VI

   At the UWA desk, at Rocky Field in New York City, Joan Hiashi said to the uniformed clerk, “I want to buy a one-way ticket to Los Angeles on the next flight. Jet or rocket; it doesn’t matter. I just want to get there.”
   “First class or tourist?” the clerk asked.
   “Aw, hell,” Joan said wearily, “just sell me a ticket. Any kind of a ticket.” She opened her purse.
   As she started to pay for the ticket a hand stopped hers. She turned—and there stood Ray Meritan, his face twisting with relief.
   “What a place to try to pick up your thoughts,” he said. “Come on, let’s go where it’s quiet. You have ten minutes before your flight.”
   They hurried together through the building until they came to a deserted ramp. There they stopped, and Joan said, “Listen, Ray, I know it’s a trap for you. That’s why they let me out. But where else can I go except to you?”
   Ray said, “Don’t worry about it. They were bound to pick me up sooner or later. I’m sure they know I left California and came here.” He glanced around. “No FBI agents near us yet. At least I don’t pick up anything suggesting it.” He lit a cigarette.
   “I don’t have any reason to go back to L.A.,” Joan said, “now that you’re here. I might as well cancel my flight.”
   “You know they’re picking up and destroying all the empathy boxes they can,” Ray said.
   “No,” she said. “I didn’t know; I was just released half an hour ago. That’s dreadful. They really mean business.”
   Ray laughed. “Let’s say they’re really frightened.” He put his arm around her and kissed her. “I tell you what we’ll do. We’ll try to sneak out of this place, go to the lower East Side and rent a little cold-water walk-up. We’ll hide out and find an empathy box they missed.” But, he thought, it’s unlikely; they probably have them all by now. There weren’t that many to start with.
   “Anything you say,” Joan said drably.
   “Do you love me?” he asked her. “I can read your mind; you do.” And then he said quietly, “I can also read the mind of a Mr. Lewis Scanlan, an FBI man who’s now at the UWA desk. What name did you give?”
   “Mrs. George McIsaacs,” Joan said. “I think.” She examined her ticket and envelope. “Yes, that’s right.”
   “But Scanlan is asking if a japanese woman has been at the desk in the last fifteen minutes,” Ray said. “And the clerk remembers you. So—” He took hold of Joan’s arm. “We better get started.”
   They hurried down the deserted ramp, passed through an electric-eye operated door and came out in a baggage lobby. Everyone there was far too busy to pay any attention as Ray Meritan and Joan threaded their way to the street door and, a moment later, stepped out onto the chill gray sidewalk where cabs had parked in a long double row. Joan started to hail a cab…
   “Wait,” Ray said, pulling her back. “I’m getting a jumble of thoughts. One of the cab drivers is an FBI man but I can’t tell which.” He stood uncertainly, not knowing what to do.
   “We can’t get away, can we?” Joan said.
   “It’s going to be hard.” To himself he thought, More like impossible; you’re right. He experienced the girl’s confused, frightened thoughts, her anxiety about him, that she had made it possible for them to locate and capture him, her fierce desire not to return to jail, her pervasive bitterness at having been betrayed by Mr. Lee, the Chinese Communist bigshot who had met her in Cuba.
   “What a life,” Joan said, standing close to him.
   And still he did not know which cab to take. One precious second after another escaped as he stood there. “Listen,” he said to Joan, “maybe we should separate.”
   “No,” she said clinging to him. “I can’t stand to do it alone any more. Please.”
   A bewhiskered peddler walked up to them with a tray suspended by a cord which ran about his neck. “Hi, folks,” he mumbled.
   “Not now,” Joan said to him.
   “Free sample of breakfast cereal,” the peddler said. “No cost. Just take a box, miss. You mister. Take one.” He extended the tray of small, gaily colored cartons toward Ray.
   Strange, Ray thought. I’m not picking up anything from this man’s mind. He stared at the peddler, saw—or thought he saw—a peculiar insubstantiality to the man. A diffused quality.
   Ray took one of the samples of breakfast cereal.
   “Merry Meal, it’s called,” the peddler said. “A new product they’re introducing to the public. There’s a coupon inside. Entitles you to—”
   “Okay,” Ray said, sticking the box in his pocket. He took hold of Joan and led her along the line of cabs. He chose one at random and opened the rear door. “Get in,” he said urgently to her.
   “I took a sample of Merry Meal, too,” she said with a wan smile as he seated himself beside her. The cab started up, left the line and pulled past the entrance of the airfield terminal. “Ray, there was something strange about that salesman. It was as if he wasn’t actually there, as if he was nothing more than—a picture.”
   As the cab drove down the auto ramp, away from the terminal, another cab left the line and followed after them. Twisting, Ray saw riding in the back of it two well-fed men in dark business suits. FBI men, he said to himself.
   Joan said, “Didn’t that cereal salesman remind you of anyone?”
   “Who?”
   “A little of Wilbur Mercer. But I haven’t seen him enough to—” Ray grabbed the cereal box from her hand, tore the cardboard top from it. Poking up from the dry cereal he saw the corner of the coupon the peddler had spoken about; he lifted out the coupon, held it up and studied it. The coupon said in large clear printing:


HOW TO ASSEMBLE AN EMPATHY BOX FROM ORDINARY HOUSEHOLD OBJECTS

   “It was them,” he said to Joan.
   He put the coupon carefully away in his pocket, then he changed his mind.
   Folding it up, he tucked it in the cuff of his trousers. Where the FBI possibly wouldn’t find it.
   Behind them, the other cab came closer, and now he picked up the thoughts of the two men. They were FBI agents; he had been right. He settled back against the seat.
   There was nothing to do but wait.
   Joan said, “Could I have the other coupon?”
   “Sorry.” He got out the other cereal package. She opened it, found the coupon inside and, after a pause, folded it and hid it in the hem of her skirt.
   “I wonder how many there are of those so-called peddlers,” Ray said musingly. “I’d be interested to know how many free samples of Merry Meal they’re going to manage to give away before they’re caught.”
   The first ordinary household object needed was a common radio set; he had noticed that. The second, the filament from a five-year light-bulb. And next—he’d have to look again, but now was not the time. The other cab had drawn abreast with theirs.
   Later. And if the authorities found the coupon in the cuff of his trousers, they, he knew, would somehow manage to bring him another.
   He put his arm around Joan. “I think we’ll be all right.”
   The other cab, now, was nosing theirs to the curb and the two FBI men were waving in a menacing, official manner to the driver to stop.
   “Shall I stop?” the driver said tensely to Ray.
   “Sure,” he said. And, taking a deep breath, prepared himself.

The War with the Fnools

   Captain Edgar Lightfoot of CIA said, “Darn it, the Fnools are back again, Major. They’ve taken over Provo, Utah.”
   With a groan, Major Hauk signaled his secretary to bring him the Fnool dossier from the locked archives. “What form are they assuming this time?” he asked briskly.
   “Tiny real-estate salesmen,” Lightfoot said.
   Last time, Major Hauk reflected, it had been filling station attendants. That was the thing about the Fnools. When one took a particular shape they all took that shape. Of course, it made detection for CIA fieldmen much easier. But it did make the Fnools look absurd, and Hauk did not enjoy fighting an absurd enemy; it was a quality which tended to diffuse over both sides and even up to his own office.
   “Do you think they’d come to terms?” Hauk said, half-rhetorically. “We could afford to sacrifice Provo, Utah, if they’d be willing to circumscribe themselves there. We could even add those portions of Salt Lake City which are paved with hideous old red brick.”
   Lightfoot said, “Fnools never compromise, Major. Their goal is Sol System domination. For all time.”
   Leaning over Major Hauk’s shoulder, Miss Smith said, “Here is the Fnool dossier, sir.” With her free hand she pressed the top of her blouse against herself in a gesture indicating either advanced tuberculosis or advanced modesty. There were certain indications that it was the latter.
   “Miss Smith,” Major Hauk complained, “here are the Fnools trying to take over the Sol System and I’m handed their dossier by a woman with a forty-two inch bosom. Isn’t that a trifle schizophrenic—for me, at least?” He carefully averted his eyes from her, remembering his wife and the two children. “Wear something else from here on out,” he told her. “Or swaddle yourself. I mean, my God, let’s be reasonable: let’s be realistic.”
   “Yes, Major,” Miss Smith said. “But remember, I was selected at random from the CIA employees pool. I didn’t ask to be your secretary.”
   With Captain Lightfoot beside him, Major Hauk laid out the documents that made up the Fnool dossier.
   In the Smithsonian there was a huge Fnool, standing three feet high, stuffed and preserved in a natural habitat-type cubicle. School children for years had marveled at this Fnool, which was shown with pistol aimed at Terran innocents. By pressing a button, the school children caused the Terrans (not stuffed but imitation) to flee, whereupon the Fnool extinguished them with its advanced solar-powered weapon… and the exhibit reverted to its original stately scene, ready to begin all over again.
   Major Hauk had seen the exhibit, and it made him uneasy. The Fnools, he had declared time and time again, were no joke. But there was something about a Fnool that—well, a Fnool was an idiotic life form. That was the basis of it. No matter what it imitated it retained its midget aspect; a Fnool looked like something given away free at supermarket openings, along with balloons and moist purple orchids. No doubt, Major Hauk had ruminated, it was a survival factor. It disarmed the Fnool’s opponents. Even the name. It was just not possible to take them seriously, even at this very moment when they were infesting Provo, Utah, in the form of miniature real-estate salesmen.
   Hauk instructed, “Capture a Fnool in this current guise, Lightfoot, bring it to me and I’ll parley. I feel like capitulating, this time. I’ve been fighting them for twenty years now. I’m worn out.”
   “If you get one face to face with you,” Lightfoot cautioned, “it may successfully imitate you and that would be the end. We would have to incinerate both of you, just to be on the safe side.”
   Gloomily, Hauk said, “I’ll set up a key password situation with you right now, Captain. The word is masticate. I’ll use it in a sentence… for instance, ‘I’ve got to thoroughly masticate these data.’ The Fnool won’t know that—correct?”
   “Yes, Major,” Captain Lightfoot sighed and left the CIA office at once, hurrying to the ‘copter field across the street to begin his trip to Provo, Utah. But he had a feeling of foreboding.

