IV

   Cool morning sunlight lay across the ruined plain of black metallic ash. The ash smoldered a dull, unhealthy red; it was still warm.
   “Watch your step,” O’Neill cautioned. Grabbing hold of his wife’s arm, he led her from the rusty, sagging truck, up onto the top of a pile of strewn concrete blocks, the scattered remains of a pillbox installation. Earl Ferine followed, making his way carefully, hesitantly.
   Behind them, the dilapidated settlement lay spread out, a disorderly checkerboard of houses, buildings and streets. Since the autofac network had closed down its supply and maintenance, the human settlements had fallen into semibarbarism. The commodities that remained were broken and only partly usable. It had been over a year since the last mobile factory truck had appeared, loaded with food, tools, clothing and repair parts. From the flat expanse of dark concrete and metal at the foot of the mountains, nothing had emerged in their direction.
   Their wish had been granted—they were cut off, detached from the network.
   On their own.
   Around the settlement grew ragged fields of wheat and tattered stalks of sun-baked vegetables. Crude handmade tools had been distributed, primitive artifacts hammered out with great labor by the various settlements. The settlements were linked only by horsedrawn carts and by the slow stutter of the telegraph key.
   They had managed to keep their organization, though. Goods and services were exchanged on a slow, steady basis. Basic commodities were produced and distributed. The clothing that O’Neill and his wife and Earl Ferine wore was coarse and unbleached, but sturdy. And they had managed to convert a few of the trucks from gasoline to wood.
   “Here we are,” O’Neill said. “We can see from here.”
   “Is it worth it?” Judith asked, exhausted. Bending down, she plucked aimlessly at her shoe, trying to dig a pebble from the soft hide sole. “It’s a long way to come, to see something we’ve seen every day for thirteen months.”
   “True,” O’Neill admitted, his hand briefly resting on his wife’s limp shoulder. “But this may be the last. And that’s what we want to see.”
   In the gray sky above them, a swift circling dot of opaque black moved. High, remote, the dot spun and darted, following an intricate and wary course. Gradually, its gyrations moved it toward the mountains and the bleak expanse of bomb-rubbled structure sunk in their base.
   “San Francisco,” O’Neill explained. “One of those long-range hawk projectiles, all the way from the West Coast.”
   “And you think it’s the last?” Ferine asked.
   “It’s the only one we’ve seen this month.” O’Neill seated himself and began sprinkling dried bits of tobacco into a trench of brown paper. “And we used to see hundreds.”
   “Maybe they have something better,” Judith suggested. She found a smooth rock and tiredly seated herself. “Could it be?”
   Her husband smiled ironically. “No. They don’t have anything better.”
   The three of them were tensely silent. Above them, the circling dot of black drew closer. There was no sign of activity from the flat surface of metal and concrete; the Kansas City factory remained inert, totally unresponsive. A few billows of warm ash drifted across it and one end was partly submerged in rubble. The factory had taken numerous direct hits. Across the plain, the furrows of its subsurface tunnels lay exposed, clogged with debris and the dark, water-seeking tendrils of tough vines.
   “Those damn vines,” Ferine grumbled, picking at an old sore on his unshaven chin. “They’re taking over the world.”
   Here and there around the factory, the demolished ruin of a mobile extension rusted in the morning dew. Carts, trucks, search-bugs, factory representatives, weapons carriers, guns, supply trains, subsurface projectiles, indiscriminate parts of machinery mixed and fused together in shapeless piles. Some had been destroyed returning to the factory; others had been contacted as they emerged, fully loaded, heavy with equipment. The factory itself—what remained of it—seemed to have settled more deeply into the earth. Its upper surface was barely visible, almost lost in drifting ash.
   In four days, there had been no known activity, no visible movement of any sort.
   “It’s dead,” Ferine said. “You can see it’s dead.”
   O’Neill didn’t answer. Squatting down, he made himself comfortable and prepared to wait. In his own mind, he was sure that some fragment of automation remained in the eroded factory. Time would tell. He examined his wrist-watch; it was eight thirty. In the old days, the factory would be starting its daily routine. Processions of trucks and varied mobile units would be coming to the surface, loaded with supplies, to begin their expeditions to the human settlement.
   Off to the right, something stirred. He quickly turned his attention to it.
   A single battered ore-gathering cart was creeping clumsily toward the factory. One last damaged mobile unit trying to complete its task. The cart was virtually empty; a few meager scraps of metal lay strewn in its hold. A scavenger… the metal was sections ripped from destroyed equipment encountered on the way. Feebly, like a blind metallic insect, the cart approached the factory. Its progress was incredibly jerky. Every now and then, it halted, bucked and quivered, and wandered aimlessly off the path.
   “Control is bad,” Judith said, with a touch of horror in her voice. “The factory’s having trouble guiding it back.”
   Yes, he had seen that. Around New York, the factory had lost its high-frequency transmitter completely. Its mobile units had floundered in crazy gyrations, racing in random circles, crashing against rocks and trees, sliding into gullies, overturning, finally unwinding and becoming reluctantly inanimate.
   The ore cart reached the edge of the ruined plain and halted briefly. Above it, the dot of black still circled the sky. For a time, the cart remained frozen.
   “The factory’s trying to decide,” Ferine said. “It needs the material, but it’s afraid of that hawk up there.”
   The factory debated and nothing stirred. Then the ore cart again resumed its unsteady crawl. It left the tangle of vines and started out across the blasted open plain. Painfully, with infinite caution, it headed toward the slab of dark concrete and metal at the base of the mountains.
   The hawk stopped circling.
   “Get down!” O’Neill said sharply. “They’ve got those rigged with the new bombs.”
   His wife and Perine crouched down beside him and the three of them peered warily at the plain and the metal insect crawling laboriously across it. In the sky, the hawk swept in a straight line until it hung directly over the cart. Then, without a sound or warning, it came down in a straight dive. Hands to her face, Judith shrieked, “I can’t watch! It’s awful! Like wild animals!”
   “It’s not after the cart,” O’Neill grated.
   As the airborne projectile dropped, the cart put on a burst of desperate speed. It raced noisily toward the factory, clanking and rattling, trying in a last futile attempt to reach safely. Forgetting the menace above, the frantically eager factory opened up and guided its mobile unit directly inside. And the hawk had what it wanted.
   Before the barrier could close, the hawk swooped down in a long glide parallel with the ground. As the cart disappeared into the depths of the factory, the hawk shot after it, a swift shimmer of metal that hurtled past the clanking cart. Suddenly aware, the factory snapped the barrier shut. Grotesquely, the cart struggled; it was caught fast in the half-closed entrance.
   But whether it freed itself didn’t matter. There was a dull rumbling stir. The ground moved, billowed, then settled back. A deep shock wave passed beneath the three watching human beings. From the factory rose a single column of black smoke. The surface of concrete split like a dried pod; it shriveled and broke, and dribbled shattered bits of itself in a shower of ruin. The smoke hung for a while, drifting aimlessly away with the morning wind.
   The factory was a fused, gutted wreck. It had been penetrated and destroyed.
   O’Neill got stiffly to his feet. “That’s all. All over with. We’ve got what we set out after—we’ve destroyed the autofac network.” He glanced at Perine. “Or was that what we were after?”
   They looked toward the settlement that lay behind them. Little remained of the orderly rows of houses and streets of the previous years. Without the network, the settlement had rapidly decayed. The original prosperous neatness had dissipated; the settlement was shabby, ill-kept.
   “Of course,” Perine said haltingly. “Once we get into the factories and start setting up our own assembly lines…”
   “Is there anything left?” Judith inquired.
   “There must be something left. My God, there were levels going down miles!”
   “Some of those bombs they developed toward the end were awfully big,” Judith pointed out. “Better than anything we had in our war.”
   “Remember that camp we saw? The ruins-squatters?”
   “I wasn’t along,” Perine said.
   “They were like wild animals. Eating roots and larvae. Sharpening rocks, tanning hides. Savagery, bestiality.”
   “But that’s what people like that want,” Perine answered defensively
   “Do they? Do we want this?” O’Neill indicated the straggling settlement. “Is this what we set out looking for, that day we collected the tungsten? Or that day we told the factory truck its milk was—” He couldn’t remember the word.
   “Pizzled,” Judith supplied.
   “Come on,” O’Neill said. “Let’s get started. Let’s see what’s left of that factory—left for us.”

   They approached the ruined factory late in the afternoon. Four trucks rumbled shakily up to the rim of the gutted pit and halted, motors steaming, tailpipes dripping. Wary and alert, workmen scrambled down and stepped gingerly across the hot ash.
   “Maybe it’s too soon,” one of them objected.
   O’Neill had no intention of waiting. “Come on,” he ordered. Grabbing up a flashlight, he stepped down into the crater.
   The sheltered hull of the Kansas City factory lay directly ahead. In its gutted mouth, the ore cart still hung caught, but it was no longer struggling. Beyond the cart was an ominous pool of gloom. O’Neill flashed his light through the entrance; the tangled, jagged remains of upright supports were visible.
   “We want to get down deep,” he said to Morrison, who prowled cautiously beside him. “If there’s anything left, it’s at the bottom.”
   Morrison grunted. “Those boring moles from Atlanta got most of the deep layers.”
   “Until the others got their mines sunk.” O’Neill stepped carefully through the sagging entrance, climbed a heap of debris that had been tossed against the slit from inside, and found himself within the factory—an expanse of confused wreckage, without pattern or meaning.
   “Entropy,” Morrison breathed, oppressed. “The thing it always hated. The thing it was built to fight. Random particles everywhere. No purpose to it.”
   “Down underneath,” O’Neill said stubbornly, “we may find some sealed enclaves. I know they got so they were dividing up into autonomous sections, trying to preserve repair units intact, to re-form the composite factory.”
   “The moles got most of them, too,” Morrison observed, but he lumbered after O’Neill.
   Behind them, the workmen came slowly. A section of wreckage shifted ominously and a shower of hot fragments cascaded down.
   “You men get back to the trucks,” O’Neill said. “No sense endangering any more of us than we have to. If Morrison and I don’t come back, forget us—don’t risk sending a rescue party.” As they left, he pointed out to Morrison a descending ramp still partially intact. “Let’s get below.”
   Silently, the two men passed one dead level after another. Endless miles of dark ruin stretched out, without sound or activity. The vague shapes of darkened machinery, unmoving belts and conveyer equipment were partially visible, and the partially completed husks of war projectiles, bent and twisted by the final blast.
   “We can salvage some of that,” O’Neill said, but he didn’t actually believe it. The machinery was fused, shapeless. Everything in the factory had run together, molten slag without form or use. “Once we get it to the surface ...”
   “We can’t,” Morrison contradicted bitterly. “We don’t have hoists or winches.” He kicked at a heap of charred supplies that had stopped along its broken belt and spilled halfway across the ramp.
   “It seemed like a good idea at the time,” O’Neill said as the two of them continued past vacant levels of machines. “But now that I look back, I’m not so sure.”
   They had penetrated a long way into the factory. The final level lap spread out ahead of them. O’Neill flashed the light here and there, trying to locate undestroyed sections, portions of the assembly process still intact.
   It was Morrison who felt it first. He suddenly dropped to his hands and knees; heavy body pressed against the floor, he lay listening, face hard, eyes wide. “For God’s sake—”
   “What is it?” O’Neill cried. Then he, too, felt it. Beneath them, a faint, insistent vibration hummed through the floor, a steady hum of activity. They had been wrong; the hawk had not been totally successful. Below, in a deeper level, the factory was still alive. Closed, limited operations still went on.
   “On its own,” O’Neill muttered, searching for an extension of the descent lift. “Autonomous activity, set to continue after the rest is gone. How do we get down?”
   The descent lift was broken off, sealed by a thick section of metal. The still-living layer beneath their feet was completely cut off; there was no entrance.
   Racing back the way they had come, O’Neill reached the surface and hailed the first truck. “Where the hell’s the torch? Give it here!”
   The precious blowtorch was passed to him and he hurried back, puffing, into the depths of the ruined factory where Morrison waited. Together, the two of them began frantically cutting through the warped metal flooring, burning apart the sealed layers of protective mesh.
   “It’s coming,” Morrison gasped, squinting in the glare of the torch. The plate fell with a clang, disappearing into the level below. A blaze of white light burst up around them and the two men leaped back.
   In the sealed chamber, furious activity boomed and echoed, a steady process of moving belts, whirring machine-tools, fast-moving mechanical supervisors. At one end, a steady flow of raw materials entered the line; at the far end, the final product was whipped off, inspected and crammed into a conveyer tube.
   All this was visible for a split second; then the intrusion was discovered. Robot relays came into play. The blaze of lights flickered and dimmed. The assembly line froze to a halt, stopped in its furious activity.
   The machines clicked off and became silent.
   At one end, a mobile unit detached itself and sped up the wall toward the hole O’Neill and Morrison had cut. It slammed an emergency seal in place and expertly welded it tight. The scene below was gone. A moment later the floor shivered as activity resumed.
   Morrison, white-faced and shaking, turned to O’Neill. “What are they doing? What are they making?”
   “Not weapons,” O’Neill said.
   “That stuff is being sent up”—Morrison gestured convulsively—“to the surface.”
   Shakily, O’Neill climbed to his feet. “Can we locate the spot?”
   “I—think so.”
   “We better.” O’Neill swept up the flashlight and started toward the ascent ramp. “We’re going to have to see what those pellets are that they’re shooting up.”

   The exit valve of the conveyor tube was concealed in a tangle of vines and ruins a quarter of a mile beyond the factory. In a slot of rock at the base of the mountains the valve poked up like a nozzle. From ten yards away, it was invisible; the two men were almost on top of it before they noticed it.
   Every few moments, a pellet burst from the valve and shot up into the sky. The nozzle revolved and altered its angle of deflection; each pellet was launched in a slightly varied trajectory.
   “How far are they going?” Morrison wondered.
   “Probably varies. It’s distributing them at random.” O’Neill advanced cautiously, but the mechanism took no note of him. Plastered against the towering wall of rock was a crumpled pellet; by accident, the nozzle had released it directly at the mountainside. O’Neill climbed up, got it and jumped down.
   The pellet was a smashed container of machinery, tiny metallic elements too minute to be analyzed without a microscope.
   “Not a weapon,” O’Neill said.
   The cylinder had split. At first he couldn’t tell if it had been the impact or deliberate internal mechanisms at work. From the rent, an ooze of metal bits was sliding. Squatting down, O’Neill examined them.
   The bits were in motion. Microscopic machinery, smaller than ants, smaller than pins, working energetically, purposefully—constructing something that looked like a tiny rectangle of steel.
   “They’re building,” O’Neill said, awed. He got up and prowled on. Off to the side, at the far edge of the gully, he came across a downed pellet far advanced on its construction. Apparently it had been released some time ago.
   This one had made great enough progress to be identified. Minute as it was, the structure was familiar. The machinery was building a miniature replica of the demolished factory.
   “Well,” O’Neill said thoughtfully, “we’re back where we started from. For better or worse . .. I don’t know.”
   “I guess they must be all over Earth by now,” Morrison said, “landing everywhere and going to work.”
   A thought struck O’Neill. “Maybe some of them are geared to escape velocity. That would be neat—autofac networks throughout the whole universe.” Behind him, the nozzle continued to spurt out its torrent of metal seeds.

Service Call

   It would be wise to explain what Courtland was doing just before the doorbell rang.
   In his swank apartment on Leavenworth Street where Russian Hill drops to the flat expanse of North Beach and finally to the San Francisco Bay itself, David Courtland sat hunched over a series of routine reports, a week’s file of technical data dealing with the results of the Mount Diablo tests. As research director for Pesco Paints, Courtland was concerning himself with the comparative durability of various surfaces manufactured by his company. Treated shingles had baked and sweated in the California heat for five hundred and sixty-four days. It was now time to see which pore-filler withstood oxidation, and to adjust production schedules accordingly.
   Involved with his intricate analytical data, Courtland at first failed to hear the bell. In the corner of the living room his high-fidelity Bogen amplifier, turntable, and speaker were playing a Schumann symphony. His wife, Fay, was doing the dinner dishes in the kitchen. The two children, Bobby and Ralf, were already in their bunk beds, asleep. Reaching for his pipe, Courtland leaned back from the desk a moment, ran a heavy hand through his thinning gray hair … and heard the bell.
   “Damn,” he said. Vaguely, he wondered how many times the demure chimes had sounded; he had a dim subliminal memory of repeated attempts to attract his attention. Before his tired eyes the mass of report sheets wavered and receded. Who the hell was it? His watch read only nine-thirty; he couldn’t really complain, yet.
   “Want me to get it?” Fay called brightly from the kitchen.
   “I’ll get it.” Wearily, Courtland got to his feet, stuffed his feet into his shoes, and plodded across the room, past the couch, floor lamp, magazine rack, the phonograph, the bookcase, to the door. He was a heavy-set middle-aged technologist, and he didn’t like people interrupting his work.
   In the halls stood an unfamiliar visitor. “Good evening, sir,” the visitor said, intently examining a clipboard; “I’m sorry to bother you.”
   Courtland glared sourly at the young man. A salesman, probably. Thin, blond-haired, in a white shirt, bow tie, single-breasted blue suit, the young man stood gripping his clipboard in one hand and a bulging black suitcase with the other. His bony features were set in an expression of serious concentration. There was an air of studious confusion about him; brow wrinkled, lips tight together, the muscles of his cheeks began to twitch into overt worry. Glancing up he asked, “Is this 1846 Leavenworth? Apartment 3A?”
   “That’s right,” Courtland said, with the infinite patience due a dumb animal.
   The taut frown on the young man’s face relaxed a trifle. “Yes, sir,” he said, in his urgent tenor. Peering past Courtland into the apartment, he said, “I’m sorry to bother you in the evening when you’re working, but as you probably know we’ve been pretty full up the last couple of days. That’s why we couldn’t answer your call sooner.”
   “My call?” Courtland echoed. Under his unbuttoned collar, he was beginning to glow a dull red. Undoubtedly something Fay had got him mixed up in; something she thought he should look into, something vital to gracious living. “What the hell are you talking about?” he demanded. “Come to the point.”
   The young man flushed, swallowed noisily, tried to grin, and then hurried on huskily, “Sir, I’m the repairman you asked for; I’m here to fix your swibble.”
   The facetious retort that came to Courtland’s mind was one that later on he wished he had used. “Maybe,” he wished he had said, “I don’t want my swibble fixed. Maybe I like my swibble the way it is.” But he didn’t say that. Instead, he blinked, pulled the door in slightly, and said, “My what!”
   “Yes, sir,” the young man persisted. “The record of your swibble installation came to us as a matter of course. Usually we make an automatic adjustment inquiry, but your call preceded that—so I’m here with complete service equipment. Now, as to the nature of your particular complaint…” Furiously, the young man pawed through the sheaf of papers on his clipboard. “Well, there’s no point in looking for that; you can tell me orally. As you probably know, sir, we’re not officially a part of the vending corporation… we have what is called an insurance-type coverage that comes into existence automatically, when your purchase is made. Of course, you can cancel the arrangement with us.” Feebly, he tried a joke. “I have heard there’re a couple of competitors in the service business.”
   Stern morality replaced humor. Pulling his lank body upright, he finished, “But let me say that we’ve been in the swibble repair business ever since old R.J. Wright introduced the first A-driven experimental model.”
   For a time, Courtland said nothing. Phantasmagoria swirled through his mind: random quasi-technological thoughts, reflex evaluations and notations of no importance. So swibbles broke right down, did they? Big-time business operations … send out a repairman as soon as the deal is closed. Monopoly tactics … squeeze out the competition before they have a chance. Kickback to the parent company, probably. Interwoven books.
   But none of his thoughts got down to the basic issue. With a violent effort he forced his attention back onto the earnest young man who waited nervously in the hall with his black service kit and clipboard. “No,” Courtland said emphatically, “no, you’ve got the wrong address.”
   “Yes, sir?” the young man quavered politely, a wave of stricken dismay crossing his features. “The wrong address? Good Lord, has dispatch got another route fouled up with that new-fangled—”
   “Better look at your paper again,” Courtland said, grimly pulling the door toward him. “Whatever the hell a swibble is, I haven’t got one; and I didn’t call you.”
   As he shut the door, he perceived the final horror on the young man’s face, his stupefied paralysis. Then the brightly painted wood surface cut off the sight, and Courtland turned wearily back to his desk.
   A swibble. What the hell was a swibble? Seating himself moodily, he tried to take up where he had left off… but the direction of his thoughts had been totally shattered.
   There was no such thing as a swibble. And he was on the in, industrially speaking. He read U.S. News, the Wall Street Journal. If there was a swibble he would have heard about it—unless a swibble was some pip-squeak gadget for the home. Maybe that was it.
   “Listen,” he yelled at his wife as Fay appeared momentarily at the kitchen door, dishcloth and blue-willow plate in her hands. “What is this business? You know anything about swibbles?”
   Fay shook her head. “It’s nothing of mine.”
   “You didn’t order a chrome-and-plastic a.c.-d.c. swibble from Macy’s?”
   “Certainly not.”
   Maybe it was something for the kids. Maybe it was the latest grammar-school craze, the contemporary bolo or flip cards or knock-knock-who’s-there? But nine-year-old kids didn’t buy things that needed a service man carrying a massive black tool kit—not on fifty cents a week allowance.
   Curiosity overcame aversion. He had to know, just for the record, what a swibble was. Springing to his feet, Courtland hurried to the hall door and yanked it open.
   The hall was empty, of course. The young man had wandered off. There was a faint smell of men’s cologne and nervous perspiration, nothing more.
   Nothing more, except a wadded-up fragment of paper that had come unclipped from the man’s board. Courtland bent down and retrieved it from the carpet. It was a carbon copy of a route-instruction, giving code-identification, the name of the service company, the address of the caller.


