he stated.
   “Me?” Lantano echoed feebly. “Hey, officer, I’ve got lawyers to take care of these things.” He yawned voluminously. “Care for some coffee?” Stupidly, he began puttering around his front room, fixing a pot.
   It had been years since Ackers had splurged and bought himself a cup of coffee. With Terran land covered by dense industrial and residential installations there was no room for crops, and coffee had refused to “take” in any other system. Lantano probably grew his somewhere on an illicit plantation in South America—the pickers probably believed they had been transported to some remote colony.
   “No thanks,” Ackers said. “Let’s get going.”
   Still dazed, Lantano plopped himself down in an easy chair and regarded Ackers with alarm. “You’re serious.” Gradually his expression faded; he seemed to be drifting back to sleep. “Who?” he murmured distantly.
   “Heimie Rosenburg.”
   “No kidding.” Lantano shook his head listlessly. “I always wanted him in my company. Heimie’s got real charm. Had, I mean.”
   It made Ackers nervous to remain here in the vast lush mansion. The coffee was heating, and the smell of it tickled his nose. And, heaven forbid—there on the table was a basket of apricots.
   “Peaches,” Lantano corrected, noticing his fixed stare. “Help yourself.”
   “Where—did you get them?”
   Lantano shrugged. “Synthetic dome. Hydroponics. I forget where … I don’t have a technical mind.”
   “You know what the fine is for possessing natural fruit?”
   “Look,” Lantano said earnestly, clasping his mushy hands together. “Give me the details on this affair, and I’ll prove to you I had nothing to do with it. Come on, officer.”
   “Ackers,” Ackers said.
   “Okay, Ackers. I thought I recognized you, but I wasn’t sure; didn’t want to make a fool of myself. When was Heimie killed?”
   Grudgingly, Ackers gave him the pertinent information.
   For a time Lantano was silent. Then, slowly, gravely, he said: “You better look at those seven cards again. One of those fellows isn’t in the Sirius System … he’s back here.”
   Ackers calculated the chances of successfully banishing a man of David Lantano’s importance. His organization—Interplay Export—had fingers all over the galaxy; there’d be search crews going out like bees. But nobody went out banishment distance. The condemned, temporarily ionized, rendered in terms of charged particles of energy, radiated outward at the velocity of light. This was an experimental technique that had failed; it worked only one way.
   “Consider,” Lantano said thoughtfully. “If I was going to kill Heimie—would I do it myself? You’re not being logical, Ackers. I’d send somebody.” He pointed a fleshy finger at Ackers. “You imagine I’d risk my own life? I know you pick up everybody … you usually turn up enough specifications.”
   “We have ten on you,” Ackers said briskly.
   “So you’re going to banish me?”
   “If you’re guilty, you’ll have to face banishment like anyone else. Your particular prestige has no bearing.”
   Nettled, Ackers added, “Obviously, you’ll be released. You’ll have plenty of opportunity to prove your innocence; you can question each of the ten specifications in turn.”
   He started to go on and describe the general process of court procedure employed in the twenty-first century, but something made him pause. David Lantano and his chair seemed to be gradually sinking into the floor. Was it an illusion? Blinking, Ackers rubbed his eyes and peered. At the same time, one of the policemen yelped a warning of dismay; Lantano was quietly leaving them.
   “Come back!” Ackers demanded; he leaped forward and grabbed hold of the chair. Hurriedly, one of his men shorted out the power supply of the building; the chair ceased descending and groaned to a halt. Only Lantano’s head was visible above the floor level. He was almost entirely submerged in a concealed escape shaft.
   “What seedy, useless—“ Ackers began.
   “I know,” Lantano admitted, making no move to drag himself up. He seemed resigned; his mind was again off in clouds of contemplation. “I hope we can clear all this up. Evidently I’m being framed. Tirol got somebody who looks like me, somebody to go in and murder Heimie.”
   Ackers and the police crew helped him up from his depressed chair. He gave no resistance; he was too deep in his brooding.

   The cab let Leroy Beam off in front of the bar. To his right, in the next block, was the Interior Building… and, on the sidewalk, the opaque blob that was Harvey Garth’s propaganda booth.
   Entering the bar, Beam found a table in the back and seated himself. Already he could pick up the faint, distorted murmur of Garth’s reflections. Garth, speaking to himself in a directionless blur, was not yet aware of him.
   “Banish it,” Garth was saying. “Banish all of them. Bunch of crooks and thieves.” Garth, in the miasma of his booth, was rambling vitriolically.
   “What’s going on?” Beam asked. “What’s the latest?”
   Garth’s monologue broke off as he focussed his attention on Beam. “You in there? In the bar?”
   “I want to find out about Heimie’s death.”
   “Yes,” Garth said. “He’s dead; the files are moving, kicking out cards.”
   “When I left Heimie’s apartment,” Beam said, “they had turned up six specifications.” He punched a button on the drink selector and dropped in a token.
   “That must have been earlier,” Garth said; “they’ve got more.”
   “How many?”
   “Ten in all.”
   Ten. That was usually enough. And all ten of them laid out by a robot device … a little procession of hints strewn along its path: between the concrete side of the building and the dead body of Heimie Rosenburg.
   “That’s lucky,” he said speculatively. “Helps out Ackers.”
   “Since you’re paying me,” Garth said, “I’ll tell you the rest. They’ve already gone out on their pick-up: Ackers went along.”
   Then the device had been successful. Up to a point, at least. He was sure of one thing: the device should have been out of the apartment. Tirol hadn’t known about Heimie’s death rattle; Heimie had been wise enough to do the installation privately.
   Had the rattle not brought persons into the apartment, the device would have scuttled out and returned to Tirol. Then, no doubt, Tirol would have detonated it. Nothing would remain to indicate that a machine could lay down a trail of synthetic clues: blood type, fabric, pipe tobacco, hair... all the rest, and all spurious.
   “Who’s the pick-up on?” Beam asked.
   “David Lantano.”
   Beam winced. “Naturally. That’s what the whole thing’s about; he’s being framed!”