   When his ‘copter landed at the end of Provo Canyon on the outskirts of the town, he was at once approached by a two-foot-high man in a gray business suit carrying a briefcase.
   “Good morning, sir,” the Fnool piped. “Care to look at some choice lots, all with unobstructed views? Can be subdivided into—”
   “Get in the ‘copter,” Lightfoot said, aiming his Army-issue .45 at the Fnool.
   “Listen, my friend,” the Fnool said, in a jolly tone of voice. “I can see you’ve never really given any hardheaded thought to the meaning of our race having landed on your planet. Why don’t we step into the office a moment and sit down?” The Fnool indicated a nearby small building in which Lightfoot saw a desk and chairs. Over the office there was a sign:


EARLY BIRD
Land Development
Incorporated

   “ ‘The early bird catches the worm,’ ” the Fnool declared. “And the spoils go to the winner, Captain Lightfoot. By nature’s laws, if we manage to infest your planet and pre-empt you, we’ve got all the forces of evolution and biology on our side.” The Fnool beamed cheerily.
   Lightfoot said, “There’s a CIA major back in Washington, D.C. who’s on to you.”
   “Major Hauk has defeated us twice,” the Fnool admitted. “We respect him. But he’s a voice crying in the wilderness, in this country, at least. You know perfectly well, Captain, that the average American viewing that exhibit at the Smithsonian merely smiles in a tolerant fashion. There’s just no awareness of the menace.”
   By now two other Fnools, also in the form of tiny real-estate salesmen in gray business suits carrying briefcases, had approached. “Look,” one said to the other. “Charley’s captured a Terran.”
   “No,” its companion disagreed, “the Terran captured him.”
   “All three of you get in the CIA ‘copter,” Lightfoot ordered, waving his .45 at them.
   “You’re making a mistake,” the first Fnool said, shaking its head. “But you’re a young man; you’ll mature in time.” It walked to the ‘copter. Then, all at once, it spun and cried, “Death to the Terrans!”
   Its briefcase whipped up, a bolt of pure solar energy whined past Lightfoot’s right ear. Lightfoot dropped to one knee and squeezed the trigger of the .45; the Fnool, in the doorway of the ‘copter, pitched head-forward and lay with its briefcase beside it. The other two Fnools watched as Lightfoot cautiously kicked the briefcase away.
   “Young,” one of the remaining Fnools said, “but with quick reflexes. Did you see the way he dropped on one knee?”
   “Terrans are no joke,” the other agreed. “We’ve got an uphill battle ahead of us.”
   “As long as you’re here,” the first of the remaining Fnools said to Lightfoot, “why don’t you put a small deposit down on some valuable unimproved land we’ve got a listing for? I’ll be glad to run you out to have a look at it. Water and electricity available at a slight additional cost.”
   “Get in the ‘copter,” Lightfoot repeated, aiming his gun steadily at them.

   In Berlin, an Oberstleutnant of the SHD, the Sicherheitsdienst—the West German Security Service—approaching his commanding officer, saluted in what is termed Roman style and said, “General, die Fnoolen sind wieder zuruck. Was sollen wir jetz tun?”
   “The Fnools are back?”Hochflieger said, horrified. “Already? But it was only three years ago that we uncovered their network and eradicated them.” Jumping to his feet General Hochflieger paced about his cramped temporary office in the basement of the Bundesrat Gebaude, his large hands clasped behind his back. “And what guise this time? Assistant Ministers of Domestic Finance, as before?”
   “No sir,” the Oberstleutnant said. “They have come as gear inspectors of the VW works. Brown suit, clipboard, thick glasses, middle-aged. Fussy. And, as before, nur six-tenths of a meter high.”
   “What I detest about the Fnools,” Hochflieger said, “is their ruthless use of science in the service of destruction, especially their medical techniques. They almost defeated us with that virus infection suspended in the gum on the backs of multi-color commemorative stamps.”
   “A desperate weapon,” his subordinate agreed, “but rather too fantastic to be successful, ultimately. This time they’ll probably rely on crushing force combined with an absolutely synchronized timetable.”
   “Selbsverstandlich,” Hochflieger agreed. “But we’ve nonetheless got to react and defeat them. Inform Terpol.” That was the Terra-wide organization of counterintelligence with headquarters on Luna. “Where, specifically, have they been detected?”
   “In Schweinfurt only, so far.”
   “Perhaps we should obliterate the Schweinfurt area.”
   “They’ll only turn up elsewhere.”
   “True.” Hochflieger brooded. “What we must do is pursue Operation Hundefutter to successful culmination.” Hundefutter had developed for the West German Government a sub-species of Terrans six-tenths of a meter high and capable of assuming a variety of forms. They would be used to penetrate the network of Fnool activity and destroy it from within. Hundefutter, financed by the Krupp family, had been held in readiness for just this moment.
   “I’ll activate Kommando Einsatzgruppe II,”his subordinate said. “As counter-Fnools they can begin to drop behind Fnool lines near the Schweinfurt area immediately. By nightfall the situation should be in our hands.”
   “Gruss Gott,” Hochflieger prayed, nodding. “Well, get the kommando started, and we’ll keep our ears open to see how it proceeds.”
   If it failed, he realized, more desperate measures would have to be initiated.
   The survival of our race is at stake, Hochflieger said to himself. The next four thousand years of history will be determined by the brave act of a member of the SHD at this hour. Perhaps myself.
   He paced about, meditating on that.

   In Warsaw the local chief of the People’s Protective Agency for Preserving the Democratic Process—the NNBNDL—read the coded teletype dispatch several times as he sat at his desk drinking tea and eating a late breakfast of sweet rolls and Polish ham. This time disguised as chess players, Serge Nicov said to himself. And each Fnool making use of the queen’s pawn opening, Qp to Q3… a weak opening, he reflected, especially against Kp to K4, even if they draw white. But—
   Still a potentially dangerous situation.
   On a piece of official stationery he wrote select out class of chess players employing queen’s pawn opening. For Invigorating Forest-renewal Team, he decided. Fnools are small, but they can plant saplings… we must get some use out of them. Seeds; they can plant sunflower seeds for our tundra-removal vegetable-oil venture.
   A year of hard physical work, he decided, and they’ll think twice before they invade Terra again.
   On the other hand, we could make a deal with them, offer them an alternative to invigorating forest-renewal activity. They could enter the Army as a special brigade and be used in Chile, in the rugged mountains. Being only sixty-one centimeters high, many of them could be packed into a single nuclear sub for transport… but can Fnools be trusted?
   The thing he hated most about Fnools—and he had learned to know them in their previous invasions of Terra—was their deceitfulness. Last time they had taken the physical form of a troupe of ethnic dancers… and what dancers they had turned out to be. They had massacred an audience in Leningrad before anyone could intervene, men, women and children all dead on the spot by weapons of ingenious design and sturdy although monotonous construction which had masqueraded as folk-instruments of a five-stringed variety.
   It could never happen again; all Democratic lands were alert, now; special youth groups had been set up to keep vigil. But something new—such as this chess-player deception—could succeed as well, especially in small towns in the East republics, where chess players were enthusiastically welcomed.
   From a hidden compartment in his desk Serge Nicov brought out the special non-dial phone, picked up the receiver and said into the mouthpiece, “Fnools back, in North Caucasus area. Better get as many tanks as possible lined up to accept their advance as they attempt to spread out. Contain them and then cut directly through their center, bisecting them repeatedly until they’re splintered and can be dealt with in small bands.”
   “Yes, Political Officer Nicov.”
   Serge Nicov hung up and resumed eating his—now cold—late breakfast.