   1846 Leavenworth Street S.F. v-call rec’d Ed Fuller 9:20 P.M. 5-28. Swibble 30s15H (deluxe). Suggest check lateral feedback & neural replacement bank. AAw3-6.


   The numbers, the information, meant nothing to Courtland. He closed the door and slowly returned to his desk. Smoothing out the crumpled sheet of paper, he reread the dull words again, trying to squeeze some meaning from them. The printed letterhead was:


Electronic Service Industries
455 Montgomery Street, San Francisco 14. Ri8-4456n
Est. 1963

   That was it. The meager printed statement: Established in 1963. Hands trembling, Courtland reached mechanically for his pipe. Certainly, it explained why he had never heard of swibbles. It explained why he didn’t own one… and why, no matter how many doors in the apartment building he knocked on, the young repairman wouldn’t find anybody who did.
   Swibbles hadn’t been invented yet.
   After an interval of hard, furious thought Courtland picked up the phone and dialed the home number of his subordinate at the Pesco labs.
   “I don’t care,” he said carefully, “what you’re doing this evening. I’m going to give you a list of instructions and I want them carried out right away.”
   At the other end of the line Jack Hurley could be heard pulling himself angrily together. “Tonight? Listen, Dave, the company isn’t my mother—I have some life of my own. If I’m supposed to come running down—”
   “This has nothing to do with Pesco. I want a tape recorder and a movie camera with infrared lens. I want you to round up a legal stenographer. I want one of the company electricians—you pick him out, but get the best. And I want Anderson from the engineering room. If you can’t get him, get any of our designers. And I want somebody off the assembly line; get me some old mechanic who knows his stuff. Who really knows machines.”
   Doubtfully, Hurley said, “Well, you’re the boss; at least, you’re boss of research. But I think this will have to be cleared with the company. Would you mind if I went over your head and got an okay from Pesbroke?”
   “Go ahead.” Courtland made a quick decision. “Better yet, I’ll call him myself; he’ll probably have to know what’s going on.”
   “What is going on?” Hurley demanded curiously. “I never heard you sound this way before … has somebody brought out a self-spraying paint?”
   Courtland hung up the phone, waited out a torturous interval, and then dialed his superior, the owner of Pesco Paint.
   “You have a minute?” he asked tightly, when Pesbroke’s wife had roused the white-haired old man from his after-dinner nap and got him to the phone. “I’m mixed up in something big; I want to talk to you about it.”
   “Has it got to do with paint?” Pesbroke muttered, half humorously, half seriously. “If not—”
   Courtland interrupted him. Speaking slowly, he gave a full account of his contact with the swibble repairman.
   When Courtland had finished, his employer was silent. “Well,” Pesbroke said finally, “I guess I could go through some kind of routine. But you’ve got me interested. All right, I’ll buy it. But,” he added quietly, “if this is an elaborate time-waster, I’m going to bill you for the use of the men and equipment.”
   “By time-waster, you mean if nothing profitable comes out of this?”
   “No,” Pesbroke said. “I mean, if you know it’s a fake; if you’re consciously going along with a gag. I’ve got a migraine headache and I’m not going along with a gag. If you’re serious, if you really think this might be something, I’ll put the expenses on the company books.”
   “I’m serious,” Courtland said. “You and I are both too damn old to play games.”
   “Well,” Pesbroke reflected, “the older you get, the more you’re apt to go off the deep end; and this sounds pretty deep.” He could be heard making up his mind. “I’ll telephone Hurley and give him the okay. You can have whatever you want… I suppose you’re going to try to pin this repairman down and find out what he really is.”
   “That’s what I want to do.”
   “Suppose he’s on the level… what then?”
   “Well,” Courtland said cautiously, “then I want to find out what a swibble is. As a starter. Maybe after that—”
   “You think he’ll be back?”
   “He might be. He won’t find the right address; I know that. Nobody in this neighborhood called for a swibble repairman.”
   “What do you care what a swibble is? Why don’t you find out how he got from his period back here?”
   “I think he knows what a swibble is—and I don’t think he knows how he got here. He doesn’t even know he’s here.”
   Pesbroke agreed. “That’s reasonable. If I come over, will you let me in? I’d sort of enjoy watching.”
   “Sure,” Courtland said, perspiring, his eye on the closed door to the hall.
   “But you’ll have to watch from the other room. I don’t want anything to foul this up … we may never have another chance like this.”

   Grumpily, the jury-rigged company team filed into the apartment and stood waiting for Courtland to instruct. Jack Hurley, in aloha sports shirt, slacks, and crepe-soled shoes, clodded resentfully over to Courtland and waved his cigar in his face. “Here we are; I don’t know what you told Pesbroke, but you certainly pulled him along.” Glancing around the apartment, he asked, “Can I assume we’re going to get the pitch now? There’s not much these people can do unless they understand what they’re after.”
   In the bedroom doorway stood Courtland’s two sons, eyes half-shut with sleep. Fay nervously swept them up and herded them back into the bedroom. Around the living room the various men and women took up uncertain positions, their faces registering outrage, uneasy curiosity, and bored indifference. Anderson, the designing engineer, acted aloof and blase. MacDowell, the stoop-shouldered, pot-bellied lathe operator, glared with proletarian resentment at the expensive furnishings of the apartment, and then sank into embarrassed apathy as he perceived his own work boots and grease-saturated pants. The recording specialist was trailing wire from his microphones to the tape recorder set up in the kitchen. A slim young woman, the legal stenographer, was trying to make herself comfortable in a chair in the corner. On the couch, Parkinson, the plant emergency electrician, was glancing idly through a copy of Fortune.
   “Where’s the camera equipment?” Courtland demanded.
   “Coming,” Hurley answered. “Are you trying to catch somebody trying out the old Spanish Treasure bunco?”
   “I wouldn’t need an engineer and an electrician for that,” Courtland said dryly. Tensely, he paced around the living room. “Probably he won’t even show up; he’s probably back in his own time, by now, or wandering around God knows where.”
   “Who?” Hurley shouted, puffing gray cigar smoke in growing agitation. “What’s going on?”
   “A man knocked on my door,” Courtland told him briefly. “He talked about some machinery, equipment I never heard of. Something called a swibble.”
   Around the room blank looks passed back and forth.
   “Let’s guess what a swibble is,” Courtland continued grimly. “Anderson, you start. What would a swibble be?”
   Anderson grinned. “A fish hook that chases down fish.”
   Parkinson volunteered a guess. “An English car with only one wheel.”
   Grudgingly, Hurley came next. “Something dumb. A machine for house-breaking pets.”
   “A new plastic bra,” the legal stenographer suggested.
   “I don’t know,” MacDowell muttered resentfully. “I never heard of anything like that.”
   “All right,” Courtland agreed, again examining his watch. He was getting close to hysteria; an hour had passed and there was no sign of the repairman. “We don’t know; we can’t even guess. But someday, nine years from now, a man named Wright is going to invent a swibble, and it’s going to become big business. People are going to make them; people are going to buy them and pay for them; repairmen are going to come around and service them.”
   The door opened and Pesbroke entered the apartment, overcoat over his arm, crushed Stetson hat clamped over his head. “Has he showed up again?” His ancient, alert eyes darted around the room. “You people look ready to go.”
   “No sign of him,” Courtland said drearily. “Damn it—I sent him off; I didn’t grasp it until he was gone.” He showed Pesbroke the crumpled carbon.
   “I see,” Pesbroke said, handing it back. “And if he comes back you’re going to tape what he says, and photograph everything he has in the way of equipment.” He indicated Anderson and MacDowell. “What about the rest of them? What’s the need of them?”
   “I want people here who can ask the right questions,” Courtland explained. “We won’t get answers any other way. The man, if he shows up at all, will stay only a finite time. During that time, we’ve got to find out–” He broke off as his wife came up beside him. “What is it?”
   “The boys want to watch,” Fay explained. “Can they? They promise they won’t make any noise.” She added wistfully, “I’d sort of like to watch, too.”
   “Watch, then,” Courtland answered gloomily. “Maybe there won’t be anything to see.”
   While Fay served coffee around, Courtland went on with his explanation. “First of all, we want to find out if this man is on the level. Our first questions will be aimed at tripping him up; I want these specialists to go to work on him. If he’s a fake, they’ll probably find it out.”
   “And if he isn’t?” Anderson asked, an interested expression on his face. “If he isn’t, you’re saying…”
   “If he isn’t, then he’s from the next decade, and I want him pumped for all he’s worth. But—” Courtland paused. “I doubt if we’ll get much theory. I had the impression that he’s a long way down on the totem pole. The best we probably can do is get a run-down on his specific work. From that, we may have to assemble our picture, make our own extrapolations.”
   “You think he can tell us what he does for a living,” Pesbroke said cannily, “but that’s about it.”
   “We’ll be lucky if he shows up at all,” Courtland said. He settled down on the couch and began methodically knocking his pipe against the ashtray. “All we can do is wait. Each of you think over what you’re going to ask. Try to figure out the questions you want answered by a man from the future who doesn’t know he’s from the future, who’s trying to repair equipment that doesn’t yet exist.”
   “I’m scared,” the legal stenographer said, white-faced and wide-eyed, her coffee cup trembling.
   “I’m about fed up,” Hurley muttered, eyes fixed sullenly on the floor. “This is all a lot of hot air.”
   It was just about that time that the swibble repairman came again, and once more timidly knocked on the hall door.
   The young repairman was flustered. And he was getting perturbed. “I’m sorry, sir,” he began without preamble. “I can see you have company, but I’ve rechecked my route instructions and this is absolutely the right address.” He added plaintively, “I tried some other apartments; nobody knew what I was talking about.”
   “Come in,” Courtland managed. He stepped aside, got himself between the swibble repairman and the door, and ushered him into the living room.
   “Is this the person?” Pesbroke rumbled doubtfully, his gray eyes narrowing.
   Courtland ignored him. “Sit down,” he ordered the swibble repairman. Out of the corner of his eye he could see Anderson and Hurley and MacDowell moving in closely; Parkinson threw down his Fortune and got quickly to his feet. In the kitchen, the sound of tape running through the recording head was audible … the room had begun moving into activity.
   “I could come some other time,” the repairman said apprehensively, eyeing the closing circle of people. “I don’t want to bother you, sir, when you have guests.”
   Perched grimly on the arm of the couch, Courtland said, “This is as good a time as any. In fact, this is the best time.” A wild flood of relief spilled over him: now they had a chance. “I don’t know what got into me,” he went on rapidly. “I was confused. Of course I have a swibble; it’s set up in the dining room.”
   The repairman’s face twitched with a spasm of laughter. “Oh, really,” he choked. “In the dining room? That’s about the funniest joke I’ve heard in weeks.”
   Courtland glanced at Pesbroke. What the hell was so funny about that? Then his flesh began to crawl; cold sweat broke out on his forehead and the palms of his hands. What the hell was a swibble? Maybe they had better find out right away—or not at all. Maybe they were getting into something deeper than they knew. Maybe—and he didn’t like the thought—they were better off where they were.
   “I was confused,” he said, “by your nomenclature. I don’t think of it as a swibble.” Cautiously, he finished, “I know that’s the popular jargon, but with that much money involved, I like to think of it by its legitimate title.”
   The swibble repairman looked completely confused; Courtland realized that he had made another mistake; apparently swibble was its correct name.
   Pesbroke spoke up. “How long have you been repairing swibbles, Mr…” He waited, but there was no response from the thin, blank face. “What’s your name, young man?” he demanded.
   “My what?” The swibble repairman pulled jerkily away. “I don’t understand you, sir.”
   Good Lord, Courtland thought. It was going to be a lot harder than he had realized—than any of them had realized.
   Angrily, Pesbroke said, “You must have a name. Everybody has a name.”
   The young repairman gulped and stared down red-faced at the carpet. “I’m still only in service group four, sir. So I don’t have a name yet.”
   “Let it go,” Courtland said. What kind of a society gave out names as a status privilege? “I want to make sure you’re a competent repairman,” he explained. “How long have you been repairing swibbles?”
   “For six years and three months,” the repairman asserted. Pride took the place of embarrassment. “In junior high school I showed a straight-A record in swibble-maintenance aptitude.” His meager chest swelled. “I’m a born swibble-man,”
   “Fine,” Courtland agreed uneasily; he couldn’t believe the industry was that big. They gave tests in junior high school? Was swibble maintenance considered a basic talent, like symbol manipulation and manual dexterity? Had swibble work become as fundamental as musical talent, or as the ability to conceive spatial relationships?
   “Well,” the repairman said briskly, gathering up his bulging tool kit, “I’m all ready to get started. I have to be back at the shop before long… I’ve got a lot of other calls.”
   Bluntly, Pesbroke stepped up squarely in front of the thin young man. “What is a swibble?” he demanded. “I’m tired of this damn fooling around. You say you work on these things—what are they? That’s a simple enough question; they must be something.”
   “Why,” the young man said hesitantly, “I mean, that’s hard to say. Suppose—well, suppose you ask me what a cat or a dog is. How can I answer that?’
   “We’re getting nowhere,” Anderson spoke up. “The swibble is manufactured, isn’t it? You must have schematics, then; hand them over.”
   The young repairman gripped his tool kit defensively. “What in the world is the matter, sir? If this is your idea of a joke—“ He turned back to Courtland. “I’d like to start work; I really don’t have much time.”
   Standing in the corner, hands shoved deep in his pockets, MacDowell said slowly, “I’ve been thinking about getting a swibble. The missus thinks we ought to have one.”
   “Oh, certainly,” the repairman agreed. Color rising in his cheeks, he rushed on, “I’m surprised you don’t have a swibble already; in fact, I can’t imagine what’s wrong with you people. You’re all acting—oddly. Where, if I may ask, do you come from? Why are you so—well, so uninformed?”
   “These people,” Courtland explained, “come from a part of the country where there aren’t any swibbles.”
   Instantly, the repairman’s face hardened with suspicion. “Oh?” he said sharply. “Interesting. What part of the country is that?”
   Again, Courtland had said the wrong thing; he knew that. While he floundered for a response, MacDowell cleared his throat and inexorably went on. “Anyhow,” he said, “we’ve been meaning to get one. You have any folders with you? Pictures of different models?”
   The repairman responded. “I’m afraid not, sir. But if you’ll give me your address I’ll have the sales department send you information. And if you want, a qualified representative can call on you at your convenience and describe the advantages of owning a swibble.”
   “The first swibble was developed in 1963?” Hurley asked.
   “That’s right.” The repairman’s suspicions had momentarily lulled. “And just in time, too. Let me say this—if Wright hadn’t got his first model going, there wouldn’t be any human beings left alive. You people here who don’t own swibbles—you may not know it—and you certainly act as if you didn’t know it—but you’re alive right now because of old R.J. Wright. It’s swibbles that keep the world going.”
   Opening his black case, the repairman briskly brought out a complicated apparatus of tubes and wiring. He filled a drum with clear fluid, sealed it, tried the plunger, and straightened up. “I’ll start out with a shot of dx—that usually puts them back into operation.”
   “What is dx?” Anderson asked quickly.
   Surprised at the question, the repairman answered, “It’s a high-protein food concentrate. We’ve found that ninety per cent of our early service calls are the result of improper diet. People just don’t know how to care for their new swibble.”
   “My God,” Anderson said feebly. “It’s alive.”
   Courtland’s mind took a nose dive. He had been wrong; it wasn’t precisely a repairman who had stood gathering his equipment together. The man had come to fix the swibble, all right, but his capacity was slightly different than Courtland had supposed. He wasn’t a repairman; he was a veterinarian.
   Laying out instruments and meters, the young man explained: “The new swibbles are a lot more complex than the early models; I need all this before I can even get started. But blame the War.”
   “The War?” Fay Courtland echoed apprehensively.
   “Not the early war. The big one, in ‘75. That little war in ‘61 wasn’t really much. You know, I suppose, that Wright was originally an Army engineer, stationed over in—well, I guess it was called Europe. I believe the idea came to him because of all those refugees pouring across the border. Yes, I’m sure that’s how it was. During that little war, back in ‘61, they came across by the millions. And they went the other way, too. My goodness, people were shifting back and forth between the two camps—it was revolting.”
   “I’m not clear on my history,” Courtland said thickly. “I never paid much attention in school… the ‘61 war, that was between Russia and America?”
   “Oh,” the repairman said, “it was between everybody. Russia headed the Eastern side, of course. And America the West. But everybody was in it. That was the little war, though; that didn’t count.”
   “Little?” Fay demanded, horrified.
   “Well,” the repairman admitted, “I suppose it looked like a lot at the time. But I mean, there were buildings still standing, afterward. And it only lasted a few months.”
   “Who—won?” Anderson croaked.
   The repairman tittered. “Won? What an odd question. Well, there were more people left in the Eastern bloc, if that’s what you mean. Anyhow, the importance of the ‘61 war—and I’m sure your history teachers made that clear—was that swibbles appeared. R.J. Wright got his idea from the camp-changers that appeared in that war. So by ‘75, when the real war came along, we had plenty of swibbles.” Thoughtfully, he added, “In fact, I’d say the real war was a war over swibbles. I mean, it was the last war. It was the war between the people who wanted swibbles and those who didn’t.” Complacently, he finished, “Needless to say, we won.”
   After a time Courtland managed to ask, “What happened to the others? Those who—didn’t want swibbles.”
   “Why,” the repairman said gently, “the swibbles got them.”
   Shakily, Courtland started his pipe going. “I didn’t know about that.”
   “What do you mean?” Pesbroke demanded hoarsely. “How did they get them? What did they do?”
   Astonished, the repairman shook his head. “I didn’t know there was such ignorance in lay circles.” The position of pundit obviously pleased him; sticking out his bony chest, he proceeded to lecture the circle of intent faces on the fundamentals of history. “Wright’s first A-driven swibble was crude, of course. But it served its purpose. Originally, it was able to differentiate the camp-shifters into two groups: those who had really seen the light, and those who were insincere. Those who were going to shift back… who weren’t really loyal. The authorities wanted to know which of the shifters had really come over to the West and which were spies and secret agents. That was the original swibble function. But that was nothing compared to now.”
   “No,” Courtland agreed, paralyzed. “Nothing at all.”
   “Now,” the repairman said sleekly, “we don’t deal with such crudities. It’s absurd to wait until an individual has accepted a contrary ideology, and then hope he’ll shift away from it. In a way, it’s ironic, isn’t it? After the ‘61 war there was really only one contrary ideology: those who opposed the swibbles.”
   He laughed happily. “So the swibbles differentiated those who didn’t want to be differentiated by swibbles. My, that was quite a war. Because that wasn’t a messy war, with a lot of bombs and jellied gasoline. That was a scientific war—none of that random pulverizing. That was just swibbles going down into cellars and ruins and hiding places and digging out those Contrapersons one by one. Until we had all of them. So now,” he finished, gathering up his equipment, “we don’t have to worry about wars or anything of that sort. There won’t be any more conflicts, because we don’t have any contrary ideologies. As Wright showed, it doesn’t really matter what ideology we have; it isn’t important whether it’s Communism or Free Enterprise or Socialism or Fascism or Slavery. What’s important is that every one of us agrees completely; that we’re all absolutely loyal. And as long as we have our swibbles—” He winked knowingly at Courtland. “Well, as a new swibble owner, you’ve found out the advantages. You know the sense of security and satisfaction in being certain that your ideology is exactly congruent with that of everybody else in the world. That there’s no possibility, no chance whatsoever that you’ll go astray—and that some passing swibble will feed on you.”
   It was MacDowell who managed to pull himself together first. “Yeah,” he said ironically. “It certainly sounds like what the missus and I want.”
   “Oh, you ought to have a swibble of your own,” the repairman urged. “Consider—if you have your own swibble, it’ll adjust you automatically. It’ll keep you on the right track without strain or fuss. You’ll always know you’re not going wrong—remember the swibble slogan: Why be half loyal? With your own swibble, your outlook will be corrected by painless degrees … but if you wait, if you just hope you’re on the right track, why, one of these days you may walk into a friend’s living room and his swibble may just simply crack you open and drink you down. Of course,” he reflected, “a passing swibble may still get you in time to straighten you out. But usually it’s too late. Usually—” He smiled. “Usually people go beyond redemption, once they get started.”
   “And your job,” Pesbroke muttered, “is to keep the swibbles working?”
   “They do get out of adjustment, left to themselves.”
   “Isn’t it a kind of paradox?” Pesbroke pursued. “The swibbles keep us in adjustment, and we keep them in adjustment… it’s a closed circle.”
   The repairman was intrigued. “Yes, that’s an interesting way of putting it. But we must keep control over the swibbles, of course. So they don’t die.” He shivered. “Or worse.”
   “Die?” Hurley said, still not understanding. “But if they’re built—” Wrinkling his brows he said, “Either they’re machines or they’re alive. Which is it?”
   Patiently, the repairman explained elementary physics. “Swibble-culture is an organic phenotype evolved in a protein medium under controlled conditions. The directing neurological tissue that forms the basis of the swibble is alive, certainly, in the sense that it grows, thinks, feeds, excretes waste. Yes, it’s definitely alive. But the swibble, as a functioning whole, is a manufactured item. The organic tissue is inserted in the master tank and then sealed. I certainly don’t repair that; I give it nutriments to restore a proper balance of diet, and I try to deal with parasitic organisms that find their way into it. I try to keep it adjusted and healthy. The balance of the organism, is, of course, totally mechanical.”
   “The swibble has direct access to human minds?” Anderson asked, fascinated.
   “Naturally. It’s an artificially evolved telepathic metazoan. And with it, Wright solved the basic problem of modern times: the existence of diverse, warring ideological factions, the presence of disloyalty and dissent. In the words of General Steiner’s famous aphorism: War is an extension of the disagreement from the voting booth to the battlefield. And the preamble of the World Service Charter: war, if it is to be eliminated, must be eliminated from the minds of men, for it is in the minds of men that disagreement begins. Up until 1963, we had no way to get into the minds of men. Up until 1963, the problem was unsolvable.”
   “Thank God,” Fay said clearly.
   The repairman failed to hear her; he was carried away by his own enthusiasm. “By means of the swibble, we’ve managed to transform the basic sociological problem of loyalty into a routine technical matter: to the mere matter of maintenance and repair. Our only concern is keep the swibbles functioning correctly; the rest is up to them.”
   “In other words,” Courtland said faintly, “you repairmen are the only controlling influence over the swibbles. You represent the total human agency standing above these machines.”
   The repairman reflected. “I suppose so,” he admitted modestly. “Yes, that’s correct.”
   “Except for you, they pretty damn well manage the human race.”
   The bony chest swelled with complacent, confident pride. “I suppose you could say that.”
   “Look,” Courtland said thickly. He grabbed hold of the man’s arm. “How the hell can you be sure? Are you really in control?” A crazy hope was rising up inside him: as long as men had power over the swibbles there was a chance to roll things back. The swibbles could be disassembled, taken apart piece by piece. As long as swibbles had to submit to human servicing it wasn’t quite hopeless.
   “What, sir?” the repairman inquired. “Of course we’re in control. Don’t you worry.” Firmly, he disengaged Courtland’s fingers. “Now, where is your swibble?” He glanced around the room. “I’ll have to hurry; there isn’t much time left.”
   “I haven’t got a swibble,” Courtland said.
   For a moment it didn’t register. Then a strange, intricate expression crossed the repairman’s face. “No swibble? But you told me—”
   “Something went wrong,” Courtland said hoarsely. “There aren’t any swibbles. It’s too early—they haven’t been invented. Understand? You came too soon!”
   The young man’s eyes popped. Clutching his equipment, he stumbled back two steps, blinked, opened his mouth and tried to speak. “Too—soon?” The comprehension arrived. Suddenly he looked older, much older. “I wondered. All the undamaged buildings… the archaic furnishings. The transmission machinery must have misphased!” Rage flashed over him. “That instantaneous service—I knew dispatch should have stuck to the old mechanical system. I told them to make better tests. Lord, there’s going to be hell to pay; if we ever get this mix-up straightened out I’ll be surprised.”
   Bending down furiously, he hastily dropped his equipment back in the case. In a single motion he slammed and locked it, straightened up, bowed briefly at Courtland.
   “Good evening,” he said frigidly. And vanished.
   The circle of watchers had nothing to watch. The swibble repairman had gone back to where he came from.