   Garth was indifferent; he was a hired employee, stationed by the pool of independent researchers to siphon information from the Interior Department. He had no actual interest in politics; his Banish It! was sheer window-dressing.
   “I know it’s a frame,” Beam said, “and so does Lantano. But neither of us can prove it… unless Lantano has an absolutely airtight alibi.”
   “Banish it,” Garth murmured, reverting to his routine. A small group of late-retiring citizens had strolled past his booth, and he was masking his conversation with Beam. The conversation, directed to the one listener, was inaudible to everyone else; but it was better not to take risks. Sometimes, very close to the booth, there was an audible feedback of the signal.
   Hunched over his drink, Leroy Beam contemplated the various items he could try. He could inform Lantano’s organization, which existed relatively intact… but the result would be epic civil war. And, in addition, he didn’t really care if Lantano was framed; it was all the same to him. Sooner or later one of the big slavers had to absorb the other: cartel is the natural conclusion of big business. With Lantano gone, Tirol would painlessly swallow his organization; everybody would be working at his desk as always.
   On the other hand, there might someday be a device—now half-completed in Tirol’s basement—that left a trail of Leroy Beam clues. Once the idea caught on, there was no particular end.
   “And I had the damn thing,” he said fruitlessly. “I hammered on it for five hours. It was a TV unit, then, but it was still the device that killed Heimie.”
   “You’re positive it’s gone?”
   “It’s not only gone—it’s out of existence. Unless she wrecked the car driving Tirol home.”
   “She?” Garth asked.
   “The woman.” Beam pondered. “She saw it. Or she knew about it; she was with him.” But, unfortunately, he had no idea who the woman might be.
   “What’d she look like?” Garth asked.
   “Tall, mahogany hair. Very nervous mouth.”
   “I didn’t realize she was working with him openly. They must have really needed the device.” Garth added: “You didn’t identify her? I guess there’s no reason why you should; she’s kept out of sight.”
   “Who is she?”
   “That’s Ellen Ackers.”
   Beam laughed sharply. “And she’s driving Paul Tirol around?”
   “She’s—well, she’s driving Tirol around, yes. You can put it that way.”
   “How long?”
   “I thought you were in on it. She and Ackers split up; that was last year. But he wouldn’t let her leave; he wouldn’t give her a divorce. Afraid of the publicity. Very important to keep up respectability… keep the shirt fully stuffed.”
   “He knows about Paul Tirol and her?”
   “Of course not. He knows she’s—spiritually hooked up. But he doesn’t care … as long as she keeps it quiet. It’s his position he’s thinking about.”
   “If Ackers found out,” Beam murmured. “If he saw the link between his wife and Tirol… he’d ignore his ten interoffice memos. He’d want to haul in Tirol. The hell with the evidence; he could always collect that later.” Beam pushed away his drink; the glass was empty anyhow. “Where is Ackers?”
   “I told you. Out at Lantano’s place, picking him up.”
   “He’d come back here? He wouldn’t go home?”
   “Naturally he’d come back here.” Garth was silent a moment. “I see a couple of Interior vans turning into the garage ramp. That’s probably the pick-up crew returning.”
   Beam waited tensely. “Is Ackers along?”
   “Yes, he’s there. Banish It!” Garth’s voice rose in stentorian frenzy. “Banish the system of Banishment! Root out the crooks and pirates!”
   Sliding to his feet, Beam left the bar.

   A dull light showed in the rear of Edward Ackers’ apartment: probably the kitchen light. The front door was locked. Standing in the carpeted hallway, Beam skillfully tilted with the door mechanism. It was geared to respond to specific neural patterns: those of its owners and a limited circle of friends. For him there was no activity.
   Kneeling down, Beam switched on a pocket oscillator and started sine wave emission. Gradually, he increased the frequency. At perhaps 150,000 cps the lock guiltily clicked; that was all he needed. Switching the oscillator off, he rummaged through his supply of skeleton patterns until he located the closet cylinder. Slipped into the turret of the oscillator, the cylinder emitted a synthetic neural pattern close enough to the real thing to affect the lock.
   The door swung open. Beam entered.
   In half-darkness the living room seemed modest and tasteful. Ellen Ackers was an adequate housekeeper. Beam listened. Was she home at all? And if so, where? Awake? Asleep?
   He peeped into the bedroom. There was the bed, but nobody was in it.
   If she wasn’t here she was at Tirol’s. But he didn’t intend to follow her; this was as far as he cared to risk.
   He inspected the dining room. Empty. The kitchen was empty, too. Next came an upholstered general-purpose rumpus room; on one side was a gaudy bar and on the other a wall-to-wall couch. Tossed on the couch was a woman’s coat, purse, gloves. Familiar clothes: Ellen Ackers had worn them. So she had come here after leaving his research lab.
   The only room left was the bathroom. He fumbled with the knob; it was locked from the inside. There was no sound, but somebody was on the other side of the door. He could sense her in there.
   “Ellen,” he said, against the panelling. “Mrs. Ellen Ackers; is that you?”
   No answer. He could sense her not making any sound at all: a stifled, frantic silence.
   While he was kneeling down, fooling with his pocketful of magnetic lock-pullers, an explosive pellet burst through the door at head level and splattered into the plaster of the wall beyond.
   Instantly the door flew open; there stood Ellen Ackers, her face distorted with fright. One of her husband’s government pistols was clenched in her small, bony hand. She was less than a foot from him. Without getting up, Beam grabbed her wrist; she fired over his head, and then the two of them deteriorated into harsh, labored breathing.
   “Come on,” Beam managed finally. The nozzle of the gun was literally brushing the top of his head. To kill him, she would have to pull the pistol back against her. But he didn’t let her; he kept hold of her wrist until finally, reluctantly, she dropped the gun. It clattered to the floor and he got stiffly up.
   “You were sitting down,” she whispered, in a stricken, accusing voice.
   “Kneeling down: picking the lock. I’m glad you aimed for my brain.” He picked up the gun and succeeded in getting it into his overcoat pocket; his hands were shaking.
   Ellen Ackers gazed at him starkly; her eyes were huge and dark, and her face was an ugly white. Her skin had a dead cast, as if it were artificial, totally dry, thoroughly sifted with talc. She seemed on the verge of hysteria; a harsh, muffled shudder struggled up inside her, lodging finally in her throat. She tried to speak but only a rasping noise came out.
   “Gee, lady,” Beam said, embarrassed. “Come in the kitchen and sit down.”
   She stared at him as if he had said something incredible or obscene or miraculous; he wasn’t sure which.
   “Come on.” He tried to take hold of her arm but she jerked frantically away. She had on a simple green suit, and in it she looked very nice; a little too thin and terribly tense, but still attractive. She had on expensive earrings, an imported stone that seemed always in motion … but otherwise her outfit was austere.
   “You—were the man at the lab,” she managed, in a brittle, choked voice.
   “I’m Leroy Beam. An independent.” Awkwardly guiding her, he led her into the kitchen and seated her at the table. She folded her hands in front of her and studied them fixedly; the bleak boniness of her face seemed to be increasing rather than receding. He felt uneasy.
   “Are you all right?” he asked.
   She nodded.
   “Cup of coffee?” He began searching the cupboards for a bottle of Venusian-grown coffee substitute. While he was looking, Ellen Ackers said tautiy: “You better go in there. In the bathroom. I don’t think he’s dead, but he might be.”
   Beam raced into the bathroom. Behind the plastic shower curtain was an opaque shape. It was Paul Tirol, lying wadded up in the tub, fully clothed. He was not dead but he had been struck behind the left ear and his scalp was leaking a slow, steady trickle of blood. Beam took his pulse, listened to his breathing, and then straightened up.
   At the doorway Ellen Ackers materialized, still pale with fright. “Is he? Did I kill him?”
   “He’s fine.”
   Visibly, she relaxed. “Thank God. It happened so fast—he stepped ahead of me to take the M inside his place, and then I did it. I hit him as lightly as I could. He was so interested in it… he forgot about me.” Words spilled from her, quick, jerky sentences, punctuated by rigid tremors of her hands. “I lugged him back in the car and drove here; it was all I could think of.”
   “What are you in this for?”
   Her hysteria rose in a spasm of convulsive muscle-twitching. “It was all planned—I had everything worked out. As soon as I got hold of it I was going to—” She broke off.
   “Blackmail Tirol?” he asked, fascinated.
   She smiled weakly. “No, not Paul. It was Paul who gave me the idea … it was his first idea, when his researchers showed him the thing. The M, he calls it. M stands for machine. He means it can’t be educated, morally corrected.”
   Incredulous, Beam said: “You were going to blackmail your husband.”
   Ellen Ackers nodded. “So he’d let me leave.”
   Suddenly Beam felt sincere respect for her. “My God—the rattle. Heimie didn’t arrange that; you did. So the device would be trapped in the apartment.”
   “Yes,” she agreed. “I was going to pick it up. But Paul showed up with other ideas; he wanted it, too.”
   “What went haywire? You have it, don’t you?”
   Silently she indicated the linen closet. “I stuffed it away when I heard you.”
   Beam opened the linen closet. Resting primly on the neatly-folded towels was a small, familiar, portable TV unit.
   “It’s reverted,” Ellen said, from behind him, in an utterly defeated monotone. “As soon as I hit Paul it changed. For half an hour I’ve been trying to get it to shift. It won’t. It’ll stay that way forever.”