   As Captain Lightfoot piloted the ‘copter back to Washington, D.C. one of the two captured Fnools said, “How is it that no matter what guise we come in, you Terrans can always detect us? We’ve appeared on your planet as filling station attendants, Volkswagen gear inspectors, chess champions, folk singers complete with native instruments, minor government officials, and now real-estate salesmen—”
   Lightfoot said, “It’s your size.”
   “That concept conveys nothing to us.”
   “You’re only two feet tall!”
   The two Fnools conferred, and then the other Fnool patiently explained, “But size is relative. We have all the absolute qualities of Terrans embodied in our temporary forms, and according to obvious logic—”
   “Look,” Lightfoot said, “stand here next to me.” The Fnool, in its gray business suit, carrying its briefcase, came cautiously up to stand beside him. “You just come up to my knee cap,” Lightfoot pointed out. “I’m six feet high. You’re only one-third as tall as I. In a group of Terrans you Fnools stand out like an egg in a barrel of kosher pickles.”
   “Is that a folk saying?” the Fnool asked. “I’d better write that down.” From its coat pocket it produced a tiny ball point pen no longer than a match. “Egg in barrel of pickles. Quaint. I hope, when we’ve wiped out your civilization, that some of your ethnic customs will be preserved by our museums.”
   “I hope so, too,” Lightfoot said, lighting a cigarette.
   The other Fnool, pondering, said, “I wonder if there’s any way we can grow taller. Is it a racial secret preserved by your people?” Noticing the burning cigarette dangling between Lightfoot’s lips, the Fnool said, “Is that how you achieve unnatural height? By burning that stick of compressed dried vegetable fibers and inhaling the smoke?”
   “Yes,” Lightfoot said, handing the cigarette to the two-foot-high Fnool. “That’s our secret. Cigarette-smoking makes you grow. We have all our offspring, especially teen-agers, smoke. Everyone that’s young.”
   “I’m going to try it,” the Fnool said to its companion. Placing the cigarette between its lips, it inhaled deeply.
   Lightfoot blinked. Because the Fnool was now four feet high, and its companion instantly imitated it; both Fnools were twice as high as before. Smoking the cigarette had augmented the Fnools’ height incredibly by two whole feet.
   “Thank you,” the now four-foot-high real-estate salesman said to Lightfoot, in a much deeper voice than before. “We are certainly making bold strides, are we not?”
   Nervously, Lightfoot said, “Gimme back the cigarette.”

   In his office at the CIA building, Major Julius Hauk pressed a button on his desk, and Miss Smith alertly opened the door and entered the room, dictation pad in hand.
   “Miss Smith,” Major Hauk said, “Captain Lightfoot’s away. Now I can tell you. The Fnools are going to win this time. As senior officer in charge of defeating them, I’m about to give up and go down to the bomb-proof shelter constructed for hopeless situations such as this.”
   “I’m sorry to hear that, sir,” Miss Smith said, her long eyelashes fluttering. “I’ve enjoyed working for you.”
   “But you, too,” Hauk explained. “All Terrans are wiped out; our defeat is planet-wide.” Opening a drawer of his desk he brought out an unopened fifth of Bullock & Lade Scotch which he had been given as a birthday present. “I’m going to finish this B & L Scotch off first,” he informed Miss Smith. “Will you join me?”
   “No thank you, sir,” Miss Smith said. “I’m afraid I don’t drink, at least during the daylight hours.”
   Major Hauk drank for a moment from a dixie cup, then tried a little more from the bottle just to be sure it was Scotch all the way to the bottom. At last he put it down and said, “It’s hard to believe that our backs could be put to the wall by creatures no larger than domestic orange-striped tomcats, but such is the case.” He nodded courteously to Miss Smith. “I’m off for the concrete sub-surface bomb-proof shelter, where I hope to hold out after the general collapse of life as we know it.”
   “Good for you, Major Hauk,” Miss Smith said, a little uneasily. “But are you—just going to leave me here to become a captive of the Fnools? I mean—” Her sharply pointed breasts quivered in becoming unison beneath her blouse. “It seems sort of mean.”
   “You have nothing to fear from the Fnools, Miss Smith,” Major Hauk said. “After all, two feet tall—” He gestured. “Even a neurotic young woman could scarcely—” He laughed. “Really.”
   “But it’s a terrible feeling,” Miss Smith said, “to be abandoned in the face of what we know to be an unnatural enemy from another planet entirely.”
   “I tell you what,” Major Hauk said thoughtfully. “Perhaps I’ll break a series of strict CIA rulings and allow you to go below to the shelter with me.”
   Putting down her pad and pencil and hurrying over to him, Miss Smith breathed, “Oh, Major, how can I thank you!”
   “Just come along,” Major Hauk said, leaving the bottle of B & L Scotch behind in his haste, the situation being what it was.
   Miss Smith clung to him as he made his way a trifle unsteadily down the corridor to the elevator.
   “Drat that Scotch,” he murmured. “Miss Smith, Vivian, you were wise not to touch it. Given the cortico-thalamic reaction we are all experiencing in the face of the Fnoolian peril, Scotch isn’t the beneficial balm it generally is.”
   “Here,” his secretary said, sliding under his arm to help prop him up as they waited for the elevator. “Try to stand firm, Major. It won’t be long now.”
   “You have a point there,” Major Hauk agreed. “Vivian, my dear.”

   The elevator came at last. It was the self-service type.
   “You’re being really very kind to me,” Miss Smith said, as the Major pressed the proper button and the elevator began to descend.
   “Well, it may prolong your life,” Major Hauk agreed. “Of course, that far underground… the average temperature is much greater than at the Earth’s surface. Like a deep mine shaft, it runs in the near-hundreds.”
   “But at least we’ll be alive,” Miss Smith pointed out.
   Major Hauk removed his coat and tie. “Be prepared for the humid warmth,” he told her. “Here, perhaps you would like to remove your coat.”
   “Yes,” Miss Smith said, allowing him in his gentlemanly way to remove her coat.
   The elevator arrived at the shelter. No one was there ahead of them, fortunately; they had the shelter all to themselves.
   “It is stuffy down here,” Miss Smith said as Major Hauk switched on one dim yellow light. “Oh dear.” She stumbled over something in the gloom. “It’s so hard to see.” Again she stumbled over some object; this time she half-fell. “Shouldn’t we have more light, Major?”
   “What, and attract the Fnools?” In the dark, Major Hauk felt about until he located her; Miss Smith had toppled onto one of the shelter’s many bunks and was groping about for her shoe.
   “I think I broke the heel off,” Miss Smith said.
   “Well, at least you got away with your life,” Major Hauk said. “If nothing else.” In the gloom he began to assist her in removing her other shoe, it being worthless now.
   “How long will we be down here?” Miss Smith asked.
   “As long as the Fnools are in control,” Major Hauk informed her. “You’d better change into radiation-proof garb in case the rotten little non-terrestrials try H-bombing the White House. Here, I’ll take your blouse and skirt—there should be overalls somewhere around.”
   “You’re being really kind to me,” Miss Smith breathed, as she handed him her blouse and skirt. “I can’t get over it.”
   “I think,” Major Hauk said, “I’ll change my mind and go back up for that Scotch; we’ll be down here longer than I anticipated and we’ll need something like that as the solitude frays our nerves. You stay here.” He felt his way back to the elevator.
   “Don’t be gone long,” Miss Smith called anxiously after him. “I feel terribly exposed and unprotected down here alone, and what is more I can’t seem to find that radiation-proof garb you spoke of.”
   “Be right back,” Major Hauk promised.