   After a time Pesbroke turned and signaled to the man in the kitchen. “Might as well shut off the tape recorder,” he muttered bleakly. “There’s nothing more to record.”
   “Good Lord,” Hurley said, shaken. “A world run by machines.”
   Fay shivered. “I couldn’t believe that little fellow had so much power; I thought he was just a minor official.”
   “He’s completely in charge,” Courtland said harshly.
   There was silence.
   One of the two children yawned sleepily. Fay turned abruptly to them and herded them efficiently into the bedroom. “Time for you two to be in bed,” she commanded, with false gaiety.
   Protesting sullenly, the two boys disappeared, and the door closed. Gradually, the living room broke into motion. The tape-recorder man began rewinding his reel. The legal stenographer shakily collected her notes and put away her pencils. Hurley lit up a cigar and stood puffing moodily, his face dark and somber.
   “I suppose,” Courtland said finally, “that we’ve all accepted it; we assume it’s not a fake.”
   “Well,” Pesbroke pointed out, “he vanished. That ought to be proof enough. And all the junk he took out of his kit—”
   “It’s only nine years,” Parkinson, the electrician, said thoughtfully. “Wright must be alive already. Let’s look him up and stick a shiv into him.”
   “Army engineer,” MacDowell agreed. “R.J. Wright. It ought to be possible to locate him. Maybe we can keep it from happening.”
   “How long would you guess people like him can keep the swibbles under control?” Anderson asked.
   Courtland shrugged wearily. “No telling. Maybe years … maybe a century. But sooner or later something’s going to come up, something they didn’t expect. And then it’ll be predatory machinery preying on all of us.”
   Fay shuddered violently. “It sounds awful; I’m certainly glad it won’t be for a while.”
   “You and the repairman,” Courtland said bitterly. “As long as it doesn’t affect you—”
   Fay’s overwrought nerves flared up. “We’ll discuss it later on.” She smiled jerkily at Pesbroke. “More coffee? I’ll put some on.” Turning on her heel, she rushed from the living room into the kitchen.
   While she was filling the Silex with water, the doorbell quietly rang.
   The roomful of people froze. They looked at each other, mute and horrified.
   “He’s back,” Hurley said thickly.
   “Maybe it’s not him,” Anderson suggested weakly. “Maybe it’s the camera people, finally.”
   But none of them moved toward the door. After a time the bell rang again, longer, and more insistently.
   “We have to answer it,” Pesbroke said woodenly.
   “Not me,” the legal stenographer quavered.
   “This isn’t my apartment,” MacDowell pointed out.
   Courtland moved rigidly toward the door. Even before he took hold of the knob he knew what it was. Dispatch, using its new-fangled instantaneous transmission. Something to get work crews and repairmen directly to their stations. So control of the swibbles would be absolute and perfect; so nothing would go wrong.
   But something had gone wrong. The control had fouled itself up. It was working upside down, completely backward. Self-defeating, futile: it was too perfect. Gripping the knob, he tore the door open.
   Standing in the hall were four men. They wore plain gray uniforms and caps. The first of them whipped off his cap, glanced at a written sheet of paper, and then nodded politely at Courtland.
   “Evening, sir,” he said cheerfully. He was a husky man, wide-shouldered, with a shock of thick brown hair hanging over his sweat-shiny forehead. “We—uh—got a little lost, I guess. Took a while to get here.”
   Peering into the apartment, he hitched up his heavy leather belt, stuffed his route sheet into his pocket, and rubbed his large, competent hands together.
   “It’s downstairs in the trunk,” he announced, addressing Courtland and the whole living room of people. “Tell me where you want it, and we’ll bring it right up. We should have a good-sized space—that side over there by the window should do.” Turning away, he and his crew moved energetically toward the service elevator. “These late-model swibbles take up a lot of room.”

Captive Market

   Saturday morning, about eleven o’clock, Mrs. Edna Berthelson was ready to make her little trip. Although it was a weekly affair, consuming four hours of her valuable business time, she made the profitable trip alone, preserving for herself the integrity of her find.
   Because that was what it was. A find, a stroke of incredible luck. There was nothing else like it, and she had been in business fifty-three years. More, if the years in her father’s store were counted—but they didn’t really count. That had been for the experience (her father made that clear); no pay was involved. But it gave her the understanding of business, the feel of operating a small country store, dusting pencils and unwrapping flypaper and serving up dried beans and chasing the cat out of the cracker barrel where he liked to sleep.
   Now the store was old, and so was she. The big, heavyset, black browed man who was her father had died long ago; her own children and grandchildren had been spawned, had crept out over the world, were everywhere. One by one they had appeared, lived in Walnut Creek, sweated through the dry, sun-baked summers, and then gone on, leaving one by one as they had come. She and the store sagged and settled a little more each year, became a little more frail and stern and grim. A little more themselves.
   That morning very early Jackie said: “Grandmaw, where are you going?” Although he knew, of course, where she was going. She was going out in her truck as she always did; this was the Saturday trip. But he liked to ask; he was pleased by the stability of the answer. He liked having it always the same.
   To another question there was another unvarying answer, but this one didn’t please him so much. It came in answer to the question.”Can I come along?”
   The answer to that was always no.
   Edna Berthelson laboriously carried packages and boxes from the back of the store to the rusty, upright pickup truck. Dust lay over the truck; its red-metal sides were bent and corroded. The motor was already on; it was wheezing and heating up in the midday sun. A few drab chickens pecked in the dust around its wheels. Under the porch of the store a plump white shaggy sheep squatted, its face vapid, indolent, indifferently watching the activity of the day. Cars and trucks rolled along Mount Diablo Boulevard. Along Lafayette Avenue a few shoppers strolled, farmers and their wives, petty businessmen, farmhands, some city women in their gaudy slacks and print shirts, sandals, bandannas. In the front of the store the radio tinnily played popular songs.
   “I asked you a question,” Jackie said righteously. “I asked you where you’re going.”
   Mrs. Berthelson bent stiffly over to lift the last armload of boxes. Most of the loading had been done the night before by Arnie the Swede, the hulking, white-haired hired man who did the heavy work around the store. “What?” she murmured vaguely, her gray, wrinkled face twisting with concentration. “You know perfectly well where I’m going. “
   Jackie trailed plaintively after her, as she reentered the store to look for her order book. “Can I come? Please, can I come along? You never let me come—you never let anybody come. “
   “Of course not,” Mrs. Berthelson said sharply. “It’s nobody’s business. “
   “But I want to come along,” Jackie explained.
   Slyly, the little old woman turned her gray head and peered back at him, a worn, colorless bird taking in a world perfectly understood. “So does everybody else.” Thin lips twitching in a secret smile, Mrs. Berthelson said softly: “But nobody can.”
   Jackie didn’t like the sound of that. Sullenly, he retired to a comer, hands stuck deep in the pockets of his jeans, not taking part in something that was denied him, not approving of something in which he could not share. Mrs. Berthelson ignored him. She pulled her frayed blue sweater around her thin shoulders, located her sunglasses, pulled the screen door shut after her, and strode briskly to the truck.
   Getting the truck into gear was an intricate process. For a time she sat tugging crossly at the shift, pumping the clutch up and down, waiting impatiently for the teeth to fall into place. At last, screeching and chattering, the gears meshed; the truck leaped a little, and Mrs. Berthelson gunned the motor and released the hand brake.
   As the truck roared jerkily down the driveway, Jackie detached himself from the shade by the house and followed along after it. His mother was nowhere in sight. Only the dozing sheep and the two scratching chickens were visible. Even Arnie the Swede was gone, probably getting a cold Coke. Now was a fine time. Now was the best time he had ever had. And it was going to be sooner or later anyhow, because he was determined to come along.
   Grabbing hold of the tailboard of the truck, Jackie hoisted himself up and landed facedown on the tightly packed heaps of packages and boxes. Under him the truck bounced and bumped. Jackie hung on for dear life; clutching at the boxes he pulled his legs under him, crouched down, and desperately sought to keep from being flung off. Gradually, the truck righted itself, and the torque diminished. He breathed a sigh of relief and settled gratefully down.
   He was on his way. He was along, finally. Accompanying Mrs. Berthelson on her secret weekly trip, her strange covert enterprise from which—he had heard—she made a fabulous profit. A trip which nobody understood, and which he knew, in the deep recesses of his child’s mind, was something awesome and wonderful, something that would be well worth the trouble.
   He had hoped fervently that she wouldn’t stop to check her load along the way.

   With infinite care, Tellman prepared himself a cup of “coffee”. First, he carried a tin cup of roasted grain over to the gasoline drum the colony used as a mixing bowl. Dumping it in, he hurried to add a handful of chicory and a few fragments of dried bran. Dirt-stained hands trembling, he managed to get a fire started among the ashes and coals under the pitted metal grate. He set a pan of tepid water on the flames and searched for a spoon.
   “What are you up to?” his wife demanded from behind him.
   “Uh,” Tellman muttered. Nervously, he edged between Gladys and the meal. “Just fooling around.” In spite of himself, his voice took on a nagging whine. “I have a right to fix myself something, don’t I? As much right as anybody else.”
   “You ought to be over helping.”
   “I was. I wrenched something in my back.” The wiry, middle-aged man ducked uneasily away from his wife; tugging at the remains of his soiled white shirt, he retreated toward the door of the shack. “Damn it, a person has to rest, sometimes.”
   “Rest when we get there.” Gladys wearily brushed back her thick, dark-blonde hair. “Suppose everybody was like you.”
   Tellman flushed resentfully. “Who plotted our trajectory? Who’s done all the navigation work?”
   A faint ironic smile touched his wife’s chapped lips. “We’ll see how your charts work out,” she said. “Then we’ll talk about it.”
   Enraged, Tellman plunged out of the shack, into the blinding late afternoon sunlight.
   He hated the sun, the sterile white glare that began at five in the morning and lasted until nine in the evening. The Big Blast had sizzled the water vapor from the air; the sun beat down pitilessly, sparing nobody. But there were few left to care.
   To his right was the cluster of shacks that made up the camp. An eclectic hodgepodge of boards, sheets of tin, wire and tar paper, upright concrete blocks, anything and everything dragged from the San Francisco ruins, forty miles west. Cloth blankets flapped dismally in doorways, protection against the vast hosts of insects that swept across the campsite from time to time. Birds, the natural enemy of insects, were gone. Tellman hadn’t seen a bird in two years—and he didn’t expect to see one again. Beyond the camp began the eternal dead black ash, the charred face of the world, without features, without life.
   The camp had been set up in a natural hollow. One side was sheltered by the tumbled ruins of what had once been a minor mountain range. The concussion of the blast had burst the towering cliffs; rock had cascaded into the valley for days. After San Francisco had been fired out of existence, survivors had crept into the heaps of boulders, looking for a place to hide from the sun. That was the hardest part: the unshielded sun. Not the insects, not the radioactive clouds of ash, not the flashing white fury of the blasts, but the sun. More people had died of thirst and dehydration and blind insanity than from toxic poisons.
   From his breast pocket, Tellman got a precious package of cigarettes. Shakily, he lit up. His thin, clawlike hands were trembling, partly from fatigue, partly from rage and tension. How he hated the camp. He loathed everybody in it, his wife included. Were they worth saving? He doubted it. Most of them were barbarians, already; what did it matter if they got the ship off or not? He was sweating away his mind and life, trying to save them. The hell with them.
   But then, his own safety was involved with theirs.
   He stalked stiff-legged over to where Barnes and Masterson stood talking. “How’s it coming?” he demanded gruffly.
   “Fine,” Barnes answered. “It won’t he long, now.”
   “One more load,” Masterson said. His heavy features twitched uneasily. “I hope nothing gets fouled up. She ought to be here any minute. “
   Tellman loathed the sweaty, animal-like scent that rolled from Masterson’s beefy body. Their situation wasn’t an excuse to creep around filthy as a pig … on Venus, things would be different. Masterson was useful, now; he was an experienced mechanic, invaluable in servicing the turbine and jets of the ship. But when the ship had landed and been pillaged …
   Satisfied, Tellman brooded over the reestablishment of the rightful order. The hierarchy had collapsed in the ruins of the cities, but it would be back strong as ever. Take Flannery, for example. Flannery was nothing but a foul-mouthed, shanty-Irish stevedore … but he was in charge of loading the ship, the greatest job at the moment. Flannery was top dog, for the time being … but that would change.
   It had to change. Consoled, Tellman strolled away from Barnes and Masterson, over to the ship itself.
   The ship was huge. Across its muzzle the stenciled identification still remained, not yet totally obliterated by drifting ash and the searing heat of the sun.