III

   Beam went to the telephone and called a doctor. In the bathroom, Tirol groaned and feebly thrashed his arms. He was beginning to return to consciousness.
   “Was that necessary?” Ellen Ackers demanded. “The doctor—did you have to call?”
   Beam ignored her. Bending, he lifted the portable TV unit and held it in his hands; he felt its weight move up his arms like a slow, leaden fatigue. The ultimate adversary, he thought; too stupid to be defeated. It was worse than an animal. It was a rock, solid and dense, lacking all qualities. Except, he thought, the quality of determination. It was determined to persist, to survive; a rock with will. He felt as if he were holding up the universe, and he put the unreconstructed M down.
   From behind him Ellen said: “It drives you crazy.” Her voice had regained tone. She lit a cigarette with a silver cigarette lighter and then shoved her hands in the pockets of her suit.
   “Yes,” he said.
   “There’s nothing you can do, is there? You tried to get it open before. They’ll patch Paul up, and he’ll go back to his place, and Lantano will be banished—” She took a deep shuddering breath. “And the Interior Department will go on as always.”
   “Yes,” he said. Still kneeling, he surveyed the M. Now, with what he knew, he did not waste time struggling with it. He considered it impassively; he did not even bother to touch it.
   In the bathroom, Paul Tirol was trying to crawl from the tub. He slipped back, cursed and moaned, and started his laborious ascent once again.
   “Ellen?” his voice quavered, a dim and distorted sound, like dry wires rubbing.
   “Take it easy,” she said between her teeth; not moving she stood smoking rapidly on her cigarette.
   “Help me, Ellen,” Tirol muttered. “Something happened to me … I don’t remember what. Something hit me.”
   “He’ll remember,” Ellen said.
   Beam said: “I can take this thing to Ackers as it is. You can tell him what it’s for—what it did. That ought to be enough; he won’t go through with Lantano.”
   But he didn’t believe it, either. Ackers would have to admit a mistake, a basic mistake, and if he had been wrong to pick up Lantano, he was ruined. And so, in a sense, was the whole system of delineation. It could be fooled; it had been fooled. Ackers was rigid, and he would go right on in a straight line: the hell with Lantano. The hell with abstract justice. Better to preserve cultural continuity and keep society running on an even keel.
   “Tirol’s equipment,” Beam said. “Do you know where it is?”
   She shrugged wildly. “What equipment?”
   “This thing—“ he jabbed at the M—“was made somewhere.”
   “Not here, Tirol didn’t make it.”
   “All right,” he said reasonably. They had perhaps six minutes more before the doctor and the emergency medical carrier arrived on rooftop. “Who did make it?”
   “The alloy was developed on Bellatrix.” She spoke jerkily, word by word. “The rind … forms a skin on the outside, a bubble that gets sucked in and out of a reservoir. That’s its rind, the TV shape. It sucks it back and becomes the M; it’s ready to act.”
   “What made it?” he repeated.
   “A Bellatrix machine tool syndicate … a subsidiary of Tirol’s organization. They’re made to be watchdogs. The big plantations on outplanets use them; they patrol. They get poachers.”
   Beam said: “Then originally they’re not set for one person.”
   “No.”
   “Then who set this for Heimie? Not a machine tool syndicate.”
   “That was done here.”
   He straightened up and lifted the portable TV unit. “Let’s go. Take me there, where Tirol had it altered.”
   For a moment the woman did not respond. Grabbing her arm he hustled her to the door. She gasped and stared at him mutely.
   “Come on,” he said, pushing her out into the hall. The portable TV unit bumped against the door as he shut it; he held the unit tight and followed after Ellen Ackers.

   The town was slatternly and run-down, a few retail stores, fuel station, bars and dance halls. It was two hours’ flight from Greater New York and it was called Olum.
   “Turn right,” Ellen said listlessly. She gazed out at the neon signs and rested her arm on the window sill of the ship.
   They flew above warehouses and deserted streets. Lights were few. At an intersection Ellen nodded and he set the ship down on a roof.
   Below them was a sagging, fly-specked wooden frame store. A peeling sign was propped up in the window:


FULTON BROTHERS
locksmiths

   With the sign were doorknobs, locks, keys, saws, and spring-wound alarm clocks. Somewhere in the interior of the store a yellow night light burned fitfully.
   “This way,” Ellen said. She stepped from the ship and made her way down a flight of rickety wooden stairs. Beam laid the portable TV unit on the floor of the ship, locked the doors, and then followed after the woman. Holding onto the railing, he descended to a back porch on which were trash cans and a pile of sodden newspapers tied with string. Ellen was unlocking a door and feeling her way inside.
   First he found himself in a musty, cramped storeroom. Pipe and rolls of wire and sheets of metal were heaped everywhere; it was like a junkyard. Next came a narrow corridor and then he was standing in the entrance of a workshop. Ellen reached overhead and groped to find the hanging string of a light. The light clicked on. To the right was a long and littered workbench with a hand grinder at one end, a vise, a keyhole saw; two wooden stools were before the bench and half-assembled machinery was stacked on the floor in no apparent order. The workshop was chaotic, dusty, and archaic. On the wall was a threadbare blue coat hung from a nail: the workcoat of a machinist.
   “Here,” Ellen said, with bitterness. “This is where Paul had it brought. This outfit is owned by the Tirol organization; this whole slum is part of their holdings.”
   Beam walked to the bench. “To have altered it,” he said, “Tirol must have had a plate of Heimie’s neural pattern.” He overturned a heap of glass jars; screws and washers poured onto the pitted surface of the bench.
   “He got it from Heimie’s door,” Ellen said. “He had Heimie’s lock analyzed and Heimie’s pattern inferred from the setting of the tumblers.”
   “And he had the M opened?”
   “There’s an old mechanic,” Ellen said. “A little dried-up old man; he runs this shop. Patrick Fulton. He installed the bias on the M.”
   “A bias,” Beam said, nodding.
   “A bias against killing people. Heimie was the exception, for everybody else it took its protective form. Out in the wilds they would have set it for something else, not a TV unit.” She laughed, a sudden ripple close to hysteria. “Yes, that would have looked odd, it sitting out in a forest somewhere, a TV unit. They would have made it into a rock or a stick.”
   “A rock,” Beam said. He could imagine it. The M waiting, covered with moss, waiting for months, years, and then weathered and corroded, finally picking up the presence of a human being. Then the M ceasing to be a rock, becoming, in a quick blur of motion, a box one foot wide and two feet long. An oversized cracker box that started forward—
   But there was something missing. “The fakery,” he said. “Emitting flakes of paint and hair and tobacco. How did that come in?”
   In a brittle voice Ellen said: “The landowner murdered the poacher, and he was culpable in the eyes of the law. So the M left clues. Claw marks. Animal blood. Animal hair.”
   “God,” he said, revolted. “Killed by an animal.”
   “A bear, a wildcat—whatever was indigenous, it varied. The predator of the region, a natural death.” With her toe she touched a cardboard carton under the workbench. “It’s in there, it used to be, anyhow. The neural plate, the transmitter, the discarded parts of the M, the schematics.”
   The carton had been a shipping container for power packs. Now the packs were gone, and in their place was a carefully-wrapped inner box, sealed against moisture and insect infestation. Beam tore away the metal foil and saw that he had found what he wanted. He gingerly carried the contents out and spread them on the workbench among the soldering irons and drills.
   “It’s all there,” Ellen said, without emotion.
   “Maybe,” he said, “I can leave you out of this. I can take this and the TV unit to Ackers and try it without your testimony.”
   “Sure,” she said wearily.
   “What are you going to do?”
   “Well,” she said, “I can’t go back to Paul, so I guess there’s not much I can do.”
   “The blackmail bit was a mistake,” he said.
   Her eyes glowed. “Okay.”
   “If he releases Lantano,” Beam said, “he’ll be asked to resign. Then he’ll probably give you your divorce, it won’t be important to him one way or another.”
   “I—” she began. And then she stopped. Her face seemed to fade, as if the color and texture of her flesh was vanishing from within. She lifted one hand and half-turned, her mouth open and the sentence still unfinished.
   Beam, reaching, slapped the overhead light out; the workroom winked into darkness. He had heard it too, had heard it at the same time as Ellen Ackers. The rickety outside porch had creaked and now the slow, ponderous motion was past the storeroom and into the hall.
   A heavy man, he thought. A slow-moving man, sleepy, making his way step by step, his eyes almost shut, his great body sagging beneath his suit. Beneath, he thought, his expensive tweed suit. In the darkness the man’s shape was looming; Beam could not see it but he could sense it there, filling up the doorway as it halted. Boards creaked under its weight. In a daze he wondered if Ackers already knew, if his order had already been rescinded. Or had the man got out on his own, worked through his own organization?
   The man, starting forward again, spoke in a deep, husky voice. “Ugh,” Lantano said. “Damn it.”
   Ellen began to shriek. Beam still did not realize what it was; he was still fumbling for the light and wondering stupidly why it did not come on. He had smashed the bulb, he realized. He lit a match; the match went out and he grabbed for Ellen Ackers’ cigarette lighter. It was in her purse, and it took him an agonized second to get it out.
   The unreconstructed M was approaching them slowly, one receptor stalk extended. Again it halted, swiveled to the left until it was facing the workbench. It was not now in the shape of a portable TV unit; it had retaken its cracker-box shape.
   “The plate,” Ellen Ackers whispered. “It responded to the plate.”

   The M had been roused by Heimie Rosenburg’s looking for it. But Beam still felt the presence of David Lantano. The big man was still here in the room; the sense of heaviness, the proximity of weight and ponderousness had arrived with the machine, as it moved, sketching Lantano’s existence. As he fixedly watched, the machine produced a fragment of cloth fabric and pressed it into a nearby heap of grid-mesh. Other elements, blood and tobacco and hair, were being produced, but they were too small for him to see. The machine pressed a heel mark into the dust of the floor and then projected a nozzle from its anterior section.
   Her arm over her eyes, Ellen Ackers ran away. But the machine was not interested in her; revolving in the direction of the workbench it raised itself and fired. An explosive pellet, released by the nozzle, traveled across the workbench and entered the debris heaped across the bench. The pellet detonated; bits of wire and nails showered in particles.
   Heimie’s dead, Beam thought, and went on watching. The machine was searching for the plate, trying to locate and destroy the synthetic neural emission. It swiveled, lowered its nozzle hesitantly, and then fired again. Behind the workbench, the wall burst and settled into itself.
   Beam, holding the cigarette lighter, walked toward the M. A receptor stalk waved toward him and the machine retreated. Its lines wavered, flowed, and then painfully reformed. For an interval, the device struggled with itself; then, reluctantly, the portable TV unit again became visible. From the machine a high-pitched whine emerged, an anguished squeal. Conflicting stimuli were present; the machine was unable to make a decision.
   The machine was developing a situation neurosis and the ambivalence of its response was destroying it. In a way its anguish had a human quality, but he could not feel sorry for it. It was a mechanical contraption trying to assume a posture of disguise and attack at the same time; the breakdown was one of relays and tubes, not of a living brain. And it had been a living brain into which it had fired its original pellet. Heimie Rosenburg was dead, and there were no more like him and no possibility that more could be assembled. He went over to the machine and nudged it onto its back with his foot.
   The machine whirred snake-like and spun away. “Ugh, damn it!” it said. It showered bits of tobacco as it rolled off; drops of blood and flakes of blue enamel fell from it as it disappeared into the corridor. Beam could hear it moving about, bumping into the walls like a blind, damaged organism. After a moment he followed after it.
   In the corridor, the machine was traveling in a slow circle. It was erecting around itself a wall of particles: cloth and hairs and burnt matches and bits of tobacco, the mass cemented together with blood.
   “Ugh, damn it,” the machine said in its heavy masculine voice. It went on working, and Beam returned to the other room.
   “Where’s a phone?” he said to Ellen Ackers.
   She stared at him vacantly.
   “It won’t hurt you,” he said. He felt dull and worn-out. “It’s in a closed cycle. It’ll go on until it runs down.”
   “It went crazy,” she said. She shuddered.
   “No,” he said. “Regression. It’s trying to hide.”
   From the corridor the machine said, “Ugh. Damn it.” Beam found the phone and called Edward Ackers.

   Banishment for Paul Tirol meant first a procession of bands of darkness and then a protracted, infuriating interval in which empty matter drifted randomly around him, arranging itself into first one pattern and then another.
   The period between the time Ellen Ackers attacked him and the time banishment sentence had been pronounced was vague and dim in his mind. Like the present shadows, it was hard to pin down.
   He had—he thought—awakened in Ackers’ apartment. Yes, that was it; and Leroy Beam was there, too. A sort of transcendental Leroy Beam who hovered robustly around, arranging everybody in configurations of his choice. A doctor had come. And finally Edward Ackers had shown up to face his wife and the situation.
   Bandaged, and on his way into Interior, he had caught a glimpse of a man going out. The ponderous, bulbous shape of David Lantano, on his way home to his luxurious stone mansion and acre of grass.
   At sight of him Tirol had felt a goad of fear. Lantano hadn’t even noticed him; an acutely thoughtful expression on his face, Lantano padded into a waiting car and departed.