   At the field opposite the CIA Building, Captain Lightfoot landed the ‘copter with the two captive Fnools aboard. “Get moving,” he instructed them, digging the muzzle of his Service .45 into their small ribs.
   “It’s because he’s bigger than us, Len,” one of the Fnools said to the other. “If we were the same size he wouldn’t dare treat us this way. But now we understand—finally—the nature of the Terrans’ superiority.”
   “Yes,” the other Fnool said. “The mystery of twenty years has been cleared up.”
   “Four feet tall is still suspicious-looking,” Captain Lightfoot said, but he was thinking, If they grow from two feet to four feet in one instant, just by smoking a cigarette, what’s to stop them from growing two feet more? Then they’ll be six feet and look exactly like us.
   And it’s all my fault, he said to himself miserably.
   Major Hauk will destroy me, career-wise if not body-wise.
   However, he continued on as best he could; the famous tradition of the CIA demanded it. “I’m taking you directly to Major Hauk,” he told the two Fnools. “He’ll know what to do with you.”
   When they reached Major Hauk’s office, no one was there.
   “This is strange,” Captain Lightfoot said.
   “Maybe Major Hauk has beaten a hasty retreat,” one of the Fnools said. “Does this tall amber bottle indicate anything?”
   “That’s a tall amber bottle of Scotch,” Lightfoot said, scrutinizing it. “And it indicates nothing. However—” he removed the cap—“I’ll try it. Just to be on the safe side.”
   After he had tried it, he found the two Fnools staring at him intently.
   “This is what Terrans deem drink,” Lightfoot explained. “It would be bad for you.”
   “Possibly,” one of the two Fnools said, “but while you were drinking from that bottle I obtained your .45 Service revolver. Hands up.”
   Lightfoot, reluctantly, raised his hands.
   “Give us that bottle,” the Fnool said. “And let us try it for ourselves; we will be denied nothing. For in point of fact, Terran culture lies open before us.”
   “Drink will put an end to you,” Lightfoot said desperately.
   “As that burning tube of aged vegetable matter did?” the nearer of the two Fnools said with contempt.
   It and its companion drained the bottle as Lightfoot watched. Sure enough, they now stood six feet high. And, he knew, everywhere in the world, all Fnools had assumed equal stature. Because of him, the invasion of the Fnools would this time be successful. He had destroyed Terra. “Cheers,” the first Fnool said.
   “Down the hatch,” the other said. “Ring-a-ding.” They studied Lightfoot. “You’ve shrunk to our size.”
   “No, Len,” the other said. “We have expanded to his.”
   “Then at last we’re all equal,” Len said. “We’re finally a success. The magic defense of the Terrans—their unnatural size—has been eradicated.”
   At that point a voice said, “Drop that .45 Service revolver.” And Major Hauk stepped into the room behind the two thoroughly drunken Fnools.
   “Well I’ll be goddamned,” the first Fnool mumbled. “Look, Len, it’s the man most responsible for previously defeating us.”
   “And he’s little,” Len said. “Little, like us. We’re all little, now. I mean, we’re all huge; goddamn it, it’s the same thing. Anyhow we’re equal.” It lurched toward Major Hauk—
   Major Hauk fired. And the Fnool named Len dropped. It was absolutely undeniably dead. Only one of the captured Fnools remained.
   “Edgar, they’ve increased in size,” Major Hauk said, pale. “Why?”
   “It’s due to me,” Lightfoot admitted. “First because of the cigarette, then second because of the Scotch—your Scotch, Major, that your wife gave you on your last birthday. I admit their now being the same size as us makes them undistinguishable from us… but consider this, sir. What if they grew once more?”
   “I see your idea clearly,” Major Hauk said, after a pause. “If eight feet tall, the Fnools would be as conspicuous as they were when—”
   The captured Fnool made a dash for freedom.
   Major Hauk fired, low, but it was too late; the Fnool was out into the corridor and racing toward the elevator.
   “Get it!” Major Hauk shouted.
   The Fnool reached the elevator and without hesitation pressed the button; some extraterrestrial Fnoolian knowledge guided its hand.
   “It’s getting away,” Lightfoot grated.
   Now the elevator had come. “It’s going down to the bomb-proof shelter,” Major Hauk yelled in dismay.
   “Good,” Lightfoot said grimly. “We’ll be able to capture it with no trouble.”
   “Yes, but—” Major Hauk began, and then broke off. “You’re right, Lightfoot; we must capture it. Once out on the street—It would be like any other man in a gray business suit carrying a briefcase.”
   “How can it be made to grow again?” Lightfoot said, as he and Major Hauk descended by means of the stairs. “A cigarette started it, then the Scotch—both new to Fnools. What would complete their growth, make them a bizarre eight feet tall?” He racked his brain as they dashed down and down, until at last the concrete and steel entrance of the shelter lay before them.
   The Fnool was already inside.
   “That’s, um, Miss Smith you hear,” Major Hauk admitted. “She was, or rather actually, we were—well, we were taking refuge from the invasion down here.”
   Putting his weight against the door, Lightfoot swung it aside.
   Miss Smith at once hopped up, ran toward them and a moment later clung to the two men, safe now from the Fnool. “Thank God,” she gasped. “I didn’t realize what it was until—” She shuddered.
   “Major,” Captain Lightfoot said, “I think we’ve stumbled on it.”
   Rapidly, Major Hauk said, “Captain, you get Miss Smith’s clothes, I’ll take care of the Fnool. There’s no problem now.”
   The Fnool, eight feet high, came slowly toward them, its hands raised.

Precious Artifact

   Below the ‘copter of Milt Biskle lay newly fertile lands. He had done well with his area of Mars, verdant from his reconstruction of the ancient water-network. Spring, two springs each year, had been brought to this autumn world of sand and hopping toads, a land once made of dried soil cracking with the dust of former times, of a dreary and unwatered waste. Victim of the recent Prox-Terra conflict.
   Quite soon the first Terran emigrants would appear, stake their claims and take over. He could retire. Perhaps he could return to Terra or bring his own family here, receive priority of land-acquisition—as a reconstruct engineer he deserved it. Area Yellow had progressed far faster than the other engineers’ sections. And now his reward came.
   Reaching forward, Milt Biskle touched the button of his long-range transmitter. “This is Reconstruct Engineer Yellow,” he said. “I’d like a psychiatrist. Any one will do, so long as he’s immediately available.”

   When Milt Biskle entered the office Dr. DeWinter rose and held out his hand. “I’ve heard,” Dr. DeWinter said, “that you, of all the forty odd reconstruct engineers, have been the most creative. It’s no wonder you’re tired. Even God had to rest after six days of such work, and you’ve been at it for years. As I was waiting for you to reach me I received a news memo from Terra that will interest you.” He picked the memo up from his desk. “The initial transport of settlers is about to arrive here on Mars… and they’ll go directly into your area. Congratulations, Mr. Biskle.”
   Rousing himself Milt Biskle said, “What if I returned to Earth?”
   “But if you mean to stake a claim for your family, here—”
   Milt Biskle said, “I want you to do something for me. I feel too tired, too—” He gestured. “Or depressed, maybe. Anyhow I’d like you to make arrangements for my gear, including my wug-plant, to be put aboard a transport returning to Terra.”
   “Six years of work,” Dr. DeWinter said. “And now you’re abandoning your recompense. Recently I visited Earth and it’s just as you remember—”
   “How do you know how I remember it?”
   “Rather,” DeWinter corrected himself smoothly, “I should say it’s just as it was. Overcrowded, tiny conapts with seven families to a single cramped kitchen. Autobahns so crowded you can’t make a move until eleven in the morning.”
   “For me,” Milt Biskle said, “the overcrowding will be a relief after six years of robot autonomic equipment.” He had made up his mind. In spite of what he had accomplished here, or perhaps because of it, he intended to go home. Despite the psychiatrist’s arguments.
   Dr. DeWinter purred, “What if your wife and children, Milt, are among the passengers of this first transport?” Once more he lifted a document from his neatly-arranged desk. He studied the paper, then said, “Biskle, Fay, Mrs. Laura C. June C. Woman and two girl children. Your family?”
   “Yes,” Milt Biskle admitted woodenly; he stared straight ahead.
   “So you see you can’t head back to Earth. Put on your hair and prepare to meet them at Field Three. And exchange your teeth. You’ve got the stainless steel ones in, at the moment.”
   Chagrined, Biskle nodded. Like all Terrans he had lost his hair and teeth from the fallout during the war. For everyday service in his lonely job of re-reconstructing Yellow Area of Mars he made no use of the expensive wig which he had brought from Terra, and as to the teeth he personally found the steel ones far more comfortable than the natural-color plastic set. It indicated how far he had drifted from social interaction. He felt vaguely guilty; Dr. DeWinter was right.
   But he had felt guilty ever since the defeat of the Proxmen. The war had embittered him; it didn’t seem fair that one of the two competing cultures would have to suffer, since the needs of both were legitimate.
   Mars itself had been the locus of contention. Both cultures needed it as a colony on which to deposit surplus populations. Thank God Terra had managed to gain tactical mastery during the last year of the war… hence it was Terrans such as himself, and not Proxmen, patching up Mars.
   “By the way,” Dr. DeWinter said. “I happen to know of your intentions regarding your fellow reconstruct engineers.”
   Milt Biskle glanced up swiftly.
   “As a matter of fact,” Dr. DeWinter said, “we know they’re at this moment gathering in Red Area to hear your account.” Opening his desk drawer he got out a yo-yo, stood up and began to operate it expertly doing walking the dog.
   “Your panic-stricken speech to the effect that something is wrong, although you can’t seem to say just what it might be.”
   Watching the yo-yo Biskle said, “That’s a toy popular in the Prox system. At least so I read in a homeopape article, once.”
   “Hmm. I understood it originated in the Philippines.” Engrossed, Dr. DeWinter now did around the world. He did it well. “I’m taking the liberty of sending a disposition to the reconstruct engineers’ gathering, testifying to your mental condition. It will be read aloud—sorry to say.”
   “I still intend to address the gathering,” Biskle said.
   “Well, then there’s a compromise that occurs to me. Greet your little family when it arrives here on Mars and then we’ll arrange a trip to Terra for you. At our expense. And in exchange you’ll agree not to address the gathering of reconstruct engineers or burden them in any way with your nebulous forebodings.” DeWinter eyed him keenly. “After all, this is a critical moment. The first emigrants are arriving. We don’t want trouble; we don’t want to make anyone uneasy.”
   “Would you do me a favor?” Biskle asked. “Show me that you’ve got a wig on. And that your teeth are false. Just so I can be sure that you’re a Terran.”
   Dr. DeWinter tilted his wig and plucked out his set of false teeth.
   “I’ll take the offer,” Milt Biskle said. “If you’ll agree to make certain that my wife obtains the parcel of land I set aside for her.”
   Nodding, DeWinter tossed him a small white envelope. “Here’s your ticket. Round trip, of course, since you’ll be coming back.”
   I hope so, Biskle thought as he picked up the ticket. But it depends on what I see on Terra. Or rather on what they let me see.
   He had a feeling they’d let him see very little. In fact as little as Proxmanly possible.