U.S. ARMY ORDNANCE
SERIES A-3 (B)

   Originally, it had been a high-velocity “massive retaliation” weapon, loaded with an H-warhead, ready to carry indiscriminate death to the enemy. The projectile had never been launched. Soviet toxic crystals had blown quietly into the windows and doors of the local command barracks. When launching day arrived, there was no crew to send it off. But it didn’t matter—there was no enemy, either. The rocket had stood on its buttocks for months … it was still there when the first refugees straggled into the shelter of the demolished mountains.
   “Nice, isn’t it?” Patricia Shelby said. She glanced up from her work and smiled blearily at Tellman. Her small, pretty face was streaked with fatigue and eyestrain. “Sort of like the trylon at the New York World’s Fair.”
   “My God,” Tellman said, “you remember that?”
   “I was only eight,” Patricia answered. In the shadow of the ship she was carefully checking the automatic relays that would maintain the air, temperature, and humidity of the ship. “But I’ll never forget it. Maybe I was a precog—when I saw it sticking up I knew someday it would mean a lot to everybody. “
   “A lot to the twenty of us,” Tellman corrected. Suddenly he offered her the remains of his cigarette. “Here—you look like you could use it.”
   “Thanks.” Patricia continued with her work, the cigarette between her lips. “I’m almost done—Boy, some of these relays are tiny. Just think.” She held up a microscopic wafer of transparent plastic. “While we’re all out cold, this makes the difference between life and death.” A strange, awed look crept into her dark-blue eyes. “To the human race.”
   Tellman guffawed. “You and Flannery. He’s always spouting idealistic twaddle.”
   Professor John Crowley, once head of the history department at Stanford, now the nominal leader of the colony, sat with Flannery and Jean Dobbs, examining the suppurating arm of a ten-year-old boy. “Radiation,” Crowley was saying emphatically. “The overall level is rising daily. It’s settling ash that does it. If we don’t get out soon, we’re done.”
   “It’s not radiation,” Flannery corrected in his ultimately certain voice. “It’s toxic crystalline poisoning; that stuff’s knee-deep up in the hills. He’s been playing around up there.”
   “Is that so?” Jean Dobbs demanded. The boy nodded his head not daring to look at her. “You’re right,” she said to Flannery.
   “Put some salve on it,” Flannery said. “And hope he’ll live. Outside of sulfathiazole there’s not much we have.” He glanced at his watch, suddenly tense. “Unless she brings the penicillin, today.”
   “If she doesn’t bring it today,” Crowley said, “she’ll never bring it. This is the last load; as soon as it’s stored, we’re taking off.”
   Rubbing his hands, Flannery suddenly bellowed: “Then get out the money!”
   Crowley grinned. “Right.” He fumbled in one of the steel storage lockers and yanked out a handful of paper bills. Holding a sheaf of bills up to Tellman he fanned them out invitingly. “Take your pick. Take them all.”
   Nervously, Tellman said, “Be careful with that. She’s probably raised the price on everything, again.”
   “We’ve got plenty.” Flannery took some and stuffed it into a partly filled load being wheeled by, on its way to the ship. “There’s money blowing all over the world, along with the ash and particles of bone. On Venus we won’t need it—she might as well have it all.”
   On Venus, Tellman thought, savagely, things would revert to their legitimate order—with Flannery digging sewers where he belonged. “What’s she bringing mostly?” he asked Crowley and Jean Dobbs, ignoring Flannery. “What’s the last load made up of?”
   “Comic books,” Flannery said dreamily, wiping perspiration from his balding forehead; he was a lean, tall, dark-haired young man. “And harmonicas.”
   Crowley winked at him. “Uke picks, so we can lie in our hammocks all day, strumming ‘Someone’s in the Kitchen with Dinah.’ ”
   “And swizzle sticks,” Flannery reminded him. “In order that we may all the more properly flatten the bubbles of our vintage ‘38 champagne.”
   Tellman boiled. “You degenerate!”
   Crowley and Flannery roared with laughter, and Tellman stalked off, smoldering under this new humiliation. What kind of morons and lunatics were they? Joking at a time like this … He peered miserably, almost accusingly, at the ship. Was this the kind of world they were going to found?
   In the pitiless white-hot sun, the huge ship shimmered and glowed. A vast upright tube of alloy and protective fiber mesh rising up above the tumble of wretched shacks. One more load, and they were off. One more truckful of supplies from their only source, the meager trickle of uncontaminated goods that meant the difference between life and death.
   Praying that nothing would go wrong, Tellman turned to await the arrival of Mrs. Edna Berthelson and her battered red pickup truck. Their fragile umbilical cord, connecting them with the opulent, undamaged past.

   On both sides of the road lay groves of lush apricot trees. Bees and flies buzzed sleepily among the rotting fruit scattered over the soil; every now and then a roadside stand appeared, operated by somnambulistic children. In driveways stood parked Buicks and Oldsmobiles. Rural dogs wandered here and there. At one intersection stood a swank tavern, its neon sign blinking on and off, ghostly pale in the midmorning sun.
   Mrs. Edna Berthelson glared hostilely at the tavern, and at the cars parked around it. City people were moving out into the valley, cutting down the old oak trees, the ancient fruit orchards, setting up suburban homes, stopping in the middle of the day for a whiskey sour and then driving cheerfully on. Driving at seventy-five miles an hour in their swept-back Chryslers. A column of cars that had piled up behind her truck suddenly burst forth and swung past her. She let them go, stony-faced, indifferent. Served them right for being in such a hurry. If she always hurried like that, she would never have had time to pay attention to that odd ability she had found in her introspective, lonely drives; never have discovered that she could look “ahead,” never have discovered that hole in the warp of time which enabled her to trade so easily at her own exorbitant prices. Let them hurry if they wanted. The heavy load in the back of the truck jogged rhythmically. The motor wheezed. Against the back window a half-dead fly buzzed.
   Jackie lay stretched out among the cartons and boxes, enjoying the ride, gazing complacently at the apricot trees and cars. Against the hot sky the peak of Mount Diablo rose, blue and white, an expanse of cold rock. Trails of mist clung to the peak; Mount Diablo went a long way up. He made a face at a dog standing indolently at the side of the road, waiting to cross. He waved gaily at a Pacific Telephone Co. repairman, stringing wire from a huge reel.
   Abruptly the truck turned off the state highway and onto a black surfaced side road. Now there were fewer cars. The truck began to climb … the rich orchards fell behind and gave way to flat brown fields. A dilapidated farmhouse lay to the right; he watched it with interest, wondering how old it was. When it was out of sight, no other man-made structures followed. The fields became unkempt. Broken, sagging fences were visible occasionally. Tom signs, no longer legible. The truck was approaching the base of Mount Diablo … almost nobody came this way.
   Idly, the boy wondered why Mrs. Berthelson’s little trip took her in this direction. Nobody lived here; suddenly there were no fields, only scrub grass and bushes, wild countryside, the tumbled slope of the mountain. A rabbit hopped skillfully across the half-decayed road. Rolling hills, a broad expanse of trees and strewn boulders … there was nothing here but a state fire tower, and maybe a watershed. And an abandoned picnic area, once maintained by the state, now forgotten.
   An edge of fear touched the boy. No customers lived out this way … he had been positive the battered red pickup truck would head directly into town, take him and the load to San Francisco or Oakland or Berkeley, a city where he could get out and run around, see interesting sights. There was nothing here, only abandoned emptiness, silent and foreboding. In the shadow of the mountain, the air was chill. He shivered. All at once he wished he hadn’t come.
   Mrs. Berthelson slowed the truck and shifted noisily into low. With a roar and an explosive belch of exhaust gases, the truck crept up a steep ascent, among jagged boulders, ominous and sharp. Somewhere far off a bird cried shrilly; Jackie listened to its thin sounds echoing dismally away and wondered how he could attract his grandmother’s attention. It would be nice to be in front, in the cabin. It would be nice—
   And then he noticed it. At first he didn’t believe it … but he had to believe it.
   Under him, the truck was beginning to fade away.
   It faded slowly, almost imperceptibly. Dimmer and dimmer the truck grew; its rusty red sides became gray, then colorless. The black road was visible underneath. In wild panic, the boy clutched at the piles of boxes. His hands passed through them; he was riding precariously on an uneven sea of dim shapes, among almost invisible phantoms.
   He lurched and slid down. Now—hideously—he was suspended momentarily halfway through the truck, just above the tail pipe. Groping desperately, he struggled to catch hold of the boxes directly above him. “Help!” he shouted. His voice echoed around him; it was the only sound … the roar of the truck was fading. For a moment he clutched at the retreating shape of the truck; then, gently, gradually, the last image of the truck faded, and with a sickening crunch, the boy dropped to the road.
   The impact sent him rolling into the dry weeds beyond the drainage ditch. Stunned, dazed with disbelief and pain, he lay gasping, trying feebly to pull himself up. There was only silence; the truck, Mrs. Berthelson, had vanished. He was totally alone. He closed his eyes and lay back, stupefied with fright.
   Sometime later, probably not much later, he was aroused by the squeal of brakes. A dirty, orange state maintenance truck had lurched to a stop; two men in khaki work clothes were climbing down and hurrying over.
   “What’s the matter?” one yelled at him. They grabbed him up, faces serious and alarmed. “What are you doing here?”
   “Fell,” he muttered. “Off the truck.”
   ‘What truck?” they demanded. “How?”
   He couldn’t tell them. All he knew was that Mrs. Berthelson had gone. He hadn’t made it, after all. Once again, she was making her trip alone. He would never know where she went; he would never find out who her customers were.

   Gripping the steering wheel of the truck, Mrs. Berthelson was conscious that the transition had taken place. Vaguely, she was aware that the rolling brown fields, rocks and green scrub bushes had faded out. The first time she had gone “ahead” she had found the old truck floundering in a sea of black ash. She had been so excited by her discovery that day that she had neglected to “scan” conditions on the other side of the hole. She had known there were customers … and dashed headlong through the warp to get there first. She smiled complacently … she needn’t have hurried, there was no competition here. In fact, the customers were so eager to deal with her, they had done virtually everything in their power to make things easier for her.
   The men had built a crude strip of road out into the ash, a sort of wooden platform onto which the truck now rolled. She had learned the exact moment to “go ahead”; it was the instant that the truck passed the drainage culvert a quarter mile inside the state park. Here, “ahead,” the culvert also existed … but there was little left of it, only a vague jumble of shattered stone. And the road was utterly buried. Under the wheels of the truck the rough boards thumped and banged. It would be bad if she had a flat tire … but some of them could fix it. They were always working; one little additional task wouldn’t make much difference. She could see them, now; they stood at the end of the wooden platform, waiting impatiently for her. Beyond them was their jumble of crude, smelly shacks, and beyond that, their ship.
   A lot she cared about their ship. She knew what it was: stolen army property. Setting her bony hand rigidly around the gearshift knob, she threw the truck into neutral and coasted to a stop. As the men approached, she began pulling on the hand brake.
   “Afternoon,” Professor Crowley muttered, his eyes sharp and keen as he peered eagerly into the back of the truck.
   Mrs. Berthelson grunted a noncommittal answer. She didn’t like any of them … dirty men, smelling of sweat and fear, their bodies and clothes streaked with grime, and the ancient coating of desperation that never seemed to leave them. Like awed, pitiful children they clustered around the truck, poking hopefully at the packages, already beginning to pluck them out onto the black ground.
   “Here now,” she said sharply. “You leave those alone.”
   Their hands darted back as if seared. Mrs. Berthelson sternly climbed from the truck, grabbed up her inventory sheet and plodded up to Crowley.
   “You just wait,” she told him. “Those have to be checked off.”
   He nodded, glanced at Masterson, licked his dry lips, and waited. They all waited. It had always been that way; they knew, and she knew, that there was no other way they could get their supplies. And if they didn’t get their supplies, their food and medicine and clothing and instruments and tools and raw materials, they wouldn’t be able to leave in their ship.
   In this world, in the “ahead,” such things didn’t exist. At least, not so anybody could use them. A cursory glance had told her that; she could see the ruin with her own eyes. They hadn’t taken very good care of their world. They had wasted it all, turned it into black ash and ruin. Well, it was their business, not hers.
   She had never been much interested in the relationship between their world and hers. She was content to know that both existed, and that she could go from one to the other and back. And she was the only one who knew how. Several times, people from this world, members of this group, had tried to go “back there” with her. It had always failed. As she made the transition, they were left behind. It was her power, her faculty. Not a shared faculty—she was glad of that. And for a person in business, quite a valuable faculty.
   “All right,” she said crisply. Standing where she could keep her eye on them, she began checking off each box as it was carried from the truck. Her routine was exact and certain; it was part of her life. As long as she could remember she had transacted business in a distinct way. Her father had taught her how to live in a business world; she had learned his stem principles and rules. She was following them now.
   Flannery and Patricia Shelby stood together at one side; Flannery held the money, payment for the delivery. “Well,” he said, under his breath, “now we can tell her to go leap in the river.”
   “Are you sure?” Pat asked nervously.
   “The last load’s here.” Flannery grinned starkly and ran a trembling hand through his thinning black hair. “Now we can get rolling. With this stuff, the ship’s crammed to the gills. We may even have to sit down and eat some of that now.” He indicated a bulging pasteboard carton of groceries. “Bacon, eggs, milk, real coffee. Maybe we won’t shove it in deep-freeze. Maybe we ought to have a last-meal-before-the-flight orgy.”
   Wistfully, Pat said, “It would be nice. It’s been a long time since we’ve had food like that.”
   Masterson strode over. “Let’s kill her and boil her in a big kettle. Skinny old witch—she might make good soup.”
   “In the oven,” Flannery corrected. “Some gingerbread, to take along with us.”
   “I wish you wouldn’t talk like that,” Pat said apprehensively. “She’s so—well, maybe she is a witch. I mean, maybe that’s what witches were … old women with strange talents. Like her—being able to pass through time.”
   “Damn lucky for us,” Masterson said briefly.
   “But she doesn’t understand it. Does she? Does she know what she’s doing? That she could save us all this by sharing her ability. Does she know what’s happened to our world?”
   Flannery considered. “Probably she doesn’t know—or care. A mind like hers, business and profit-getting exorbitant rates from us, selling this stuff to us at an incredible premium. And the joke is that money’s worth nothing to us. If she could see, she’d know that. It’s just paper, in this world. But she’s caught in a narrow little routine. Business, profit.” He shook his head. “A mind like that, a warped, miserable flea-sized mind … and she has that unique talent.”
   “But she can see,” Pat persisted. “She can see the ash, the ruin. How can she not know?”
   Flannery shrugged. “She probably doesn’t connect it with her own life. After all, she’ll be dead in a couple of years … she won’t see the war in her real time. She’ll only see it this way, as a region into which she can travel. A sort of travelogue of strange lands. She can enter and leave—but we’re stuck. It must give you a damn fine sense of security to be able to walk out of one world into another. God, what I’d give to be able to go back with her.”
   “It’s been tried,” Masterson pointed out. “That lizardhead Tellman tried it. And he came walking back, covered with ash. He said the truck faded out.”
   “Of course it did,” Flannery said mildly. “She drove it back to Walnut Creek. Back to 1965. “
   The unloading had been completed. The members of the colony were toiling up the slope, lugging the cartons to the check area beneath the ship. Mrs. Berthelson strode over to Flannery, accompanied by Professor Crowley.
   “Here’s the inventory,” she said briskly. “A few items couldn’t be found. You know, I don’t stock all that in my store. I have to send out for most of it.”
   “We know,” Flannery said, coldly amused. It would be interesting to see a country store that stocked binocular microscopes, turret lathes, frozen packs of antibiotics, high-frequency radio transmitters, advanced textbooks in all fields.
   “So that’s why I have to charge you a little dearer,” the old woman continued, the inflexible routine of squeeze. “On items I bring in—” She examined her inventory, then returned the ten-page typewritten list that Crowley had given her on the previous visit. “Some of these weren’t available. I marked them back order. That bunch of metals from those laboratories back East—they said maybe later.” A cunning look slid over the ancient gray eyes. “And they’ll be very expensive.”
   “It doesn’t matter,” Flannery said, handing her the money. “You can cancel all the back orders.”
   At first her face showed nothing. Only a vague inability to understand.
   “No more shipments,” Crowley explained. A certain tension faded from them; for the first time, they weren’t afraid of her. The old relationship had ended. They weren’t dependent on the rusty red truck. They had their shipment; they were ready to leave.
   “We’re taking off,” Flannery said, grinning starkly. “We’re full up. “
   Comprehension came. “But I placed orders for those things.” Her voice was thin, bleak. Without emotion, “They’ll be shipped to me. I’ll have to pay for them.”
   “Well,” Flannery said softly, “isn’t that too damn bad.”
   Crowley shot him a warning glance. “Sorry,” he said to the old woman. “We can’t stick around—this place is getting hot. We’ve got to take off.”
   On the withered face, dismay turned to growing wrath. “You ordered those things! You have to take them!” Her shrill voice rose to a screech of fury. “What am I supposed to do with them?”
   As Flannery framed his bitter answer, Pat Shelby intervened. “Mrs. Berthelson,” she said quietly, “you’ve done a lot for us, even if you wouldn’t help us through the hole in your time. And we’re very grateful. If it wasn’t for you, we couldn’t have got together enough supplies. But we really have to go.” She reached out her hand to touch the frail shoulder, but the old woman jerked furiously away. “I mean,” Pat finished awkwardly, “we can’t stay any longer, whether we want to or not. Do you see all that black ash? It’s radioactive, and more of it sifts down all the time. The toxic level is rising—if we stay any longer it’ll start destroying us.”
   Mrs. Edna Berthelson stood clutching her inventory list. There was an expression on her face that none of the group had ever seen before. The violent spasm of wrath had vanished; now a cold, chill glaze lay over the aged features. Her eyes were like gray rocks, utterly without feeling.
   Flannery wasn’t impressed. “Here’s your loot,” he said, thrusting out the handful of bills. “What the hell.” He turned to Crowley. “Let’s toss in the rest. Let’s stuff it down her goddamn throat.”
   “Shut up,” Crowley snapped.
   Flannery sank resentfully back. “Who are you talking to?”
   “Enough’s enough.” Crowley, worried and tense, tried to speak to the old woman. “My God, you can’t expect us to stay around here forever, can you?”
   There was no response. Abruptly, the old woman turned and strode silently back to her truck.
   Masterson and Crowley looked uneasily at each other. “She sure is mad,” Masterson said apprehensively.
   Tellman hurried up, glanced at the old woman getting into her truck, and then bent down to root around in one of the cartons of groceries. Childish greed flushed across his thin face. “Look,” he gasped. “Coffee—fifteen pounds of it. Can we open some? Can we get one tin open, to celebrate?”
   “Sure,” Crowley said tonelessly, his eyes on the truck. With a muffled roar, the truck turned in a wide arc and rumbled off down the crude platform, toward the ash. It rolled off into the ash, slithered for a short distance, and then faded out. Only the bleak, sun-swept plain of darkness remained.
   “Coffee!” Tellman shouted gleefully. He tossed the bright metal can high in the air and clumsily caught it again. “A celebration! Our last night—last meal on Earth!”