   “You have one thousand dollars,” Edward Ackers was saying wearily, during the final phase. Distorted, Ackers’ face bloomed again in the drifting shadows around Tirol, an image of the man’s last appearance. Ackers, too, was ruined, but in a different way. “The law supplies you with one thousand dollars to meet your immediate needs, also you’ll find a pocket dictionary of representative out-system dialects.”
   Ionization itself was painless. He had no memory of it; only a blank space darker than the blurred images on either side.
   “You hate me,” he had declared accusingly, his last words to Ackers. “I destroyed you. But… it wasn’t you.” He had been confused. “Lantano. Maneuvered but not. How? You did …”
   But Lantano had had nothing to do with it. Lantano had shambled off home, a withdrawn spectator throughout. The hell with Lantano. The hell with Ackers and Leroy Beam and—reluctantly—the hell with Mrs. Ellen Ackers.
   “Wow,” Tirol babbled, as his drifting body finally collected physical shape. “We had a lot of good times … didn’t we, Ellen?”
   And then a roaring hot field of sunlight was radiating down on him. Stupefied, he sat slumped over, limp and passive. Yellow, scalding sunlight… everywhere. Nothing but the dancing heat of it, blinding him, cowing him into submission.

   He was sprawled in the middle of a yellow clay road. To his right was a baking, drying field of corn wilted in the midday heat. A pair of large, disreputable-looking birds wheeled silently overhead. A long way off was a line of blunted hills: ragged troughs and peaks that seemed nothing more than heaps of dust. At their base was a meager lump of man-made buildings.
   At least he hoped they were man-made.
   As he climbed shakily to his feet, a feeble noise drifted to his ears. Coming down the hot, dirty road was a car of some sort. Apprehensive and cautious, Tirol walked to meet it.
   The driver was human, a thin, almost emaciated youth with pebbled black skin and a heavy mass of weed-colored hair. He wore a stained canvas shirt and overalls. A bent, unlit cigarette hung from his lower lip. The car was a combustion-driven model and had rolled out of the twentieth century; battered and twisted, it rattled to a halt as the driver critically inspected Tirol. From the car’s radio yammered a torrent of tinny dance music.
   “You a tax collector?” the driver asked.
   “Certainly not,” Tirol said, knowing the bucolic hostility toward tax collectors. But—he floundered. He couldn’t confess that he was a banished criminal from Earth; that was an invitation to be massacred, usually in some picturesque way. “I’m an inspector,” he announced, “Department of Health.”
   Satisfied, the driver nodded. “Lots of scuttly cutbeede, these days. You fellows got a spray, yet? Losing one crop after another.”
   Tirol gratefully climbed into the car. “I didn’t realize the sun was so hot,” he murmured.
   “You’ve got an accent,” the youth observed, starting up the engine. “Where you from?”
   “Speech impediment,” Tirol said cagily. “How long before we reach town?”
   “Oh, maybe an hour,” the youth answered, as the car wandered lazily forward.
   Tirol was afraid to ask the name of the planet. It would give him away. But he was consumed with the need to know. He might be two star-systems away or two million; he might be a month out of Earth or seventy years. Naturally, he had to get back; he had no intention of becoming a sharecropper on some backwater colony planet.
   “Pretty swip,” the youth said, indicating the torrent of noxious jazz pouring from the car radio. “That’s Calamine Freddy and his Woolybear Creole Original Band. Know that tune?”
   “No,” Tirol muttered. The sun and dryness and heat made his head ache, and he wished to God he knew where he was.

   The town was miserably tiny. The houses were dilapidated; the streets were dirt. A kind of domestic chicken roamed here and there, pecking in the rubbish. Under a porch a bluish quasi-dog lay sleeping. Perspiring and unhappy, Paul Tirol entered the bus station and located a schedule. A series of meaningless entries flashed by: names of towns. The name of the planet, of course, was not listed.
   “What’s the fare to the nearest port?” he asked the indolent official behind the ticket window.
   The official considered. “Depends on what sort of port you want. Where you planning to go?”
   “Toward Center,” Tirol said. “Center” was the term used in out-systems for the Sol Group.
   Dispassionately, the official shook his head. “No inter-system port around here.”
   Tirol was baffled. Evidently, he wasn’t on the hub planet of this particular system. “Well,” he said, “then the nearest interplan port.”
   The official consulted a vast reference book. “You want to go to which system-member?”
   “Whichever one has the inter-system port,” Tirol said patiently. He would leave from there.
   “That would be Venus.”
   Astonished, Tirol said: “Then this system—“ He broke off, chagrined, as he remembered. It was the parochial custom in many out-systems, especially those a long way out, to name their member planets after the original nine. This one was probably called “Mars” or “Jupiter” or “Earth,” depending on its position in the group. “Fine,” Tirol finished. “One-way ticket to—Venus.”
   Venus, or what passed for Venus, was a dismal orb no larger than an asteroid. A bleak cloud of metallic haze hung over it, obscuring the sun. Except for mining and smelting operations the planet was deserted. A few dreary shacks dotted the barren countryside. A perpetual wind blew, scattering debris and trash.
   But the inter-system port was here, the field which linked the planet to its nearest star-neighbor and, ultimately, with the balance of the universe. At the moment a giant freighter was taking ore.
   Tirol entered the ticket office. Spreading out most of his remaining money he said: “I want a one-way ticket taking me toward Center. As far as I can go.”
   The clerk calculated. “You care what class?”
   “No,” he said, mopping his forehead.
   “How fast?”
   “No.”
   The clerk said: “That’ll carry you as far as the Betelgeuse System.”
   “Good enough,” Tirol said, wondering what he did then. But at least he could contact his organization from there; he was already back in the charted universe. But now he was almost broke. He felt a prickle of icy fear, despite the heat.

   The hub planet of the Betelgeuse System was called Plantagenet III. It was a thriving junction for passenger carriers transporting settlers to undeveloped colony planets. As soon as Tirol’s ship landed he hurried across the field to the taxi stand.
   “Take me to Tirol Enterprises,” he instructed, praying there was an outlet here. There had to be, but it might be operating under a front name. Years ago he lost track of the particulars of his sprawling empire.
   “Tirol Enterprises,” the cab driver repeated thoughtfully. “Nope, no such outfit, mister.”
   Stunned, Tirol said: “Who does the slaving around here?”
   The driver eyed him. He was a wizened, dried-up little man with glasses; he peered turtle-wise, without compassion. “Well,” he said, “I’ve been told you can get carried out-system without papers. There’s a shipping contractor… called—” He reflected. Tirol, trembling, handed him a last bill.
   “The Reliable Export-Import,” the driver said.
   That was one of Lantano’s fronts. In horror Tirol said: “And that’s it?”
   The driver nodded.