   When his ship reached Terra a smartly uniformed guide waited for him. “Mr. Biskle?” Trim and attractive and exceedingly young she stepped forward alertly. “I’m Mary Ableseth, your Tourplan companion. I’ll show you around the planet during your brief stay here.” She smiled brightly and very professionally. He was taken aback. “I’ll be with you constantly, night and day.”
   “Night, too?” he managed to say.
   “Yes, Mr. Biskle. That’s my job. We expect you to be disoriented due to your years of labor on Mars… labor we of Terra applaud and honor, as is right.” She fell in beside him, steering him toward a parked ‘copter. “Where would you like to go first? New York City? Broadway? To the night clubs and theaters and restaurants…”
   “No, to Central Park. To sit on a bench.”
   “But there is no more Central Park, Mr. Biskle. It was turned into a parking lot for government employees while you were on Mars.”
   “I see,” Milt Biskle said. “Well, then Portsmouth Square in San Francisco will do.” He opened the door of the ‘copter.
   “That, too, has become a parking lot,” Miss Ableseth said, with a sad shake of her long, luminous red hair. “We’re so darn over-populated. Try again, Mr. Biskle; there are a few parks left, one in Kansas, I believe, and two in Utah in the south part near St. George.”
   “This is bad news,” Milt said. “May I stop at that amphetamine dispenser and put in my dime? I need a stimulant to cheer me up.”
   “Certainly,” Miss Ableseth said, nodding graciously.
   Milt Biskle walked to the spaceport’s nearby stimulant dispenser, reached into his pocket, found a dime, and dropped the dime in the slot.
   The dime fell completely through the dispenser and bounced onto the pavement.
   “Odd,” Biskle said, puzzled.
   “I think I can explain that,” Miss Ableseth said. “That dime of yours is a Martian dime, made for a lighter gravity.”
   “Hmm,” Milt Biskle said, as he retrieved the dime. As Miss Ableseth had predicted he felt disoriented. He stood by as she put in a dime of her own and obtained the small tube of amphetamine stimulants for him.. Certainly her explanation seemed adequate. But—
   “It is now eight P.M. local time,” Miss Ableseth said. “And I haven’t had dinner, although of course you have, aboard your ship. Why not take me to dinner? We can talk over a bottle of Pinot Noir and you can tell me these vague forebodings which have brought you to Terra, that something dire is wrong and that all your marvelous reconstruct work is pointless. I’d adore to hear about it.” She guided him back to the ‘copter and the two of them entered, squeezing into the back seat together. Milt Biskle found her to be warm and yielding, decidedly Terran; he became embarrassed and felt his heart pounding in effort-syndrome. It had been some time since he had been this close to a woman.

   “Listen,” he said, as the automatic circuit of the ‘copter caused it to rise from the spaceport parking lot, “I’m married. I’ve got two children and I came here on business. I’m on Terra to prove that the Proxmen really won and that we few remaining Terrans are slaves of the Prox authorities, laboring for—” He gave up; it was hopeless. Miss Ableseth remained pressed against him.
   “You really think,” Miss Ableseth said presently, as the ‘copter passed above New York City, “that I’m a Prox agent?”
   “N-no,” Milt Biskle said. “I guess not.” It did not seem likely, under the circumstances.
   “While you’re on Terra,” Miss Ableseth said, “why stay in an overcrowded, noisy hotel? Why not stay with me at my conapt in New Jersey? There’s plenty of room and you’re more than welcome.”
   “Okay,” Biskle agreed, feeling the futility of arguing.
   “Good.” Miss Ableseth gave an instruction to the ‘copter; it turned north. “We’ll have dinner there. It’ll save money, and at all the decent restaurants there’s a two-hour line this time of night, so it’s almost impossible to get a table. You’ve probably forgotten. How wonderful it’ll be when half our population can emigrate!”
   “Yes,” Biskle said tightly. “And they’ll like Mars; we’ve done a good job.” He felt a measure of enthusiasm returning to him, a sense of pride in the reconstruct work he and his compatriots had done. “Wait until you see it, Miss Ableseth.”
   “Call me Mary,” Miss Ableseth said, as she arranged her heavy scarlet wig; it had become dislodged during the last few moments in the cramped quarters of the ‘copter.
   “Okay,” Biskle said, and, except for a nagging awareness of disloyalty to Fay, he felt a sense of well-being.
   “Things happen fast on Terra,” Mary Ableseth said. “Due to the terrible pressure of over-population.” She pressed her teeth in place; they, too, had become dislodged
   “So I see,” Milt Biskle agreed, and straightened his own wig and teeth, too. Could I have been mistaken? he asked himself. After all he could see the lights of New York below; Terra was decidedly not a depopulated ruin and its civilization was intact.
   Or was this all an illusion, imposed on his percept-system by Prox psychiatric techniques unfamiliar to him? It was a fact that his dime had fallen completely through the amphetamine dispenser. Didn’t that indicate something was subtly, terribly wrong?
   Perhaps the dispenser hadn’t really been there.

   The next day he and Mary Ableseth visited one of the few remaining parks. In the southern part of Utah, near the mountains, the park although small was bright green and attractive. Milt Biskle lolled on the grass watching a squirrel progressing toward a tree in wicket-like leaps, its tail flowing behind it in a gray stream.
   “No squirrels on Mars,” Milt Biskle said sleepily.
   Wearing a slight sunsuit, Mary Ableseth stretched out on her back, eyes shut. “It’s nice here, Milt. I imagine Mars is like this.” Beyond the park heavy traffic moved along the freeway; the noise reminded Milt of the surf of the Pacific Ocean. It lulled him. All seemed well, and he tossed a peanut to the squirrel. The squirrel veered, wicket-hopped toward the peanut, its intelligent face twitching in response.
   As it sat upright, holding the nut, Milt Biskle tossed a second nut off to the right. The squirrel heard it land among the maple leaves; its ears pricked up, and this reminded Milt of a game he once had played with a cat, an old sleepy tom which had belonged to him and his brother in the days before Terra had been so overpopulated, when pets were still legal. He had waited until Pumpkin—the tomcat—was almost asleep and then he had tossed a small object into the corner of the room. Pumpkin woke up. His eyes had flown open and his ears had pricked, turned, and he had sat for fifteen minutes listening and watching, brooding as to what had made the noise. It was a harmless way of teasing the old cat, and Milt felt sad, thinking how many years Pumpkin had been dead, now, his last legal pet. On Mars, though, pets would be legal again. That cheered him.
   In fact on Mars, during his years of reconstruct work, he had possessed a pet. A Martian plant. He had brought it with him to Terra and it now stood on the living room coffee table in Mary Ableseth’s conapt, its limbs draped rather unhappily. It had not prospered in the unfamiliar Terran climate.
   “Strange,” Milt murmured, “that my wug-plant isn’t thriving. I’d have thought in such a moist atmosphere…”
   “It’s the gravity,” Mary said, eyes still shut, her bosom rising and falling regularly. She was almost asleep. “Too much for it.”
   Milt regarded the supine form of the woman, remembering Pumpkin under similar circumstances. The hypnogogic moment, between waking and sleeping, when consciousness and unconsciousness became blended… reaching, he picked up a pebble.
   He tossed the pebble into the leaves near Mary’s head.
   At once she sat up, eyes open startled, her sunsuit falling from her.
   Both her ears pricked up.
   “But we Terrans,” Milt said, “have lost control of the musculature of our ears, Mary. On even a reflex basis.”
   “What?” she murmured, blinking in confusion as she retied her sunsuit.
   “Our ability to prick up our ears has atrophied,” Milt explained. “Unlike the dog and cat. Although to examine us morphologically you wouldn’t know because the muscles are still there. So you made an error.”
   “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Mary said, with a trace of sullenness. She turned her attention entirely to arranging the bra of her sunsuit, ignoring him.
   “Let’s go back to the conapt,” Milt said, rising to his feet. He no longer felt like lolling in the park, because he could no longer believe in the park. Unreal squirrel, unreal grass… was it actually? Would they ever show him the substance beneath the illusion? He doubted it.
   The squirrel followed them a short way as they walked to their parked ‘copter, then turned its attention to a family of Terrans which included two small boys; the children threw nuts to the squirrel and it scampered in vigorous activity.
   “Convincing,” Milt said. And it really was.
   Mary said, “Too bad you couldn’t have seen Dr. DeWinter more, Milt. He could have helped you.” Her voice was oddly hard.
   “I have no doubt of that,” Milt Biskle agreed as they re-entered the parked ‘copter.