   It was true.
   As the red pickup truck jogged metallically along the road, Mrs Berthelson scanned “ahead” and saw that the men were telling the truth. Her thin lips writhed; in her mouth an acid taste of bile rose. She had taken it for granted that they would continue to buy—there was no competition, no other source of supply. But they were leaving. And when they left, there would be no more market.
   She would never find a market that satisfactory. It was a perfect market; the group was a perfect customer. In the locked box at the back of the store, hidden down under the reserve sacks of grain, was almost two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. A fortune, taken in over the months, received from the imprisoned colony as it toiled to construct its ship.
   And she had made it possible. She was responsible for letting them get away after all. Because of her shortsightedness, they were able to escape. She hadn’t used her head.
   As she drove back to town she meditated calmly, rationally. It was totally because of her: she was the only one who had possessed the power to bring them their supplies. Without her, they were helpless.
   Hopefully, she cast about, looking this way and that, peering with her deep inner sense, into the various “aheads.” There was more than one, of course. The “aheads” lay like a pattern of squares, an intricate web of worlds into which she could step, if she cared. But all were empty of what she wanted.
   All showed bleak plains of black ash, devoid of human habitation. What she wanted was lacking: they were each without customers.
   The patterns of “aheads” was complex. Sequences were connected like beads on a string; there were chains of “aheads” which formed interwoven links. One step led to the next … but not to alternate chains.
   Carefully, with great precision, she began the job of searching through each of the chains. There were many of them … a virtual infinity of possible “aheads.” And it was her power to select; she had stepped into that one, the particular chain in which the huddled colony had labored to construct its ship. She had, by entering it, made it manifest. Frozen it into reality. Dredged it up from among the many, from among the multitude of possibilities.
   Now she needed to dredge another. That particular “ahead” had proven unsatisfactory. The market had petered out.
   The truck was entering the pleasant town of Walnut Creek, passing bright stores and houses and supermarkets, before she located it. There were so many, and her mind was old … but now she had picked it out. And as soon as she found it, she knew it was the one. Her innate business instinct certified it; the particular “ahead” clicked.
   Of the possibilities, this one was unique. The ship was well-built, and thoroughly tested. In “ahead” after “ahead” the ship rose, hesitated as automatic machinery locked, and then burst from the jacket of atmosphere, toward the morning star. In a few “aheads,” the wasted sequences of failure, the ship exploded into white-hot fragments. Those, she ignored; she saw no advantage in that.
   In a few “aheads” the ship failed to take off at all. The turbines lashed; exhaust poured out … and the ship remained as it was. But then the men scampered out, and began going over the turbines, searching for the faulty parts. So nothing was gained. In later segments along the chain, in subsequent links, the damage was repaired, and the takeoff was satisfactorily completed.
   But one chain was correct. Each element, each link, developed perfectly. The pressure locks closed, and the ship was sealed. The turbines fired, and the ship, with a shudder, rose from the plain of black ash. Three miles up, the rear jets tore loose. The ship floundered, dropped in a screaming dive, and plunged back toward the Earth. Emergency landing jets, designed for Venus, were frantically thrown on. The ship slowed, hovered for an agonizing instant, and then crashed into the heap of rubble that had been Mount Diablo. There the remains of the ship lay, twisted metal sheets, smoking in the dismal silence.
   From the ship the men emerged, shaken and mute, to inspect the damage. To begin the miserable, futile task all over again. Collecting supplies, patching the rocket up … The old woman smiled to herself.
   That was what she wanted. That would do perfectly. And all she had to do—such a little thing—was select that sequence when she made her next trip. When she took her little business trip, the following Saturday.

   Crowley lay half buried in the black ash, pawing feebly at a deep gash in his cheek. A broken tooth throbbed. A thick ooze of blood dripped into his mouth, the hot salty taste of his own body fluids leaking helplessly out. He tried to move his leg, but there was no sensation. Broken. His mind was too dazed, too bewildered with despair, to comprehend.
   Somewhere in the half-darkness, Flannery stirred. A woman groaned; scattered among the rocks and buckled sections of the ship lay the injured and dying. An upright shape rose, stumbled, and pitched over. An artificial light flickered. It was Tellman, making his way clumsily over the tattered remains of their world. He gaped foolishly at Crowley; his glasses hung from one ear and part of his lower jaw was missing. Abruptly he collapsed face-forward into a smoking mound of supplies. His skinny body twitched aimlessly.
   Crowley managed to pull himself to his knees. Masterson was bending over him, saying something again and again.
   “I’m all right,” Crowley rasped.%

The Mold of Yancy

   Leon Sipling groaned and pushed away his work papers. In an organization of thousands he was the only employee not putting out. Probably he was the only yance-man on Callisto not doing his job. Fear, and the quick pluckings of desperation, made him reach up and wave on the audio circuit to Babson, the over-all office controller.
   “Say,” Sipling said hoarsely, “I think I’m stuck, Bab. How about running the gestalt through, up to my spot? Maybe I can pick up the rhythm…” He grinned weakly. “The hum of other creative minds.”
   After a speculative moment, Babson reached for the impulse synapsis, his massive face unsympathetic. “You holding up progress, Sip? This has to be integrated with the daily by six tonight. The schedule calls for the works to be on the vidlines during the dinner-hour stretch.”
   The visual side of the gestalt had already begun to form on the wall screen; Sipling turned his attention to it, grateful of a chance to escape Babson’s cold glare.
   The screen showed a 3-D of Yancy, the usual three quarter view, from the waist up. John Edward Yancy in his faded workshirt, sleeves rolled up, arms brown and furry. A middle-aged man in his late fifties, his face sunburned, neck slightly red, a good-natured smile on his face, squinting because he was looking into the sun. Behind Yancy was a still of his yard, his garage, his flower garden, lawn, the back of his neat little white plastic house. Yancy grinned at Sipling: a neighbor pausing in the middle of a summer day, perspiring from the heat and the exertion of mowing his lawn, about to launch into a few harmless remarks about the weather, the state of the planet, the condition of the neighborhood.
   “Say,” Yancy said, in the audio phones propped up on Sipling’s desk. His voice was low, personal. “The darndest thing happened to my grandson Ralf, the other morning. You know how Ralf is; he’s always getting to school half an hour early… says he likes to be in his seat before anybody else.”
   “That eager-beaver,” Joe Pines, at the next desk, cat-called.
   From the screen, Yancy’s voice rolled on, confident, amiable, undisturbed. “Well, Ralf saw this squirrel; it was just sitting there on the sidewalk. He stopped for a minute and watched.” The look on Yancy’s face was so real that Sipling almost believed him. He could, almost, see the squirrel and the tow-headed youngest grandson of the Yancy family, the familiar child of the familiar son of the planet’s most familiar—and beloved—person.
   “This squirrel,” Yancy explained, in his homey way, “was collecting nuts. And by golly, this was just the other day, only the middle of June. And here was this little squirrel—” with his hands he indicated the size, “collecting these nuts and carrying them off for winter.”
   And then, the amused, anecdote-look on Yancy’s face faded. A serious, thoughtful look replaced it: the meaningful-look. His blue eyes darkened (good color work). His jaw became more square, more imposing (good dummy-switch by the android crew). Yancy seemed older, more solemn and mature, more impressive. Behind him, the garden-scene had been jerked and a slightly different backdrop filtered in; Yancy now stood firmly planted in a cosmic landscape, among mountains and winds and huge old forests.
   “I got to thinking,” Yancy said, and his voice was deeper, slower. “There was that little squirrel. How did he know winter was coming? There he was, working away, getting prepared for it.” Yancy’s voice rose. “Preparing for a winter he’d never seen.”
   Sipling stiffened and prepared himself; it was coming. At his desk, Joe Pines grinned and yelled: “Get set!”
   “That squirrel,” Yancy said solemnly, “had faith. No, he never saw any sign of winter. But he knew winter was coming.” The firm jaw moved; one hand came slowly up …
   And then the image stopped. It froze, immobile, silent. No words came from it; abruptly the sermon ended, in the middle of a paragraph.
   “That’s it,” Babson said briskly, filtering the Yancy out. “Help you any?”
   Sipling pawed jerkily at his work papers. “No,” he admitted, “actually it doesn’t. But—I’ll get it worked out.”
   “I hope so.” Babson’s face darkened ominously and his small mean eyes seemed to grow smaller. “What’s the matter with you? Home problems?”
   “I’ll be okay,” Sipling muttered, sweating. “Thanks.”
   On the screen a faint impression of Yancy remained, still poised at the word coming. The rest of the gestalt was in Sipling’s head: the continuing slice of words and gestures hadn’t been worked out and fed to the composite.
   Sipling’s contribution was missing, so the entire gestalt was stopped cold in its tracks.
   “Say,” Joe Pines said uneasily, “I’ll be glad to take over, today. Cut your desk out of the circuit and I’ll cut myself in.”
   “Thanks,” Sipling muttered, “but I’m the only one who can get this damn part. It’s the central gem.”
   “You ought to take a rest. You’ve been working too hard.”
   “Yes,” Sipling agreed, on the verge of hysteria. “I’m a little under the weather.”
   That was obvious: everybody in the office could see that. But only Sipling knew why. And he was fighting with all his strength to keep from screaming out the reason at the top of his lungs.

   Basic analysis of the political milieu at Callisto was laid out by Niplan computing apparatus at Washington, D.C.; but the final evaluations were done by human technicians. The Washington computers could ascertain that the Callisto political structure was moving toward a totalitarian make-up, but they couldn’t say what that indicated. Human beings were required to class the drift as malign.
   “It isn’t possible,” Taverner protested. “There’s constant industrial traffic in and out of Callisto; except for the Ganymede syndicate they’ve got out-planet commerce bottled up. We’d know as soon as anything phony got started.”
   “How would we know?” Police Director Kellman inquired.
   Taverner indicated the data-sheets, graphs and charts of figures and percentages that covered the walls of the Niplan Police offices. “It would show up in hundreds of ways. Terrorist raids, political prisons, extermination camps. We’d hear about political recanting, treason, disloyalty … all the basic props of a dictatorship.”
   “Don’t confuse a totalitarian society with a dictatorship,” Kellman said dryly. “A totalitarian state reaches into every sphere of its citizens’ lives, forms their opinions on every subject. The government can be a dictatorship, or aparliament, or an elected president, or a council of priests. That doesn’t matter.”
   “All right,” Taverner said, mollified. “I’ll go. I’ll take a team there and see what they’re doing.”
   “Can you make yourselves look like Callistotes?”
   “What are they like?”
   “I’m not sure,” Kellman admitted thoughtfully, with a glance at the elaborate wall charts. “But whatever it is, they’re all beginning to turn out alike.”

   Among its passengers the interplan commercial liner that settled down at Callisto carried Peter Taverner, his wife, and their two children. With a grimace of concern, Taverner made out the shapes of local officials waiting at the exit hatch. The passengers were going to be carefully screened; as the ramp descended, the clot of officials moved forward.
   Taverner got to his feet and collected his family. “Ignore them,” he told Ruth. “Our papers will get us by.”
   Expertly prepared documents identified him as a speculator in nonferric metals, looking for a wholesale outlet to handle his jobbing. Callisto was a clearing-point for land and mineral operations; a constant flood of wealth-hungry entrepreneurs streamed back and forth, carting raw materials from the underdeveloped moons, hauling mining equipment from the inner planets.
   Cautiously, Taverner arranged his topcoat over his arm. A heavyset man, in his middle thirties, he could have passed for a successful business operator. His double-breasted business suit was expensive, but conservative. His big shoes were brightly shined. All things considered, he’d probably get by. As he and his family moved toward the exit ramp, they presented a perfect and exact imitation of the out-planet business-class.
   “State your business,” a green-uniformed official demanded, pencil poised. ID tabs were being checked, photographed, recorded. Brain pattern comparisons were being made: the usual routine.
   “Nonferric enterprises,” Taverner began, but a second official cut him abruptly off.
   “You’re the third cop this morning. What’s biting you people on Terra?” The official eyed Taverner intently. “We’re getting more cops than ministers.”
   Trying to maintain his poise, Taverner answered evenly: “I’m here to take a rest. Acute alcoholism—nothing official.”
   “That’s what your cohorts said.” The official grinned humorously. “Well, what’s one more Terran cop?” He slid the lockbars aside and waved Taverner and his family through. “Welcome to Callisto. Have fun—enjoy yourselves. Fastest-growing moon in the system.”
   “Practically a planet,” Taverner commented ironically.
   “Any day now.” The official examined some reports. “According to our friends in your little organization, you’ve been pasting up wall graphs and charts about us. Are we that important?”
   “Academic interest,” Taverner said; if three spots had been made, then the whole team had been netted. The local authorities were obviously primed to detect infiltration … the realization chilled him.
   But they were letting him through. Were they that confident?
   Things didn’t look good. Peering around for a cab, he grimly prepared to undertake the business of integrating the scattered team members into a functioning whole.

   That evening, at the Stay-Lit bar on the main street of the commercial district of town, Taverner met with his two team members. Hunched over their whiskey sours, they compared notes.
   “I’ve been here almost twelve hours,” Eckmund stated, gazing impassively at the rows of bottles in the gloomy depths of the bar. Cigar smoke hovered in the air; the automatic music box in the corner banged away metallically. “I’ve been walking around town, looking at things, making observations.”
   “Me,” Dorser said, “I’ve been at the tape-library. Getting official myth, comparing it to Callistote reality. And talking to the scholars—educated people hanging around the scanning rooms.”
   Taverner sipped his drink. “Anything of interest?”
   “You know the primitive rule-of-thumb test,” Eckmund said wryly. “I loafed around on a slum street corner until I got in a conversation with some people waiting for a bus. I started knocking the authorities: complaining about the bus service, the sewage disposal, taxes, everything. They chimed right in. Heartily. No hesitation. And no fear.”
   “The legal government,” Dorser commented, “is set up in the usual archaic fashion. Two-party system, one a little more conservative than the other—no fundamental difference of course. But both elect candidates at open primaries, ballots circulated to all registered voters.” A spasm of amusement touched him. “This is a model democracy. I read the text books. Nothing but idealistic slogans: freedom of speech, assembly, religion—the works. Same old grammar school stuff.”
   The three of them were temporarily silent.
   “There are jails,” Taverner said slowly. “Every society has law violations.”
   “I visited one,” Eckmund said, belching. “Petty thieves, murderers, claim-jumpers, strong-arm hoods—the usual.”
   “No political prisoners?”
   “No.” Eckmund raised his voice. “We might as well discuss this at the top of our lungs. Nobody cares—the authorities don’t care.”
   “Probably after we’re gone they’ll clap a few thousand people into prison,” Dorser murmured thoughtfully.
   “My God,” Eckmund retorted, “people can leave Callisto any time they want. If you’re operating a police state you have to keep your borders shut. And these borders are wide open. People pour in and out.”
   “Maybe it’s a chemical in the drinking water,” Dorser suggested.
   “How the hell can they have a totalitarian society without terrorism?” Eckmund demanded rhetorically. “I’ll swear to it—there are no thought-control cops here. There is absolutely no fear.”
   “Somehow, pressure is being exerted,” Taverner persisted.
   “Not by cops,” Dorser said emphatically. “Not by force and brutality. Not by illegal arrest and imprisonment and forced labor.”
   “If this were a police state,” Eckmund said thoughtfully, “there’d be some kind of resistance movement. Some sort of ‘subversive’ group trying to overthrow the authorities. But in this society you’re free to complain; you can buy time on the TV and radio stations, you can buy space in the newspapers—anything you want.” He shrugged. “So how can there be a clandestine resistance movement? It’s silly.”
   “Nevertheless,” Taverner said, “these people are living in a one-party society with a party line, with an official ideology. They show the effects of a carefully controlled totalitarian state. They’re guinea pigs—whether they realize it or not.”
   “Wouldn’t they realize it?”
   Baffled, Taverner shook his head. “I would have thought so. There must be some mechanism we don’t understand.”
   “It’s all open. We can look everything over.”
   “We must be looking for the wrong thing.” Idly, Taverner gazed at the television screen above the bar. The nude girlie song-and-dance routine had ended; now the features of a man faded into view. A genial, round-faced man in his fifties, with guileless blue eyes, an almost childish twitch to his lips, a fringe of brown hair playing around his slightly prominent ears.
   “Friends,” the TV image rumbled, “it’s good to be with you again, tonight. I thought I might have a little chat with you.”
   “A commercial,” Dorser said, signalling the bartending machine for another drink.
   “Who is that?” Taverner asked curiously.
   “That kindly-looking geezer?” Eckmund examined his notes. “A sort of popular commentator. Name of Yancy.”
   “Is he part of the government?”
   “Not that I know of. A kind of home-spun philosopher. I picked up a biography of him on a magazine stand.” Eckmund passed the gaily-colored pamphlet to his boss. “Totally ordinary man, as far as I can see. Used to be a soldier; in the Mars-Jupiter War he distinguished himself—battlefield commission. Rose to the rank of major.” He shrugged indifferently. “A sort of talking almanac. Pithy sayings on every topic. Wise old saws: how to cure a chest cold. What the trouble is back on Terra.”
   Taverner examined the booklet. “Yes, I saw his picture around.”
   “Very popular figure. Loved by the masses. Man of the people—speaks for them. When I was buying cigarettes I noticed he endorses one particular brand. Very popular brand, now; just about driven the others off the market. Same with beer. The Scotch in this glass is probably the brand Yancy endorses. The same with tennis balls. Only he doesn’t play tennis—he plays croquet. All the time, every weekend.” Accepting his fresh drink Eckmund finished, “So now everybody plays croquet.”
   “How can croquet be a planet-wide sport?” Taverner demanded.
   “This isn’t a planet,” Dorser put in. “It’s a pipsqueak moon.”
   “Not according to Yancy,” Eckmund said. “We’re supposed to think of Callisto as a planet.”
   “How?” Taverner asked.
   “Spiritually, it’s a planet. Yancy likes people to take a spiritual view of matters. He’s strong on God and honesty in government and being hardworking and clean-cut. Warmed-over truisms.”
   The expression on Taverner’s face hardened. “Interesting,” he murmured. “I’ll have to drop by and meet him.”
   “Why? He’s the dullest, most mediocre man you could dream up.”
   “Maybe,” Taverner answered, “that’s why I’m interested.”