   Dazed, Tirol moved away from the cab. The buildings of the field danced around him; he settled down on a bench to catch his breath. Under his coat his heart pounded unevenly. He tried to breathe, but his breath caught painfully in his throat. The bruise on his head where Ellen Ackers had hit him began to throb. It was true, and he was gradually beginning to understand and believe it. He was not going to get to Earth; he was going to spend the rest of his life here on this rural world, cut off from his organization and everything he had built up over the years.
   And, he realized, as he sat struggling to breathe, the rest of his life was not going to be very long.
   He thought about Heimie Rosenburg.
   “Betrayed,” he said, and coughed wrackingly. “You betrayed me. You hear that? Because of you I’m here. It’s your fault; I never should have hired you.”
   He thought about Ellen Ackers. “You too,” he gasped, coughing. Sitting on the bench he alternately coughed and gasped and thought about the people who had betrayed him. There were hundreds of them.

   The living room of David Lantano’s house was furnished in exquisite taste. Priceless late nineteenth century Blue Willow dishes lined the walls in a rack of wrought iron. At his antique yellow plastic and chrome table, David Lantano was eating dinner, and the spread of food amazed Beam even more than the house.
   Lantano was in good humor and he ate with enthusiasm. His linen napkin was tucked under his chin and once, as he sipped coffee, he dribbled and belched. His brief period of confinement was over; he ate to make up for the ordeal.
   He had been informed, first by his own apparatus and now by Beam, that banishment had successfully carried Tirol past the point of return. Tirol would not be coming back and for that Lantano was thankful. He felt expansive toward Beam; he wished Beam would have something to eat.
   Moodily, Beam said: “It’s nice here.”
   “You could have something like this,” Lantano said.
   On the wall hung a framed folio of ancient paper protected by helium-filled glass. It was the first printing of a poem of Ogden Nash, a collector’s item that should have been in a museum. It aroused in Beam a mixed feeling of longing and aversion.
   “Yes,” Beam said. “I could have this.” This, he thought, or Ellen Ackers or the job at Interior or perhaps all three at once. Edward Ackers had been retired on pension and he had given his wife a divorce. Lantano was out of jeopardy. Tirol had been banished. He wondered what he did want.
   “You could go a long way,” Lantano said sleepily.
   “As far as Paul Tirol?”
   Lantano chuckled and yawned.
   “I wonder if he left any family,” Beam said. “Any children.” He was thinking about Heimie.
   Lantano reached across the table toward the bowl of fruit. He selected a peach and carefully brushed it against the sleeve of his robe. “Try a peach,” he said.
   “No thanks,” Beam said irritably.
   Lantano examined the peach but he did not eat it. The peach was made of wax; the fruit in the bowl was imitation. He was not really as rich as he pretended, and many of the artifacts about the living room were fakes. Each time he offered fruit to a visitor he took a calculated risk. Returning the peach to the bowl he leaned back in his chair and sipped his coffee.
   If Beam did not have plans, at least he had, and with Tirol gone the plans had a better than even chance of working out. He felt peaceful. Someday, he thought, and not too far off, the fruit in the bowl would be real.

Explorers We

   “Golly,” Parkhurst gasped, his red face tingling with excitement. “Come here, you guys. Look!”
   They crowded around the viewscreen.
   “There she is,” Barton said. His heart beat strangely. “She sure looks good.”
   “Damn right she looks good,” Leon agreed. He trembled. “Say—I can make out New York.”
   “The hell you can.”
   “I can! The gray. By the water.”
   “That’s not even the United States. We’re looking at it upside down. That’s Siam.”
   The ship hurtled through space, meteoroid shields shrieking. Below it, the blue-green globe swelled. Clouds drifted around it, hiding the continents and oceans.
   “I never expected to see her again,” Merriweather said. “I thought sure as hell we were stuck up there.” His face twisted. “Mars. That damned red waste. Sun and flies and ruins.”
   “Barton knows how to repair jets,” Captain Stone said. “You can thank him.”
   “You know what I’m going to do, first thing I’m back?” Parkhurst yelled.
   “What?”
   “Go to Coney Island.”
   “Why?”
   “People. I want to see people again. Lots of them. Dumb, sweaty, noisy. Ice cream and water. The ocean. Beer bottles, milk cartons, paper napkins—”
   “And gals,” Vecchi said, eyes shining. “Long time, six months. I’ll go with you. We’ll sit on the beach and watch the gals.”
   “I wonder what kind of bathing suits they got now,” Barton said.
   “Maybe they don’t wear any!” Parkhurst cried.
   “Hey!” Merriweather shouted. “I’m going to see my wife again.” He was suddenly dazed. His voice sank to a whisper. “My wife.”
   “I got a wife, too,” Stone said. He grinned. “But I been married a long time.” Then he thought of Pat and Jean. A stabbing ache choked his windpipe. “I bet they have grown.”
   “Grown?”
   “My kids,” Stone said huskily.
   They looked at each other, six men, ragged, bearded, eyes bright and feverish.
   “How long?” Vecchi whispered.
   “An hour,” Stone said. “We’ll be down in an hour.”