   When they arrived back at Mary’s conapt he found his Martian wug-plant dead. It had evidently perished of dehydration.
   “Don’t try to explain this,” he said to Mary as the two of them stood gazing down at the parched, dead stalks of the once active plant. “You know what it shows. Terra is supposedly more humid than Mars, even reconstructed Mars at its best. Yet this plant has completely dried out. There’s no moisture left on Terra because I suppose the Prox blasts emptied the seas. Right?”
   Mary said nothing.
   “What I don’t understand,” Milt said, “is why it’s worth it to you people to keep the illusion going. I’ve finished my job.”
   After a pause Mary said, “Maybe there’re more planets requiring reconstruct work, Milt.”
   “Your population is that great?”
   “I was thinking of Terra. Here,” Mary said. “Reconstruct work on it will take generations; all the talent and ability you reconstruct engineers possess will be required.” She added, “I’m just following your hypothetical logic, of course.”
   “So Terra’s our next job. That’s why you let me come here. In fact I’m going to stay here.” He realized that, thoroughly and utterly, in a flash of insight. “I won’t be going back to Mars and I won’t see Fay again. You’re replacing her.” It all made sense.
   “Well,” Mary said, with a faint wry smile, “let’s say I’m attempting to.” She stroked his arm. Barefoot, still in her sunsuit, she moved slowly closer and closer to him.
   Frightened, he backed away from her. Picking up the dead wug-plant he numbly carried it to the apt’s disposal chute and dropped the brittle, dry remains in. They vanished at once.
   “And now,” Mary said busily, “we’re going to visit the Museum of Modern Art in New York and then, if we have time, the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C. They’ve asked me to keep you busy so you don’t start brooding.”
   “But I am brooding,” Milt said as he watched her change from her sunsuit to a gray wool knit dress. Nothing can stop that, he said to himself. And you know it now. And as each reconstruct engineer finishes his area it’s going to happen again. I’m just the first.
   At least I’m not alone, he realized. And felt somewhat better.
   “How do I look?” Mary asked as she put on lipstick before the bedroom mirror.
   “Fine,” he said listlessly, and wondered if Mary would meet each reconstruct engineer in turn, become the mistress of each. Not only is she not what she seems, he thought, but I don’t even get to keep her.
   It seemed a gratuitous loss, easily avoided.
   He was, he realized, beginning to like her. Mary was alive; that much was real. Terran or not. At least they had not lost the war to shadows; they had lost to authentic living organisms. He felt somewhat cheered.
   “Ready for the Museum of Modern Art?” Mary said briskly, with a smile.

   Later, at the Smithsonian, after he had viewed the Spirit of St. Louis and the Wright brothers’ incredibly ancient plane—it appeared to be at least a million years old—he caught sight of an exhibit which he had been anticipating.
   Saying nothing to Mary—she was absorbed in studying a case of semiprecious stones in their natural uncut state—he slipped off and, a moment later, stood before a glass-walled section entitled


PROX MILITARY OF 2014

   Three Prox soldiers stood frozen, their dark muzzles stained and grimy, side arms ready, in a makeshift shelter composed of the remains of one of their transports. A bloody Prox flag hung drably. This was a defeated enclave of the enemy; these three creatures were about to surrender or be killed.
   A group of Terran visitors stood before the exhibit, gawking. Milt Biskle said to the man nearest him, “Convincing, isn’t it?”
   “Sure is,” the man, middle-aged, with glasses and gray hair, agreed. “Were you in the war?” he asked Milt, glancing at him.
   “I’m in reconstruct,” Milt said. “Yellow Engineer.”
   “Oh.” The man nodded, impressed. “Boy, these Proxmen look scary. You’d almost expect them to step out of that exhibit and fight us to the death.” He grinned. “They put up a good fight before they gave in, those Proxmen; you have to give ‘em credit for that.”
   Beside him the man’s gray, taut wife said, “Those guns of theirs make me shiver. It’s too realistic.” Disapproving, she walked on.
   “You’re right,” Milt Biskle said. “They do look frighteningly real, because of course they are.” There was no point in creating an illusion of this sort because the genuine thing lay immediately at hand, readily available. Milt swung himself under the guard rail, reached the transparent glass of the exhibit, raised his foot and smashed the glass; it burst and rained down with a furious racket of shivering fragments.
   As Mary came running, Milt snatched a rifle from one of the frozen Proxmen in the exhibit and turned it toward her.
   She halted, breathing rapidly, eyeing him but saying nothing.
   “I am willing to work for you,” Milt said to her, holding the rifle expertly. “After all, if my own race no longer exists I can hardly reconstruct a colony world for them; even I can see that. But I want to know the truth. Show it to me and I’ll go on with my job.”
   Mary said, “No, Milt, if you knew the truth you wouldn’t go on. You’d turn that gun on yourself.” She sounded calm, even compassionate, but her eyes were bright and enlarged, wary.
   “Then I’ll kill you,” he said. And, after that, himself.
   “Wait.” She pondered. “Milt—this is difficult. You know absolutely nothing and yet look how miserable you are. How do you expect to feel when you can see your planet as it is? It’s almost too much for me and I’m—” She hesitated.
   “Say it.”
   “I’m just a—” she choked out the word—“a visitor.”
   “But I am right,” he said. “Say it. Admit it.”
   “You’re right, Milt,” she sighed.
   Two uniformed museum guards appeared, holding pistols. “You okay, Miss Ableseth?”
   “For the present,” Mary said. She did not take her eyes off Milt and the rifle which he held. “Just wait,” she instructed the guards.
   “Yes ma’am.” The guards waited. No one moved.
   Milt said, “Did any Terran women survive?”
   After a pause, Mary said, “No, Milt. But we Proxmen are within the same genus, as you well know. We can interbreed. Doesn’t that make you feel better?”
   “Sure,” he said. “A lot better.” And he did feel like turning the rifle on himself now, without waiting. It was all he could do to resist the impulse. So he had been right; that thing had not been Fay, there at Field Three on Mars. “Listen,” he said to Mary Ableseth, “I want to go back to Mars again. I came here to learn something. I learned it, now I want to go back. Maybe I’ll talk to Dr. DeWinter again, maybe he can help me. Any objection to that?”
   “No.” She seemed to understand how he felt. “After all, you did all your work there. You have a right to return. But eventually you have to begin here on Terra. We can wait a year or so, perhaps even two. But eventually Mars will be filled up and we’ll need the room. And it’s going to be so much harder here… as you’ll discover.” She tried to smile but failed; he saw the effort. “I’m sorry, Milt.”
   “So am I,” Milt Biskle said. “Hell, I was sorry when that wug-plant died. I knew the truth then. It wasn’t just a guess.”
   “You’ll be interested to know that your fellow reconstruct engineer Red, Cleveland Andre, addressed the meeting in your place. And passed your intimations on to them all, along with his own. They voted to send an official delegate here to Terra to investigate; he’s on his way now.”
   “I’m interested,” Milt said. “But it doesn’t really matter. It hardly changes things.” He put down the rifle. “Can I go back to Mars now?” He felt tired. “Tell Dr. DeWinter I’m coming.” Tell him, he thought, to have every psychiatric technique in his repertory ready for me, because it will take a lot. “What about Earth’s animals?” he asked. “Did any forms at all survive? How about the dog and the cat?”
   Mary glanced at the museum guards; a flicker of communication passed silently between them and then Mary said, “Maybe it’s all right after all.”
   “What’s all right?” Milt Biskle said.
   “For you to see. Just for a moment. You seem to be standing up to it better than we had expected. In our opinion you are entitled to that.” She added, “Yes, Milt, the dog and cat survived; they live here among the ruins. Come along and look.”
   He followed after her, thinking to himself, Wasn’t she right the first time? Do I really want to look? Can I stand up to what exists in actuality—what they’ve felt the need of keeping from me up until now?
   At the exit ramp of the museum Mary halted and said, “Go on outside, Milt. I’ll stay here. I’ll be waiting for you when you come back in.”
   Haltingly, he descended the ramp.
   And saw.
   It was, of course, as she had said, ruins. The city had been decapitated, leveled three feet above ground-level; the buildings had become hollow squares, without contents, like some infinite arrangements of useless, ancient courtyards. He could not believe that what he saw was new; it seemed to him as if these abandoned remnants had always been there, exactly as they were now. And—how long would they remain this way?
   To the right an elaborate but small-scale mechanical system had plopped itself down to a debris-filled street. As he watched, it extended a host of pseudopodia which burrowed inquisitively into the nearby foundations. The foundations, steel and cement, were abruptly pulverized; the bare ground, exposed, lay naked and dark brown, seared over from the atomic heat generated by the repair autonomic rig—a construct, Milt Biskle thought, not much different from those I employ on Mars. At least to some meager extent the rig had the task of clearing away the old. He knew from his own reconstruct work on Mars that it would be followed, probably within minutes, by an equally elaborate mechanism which would lay the groundwork for the new structures to come.
   And, standing off to one side in the otherwise deserted street, watching this limited clearing-work in progress, two gray, thin figures could be made out. Two hawk-nosed Proxmen with their pale, natural hair arranged in high coils, their earlobes elongated with heavy weights.
   The victors, he thought to himself. Experiencing the satisfaction of this spectacle, witnessing the last artifacts of the defeated race being obliterated. Some day a purely Prox city will rise up here: Prox architecture, streets of the odd, wide Prox pattern, the uniform box-like buildings with their many subsurface levels. And citizens such as these will be treading the ramps, accepting the high-speed runnels in their daily routines. And what, he thought, about the Terran dogs and cats which now inhabit these ruins, as Mary said? Will even they disappear? Probably not entirely. There will be room for them, perhaps in museums and zoos, as oddities to be gaped at. Survivals of an ecology which no longer obtained. Or even mattered.
   And yet—Mary was right. The Proxmen were within the same genus. Even if they did not interbreed with the remaining Terrans the species as he had known it would go on. And they would interbreed, he thought. His own relationship with Mary was a harbinger. As individuals they were not so far apart. The results might even be good.
   The results, he thought as he turned away and started back into the museum, may be a race not quite Prox and not quite Terran; something that is genuinely new may come from the melding. At least we can hope so.
   Terra would be rebuilt. He had seen slight but real work in progress with his own eyes. Perhaps the Proxmen lacked the skill that he and his fellow reconstruct engineers possessed… but now that Mars was virtually done they could begin here. It was not absolutely hopeless. Not quite.
   Walking up to Mary he said hoarsely, “Do me a favor. Get me a cat I can take back to Mars with me. I’ve always liked cats. Especially the orange ones with stripes.”
   One of the museum guards, after a glance at his companion, said, “We can arrange that, Mr. Biskle. We can get a—cub, is that the word?”
   “Kitten, I think,” Mary corrected.