   Babson, huge and menacing, met Taverner at the entrance of the Yancy Building. “Of course you can meet Mr. Yancy. But he’s a busy man—it’ll take a while to squeeze in an appointment. Everybody wants to meet Mr. Yancy.”
   Taverner was unimpressed. “How long do I have to wait?”
   As they crossed the main lobby to the elevators, Babson made a computation. “Oh, say four months.”
   “Four months?”
   “John Yancy is just about the most popular man alive.”
   “Around here, maybe,” Taverner commented angrily, as they entered the packed elevator. “I never heard of him before. If he’s got so much on the ball, why isn’t he piped all around Niplan?”
   “Actually,” Babson admitted, in a hoarse, confidential whisper, “I can’t imagine what people see in Yancy. As far as I’m concerned he’s just a big bag of wind. But people around here enjoy him. After all, Callisto is—provincial. Yancy appeals to a certain type of rural mind—to people who like their world simple. I’m afraid Terra would be too sophisticated for Yancy.”
   “Have you tried?”
   “Not yet,” Babson said. Reflectively, he added: “Maybe later.”
   While Taverner was pondering the meaning of the big man’s words, the elevator ceased climbing. The two of them stepped off into a luxurious, carpeted hall, illuminated by recessed lights. Babson pushed open a door, and they entered a large, active office.
   Inside, a screening of a recent Yancy gestalt was in progress. A group of yance-men watched it silently, faces alert and critical. The gestalt showed Yancy sitting at his old-fashioned oak desk, in his study. It was obvious that he had been working on some philosophical thoughts: spread out over the desk were books and papers. On Yancy’s face was a thoughtful expression; he sat with his hand against his forehead, features screwed up into a solemn study of concentration.
   “This is for next Sunday morning,” Babson explained.
   Yancy’s lips moved, and he spoke. “Friends,” he began, in his deep, personal, friendly, man-to-man voice, “I’ve been sitting here at my desk—well, about the way you’re sitting around your living rooms.” A switch in camera work occurred; it showed the open door of Yancy’s study. In the living room was the familiar figure of Yancy’s sweet-faced middle-aged homey wife; she was sitting on the comfortable sofa, primly sewing. On the floor their grandson Ralf played the familiar game of jacks. The family dog snoozed in the corner.
   One of the watching yance-men made a note on his pad. Taverner glanced at him curiously, baffled.
   “Of course, I was in there with them,” Yancy continued, smiling briefly. “I was reading the funnies to Ralf. He was sitting on my knee.” The background faded, and a momentary phantom scene of Yancy sitting with his grandson on his knee floated into being. Then the desk and the book-lined study returned. “I’m mighty grateful for my family,” Yancy revealed. “In these times of stress, it’s my family that I turn to, as my pillar of strength.” Another notation was made by a watching yance-man.
   “Sitting here, in my study, this wonderful Sunday morning,” Yancy rumbled on, “I realize how lucky we are to be alive, and to have this lovely planet, and the fine cities and houses, all the things God has given us to enjoy. But we’ve got to be careful. We’ve got to make sure we don’t lose these things.”
   A change had come over Yancy. It seemed to Taverner that the image was subtly altering. It wasn’t the same man; the good humor was gone. This was an older man, and larger. A firm-eyed father, speaking to his children.
   “My friends,” Yancy intoned, “there are forces that could weaken this planet. Everything we’ve built up for our loved ones, for our children, could be taken away from us overnight. We must learn to be vigilant. We must protect our liberties, our possessions, our way of life. If we become divided, and fall to bickering among each other, we will be easy prey for our enemies. We must work together, my friends.
   “That’s what I’ve been thinking about this Sunday morning. Cooperation. Teamwork. We’ve got to be secure, and to be secure, we must be one united people. That’s the key, my friends, the key to a more abundant life.” Pointing out the window at the lawn and garden, Yancy said: “You know, I was …”
   The voice trailed off. The image froze. Full room lights came on, and the watching yance-men moved into muttering activity.
   “Fine,” one of them said. “So far, at least. But where’s the rest?”
   “Sipling, again,” another answered. “His slice still hasn’t come through. What’s wrong with that guy?”
   Scowling, Babson detached himself. “Pardon me,” he said to Taverner.
   “I’ll have to excuse myself-technical matters. You’re free to look around, if you care to. Help yourself to any of the literature—anything you want.”
   “Thanks,” Taverner said uncertainly. He was confused; everything seemed harmless, even trivial. But something basic was wrong.
   Suspiciously, he began to prowl.

  It was obvious that John Yancy had pontificated on every known subject. A Yancy opinion on every conceivable topic was available… modern art, or garlic in cooking, or the use of intoxicating beverages, or eating meat, or socialism, or war, or education, or open-front dresses on women, or high taxes, or atheism, or divorce, or patriotism—every shade and nuance of opinion possible.
   Was there any subject that Yancy hadn’t expressed himself on?
   Taverner examined the voluminous tapes that lined the walls of the offices. Yancy’s utterances had run into billions of tape feet… could one man have an opinion on everything in the universe?
   Choosing a tape at random, he found himself being addressed on the topic of table manners.
   “You know,” the miniature Yancy began, his voice tinny in Taverner’s ears, “at dinner the other night I happened to notice how my grandson Ralf was cutting his steak.” Yancy grinned at the viewer, as an image of the six-year-old boy sawing grimly away floated briefly into sight. “Well, I got to thinking, there was Ralf working away at that steak, not having any luck with it. And it seemed to me—”
   Taverner snapped the tape off and returned it to the slot. Yancy had definite opinions on everything… or were they so definite?
   A strange suspicion was growing in him. On some topics, yes. On minor issues, Yancy had exact rules, specific maxims drawn from mankind’s rich storehouse of folklore. But major philosophical and political issues were something else again.
   Getting out one of the many tapes listed under War, Taverner ran it through at random.
   “…I’m against war,” Yancy pronounced angrily. “And I ought to know; I’ve done my share of fighting.”
   There followed a montage of battle scenes: the Jupiter-Mars War in which Yancy had distinguished himself by his bravery, his concern for his comrades, his hatred of the enemy, his variety of proper emotions.
   “But,” Yancy continued staunchly, “I feel a planet must be strong. We must not surrender ourselves meekly … weakness invites attack and fosters aggression. By being weak we promote war. We must gird ourselves and protect those we love. With all my heart and soul I’m against useless wars; but I say again, as I’ve said many times before, a man must come forward and fight a just war. He must not shrink from his responsibility. War is a terrible thing. But sometimes we must…”
   As he restored the tape, Taverner wondered just what the hell Yancy had said. What were his views on war? They took up a hundred separate reels of tape; Yancy was always ready to hold forth on such vital and grandiose subjects as War, the Planet, God, Taxation. But did he say anything?
   A cold chill crawled up Taverner’s spine. On specific—and trivial—items there were absolute opinions: dogs are better than cats, grapefruit is too sour without a dash of sugar, it’s good to get up early in the morning, too much drinking is bad. But on big topics … an empty vacuum, filled with the vacant roll of high-sounding phrases. A public that agreed with Yancy on war and taxes and God and planet agreed with absolutely nothing. And with everything.
   On topics of importance, they had no opinion at all. They only thought they had an opinion.
   Rapidly, Taverner scanned tapes on various major subjects. It was the same all down the line. With one sentence Yancy gave; with the next he took away. The total effect was a neat cancellation, a skillful negation. But the viewer was left with the illusion of having consumed a rich and varied intellectual feast. It was amazing. And it was professional: the ends were tied up too slickly to be mere accident.
   Nobody was as harmless and vapid as John Edward Yancy. He was just too damn good to be true.
   Sweating, Taverner left the main reference room and poked his way toward the rear offices, where busy yance-men worked away at their desks and assembly tables. Activity whirred on all sides. The expression on the faces around him was benign, harmless, almost bored. The same friendly, trivial expression that Yancy himself displayed.
   Harmless—and in its harmlessness, diabolical. And there wasn’t a damn thing he could do. If people liked to listen to John Edward Yancy, if they wanted to model themselves after him—what could the Niplan Police do about it?
   What crime was being committed?
   No wonder Babson didn’t care if the police prowled around. No wonder the authorities had freely admitted them. There weren’t any political jails of labor gangs or concentration camps … there didn’t have to be.
   Torture chambers and extermination camps were needed only when persuasion failed. And persuasion was working perfectly. A police state, rule by terror, came about when the totalitarian apparatus began to break down. The earlier totalitarian societies had been incomplete; the authorities hadn’t really gotten into every sphere of life. But techniques of communication had improved.
   The first really successful totalitarian state was being realized before his eyes: harmless and trivial, it emerged. And the last stage—nightmarish, but perfectly logical—was when all the newborn boys were happily and voluntarily named John Edward.
   Why not? They already lived, acted, and thought like John Edward. And there was Mrs. Margaret Ellen Yancy, for the women. She had her full range of opinions, too; she had her kitchen, her taste in clothes, her little recipes and advice, for all the women to imitate.
   There were even Yancy children for the youth of the planet to imitate. The authorities hadn’t overlooked anything.
   Babson strolled over, a genial expression on his face. “How’s it going, officer?” he chuckled wetly, putting his hand on Taverner’s shoulder.
   “Fine,” Taverner managed to answer; he evaded the hand.
   “You like our little establishment?” There was genuine pride in Babson’s thick voice. “We do a good job. An artistic job—we have real standards of excellence.”
   Shaking with helpless anger, Taverner plunged out of the office and into the hall. The elevator took too long; furiously, he turned toward the stairs. He had to get out of the Yancy Building; he had to get away.
   From the shadows of the hall a man appeared, face pale and taut. “Wait. Can I talk to you?”
   Taverner pushed past him. “What do you want?”
   “You’re from the Terran Niplan Police? I—” The man’s Adam’s apple bobbed. “I work here. My name’s Sipling, Leon Sipling. I have to do something—I can’t stand it anymore.”
   “Nothing can be done,” Taverner told him. “If they want to be like Yancy—”
   “But there isn’t any Yancy,” Sipling broke in, his thin face twitching spasmodically. “We made him up … we invented him.”
   Taverner halted. “You what?”
   “I’ve decided.” Voice quavering excitedly, Sipling rushed on: “I’m going to do something—and I know exactly what.” Catching hold of Taverner’s sleeve he grated: “You’ve got to help me. I can stop all this, but I can’t do it alone.”

   In Leon Sipling’s attractive, well-furnished living room, the two of them sat drinking coffee and watching their children scramble around on the floor, playing games. Sipling’s wife and Ruth Taverner were in the kitchen, drying the dishes.
   “Yancy is a synthesis,” Sipling explained. “A sort of composite person. No such individual actually exists. We drew on basic prototypes from sociological records; we based the gestalt on various typical persons. So it’s true to life. But we stripped off what we didn’t want, and intensified what we did want.”
   Broodingly, he added: “There could be a Yancy. There are a lot of Yancy-like people. In fact, that’s the problem.”
   “You deliberately set out with the idea of remolding people along Yancy’s line?” Taverner inquired.
   “I can’t precisely say what the idea is, at top level. I was an ad writer for a mouthwash company. The Callisto authorities hired me and outlined what they wanted me to do. I’ve had to guess as to the purpose of the project.”
   “By authorities, you mean the governing council?”
   Sipling laughed sharply. “I mean the trading syndicates that own this moon: lock, stock, and barrel. But we’re not supposed to call it a moon. It’s a planet.” His lips twitched bitterly. “Apparently, the authorities have a big program built up. It involves absorbing their trade rivals on Ganymede—when that’s done, they’ll have the out-planets sewed up tight.”
   “They can’t get at Ganymede without open war,” Taverner protested. “The Medean companies have their own population behind them.” And then it dawned. “I see,” he said softly. “They’d actually start a war. It would be worth a war, to them.”
   “You’re damn right it would. And to start a war, they have to get the public lined up. Actually, the people here have nothing to gain. A war would wipe out all the small operators—it would concentrate power in fewer hands—and they’re few enough already. To get the eighty million people here behind the war, they need an indifferent, sheep-like public. And they’re getting that. When this Yancy campaign is finished, the people here on Callisto will accept anything. Yancy does all their thinking for them. He tells them how to wear their hair. What games to play. He tells the jokes the men repeat in their back rooms. His wife whips up the meal they all have for dinner. All over this little world—millions of duplicates of Yancy’s day. Whatever he does, whatever he believes. We’ve been conditioning the public for eleven straight years. The important thing is the unvarying monotony of it. A whole generation is growing up looking to Yancy for an answer to everything.”
   “It’s a big business, then,” Taverner observed. “This project of creating and maintaining Yancy.”
   “Thousands of people are involved in just writing the material. You only saw the first stage—and it goes into every city. Tapes, films, books, magazines, posters, pamphlets, dramatic visual and audio shows, plants in the newspapers, sound trucks, kids’ comic strips, word-of-mouth report, elaborate ads … the works. A steady stream of Yancy.” Picking up a magazine from the coffee table he indicated the lead article. “ ‘How is John Yancy’s Heart?’ Raises the question of what would we do without Yancy? Next week, an article on Yancy’s stomach.” Acidly, Sipling finished: “We know a million approaches. We turn it out of every pore. We’re called yance-men; it’s a new art-form.”
   “How do you—the corps, feel about Yancy?”
   “He’s a big sack of hot air.”
   “None of you is convinced?”
   “Even Babson has to laugh. And Babson is at the top; after him come the boys who sign the checks. God, if we ever started believing in Yancy … if we got started thinking that trash meant something—” An expression of acute agony settled over Sipling’s face. “That’s it. That’s why I can’t stand it.”
   “Why?” Taverner asked, deeply curious. His throat-mike was taking it all in, relaying it back to the home office at Washington. “I’m interested in finding out why you broke away.”
   Sipling bent down and called his son. “Mike, stop playing and come on over here.” To Taverner he explained: “Mike’s nine years old. Yancy’s been around as long as he’s been alive.”
   Mike came dully over. “Yes, sir?”
   “What kind of marks do you get in school?” his father asked.
   The boy’s chest stuck out proudly; he was a clear-eyed little miniature of Leon Sipling. “All A’s and B’s.”
   “He’s a smart kid,” Sipling said to Taverner. “Good in arithmetic, geography, history, all that stuff.” Turning to the boy he said: “I’m going to ask you some questions; I want this gentleman to hear your answers. Okay?”
   “Yes, sir,” the boy said obediently.
   His thin face grim, Sipling said to his son: “I want to know what you think about war. You’ve been told about war in school; you know about all the famous wars in history. Right?”
   “Yes, sir. We learned about the American Revolution, and the First Global War, and then the Second Global War, and then the First Hydrogen War, and the War between the colonists on Mars and Jupiter.”
   “To the schools,” Sipling explained tightly to Taverner, “we distribute Yancy material—educational subsidies in packet form. Yancy takes children through history, explains the meaning of it all. Yancy explains natural science. Yancy explains good posture and astronomy and every other thing in the universe. But I never thought my own son …” His voice trailed off unhappily, then picked up life. “So you know all about war. Okay, what do you think of war?”
   Promptly, the boy answered: “War is bad. War is the most terrible thing there is. It almost destroyed mankind.”
   Eying his son intently, Sipling demanded: “Did anybody tell you to say that?”
   The boy faltered uncertainly. “No, sir.”
   “You really believe those things?”
   “Yes, sir. It’s true, isn’t it? Isn’t war bad?”
   Sipling nodded. “War is bad. But what about just wars?”
   Without hesitation the boy answered: “We have to fight just wars, of course.”
   “Why?”
   “Well, we have to protect our way of life.”
   “Why?”
   Again, there was no hesitation in the boy’s reedy answer. “We can’t let them walk over us, sir. That would encourage aggressive war. We can’t permit a world of brute power. We have to have a world of—” He searched for the exact word. “A world of law.”
   Wearily, half to himself, Sipling commented: “I wrote those meaningless, contradictory words myself, eight years ago.” Pulling himself together with a violent effort he asked: “So war is bad. But we have to fight just wars. Well, maybe this planet, Callisto, will get into a war with … let’s pick Ganymede, at random.” He was unable to keep the harsh irony from his voice. “Just at random. Now, we’re at war with Ganymede. Is it a just war? Or only a war?”
   This time, there was no answer. The boy’s smooth face was screwed up in a bewildered, struggling frown.
   “No answer?” Sipling inquired icily.
   “Why, uh,” the boy faltered. “I mean…” He glanced up hopefully. “When the time comes won’t somebody say?”
   “Sure,” Sipling choked. “Somebody will say. Maybe even Mr. Yancy.”
   Relief flooded the boy’s face. “Yes, sir. Mr. Yancy will say.” He retreated back toward the other children. “Can I go now?”
   As the boy scampered back to his game, Sipling turned miserably to Taverner. “You know what game they’re playing? It’s called Hippo-Hoppo. Guess whose grandson just loves it. Guess who invented the game.”
   There was silence.
   “What do you suggest?” Taverner asked. “You said you thought something could be done.”
   A cold expression appeared on Sipling’s face, a flash of deeply-felt cunning. “I know the project… I know how it can be pried apart. But somebody has to stand with a gun at the head of the authorities. In nine years I’ve come to see the essential key to the Yancy character … the key to the new type of person we’re growing, here. It’s simple. It’s the element that makes that person malleable enough to be led around.”
   “I’ll bite,” Taverner said patiently, hoping the line to Washington was good and clear.
   “All Yancy’s beliefs are insipid. The key is thinness. Every part of his ideology is diluted: nothing excessive. We’ve come as close as possible to no beliefs … you’ve noticed that. Wherever possible we’ve cancelled attitudes out, left the person apolitical. Without a viewpoint.”
   “Sure,” Taverner agreed. “But with the illusion of a viewpoint.”
   “All aspects of personality have to be controlled; we want the total person. So a specific attitude has to exist for each concrete question. In every respect, our rule is: Yancy believes the least troublesome possibility. The most shallow. The simple, effortless view, the view that fails to go deep enough to stir any real thought.”
   Taverner got the drift. “Good solid lulling views.” Excitedly he hurried on, “But if an extreme original view got in, one that took real effort to work out, something that was hard to live …”
   “Yancy plays croquet. So everybody fools around with a mallet.” Sipling’s eyes gleamed. “But suppose Yancy had a preference for—Kriegspiel.”
   “For what?”
   “Chess played on two boards. Each player has his own board, with a complete set of men. He never sees the other board. A moderator sees both; he tells each player when he’s taken a piece, or lost a piece, or moved into an occupied square, or made an impossible move, or checked, or is in check himself.”
   “I see,” Taverner said quickly. “Each player tries to infer his opponent’s location on the board. He plays blind. Lord, it would take every mental faculty possible.”
   “The Prussians taught their officers military strategy that way. It’s more than a game: it’s a cosmic wrestling match. What if Yancy sat down in the evening with his wife and grandson, and played a nice lively six-hour game of Kriegspiel? Suppose his favorite books—instead of being western gun-toting anachronisms—were Greek tragedy? Suppose his favorite piece of music was Bach’s Art of the Fugue, not My Old Kentucky Home?”
   “I’m beginning to get the picture,” Taverner said, as calmly as possible. “I think we can help.”