   The ship struck with a crash that threw them on their faces. It leaped and bucked, brake jets screaming, tearing through rocks and soil. It came to rest, nose buried in a hillside.
   Silence.
   Parkhurst got unsteadily to his feet. He caught hold of the safety rail. Blood dripped down his face from a cut over his eye.
   “We’re down,” he said.
   Barton stirred. He groaned, forced himself up on his knees. Parkhurst helped him. “Thanks. Are we …”
   “We’re down. We’re back.”
   The jets were off. The roaring had ceased… there was only the faint trickle of wall fluids leaking out on the ground.
   The ship was a mess. The hull was cracked in three places. It billowed in, bent and twisted. Papers and ruined instruments were strewn everywhere.
   Vecchi and Stone got slowly up. “Everything all right?” Stone muttered, feeling his arm.
   “Give me a hand,” Leon said. “My damn ankle’s twisted or something.”
   They got him up. Merriweather was unconscious. They revived him and got him to his feet.
   “We’re down,” Parkhurst repeated, as if he couldn’t believe it. “This is Earth. We’re back—alive!”
   “I hope the specimens are all right,” Leon said.
   “The hell with the specimens!” Vecchi shouted excitedly. He worked the port bolts frantically, unscrewing the heavy hatch lock. “Let’s get out and walk around.”
   “Where are we?” Barton asked Captain Stone.
   “South of San Francisco. On the peninsula.”
   “San Francisco! Hey—we can ride the cable cars!” Parkhurst helped Vecchi unscrew the hatch. “San Francisco. I was through Frisco once. They got a big park. Golden Gate Park. We can go to the funhouse.”
   The hatch opened, swinging wide. Talk ceased abruptly. The men peered out, blinking in the white-hot sunlight.
   A green field stretched down and away from them. Hills rose in the distance, sharp in the crystal air. Along a highway below, a few cars moved, tiny dots, the sun glinting on them. Telephone poles.
   “What’s that sound?” Stone said, listening intently.
   “A train.”
   It was coming along the distant track, black smoke pouring from its stack. A faint wind moved across the field, stirring the grass. Over to the right lay a town. Houses and trees. A theater marquee. A Standard gas station. Roadside stands. A motel.
   “Think anybody saw us?” Leon asked. “Must have.”
   “Sure heard us,” Parkhurst said. “We made a noise like God’s indigestion when we hit.”
   Vecchi stepped out onto the field. He swayed wildly, arms outstretched. “I’m falling!”
   Stone laughed. “You’ll get used to it. We’ve been in space too long. Come on.” He leaped down. “Let’s start walking.”
   “Toward the town.” Parkhurst fell in beside him. “Maybe they’ll give us free eats … Hell—champagne!” His chest swelled under his tattered uniform. “Returning heroes. Keys to the town. A parade. Military band. Floats with dames.”
   “Dames,” Leon grunted. “You’re obsessed.”
   “Sure.” Parkhurst strode across the field, the others trailing after him. “Hurry up!”
   “Look,” Stone said to Leon. “Somebody over there. Watching us.” “Kids,” Barton said. “A bunch of kids.” He laughed excitedly. “Let’s go say hello.”
   They headed toward the kids, wading through the moist grass on the rich earth.
   “Must be spring,” Leon said. “The air smells like spring.” He took a deep breath. “And the grass.”
   Stone computed. “It’s April ninth.”
   They hurried. The kids stood watching them, silent and unmoving.
   “Hey!” Parkhurst shouted. “We’re back!”
   “What town is this?” Barton shouted.
   The kids stared at them, eyes wide.
   “What’s wrong?” Leon muttered.
   “Our beards. We look pretty bad.” Stone cupped his hands. “Don’t be scared! We’re back from Mars. The rocket flight. Two years ago—remember? A year ago last October.”
   The kids stared, white-faced. Suddenly they turned and fled. They ran frantically toward the town.
   The six men watched them go.
   “What the hell,” Parkhurst muttered, dazed. “What’s the matter?”
   “Our beards,” Stone repeated uneasily.
   “Something’s wrong,” Barton said, shakily. He began to tremble. “There’s something terribly wrong.”
   “Can it!” Leon snapped. “It’s our beards.” He ripped a piece of his shirt savagely away. “We’re dirty. Filthy tramps. Come on.” He started after the children, toward the town. “Let’s go. They probably got a special car on the way here. We’ll meet them.”
   Stone and Barton glanced at each other. They followed Leon slowly. The others fell in behind.
   Silent, uneasy, the six bearded men made their way across the field toward the town.

   A youth on a bicycle fled at their approach. Some railroad workers, repairing the train track, threw down their shovels and ran, yelling.
   Numbly, the six men watched them go.
   “What is it?” Parkhurst muttered.
   They crossed the track. The town lay on the other side. They entered a huge grove of eucalyptus trees.
   “Burlingame,” Leon said, reading a sign. They looked down a street. Hotels and cafes. Parked cars. Gas stations. Dime stores. A small suburban town, shoppers on the sidewalks. Cars moving slowly.
   They emerged from the trees. Across the street a filling station attendant looked up—
   And froze.
   After a moment, he dropped the hose he held and ran down the main street, shouting shrill warnings.
   Cars stopped. Drivers leaped out and ran. Men and women poured out of stores, scattering wildly. They surged away, retreating in frantic haste.
   In a moment the street was deserted.
   “Good God.” Stone advanced, bewildered. “What—“ He crossed onto the street. No one was in sight.
   The six men walked down the main street, dazed and silent. Nothing stirred. Everyone had fled. A siren wailed, rising and falling. Down a side street a car backed quickly away.
   In an upstairs window Barton saw a pale, frightened face. Then the shade was jerked down.
   “I don’t understand,” Vecchi muttered.
   “Have they gone nuts?” Merriweather asked.
   Stone said nothing. His mind was blank. Numb. He felt tired. He sat down on the curb and rested, getting his breath. The others stood around him.
   “My ankle,” Leon said. He leaned against a stop sign, lips twisting with pain. “Hurts like hell.”
   “Captain,” Barton said. “What’s the matter with them?”
   “I don’t know,” Stone said. He felt in his ragged pocket for a cigarette. Across the street was a deserted cafe. The people had run out of it. Food was still on the counter. A hamburger was scorching on the skillet, coffee was boiling in a glass pot on the burner.
   On the sidewalk lay groceries spilling out from bags dropped by terrorized shoppers. The motor of a deserted parked car purred to itself.
   “Well?” Leon said. “What’ll we do?”
   “I don’t know.”
   “We can’t just—”
   “I don’t know!” Stone got to his feet. He walked over and entered the cafe. They watched him sit down at the counter.
   “What’s he doing?” Vecchi asked.
   “I don’t know.” Parkhurst followed Stone into the cafe. “What are you doing?”
   “I’m waiting to be served.”
   Parkhurst plucked awkwardly at Stone’s shoulder. “Come on, Captain. There’s nobody here. They all left.”
   Stone said nothing. He sat at the counter, his face vacant. Waiting passively to be served.
   Parkhurst went back out. “What the hell has happened?” he asked Barton. “What’s wrong with them all?”
   A spotted dog came nosing around. It passed them, stiff and alert, sniffing suspiciously. It trotted off down a side street. “Faces,” Barton said. “Faces?”
   “They’re watching us. Up there.” Barton gestured toward a building. “Hiding. Why? Why are they hiding from us?”
   Suddenly Merriweather stiffened. “Something’s coming.” They turned eagerly.
   Down the street two black sedans turned the corner, headed toward them. “Thank God,” Leon muttered. He leaned against the wall of a building. “Here they are.”
   The two sedans pulled to a stop at the curb. The doors opened. Men spilled out, surrounded them silently. Well-dressed. Ties and hats and long gray coats.
   “I’m Scanlan,” one said. “FBI.” An older man with iron-gray hair. His voice was clipped and frigid. He studied the five of them intently. “Where’s the other?”
   “Captain Stone? In there.” Barton pointed to the cafe.
   “Get him out here.”
   Barton went into the cafe. “Captain, they’re outside. Come on.”
   Stone came along with him, back to the curb. “Who are they, Barton?” he asked haltingly.
   “Six,” Scanlan said, nodding. He waved to his men. “Okay. This is all.” The FBI men moved in, crowding them back toward the brick front of the cafe.
   “Wait!” Barton cried thickly. His head spun. “What—what’s happening?
   “What is it?” Parkhurst demanded deprecatorily. Tears rolled down his face, streaking his cheeks. “Will you tell us, for God’s sake—”
   The FBI men had weapons. They got them out. Vecchi backed away, his hands up. “Please!” he wailed. “What have we done? What’s happening?”
   Sudden hope flickered in Leon’s breast. “They don’t know who we are. They think we’re Commies.” He addressed Scanlan. “We’re the Earth-Mars Expedition. My name is Leon. Remember? A year ago last October. We’re back. We’re back from Mars.” His voice trailed off. The weapons were coming up. Nozzles—hoses and tanks.
   “We’re back!” Merriweather croaked. “We’re the Earth-Mars Expedition, comeback!”
   Scanlan’s face was expressionless. “That sounds fine,” he said coldly. “Only, the ship crashed and blew up when it reached Mars. None of the crew survived. We know because we sent up a robot scavenger team and brought back the corpses—six of them.”
   The FBI men fired. Blazing napalm sprayed toward the six bearded figures. They retreated, and then the flames touched them. The FBI men saw the figures ignite, and then the sight was cut off. They could no longer see the six figures thrashing about, but they could hear them. It was not something they enjoyed hearing, but they remained, waiting and watching.