   On the trip back to Mars, Milt Biskle sat with the box containing the orange kitten on his lap, working out his plans. In fifteen minutes the ship would land on Mars and Dr. DeWinter—or the thing that posed as Dr. DeWinter anyhow—would be waiting to meet him. And it would be too late. From where he sat he could see the emergency escape hatch with its red warning light. His plans had become focussed around the hatch. It was not ideal but it would serve.
   In the box the orange kitten reached up a paw and batted at Milt’s hand. He felt the sharp, tiny claws rake across his hand and he absently disengaged his flesh, retreating from the probing reach of the animal. You wouldn’t have liked Mars anyhow, he thought, and rose to his feet.
   Carrying the box he strode swiftly toward the emergency hatch. Before the stewardess could reach him he had thrown open the hatch. He stepped forward and the hatch locked behind him. For an instant he was within the cramped unit, and then he began to twist open the heavy outer door.
   “Mr. Biskle!” the stewardess’s voice came, muffled by the door behind him. He heard her fumbling to reach him, opening the door and groping to catch hold of him.
   As he twisted open the outer door the kitten within the box under his arm snarled.
   You, too? Milt Biskle thought, and paused.
   Death, the emptiness and utter lack of warmth of ‘tween space, seeped around him, filtering past the partly opened outer door. He smelled it and something within him, as in the kitten, retreated by instinct. He paused, holding the box, not trying to push the outer door any farther open, and in that moment the stewardess grabbed him.
   “Mr. Biskle,” she said with a half-sob, “are you out of your mind? Good God, what are you doing?” She managed to tug the outer door shut, screw the emergency section back into shut position.
   “You know exactly what I’m doing,” Milt Biskle said as he allowed her to propel him back into the ship and to his seat. And don’t think you stopped me, he said to himself. Because it wasn’t you. I could have gone ahead and done it. But I decided not to.
   He wondered why.

   Later, at Field Three on Mars, Dr. DeWinter met him as he had expected.
   The two of them walked to the parked ‘copter and DeWinter in a worried tone of voice said, “I’ve just been informed that during the trip—”
   “That’s right. I attempted suicide. But I changed my mind. Maybe you know why. You’re the psychologist, the authority as to what goes on inside us.” He entered the ‘copter, being careful not to bang the box containing the Terran kitten.
   “You’re going to go ahead and stake your landparcel with Fay?” Dr. DeWinter asked presently as the ‘copter flew above green, wet fields of high protein wheat. “Even though—you know?”
   “Yes.” He nodded. After all, there was nothing else for him, as far as he could make out.
   “You Terrans.” DeWinter shook his head. “Admirable.” Now he noticed the box on Milt Biskle’s lap. “What’s that you have there? A creature from Terra?” He eyed it suspiciously; obviously to him it was a manifestation of an alien form of life. “A rather peculiar-looking organism.”
   “It’s going to keep me company,” Milt Biskle said. “While I go on with my work, either building up my private parcel or—” Or helping you Proxmen with Terra, he thought.
   “Is that what was called a ‘rattlesnake’? I detect the sound of its rattles.” Dr. DeWinter edged away.
   “It’s purring.” Milt Biskle stroked the kitten as the autonomic circuit of the ‘copter guided it across the dully red Martian sky. Contact with the one familiar life-form, he realized, will keep me sane. It will make it possible for me to go on. He felt grateful. My race may have been defeated and destroyed, but not all Terran creatures have perished. When we reconstruct Terra maybe we can induce the authorities to allow us to set up game preserves. We’ll make that part of our task, he told himself, and again he patted the kitten. At least we can hope for that much.
   Next to him, Dr. DeWinter was also deep in thought. He appreciated the intricate workmanship, by engineers stationed on the third planet, which had gone into the simulacrum resting in the box on Milt Biskle’s lap. The technical achievement was impressive, even to him, and he saw clearly—as Milt Biskle of course did not. This artifact, accepted by the Terran as an authentic organism from his familiar past, would provide a pivot by which the man would hang onto his psychic balance.
   But what about the other reconstruct engineers? What would carry each of them through and past the moment of discovery as each completed his work and had to—whether he liked it or not—awake?

   It would vary from Terran to Terran. A dog for one, a more elaborate simulacrum, possibly that of a nubile human female, for another. In any case each would be provided with an “exception” to the true state. One essential surviving entity, selected out of what had in fact totally vanished. Research into the past of each engineer would provide the clue, as it had in Biskle’s instance; the cat-simulacrum had been finished weeks before his abrupt, panic-stricken trip home to Terra. For instance, in Andre’s case a parrot-simulacrum was already under construction. It would be done by the time he made his trip home.
   “I call him Thunder,” Milt Biskle explained.
   “Good name,” Dr. DeWinter—as he titled himself these days—said. And thought, A shame we could not have shown him the real situation of Terra. Actually it’s quite interesting that he accepted what he saw, because on some level he must realize that nothing survives a war of the kind we conducted. Obviously he desperately wanted to believe that a remnant, even though no more than rubble, endures. But it’s typical of the Terran mind to fasten onto phantoms. That might help explain their defeat in the conflict; they were simply not realists.
   “This cat,” Milt Biskle said, “is going to be a mighty hunter of Martian sneak-mice.”
   “Right,” Dr. DeWinter agreed, and thought, As long as its batteries don’t run down. He, too, patted the kitten.
   A switch closed and the kitten purred louder.