   Babson squeaked once. “But this is—illegal!”
   “Absolutely,” Taverner acknowledged. “That’s why we’re here.” He waved the squad of Niplan secret-servicemen into the offices of the Yancy Building, ignoring the stunned workers sitting bolt-upright at their desks. Into his throat-mike he said, “How’s it coming with the big-shots?”
   “Medium,” Kellman’s faint voice came, strengthened by the relay system between Callisto and Earth. “Some slipped out of bounds to their various holdings, of course. But the majority never thought we’d taken action.”
   “You can’t!” Babson bleated, his great face hanging down in wattles of white dough. “What have we done? What law—”
   “I think,” Taverner interrupted, “we can get you on purely commercial grounds alone. You’ve used the name Yancy to endorse various manufactured products. There’s no such person. That’s a violation of statutes governing ethical presentation of advertising.”
   Babson’s mouth closed with a snap, then slid feebly open. “No—such—person? But everybody knows John Yancy. Why, he’s—” Stammering, gesturing, he finished, “He’s everywhere.”
   Suddenly a wretched little pistol appeared in his pulpy hand; he was waving it wildly as Dorser stepped up and quietly knocked it skidding across the floor. Babson collapsed into fumbling hysterics.
   Disgusted, Dorser clamped handgrapples around him. “Act like a man,” he ordered. But there was no response; Babson was too far gone to hear him.
   Satisfied, Taverner plunged off, past the knot of stunned officials and workers, into the inner offices of the project. Nodding curtly, Taverner made his way up to the desk where Leon Sipling sat surrounded by his work.
   The first of the altered gestalts was already flickering through the scanner. Together, the two men stood watching it.
   “Well?” Taverner said, when it was done. “You’re the judge.”
   “I believe it’ll do,” Sipling answered nervously. “I hope we don’t stir up too much … it’s taken eleven years to build it up; we want to tear it down by degrees.”
   “Once the first crack is made, it should start swaying.” Taverner moved toward the door. “Will you be all right on your own?”
   Sipling glanced at Eckmund who lounged at the end of the office, eyes fixed on the uneasily working yance-men. “I suppose so. Where are you going?”
   “I want to watch this as it’s released. I want to be around when the public gets its first look at it.” At the door, Taverner lingered. “It’s going to be a big job for you, putting out the gestalt on your own. You may not get much help, for a while.”
   Sipling indicated his co-workers; they were already beginning to pick up their tempo where they had left off. “They’ll stay on the job,” he disagreed. “As long as they get full salaries.”
   Taverner walked thoughtfully across the hall to the elevator. A moment later he was on his way downstairs.
   At a nearby street corner, a group of people had collected around a public vid-screen. Anticipating the late-afternoon TV cast of John Edward Yancy.
   The gestalt began in the regular way. There was no doubt about it: when Sipling wanted to, he could put together a good slice. And in this case he had done practically the whole pie.
   In rolled-up shirt sleeves and dirt-stained trousers, Yancy crouched in his garden, a trowel in one hand, straw hat pulled down over his eyes, grinning into the warm glare of the sun. It was so real that Taverner could hardly believe no such person existed. But he had watched Sipling’s sub-crews laboriously and expertly constructing the thing from the ground up.
   “Afternoon,” Yancy rumbled genially. He wiped perspiration from his steaming, florid face and got stiffly to his feet. “Man,” he admitted, “it’s a hot day.” He indicated a flat of primroses. “I was setting them out. Quite a job.”
   So far so good. The crowd watched impassively, taking their ideological nourishment without particular resistance. All over the moon, in every house, schoolroom, office, on each street corner, the same gestalt was showing. And it would be shown again.
   “Yes,” Yancy repeated, “it’s really hot. Too hot for those primroses—they like shade.” A fast pan-up showed he had carefully planted his primroses in the shadows at the base of his garage. “On the other hand,” Yancy continued, in his smooth, good-natured, over-the-back-fence conversational voice, “my dahlias need lots of sun.”
   The camera leaped to show the dahlias blooming frantically in the blazing sunlight.
   Throwing himself down in a striped lawnchair, Yancy removed his straw hat and wiped his brow with a pocket handkerchief. “So,” he continued genially, “if anybody asked me which is better, shade or sun, I’d have to reply it depends on whether you’re a primrose or a dahlia.” He grinned his famous guileless boyish grin into the cameras. “I guess I must be a primrose—I’ve had all the sun I can stand for today.”
   The audience was taking it in without complaint. An inauspicious beginning, but it was going to have long-term consequences. And Yancy was starting to develop them right now.
   His genial grin faded. That familiar look, that awaited serious frown showing that deep thoughts were coming, faded into place. Yancy was going to hold forth: wisdom was on the way. But it was nothing ever uttered by him before.
   “You know,” Yancy said slowly, seriously, “that makes a person do some thinking.” Automatically, he reached for his glass of gin and tonic—a glass which up until now would have contained beer. And the magazine beside it wasn’t Dog Stories Monthly; it was The Journal of Psychological Review. The alteration of peripheral props would sink in subliminally; right now, all conscious attention was riveted on Yancy’s words.
   “It occurs to me,” Yancy orated, as if the wisdom were fresh and brand-new, arriving just now, “that some people might maintain that, say, sunlight is good and shade is bad. But that’s down-right silly. Sunlight is good for roses and dahlias, but it would darn well finish off my fuchsias.” The camera showed his ubiquitous prize fuchsias.
   “Maybe you know people like that. They just don’t understand that—” And as was his custom, Yancy drew on folklore to make his point. “That one man’s meat,” he stated profoundly, “is another man’s poison. Like for instance, for breakfast I like a couple of eggs done sunny-side up, maybe a few stewed prunes, and a piece of toast. But Margaret, she prefers a bowl of cereal. And Ralf, he won’t take either. He likes flapjacks. And the fellow down the street, the one with the big front lawn, he likes a kidney pie and a bottle of stout.”
   Taverner winced. Well, they would have to feel their way along. But still the audience stood absorbing it, word after word. The first feeble stirrings of a radical idea: that each person had a different set of values, a unique style of life. That each person might believe, enjoy, and approve of different things.
   It would take time, as Sipling said. The massive library of tapes would have to be replaced; injunctions built up in each area would have to be broken down. A new type of thinking was being introduced, starting with a trite observation about primroses. When a nine-year-old-boy wanted to find out if a war was just or unjust, he would have to inquire into his own mind. There would be no ready answer from Yancy; a gestalt was already being prepared on that, showing that every war had been called just by some, unjust by others.
   There was one gestalt Taverner wished he could see. But it wouldn’t be around for a long time; it would have to wait. Yancy was going to change his taste in art, slowly but steadily. One of these days, the public would learn that Yancy no longer enjoyed pastoral calendar scenes.
   That now he preferred the art of that fifteenth century Dutch master of macabre and diabolical horror, Hieronymus Bosch.

The Minority Report

I

   The first thought Anderton had when he saw the young man was: I’m getting bald. Bald and fat and old. But he didn’t say it aloud. Instead, he pushed back his chair, got to his feet, and came resolutely around the side of his desk, his right hand rigidly extended. Smiling with forced amiability, he shook hands with the young man.
   “Witwer?” he asked, managing to make this query sound gracious. “That’s right,” the young man said. “But the name’s Ed to you, of course. That is, if you share my dislike for needless formality.” The look on his blond, overly-confident face showed that he considered the matter settled. It would be Ed and John: Everything would be agreeably cooperative right from the start.
   “Did you have much trouble finding the building?” Anderton asked guardedly, ignoring the too-friendly overture. Good God, he had to hold on to something. Fear touched him and he began to sweat. Witwer was moving around the office as if he already owned it—as if he were measuring it for size. Couldn’t he wait a couple of days—a decent interval?
   “No trouble,” Witwer answered blithely, his hands in his pockets. Eagerly, he examined the voluminous files that lined the wall. “I’m not coming into your agency blind, you understand. I have quite a few ideas of my own about the way Precrime is run.”
   Shakily, Anderton lit his pipe. “How is it run? I should like to know.” “Not badly,” Witwer said. “In fact, quite well.”
   Anderton regarded him steadily. “Is that your private opinion? Or is it just cant?”
   Witwer met his gaze guilelessly. “Private and public. The Senate’s pleased with your work. In fact, they’re enthusiastic.” He added, “As enthusiastic as very old men can be.”
   Anderton winced, but outwardly he remained impassive. It cost him an effort, though. He wondered what Witwer really thought. What was actually going on in that closecropped skull? The young man’s eyes were blue, bright—and disturbingly clever. Witwer was nobody’s fool. And obviously he had a great deal of ambition.
   “As I understand it,” Anderton said cautiously, “you’re going to be my assistant until I retire.”
   “That’s my understanding, too,” the other replied, without an instant’s hesitation.
   “Which may be this year, or next year—or ten years from now.” The pipe in Anderton’s hand trembled. “I’m under no compulsion to retire. I founded Precrime and I can stay on here as long as I want. It’s purely my decision.”
   Witwer nodded, his expression still guileless. “Of course.”
   With an effort, Anderton cooled down a trifle. “I merely wanted to get things straight.”
   “From the start,” Witwer agreed. “You’re the boss. What you say goes.” With every evidence of sincerity, he asked: “Would you care to show me the organization? I’d like to familiarize myself with the general routine as soon as possible.”
   As they walked along the busy, yellow-lit tiers of offices, Anderton said: “You’re acquainted with the theory of precrime, of course. I presume we can take that for granted.”
   “I have the information publicly available,” Witwer replied. “With the aid of your precog mutants, you’ve boldly and successfully abolished the post-crime punitive system of jails and fines. As we all realize, punishment was never much of a deterrent, and could scarcely have afforded comfort to a victim already dead.”
   They had come to the descent lift. As it carried them swiftly downward, Anderton said: “You’ve probably grasped the basic legalistic drawback to precrime methodology. We’re taking in individuals who have broken no law.”
   “But they surely will,” Witwer affirmed with conviction.
   “Happily they don’t—because we get them first, before they can commit an act of violence. So the commission of the crime itself is absolute metaphysics. We claim they’re culpable. They, on the other hand, eternally claim they’re innocent. And, in a sense, they are innocent.”
   The lift let them out, and they again paced down a yellow corridor. “In our society we have no major crimes,” Anderton went on, “but we do have a detention camp full of would-be criminals.”
   Doors opened and closed, and they were in the analytical wing. Ahead of them rose impressive banks of equipment—the data-receptors, and the computing mechanisms that studied and restructured the incoming material. And beyond the machinery sat the three precogs, almost lost to view in the maze of wiring.
   “There they are,” Anderton said dryly. “What do you think of them?” In the gloomy half-darkness the three idiots sat babbling. Every incoherent utterance, every random syllable, was analyzed, compared, reassembled in the form of visual symbols, transcribed on conventional punchcards, and ejected into various coded slots. All day long the idiots babbled, imprisoned in their special high-backed chairs, held in one rigid position by metal bands, and bundles of wiring, clamps. Their physical needs were taken care of automatically. They had no spiritual needs. Vegetable-like, they muttered and dozed and existed. Their minds were dull, confused, lost in shadows.
   But not the shadows of today. The three gibbering, fumbling creatures, with their enlarged heads and wasted bodies, were contemplating the future. The analytical machinery was recording prophecies, and as the three precog idiots talked, the machinery carefully listened.
   For the first time Witwer’s face lost its breezy confidence. A sick, dismayed expression crept into his eyes, a mixture of shame and moral shock. “It’s not—pleasant,” he murmured. “I didn’t realize they were so—“ He groped in his mind for the right word, gesticulating. “So—deformed.”
   “Deformed and retarded,” Anderton instantly agreed. “Especially the girl, there. Donna is forty-five years old. But she looks about ten. The talent absorbs everything; the esp-lobe shrivels the balance of the frontal area. But what do we care? We get their prophecies. They pass on what we need. They don’t understand any of it, but we do.”
   Subdued, Witwer crossed the room to the machinery. From a slot he collected a stack of cards. “Are these names that have come up?” he asked.
   “Obviously.” Frowning, Anderton took the stack from him. “I haven’t had a chance to examine them,” he explained, impatiently concealing his annoyance.
   Fascinated, Witwer watched the machinery pop a fresh card into the now empty slot. It was followed by a second—and a third. From the whirring disks came one card after another. “The precogs must see quite far into the future,” Witwer exclaimed.
   “They see a quite limited span,” Anderton informed him. “One week or two ahead at the very most. Much of their data is worthless to us—simply not relevant to our line. We pass it on to the appropriate agencies. And they in turn trade data with us. Every important bureau has its cellar of treasured monkeys.”
   “Monkeys?” Witwer stared at him uneasily. “Oh, yes, I understand. See no evil, speak no evil, et cetera. Very amusing.”
   “Very apt.” Automatically, Anderton collected the fresh cards which had been turned up by the spinning machinery. “Some of these names will be totally discarded. And most of the remainder record petty crimes: thefts, income tax evasion, assault, extortion. As I’m sure you know, Precrime has cut down felonies by ninety-nine and decimal point eight percent. We seldom get actual murder or treason. After all, the culprit knows we’ll confine him in the detention camp a week before he gets a chance to commit the crime.”
   “When was the last time an actual murder was committed?” Witwer asked.
   “Five years ago,” Anderton said, pride in his voice.
   “How did it happen?”
   “The criminal escaped our teams. We had his name—in fact, we had all the details of the crime, including the victim’s name. We knew the exact moment, the location of the planned act of violence. But in spite of us he was able to carry it out.” Anderton shrugged. “After all, we can’t get all of them.” He riffled the cards. “But we do get most.”
   “One murder in five years.” Witwer’s confidence was returning. “Quite an impressive record… something to be proud of.”
   Quietly Anderton said: “I am proud. Thirty years ago I worked out the theory—back in the days when the self-seekers were thinking in terms of quick raids on the stock market. I saw something legitimate ahead—something of tremendous social value.”
   He tossed the packet of cards to Wally Page, his subordinate in charge of the monkey block. “See which ones we want,” he told him. “Use your own judgment.”
   As Page disappeared with the cards, Witwer said thoughtfully: “It’s a big responsibility.”
   “Yes, it is,” agreed Anderton. “If we let one criminal escape—as we did five years ago—we’ve got a human life on our conscience. We’re solely responsible. If we slip up, somebody dies.” Bitterly, he jerked three new cards from the slot. “It’s a public trust.”
   “Are you ever tempted to—“ Witwer hesitated. “I mean, some of the men you pick up must offer you plenty.”
   “It wouldn’t do any good. A duplicate file of cards pops out at Army GHQ. It’s check and balance. They can keep their eye on us as continuously as they wish.” Anderton glanced briefly at the top card. “So even if we wanted to accept a—“
   He broke off, his lips tightening.
   “What’s the matter?” Witwer asked curiously.
   Carefully, Anderton folded up the top card and put it away in his pocket. “Nothing,” he muttered. “Nothing at all.”
   The harshness in his voice brought a flush to Witwer’s face. “You really don’t like me,” he observed.
   “True,” Anderton admitted. “I don’t. But—“
   He couldn’t believe he disliked the young man that much. It didn’t seem possible: it wasn’t possible. Something was wrong. Dazed, he tried to steady his tumbling mind.
   On the card was his name. Line one—an already accused future murderer! According to the coded punches, Precrime Commissioner John A. Anderton was going to kill a man—and within the next week.
   With absolute, overwhelming conviction, he didn’t believe it.

II

   In the outer office, talking to Page, stood Anderton’s slim and attractive young wife, Lisa. She was engaged in a sharp, animated discussion of policy, and barely glanced up as Witwer and her husband entered.
   “Hello, darling,” Anderton said.
   Witwer remained silent. But his pale eyes flickered slightly as they rested on the brown-haired woman in her trim police uniform. Lisa was now an executive official of Precrime but once, Witwer knew, she had been Anderton’s secretary.
   Noticing the interest on Witwer’s face Anderton paused and reflected. To plant the card in the machines would require an accomplice on the inside—someone who was closely connected with Precrime and had access to the analytical equipment. Lisa was an improbable element. But the possibility did exist.
   Of course, the conspiracy could be large-scale and elaborate, involving far more than a “rigged” card inserted somewhere along the line. The original data itself might have been tampered with. Actually, there was no telling how far back the alteration went. A cold fear touched him as he began to see the possibilities. His original impulse—to tear open the machines and remove all the data—was uselessly primitive. Probably the tapes agreed with the card: He would only incriminate himself further.
   He had approximately twenty-four hours. Then, the Army people would check over their cards and discover the discrepancy. They would find in their files a duplicate of the card he had appropriated. He had only one of two copies, which meant that the folded card in his pocket might just as well be lying on Page’s desk in plain view of everyone.
   From outside the building came the drone of police cars starting out on their routine round-ups. How many hours would elapse before one of them pulled up in front of his house?
   “What’s the matter, darling?” Lisa asked him uneasily. “You look as if you’ve just seen a ghost. Are you all right?”
   “I’m fine,” he assured her.
   Lisa suddenly seemed to become aware of Ed Witwer’s admiring scrutiny. “Is this gentleman your new co-worker, darling?” she asked.
   Warily, Anderton introduced his new associate. Lisa smiled in friendly greeting. Did a covert awareness pass between them? He couldn’t tell. God, he was beginning to suspect everybody—not only his wife and Witwer, but a dozen members of his staff.
   “Are you from New York?” Lisa asked.
   “No,” Witwer replied. “I’ve lived most of my life in Chicago. I’m staying at a hotel—one of the big downtown hotels. Wait—I have the name written on a card somewhere.”
   While he self-consciously searched his pockets, Lisa suggested: “Perhaps you’d like to have dinner with us. We’ll be working in close cooperation, and I really think we ought to get better acquainted.”
   Startled, Anderton backed off. What were the chances of his wife’s friendliness being benign, accidental? Witwer would be present the balance of the evening, and would now have an excuse to trail along to Anderton’s private residence. Profoundly disturbed, he turned impulsively, and moved toward the door.
   “Where are you going?” Lisa asked, astonished.
   “Back to the monkey block,” he told her. “I want to check over some rather puzzling data tapes before the Army sees them.” He was out in the corridor before she could think of a plausible reason for detaining him.
   Rapidly, he made his way to the ramp at its far end. He was striding down the outside stairs toward the public sidewalk, when Lisa appeared breathlessly behind him.
   “What on earth has come over you?” Catching hold of his arm, she moved quickly in front of him. “I knew you were leaving,” she exclaimed, blocking his way. “What’s wrong with you? Everybody thinks you’re—“ She checked herself. “I mean, you’re acting so erratically.”
   People surged by them—the usual afternoon crowd. Ignoring them, Anderton pried his wife’s fingers from his arm. “I’m getting out,” he told her. “While there’s still time.”
   “But—why?”
   “I’m being framed—deliberately and maliciously. This creature is out to get my job. The Senate is getting at me through him.”
   Lisa gazed up at him, bewildered. “But he seems like such a nice young man.”
   “Nice as a water moccasin.”
   Lisa’s dismay turned to disbelief. “I don’t believe it. Darling, all this strain you’ve been under—“ Smiling uncertainly, she faltered: “It’s not really credible that Ed Witwer is trying to frame you. How could he, even if he wanted to? Surely Ed wouldn’t—“
   “Ed?”
   “That’s his name, isn’t it?”
   Her brown eyes flashed in startled, wildly incredulous protest. “Good heavens, you’re suspicious of everybody. You actually believe I’m mixed up with it in some way, don’t you?”
   He considered. “I’m not sure.”
   She drew closer to him, her eyes accusing. “That’s not true. You really believe it. Maybe you ought to go away for a few weeks. You desperately need a rest. All this tension and trauma, a younger man coming in. You’re acting paranoiac. Can’t you see that? People plotting against you. Tell me, do you have any actual proof?”
   Anderton removed his wallet and took out the folded card. “Examine this carefully,” he said, handing it to her.
   The color drained out of her face, and she gave a little harsh, dry gasp.
   “The set-up is fairly obvious,” Anderton told her, as levelly as he could. “This will give Witwer a legal pretext to remove me right now. He won’t have to wait until I resign.” Grimly, he added: “They know I’m good for a few years yet.”
   “But—”
   “It will end the check and balance system. Precrime will no longer be an independent agency. The Senate will control the police, and after that—“ His lips tightened. “They’ll absorb the Army too. Well, it’s outwardly logical enough. Of course I feel hostility and resentment toward Witwer—of course I have a motive.
   “Nobody likes to be replaced by a younger man, and find himself turned out to pasture. It’s all really quite plausible—except that I haven’t the remotest intention of killing Witwer. But I can’t prove that. So what can I do?”
   Mutely, her face very white, Lisa shook her head. “I—I don’t know. Darling, if only—”
   “Right now,” Anderton said abruptly, “I’m going home to pack my things. That’s about as far ahead as I can plan.”
   “You’re really going to—to try to hide out?”
   “I am. As far as the Centaurian-colony planets, if necessary. It’s been done successfully before, and I have a twenty-four-hour start.” He turned resolutely. “Go back inside. There’s no point in your coming with me.”
   “Did you imagine I would?” Lisa asked huskily.
   Startled, Anderton stared at her. “Wouldn’t you?” Then with amazement, he murmured: “No, I can see you don’t believe me. You still think I’m imagining all this.” He jabbed savagely at the card. “Even with that evidence you still aren’t convinced.”
   “No,” Lisa agreed quickly, “I’m not. You didn’t look at it closely enough, darling. Ed Witwer’s name isn’t on it.”
   Incredulous, Anderton took the card from her.
   “Nobody says you’re going to kill Ed Witwer,” Lisa continued rapidly, in a thin, brittle voice. “The card must be genuine, understand? And it has nothing to do with Ed. He’s not plotting against you and neither is anybody else.”
   Too confused to reply, Anderton stood studying the card. She was right. Ed Witwer was not listed as his victim. On line five, the machine had neatly stamped another name.