   Scanlan kicked at the charred fragments with his foot. “Not easy to be sure,” he said. “Possibly only five here … but I didn’t see any of them get away. They didn’t have time.” At the pressure of his foot, a section of ash broke away; it fell into particles that still steamed and bubbled.
   His companion Wilks stared down. New at this, he could not quite believe what he had seen the napalm do. “I—” he said. “Maybe I’ll go back to the car,” he muttered, starting off away from Scanlan.
   “It’s not over positively,” Scanlan said, and then he saw the younger man’s face. “Yes,” he said, “you go sit down.”
   People were beginning to filter out onto the sidewalks. Peeping anxiously from doorways and windows. “They got ‘em!” a boy shouted excitedly. “They got the outer space spies!”
   Cameramen snapped pictures. Curious people appeared on all sides, faces pale, eyes popping. Gaping down in wonder at the indiscriminate mass of charred ash.
   His hands shaking, Wilks crept back into the car and shut the door after him. The radio buzzed, and he turned it off, not wanting to hear anything from it or say anything to it. At the doorway of the cafe, the gray-coated Bureau men remained, conferring with Scanlan. Presently a number of them started off at a trot, around the side of the cafe and up the alley. Wilks watched them go. What a nightmare, he thought.
   Coming over, Scanlan leaned down and put his head into the car. “Feel better?”
   “Some.” Presently he asked, “What’s this—the twenty-second time?” Scanlan said, “Twenty-first. Every couple of months ... the same names, same men. I won’t tell you that you’ll get used to it. But at least it won’t surprise you.”
   “I don’t see any difference between them and us,” Wilks said, speaking distinctly. “It was like burning up six human beings.”
   “No,” Scanlan said. He opened the car door and got into the back seat, behind Wilks. “They only looked like six human beings. That’s the whole point. They want to. They intend to. You know that Barton, Stone, and Leon—”
   “I know,” he said. “Somebody or something that lives somewhere out there saw their ship go down, saw them die, and investigated. Before we got there. And got enough to go on, enough to give them what they needed. But—“ He gestured. “Isn’t there anything else we can do with them?”
   Scanlan said, “We don’t know enough about them. Only this—sending in of imitations, again and again. Trying to sneak them past us.” His face became rigid, despairing. “Are they crazy? Maybe they’re so different no contact’s possible. Do they think we’re all named Leon and Merriweather and Parkhurst and Stone? That’s the part that personally gets me down… Or maybe that’s our chance, the fact that they don’t understand we’re individuals. Figure how much worse if sometime they made up a—whatever it is… a spore… a seed. But not like one of those poor miserable six who died on Mars—something we wouldn’t know was an imitation…”
   “They have to have a model,” Wilks said.
   One of the Bureau men waved, and Scanlan scrambled out of the car. He came back in a moment to Wilks. “They say there’re only five,” he said. “One got away; they think they saw him. He’s crippled and not moving fast. The rest of us are going after him—you stay here, keep your eyes open.” He strode off up the alley with the other Bureau men.
   Wilks lit a cigarette and sat with his head resting on his arm. Mimicry… everybody terrified. But—
   Had anybody really tried to make contact?
   Two policemen appeared, herding people back out of the way. A third black Dodge, loaded with Bureau men, moved along at the curb, stopped, and
   the men got out.
   One of the Bureau men, whom he did not recognize, approached the car.
   “Don’t you have your radio on?”
   “No,” Wilks said. He snapped it back on.
   “If you see one, do you know how to kill it?”
   “Yes,” he said.
   The Bureau man went on to join his group.
   If it was up to me, Wilks asked himself, what would I do? Try to find out what they want? Anything that looks so human, behaves in such a human way, must feel human … and if they—whatever they are—feel human, might they not become human, in time?
   At the edge of the crowd of people, an individual shape detached itself and moved toward him. Uncertainly, the shape halted, shook its head, staggered and caught itself, and then assumed a stance like that of the people near it. Wilks recognized it because he had been trained to, over a period of months. It had gotten different clothes, a pair of slacks, a shirt, but it had buttoned the shirt wrong, and one of its feet was bare. Evidently it did not understand the shoes. Or, he thought, maybe it was too dazed and injured.
   As it approached him, Wilks raised his pistol and took aim at its stomach. They had been taught to fire there; he had fired, on the practice range, at chart after chart. Right in the midsection … bisect it, like a bug.
   On its face the expression of suffering and bewilderment deepened as it saw him prepare to fire. It halted, facing him, making no move to escape. Now Wilks realized that it had been severely burned; probably it would not survive in any case.
   “I have to,” he said.
   It stared at him, and then it opened its mouth and started to say something.
   He fired.
   Before it could speak, it had died. Wilks got out as it pitched over and lay beside the car.
   I did wrong, he thought to himself as he stood looking down at it. I shot it because I was afraid. But I had to. Even if it was wrong. It came here to infiltrate us, imitating us so we won’t recognize it. That’s what we’re told—we have to believe that they are plotting against us, are inhuman, and will never be more than that.
   Thank God, he thought. It’s over.
   And then he remembered it wasn’t...

   It was a warm summer day, late in July.
   The ship landed with a roar, dug across a plowed field, tore through a fence, a shed, and came finally to rest in a gully.
   Silence.
   Parkhurst got shakily to his feet. He caught hold of the safety rail. His shoulder hurt. He shook his head, dazed.
   “We’re down,” he said. His voice rose with awe and excitement. “We’re down!”
   “Help me up,” Captain Stone gasped. Barton gave him a hand.
   Leon sat wiping a trickle of blood from his neck. The interior of the ship was a shambles. Most of the equipment was smashed and strewn about.
   Vecchi made his way unsteadily to the hatch. With trembling fingers, he began to unscrew the heavy bolts.
   “Well,” Barton said, “we’re back.”
   “I can hardly believe it,” Merriweather murmured. The hatch came loose and they swung it quickly aside. “It doesn’t seem possible. Good old Earth.”
   “Hey, listen,” Leon gasped, as he clambered down to the ground. “Somebody get the camera.”
   “That’s ridiculous,” Barton said, laughing.
   “Get it!” Stone yelled.
   “Yes, get it,” Merriweather said. “Like we planned, if we ever got back. A historic record, for the schoolbooks.”
   Vecchi rummaged around among the debris. “It’s sort of banged up,” he said. He held up the dented camera.
   “Maybe it’ll work anyhow,” Parkhurst said, panting with exertion as he followed Leon outside. “How’re we going to take all six of us? Somebody has to snap the shutter.”
   “I’ll set it for time,” Stone said, taking the camera and adjusting the knobs. “Everybody line up.” He pushed a button, and joined the others.
   The six bearded, tattered men stood by their smashed ship, as the camera ticked. They gazed across the green countryside, awed and suddenly silent. They glanced at each other, eyes bright.
   “We’re back!” Stone shouted. “We’re back!”