LEOPOLD KAPLAN

   Numbly, he pocketed the card. He had never heard of the man in his life.

III

   The house was cool and deserted, and almost immediately Anderton began making preparations for his journey. While he packed, frantic thoughts passed through his mind.
   Possibly he was wrong about Witwer—but how could he be sure? In any event, the conspiracy against him was far more complex than he had realized. Witwer, in the over-all picture, might be merely an insignificant puppet animated by someone else—by some distant, indistinct figure only vaguely visible in the background.
   It had been a mistake to show the card to Lisa. Undoubtedly, she would describe it in detail to Witwer. He’d never get off Earth, never have an opportunity to find out what life on a frontier planet might be like.
   While he was thus preoccupied, a board creaked behind him. He turned from the bed, clutching a weather-stained winter sports jacket, to face the muzzle of a gray-blue A-pistol.
   “It didn’t take you long,” he said, staring with bitterness at the tight-lipped, heavyset man in a brown overcoat who stood holding the gun in his gloved hand. “Didn’t she even hesitate?”
   The intruder’s face registered no response. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. “Come along with me.”
   Startled, Anderton laid down the sports jacket. “You’re not from my agency? You’re not a police officer?”
   Protesting and astonished, he was hustled outside the house to a waiting limousine. Instantly three heavily armed men closed in behind him. The door slammed and the car shot off down the highway, away from the city. Impassive and remote, the faces around him jogged with the motion of the speeding vehicle as open fields, dark and somber, swept past.
   Anderton was till trying futilely to grasp the implications of what had happened, when the car came to a rutted side road, turned off, and descended into a gloomy sub-surface garage. Someone shouted an order. The heavy metal lock grated shut and overhead lights blinked on. The driver turned off the car motor.
   “You’ll have reason to regret this,” Anderton warned hoarsely, as they dragged him from the car. “Do you realize who I am?”
   “We realize,” the man in the brown overcoat said.
   At gun-point, Anderton was marched upstairs, from the clammy silence of the garage into a deep-carpeted hallway. He was, apparently, in a luxurious private residence, set out in the war-devoured rural area. At the far end of the hallway he could make out a room—a book-lined study simply but tastefully furnished. In a circle of lamplight, his face partly in shadows, a man he had never met sat waiting for him.
   As Anderton approached, the man nervously slipped a pair of rimless glasses in place, snapped the case shut, and moistened his dry lips. He was elderly, perhaps seventy or older, and under his arm was a slim silver cane. His body was thin, wiry, his attitude curiously rigid. What little hair he had was dusty brown—a carefully-smoothed sheen of neutral color above his pale, bony skull. Only his eyes seemed really alert.
   “Is this Anderton?” he inquired querulously, turning to the man in the brown overcoat. “Where did you pick him up?”
   “At his home,” the other replied. “He was packing—as we expected.”
   The man at the desk shivered visibly. “Packing.” He took off his glasses and jerkily returned them to their case. “Look here,” he said bluntly to Anderton, “what’s the matter with you? Are you hopelessly insane? How could you kill a man you’ve never met?”
   The old man, Anderton suddenly realized, was Leopold Kaplan.
   “First, I’ll ask you a question,” Anderton countered rapidly. “Do you realize what you’ve done? I’m Commissioner of Police. I can have you sent up for twenty years.”
   He was going to say more, but a sudden wonder cut him short.
   “How did you find out?” he demanded. Involuntarily, his hand went to his pocket, where the folded card was hidden. “It won’t be for another—“
   “I wasn’t notified through your agency,” Kaplan broke in, with angry impatience. “The fact that you’ve never heard of me doesn’t surprise me too much. Leopold Kaplan, General of the Army of the Federated Westbloc Alliance.” Begrudgingly, he added. “Retired, since the end of the Anglo-Chinese War, and the abolishment of AFWA.”
   It made sense. Anderton had suspected that the Army processed its duplicate cards immediately, for its own protection. Relaxing somewhat, he demanded: “Well? You’ve got me here. What next?”
   “Evidently,” Kaplan said, “I’m not going to have you destroyed, or it would have shown up on one of those miserable little cards. I’m curious about you. It seemed incredible to me that a man of your stature could contemplate the cold-blooded murder of a total stranger. There must be something more here. Frankly, I’m puzzled. If it represented some kind of Police strategy—” He shrugged his thin shoulders. “Surely you wouldn’t have permitted the duplicate card to reach us.”
   “Unless,” one of his men suggested, “it’s a deliberate plant.”
   Kaplan raised his bright, bird-like eyes and scrutinized Anderton. “What do you have to say?”
   “That’s exactly what it is,” Anderton said, quick to see the advantage of stating frankly what he believed to be the simple truth. “The prediction on the card was deliberately fabricated by a clique inside the police agency. The card is prepared and I’m netted. I’m relieved of my authority automatically. My assistant steps in and claims he prevented the murder in the usual efficient Precrime manner. Needless to say, there is no murder or intent to murder.”
   “I agree with you that there will be no murder,” Kaplan affirmed grimly. “You’ll be in police custody. I intend to make certain of that.”
   Horrified, Anderton protested: “You’re taking me back there? If I’m in custody I’ll never be able to prove—“
   “I don’t care what you prove or don’t prove,” Kaplan interrupted. “All I’m interested in is having you out of the way.” Frigidly, he added: “For my own protection.”
   “He was getting ready to leave,” one of the men asserted.
   “That’s right,” Anderton said, sweating. “As soon as they get hold of me I’ll be confined in the detention camp. Witwer will take over—lock, stock and barrel.” His face darkened. “And my wife. They’re acting in concert, apparently.”
   For a moment Kaplan seemed to waver. “It’s possible,” he conceded, regarding Anderton steadily. Then he shook his head. “I can’t take the chance. If this is a frame against you, I’m sorry. But it’s simply not my affair.” He smiled slightly. “However, I wish you luck.” To the men he said: “Take him to the police building and turn him over to the highest authority.” He mentioned the name of the acting commissioner, and waited for Anderton’s reaction.
   “Witwer!” Anderton echoed, incredulous.
   Still smiling slightly, Kaplan turned and clicked on the console radio in the study. “Witwer has already assumed authority. Obviously, he’s going to create quite an affair out of this.”
   There was a brief static hum, and then, abruptly, the radio blared out into the room—a noisy professional voice, reading a prepared announcement.
   “…all citizens are warned not to shelter or in any fashion aid or assist this dangerous marginal individual. The extraordinary circumstance of an escaped criminal at liberty and in a position to commit an act of violence is unique in modern times. All citizens are hereby notified that legal statutes still in force implicate any and all persons failing to cooperate fully with the police in their task of apprehending John Allison Anderton. To repeat: The Precrime Agency of the Federal Westbloc Government is in the process of locating and neutralizing its former Commissioner, John Allison Anderton, who, through the methodology of the precrime-system, is hereby declared a potential murderer and as such forfeits his rights to freedom and all its privileges.”
   “It didn’t take him long,” Anderton muttered, appalled. Kaplan snapped off the radio and the voice vanished.
   “Lisa must have gone directly to him,” Anderton speculated bitterly.
   “Why should he wait?” Kaplan asked. “You made your intentions clear.”
   He nodded to his men. “Take him back to town. I feel uneasy having him so close. In that respect I concur with Commissioner Witwer. I want him neutralized as soon as possible.

IV

   Cold, light rain beat against the pavement, as the car moved through the dark streets of New York City toward the police building.
   “You can see his point,” one of the men said to Anderton. “If you were in his place you’d act just as decisively.”
   Sullen and resentful, Anderton stared straight ahead.
   “Anyhow,” the man went on, “you’re just one of many. Thousands of people have gone to that detention camp. You won’t be lonely. As a matter of fact, you may not want to leave.”
   Helplessly, Anderton watched pedestrians hurrying along the rain-swept sidewalks. He felt no strong emotion. He was aware only of an overpowering fatigue. Dully, he checked off the street numbers: they were getting near the police station.
   “This Witwer seems to know how to take advantage of an opportunity,” one of the men observed conversationally. “Did you ever meet him?”
   “Briefly,” Anderton answered.
   “He wanted your job—so he framed you. Are you sure of that?”
   Anderton grimaced. “Does it matter?”
   “I was just curious.” The man eyed him languidly. “So you’re the ex-Commissioner of Police. People in the camp will be glad to see you coming. They’ll remember you.”
   “No doubt,” Anderton agreed.
   “Witwer sure didn’t waste any time. Kaplan’s lucky—with an official like that in charge.” The man looked at Anderton almost pleadingly. “You’re really convinced it’s a plot, eh?”
   “Of course.”
   “You wouldn’t harm a hair of Kaplan’s head? For the first time in history, Precrime goes wrong? An innocent man is framed by one of those cards. Maybe there’ve been other innocent people—right?”
   “It’s quite possible,” Anderton admitted listlessly.
   “Maybe the whole system can break down. Sure, you’re not going to commit a murder—and maybe none of them were. Is that why you told Kaplan you wanted to keep yourself outside? Were you hoping to prove the system wrong? I’ve got an open mind, if you want to talk about it.”
   Another man leaned over, and asked, “Just between the two of us, is there really anything to this plot stuff? Are you really being framed?”
   Anderton sighed. At that point he wasn’t certain, himself. Perhaps he was trapped in a closed, meaningless time-circle with no motive and no beginning. In fact, he was almost ready to concede that he was the victim of a weary, neurotic fantasy, spawned by growing insecurity. Without a fight, he was willing to give himself up. A vast weight of exhaustion lay upon him. He was struggling against the impossible—and all the cards were stacked against him.
   The sharp squeal of tires roused him. Frantically, the driver struggled to control the car, tugging at the wheel and slamming on the brakes, as a massive bread truck loomed up from the fog and ran directly across the lane ahead. Had he gunned the motor instead he might have saved himself. But too late he realized his error. The car skidded, lurched, hesitated for a brief instant, and then smashed head on into the bread truck.
   Under Anderton the seat lifted up and flung him face-forward against the door. Pain, sudden, intolerable, seemed to burst in his brain as he lay gasping and trying feebly to pull himself to his knees. Somewhere the crackle of fire echoed dismally, a patch of hissing brilliance winking in the swirls of mist making their way into the twisted hulk of the car.
   Hands from outside the car reached for him. Slowly he became aware that he was being dragged through the rent that had been the door. A heavy seat cushion was shoved brusquely aside, and all at once he found himself on his feet, leaning heavily against a dark shape and being guided into the shadows of an alley a short distance from the car. In the distance, police sirens wailed.
   “You’ll live,” a voice grated in his ear, low and urgent. It was a voice he had never heard before, as unfamiliar and harsh as the rain beating into his face. “Can you hear what I’m saying?”
   “Yes,” Anderton acknowledged. He plucked aimlessly at the ripped sleeve of his shirt. A cut on his cheek was beginning to throb. Confused, he tried to orient himself. “You’re not—“
   “Stop talking and listen.” The man was heavyset, almost fat. Now his big hands held Anderton propped against the wet brick wall of the building, out of the rain and the flickering light of the burning car. “We had to do it that way,” he said. “It was the only alternative. We didn’t have much time. We thought Kaplan would keep you at his place longer.” “Who are you?” Anderton managed.
   The moist, rain-streaked face twisted into a humorless grin. “My name’s Fleming. You’ll see me again. We have about five seconds before the police get here. Then we’re back where we started.” A flat packet was stuffed into Anderton’s hands. “That’s enough loot to keep you going. And there’s a full set of identification in there. We’ll contact you from time to time.” His grin increased and became a nervous chuckle. “Until you’ve proved your point.”
   Anderton blinked. “It is a frameup, then?”
   “Of course.” Sharply, the man swore. “You mean they got you to believe it, too?”
   “I thought—“ Anderton had trouble talking; one of his front teeth seemed to be loose. “Hostility toward Witwer … replaced, my wife and a younger man, natural resentment. ...”
   “Don’t kid yourself,” the other said. “You know better than that. This whole business was worked out carefully. They had every phase of it under control. The card was set to pop the day Witwer appeared. They’ve already got the first part wrapped up. Witwer is Commissioner, and you’re a hunted criminal.”
   “Who’s behind it?”
   “Your wife.”
   Anderton’s head spun. “You’re positive?”
   The man laughed. “You bet your life.” He glanced quickly around. “Here come the police. Take off down this alley. Grab a bus, get yourself into the slum section, rent a room and buy a stack of magazines to keep you busy. Get other clothes—You’re smart enough to take care of yourself. Don’t try to leave Earth. They’ve got all the intersystem transports screened. If you can keep low for the next seven days, you’re made.”
   “Who are you?” Anderton demanded.
   Fleming let go of him. Cautiously, he moved to the entrance of the alley and peered out. The first police car had come to rest on the damp pavement; its motor spinning tinnily, it crept suspiciously toward the smouldering ruin that had been Kaplan’s car. Inside the wreck the squad of men were stirring feebly, beginning to creep painfully through the tangle of steel and plastic out into the cold rain.
   “Consider us a protective society,” Fleming said softly, his plump, expressionless face shining with moisture. “A sort of police force that watches the police. To see,” he added, “that everything stays on an even keel.”
   His thick hand shot out. Stumbling, Anderton was knocked away from him, half-falling into the shadows and damp debris that littered the alley.
   “Get going,” Fleming told him sharply. “And don’t discard that packet.” As Anderton felt his way hesitantly toward the far exit of the alley, the man’s last words drifted to him. “Study it carefully and you may still survive.”

V

   The identification cards described him as Ernest Temple, an unemployed electrician, drawing a weekly subsistence from the State of New York, with a wife and four children in Buffalo and less than a hundred dollars in assets. A sweat-stained green card gave him permission to travel and to maintain no fixed address. A man looking for work needed to travel. He might have to go a long way.
   As he rode across town in the almost empty bus, Anderton studied the description of Ernest Temple. Obviously, the cards had been made out with him in mind, for all the measurements fitted. After a time he wondered about the fingerprints and the brain-wave pattern. They couldn’t possibly stand comparison. The walletful of cards would get him past only the most cursory examinations.
   But it was something. And with the ID cards came ten thousand dollars in bills. He pocketed the money and cards, then turned to the neatly-typed message in which they had been enclosed.
   At first he could make no sense of it. For a long time he studied it, perplexed.
   The existence of a majority logically implies a corresponding minority.
   The bus had entered the vast slum region, the tumbled miles of cheap hotels and broken-down tenements that had sprung up after the mass destruction of the war. It slowed to a stop, and Anderton got to his feet. A few passengers idly observed his cut cheek and damaged clothing. Ignoring them, he stepped down onto the rain-swept curb.
   Beyond collecting the money due him, the hotel clerk was not interested. Anderton climbed the stairs to the second floor and entered the narrow, musty-smelling room that now belonged to him. Gratefully, he locked the door and pulled down the window shades. The room was small but clean. Bed, dresser, scenic calendar, chair, lamp, a radio with a slot for the insertion of quarters.
   He dropped a quarter into it and threw himself heavily down on the bed. All main stations carried the police bulletin. It was novel, exciting, something unknown to the present generation. An escaped criminal! The public was avidly interested.
   “…this man has used the advantage of his high position to carry out an initial escape,” the announcer was saying, with professional indignation. “Because of his high office he had access to the previewed data and the trust placed in him permitted him to evade the normal process of detection and re-location. During the period of his tenure he exercised his authority to send countless potentially guilty individuals to their proper confinement, thus sparing the lives of innocent victims. This man, John Allison Anderton, was instrumental in the original creation of the Precrime system, the prophylactic pre-detection of criminals through the ingenious use of mutant precogs, capable of previewing future events and transferring orally that data to analytical machinery. These three precogs, in their vital function....”
   The voice faded out as he left the room and entered the tiny bathroom. There, he stripped off his coat, and shirt, and ran hot water in the wash bowl. He began bathing the cut on his cheek. At the drugstore on the corner he had bought iodine and Band-aids, a razor, comb, toothbrush, and other small things he would need. The next morning he intended to find a second-hand clothing store and buy more suitable clothing. After all, he was now an unemployed electrician, not an accident-damaged Commissioner of Police.
   In the other room the radio blared on. Only subconsciously aware of it, he stood in front of the cracked mirror, examining a broken tooth.
   “…the system of three precogs finds its genesis in the computers of the middle decades of this century. How are the results of an electronic computer checked? By feeding the data to a second computer of identical design. But two computers are not sufficient. If each computer arrived at a different answer it is impossible to tell a priori which is correct. The solution, based on a careful study of statistical method, is to utilize a third computer to check the results of the first two. In this manner, a so-called majority report is obtained. It can be assumed with fair probability that the agreement of two out of three computers indicates which of the alternative results is accurate. It would not be likely that two computers would arrive at identically incorrect solutions—“
   Anderton dropped the towel he was clutching and raced into the other room. Trembling, he bent to catch the blaring words of the radio.
   “…unanimity of all three precogs is a hoped-for but seldom-achieved phenomenon, acting-Commissioner Witwer explains. It is much more common to obtain a collaborative majority report of two precogs, plus a minority report of some slight variation, usually with reference to time and place, from the third mutant. This is explained by the theory of multiple-futures. If only one time-path existed, precognitive information would be of no importance, since no possibility would exist, in possessing this information, of altering the future. In the Precrime Agency’s work we must first of all assume—“
   Frantically, Anderton paced around the tiny room. Majority report—only two of the precogs had concurred on the material underlying the card. That was the meaning of the message enclosed with the packet. The report of the third precog, the minority report, was somehow of importance.
   Why?
   His watch told him that it was after midnight. Page would be off duty. He wouldn’t be back in the monkey block until the next afternoon. It was a slim chance, but worth taking. Maybe Page would cover for him, and maybe not. He would have to risk it.
   He had to see the minority report.