Retreat Syndrome

   Peace Officer Caleb Myers picked up the fast-moving surface vehicle on his radarscope, saw at once that its operator had managed to remove the governor; the vehicle, at one-sixty miles per hour, had exceeded its legal capacity. Hence, he knew, the operator came from the Blue Class, engineers and technicians capable of tinkering with their wheels. Arrest, therefore, would be a tricky matter.
   By radio Myers contacted a police vessel ten miles north along the freeway. “Shoot its power supply out as it passes you,” he suggested to his brother officer. “It’s going too fast to block, right?”
   At 3:10 A.M. the vehicle was stopped; powerless, it had coasted to a halt on the freeway shoulder. Officer Myers pressed buttons, flew leisurely north until he spotted the helpless wheel, plus the red-lit police wheel making its way through heavy traffic toward it. He landed at the exact instant that his compatriot arrived on the scene.
   Together, warily, they walked to the stalled wheel, gravel crunching under their boots.
   In the wheel sat a slim man wearing a white shirt and tie; he stared straight ahead with a dazed expression, making no move to greet the two gray-clad officers with their laser rifles, anti-pellet bubbles protecting their bodies from thigh to cranium. Myers opened the door of the wheel and glanced in, while his fellow officer stood with rifle in hand, just in case this was another come-on; five men from the local office, San Francisco, had been killed this week alone.
   “You know,” Myers said to the silent driver, “that it’s a mandatory two-year suspension of license if you tamper with your wheel’s speed governor. Was it worth it?”
   After a pause the driver turned his head and said, “I’m sick.”
   “Psychically? Or physically?” Myers touched the emergency button at his throat, making contact with line 3, to San Francisco General Hospital; he could have an ambulance here in five minutes, if necessary.
   The driver said huskily, “Everything seemed unreal to me. I thought if I drove fast enough I could reach some place where it’s—solid.” He put his hand gropingly against the dashboard of his wheel, as if not really believing the heavily-padded surface was there.
   “Let me look in your throat, sir,” Myers said, and shone his flashlight in the driver’s face. He turned the jaw upward, peered down past well-cared-for teeth as the man reflexively opened his mouth.
   “See it?” his fellow officer asked.
   “Yes.” He had caught the glint. The anti-carcinoma unit, installed in the throat; like most non-Terrans this man was cancer phobic. Probably he had spent most of his life in a colony world, breathing pure air, the artificial atmosphere installed by autonomic reconstruct equipment prior to human habitation. So the phobia was easy to understand.
   “I have a full-time doctor.” The driver reached now into his pocket, brought out his wallet; from it he extracted a card. His hand shook as he passed the card to Myers. “Specialist in psychosomatic medicine, in San Jose. Any way you could take me there?”
   “You’re not sick,” Myers said. “You just haven’t fully adjusted to Earth, to this gravity and atmosphere and milieu factors. It’s three-fifteen in the morning; this doctor—Hagopian or whatever his name is—can’t see you now.” He studied the card. It informed him:


   This man is under medical care and should any bizarre behavior be exhibited obtain medical help at once.


   “Earth doctors,” his fellow officer said, “don’t see patients after hours; you’ll have to learn that, Mr.—” He held out his hand. “Let me see your operator’s license, please.”
   The entire wallet was reflexively passed to him.
   “Go home,” Myers said to the man. His name, according to the license, was John Cupertino. “You have a wife? Maybe she can pick you up; we’ll take you into the city… better leave your wheel here and not try to drive any more tonight. About your speed—”
   Cupertino said, “I’m not used to an arbitrary maximum. Ganymede has no traffic problem; we travel in the two and two-fifties.” His voice had an oddly flat quality. Myers thought at once of drugs, in particular of thalamic stimulants; Cupertino was hag-ridden with impatience. That might explain his removal of the official speed regulator, a rather easy removal job for a man accustomed to machinery. And yet—
   There was more. From twenty years’ experience Myers intuited it.
   Reaching out he opened the glove compartment, flashed his light in. Letters, an AAA book of approved motels…
   “You don’t really believe you’re on Earth, do you, Mr. Cupertino?” Myers said. He studied the man’s face; it was devoid of affect. “You’re another one of those bippity-bop addicts who thinks this is a drug-induced guilt-fantasy… and you’re really home on Ganymede, sitting in the living room of your twenty-room demesne—surrounded no doubt by your autonomic servants, right?” He laughed sharply, then turned to his fellow officer. “It grows wild on Ganymede,” he explained. “The stuff. Frohedadrine, the extract’s called. They grind up the dried stalks, make a mash of it, boil it, drain it, filter it, and then roll it up and smoke it. And when they’re all done—”
   “I’ve never taken Frohedadrine,” John Cupertino said remotely; he stared straight ahead. “I know I’m on Earth. But there’s something wrong with me. Look.” Reaching out, he put his hand through the heavily-padded dashboard; Officer Myers saw the hand disappear up to the wrist. “You see? It’s all insubstantial around me, like shadows. Both of you; I can banish you by just removing my attention from you. I think I can, anyhow. But—I don’t want to!” His voice grated with anguish. “I want you to be real; I want all of this to be real, including Dr. Hagopian.”
   Officer Myers switched his throat-transmitter to line 2 and said, “Put me through to a Dr. Hagopian in San Jose. This is an emergency; never mind his answering service.”
   The line clicked as the circuit was established.
   Glancing at his fellow officer Myers said, “You saw it. You saw him put his hand through the dashboard. Maybe he can banish us.” He did not particularly feel like testing it out; he felt confused and he wished now that he had let Cupertino speed on along the freeway, to oblivion if necessary. To wherever he wanted.
   “I know why all this is,” Cupertino said, half to himself. He got out cigarettes, lit up; his hand was less shaky now. “It’s because of the death of Carol, my wife.”
   Neither officer contradicted him; they kept quiet and waited for the call to Dr. Hagopian to be put through.

   His trousers on over his pajamas, and wearing a jacket buttoned to keep him warm in the night chill, Gottlieb Hagopian met his patient Mr. Cupertino at his otherwise closed-up office in downtown San Jose. Dr. Hagopian switched on lights, then the heat, arranged a chair, wondered how he looked to his patient with his hair sticking in all directions.
   “Sorry to get you up,” Cupertino said, but he did not sound sorry; he seemed perfectly wide-awake, here at four in the morning. He sat smoking with his legs crossed, and Dr. Hagopian, cursing and groaning to himself in futile complaint, went to the back room to plug in the coffeemaker: at least he could have that.
   “The police officers,” Hagopian said, “thought you might have taken some stimulants, by your behavior. We know better.” Cupertino was, as he well knew, always this way; the man was slightly manic.
   “I never should have killed Carol,” Cupertino said. “It’s never been the same since then.”
   “You miss her right now? Yesterday when you saw me you said—”
   “That was in broad daylight; I always feel confident when the sun’s up. By the way—I’ve retained an attorney. Name’s Phil Wolfson.”
   “Why?” No litigation was pending against Cupertino; they both knew that.
   “I need professional advice. In addition to yours. I’m not criticizing you, doctor; don’t take it as an insult. But there’re aspects to my situation which are more legal than medical. Conscience is an interesting phenomenon; it lies partly in the psychological realm, partly—”
   “Coffee?”
   “Lord no. It sets the vagus nerve off for four hours.”
   Dr. Hagopian said, “Did you tell the police officers about Carol? About your killing her?”
   “I just said that she was dead; I was careful.”
   “You weren’t careful when you drove at one-sixty. There was a case in the Chronicle today—it happened on the Bayshore Freeway—where the State Highway Patrol went ahead and disintegrated a car that was going one-fifty; and it was legal. Public safety, the lives of—”
   “They warned it,” Cupertino pointed out. He did not seem perturbed; in fact he had become even more tranquil. “It refused to stop. A drunk.”
   Dr. Hagopian said, “You realize, of course, that Carol is still alive. That in fact she’s living here on Earth, in Los Angeles.”
   “Of course.” Cupertino nodded irritably. Why did Hagopian have to belabor the obvious? They had discussed it countless times, and no doubt the psychiatrist was going to ask him the old query once again: how could you have killed her when you know she’s alive? He felt weary and irritable; the session with Hagopian was getting him nowhere.
   Taking a pad of paper Dr. Hagopian wrote swiftly, then tore off the sheet and held it toward Cupertino.
   “A prescription?” Cupertino accepted it warily.
   “No. An address.”
   Glancing at it Cupertino saw that it was an address in South Pasadena. No doubt it was Carol’s address; he glared at it in wrath.
   “I’m going to try this,” Dr. Hagopian said. “I want you to go there and see her face to face. Then we’ll—”
   “Tell the board of directors of Six-planet Educational Enterprises to see her, not me,” Cupertino said, handing the piece of paper back. “They’re responsible for the entire tragedy; because of them I had to do it. And you know that, so don’t look at me that way. It was their plan that had to be kept secret; isn’t that so?”
   Dr. Hagopian sighed. “At four in the morning everything seems confused. The whole world seems ominous. I’m aware that you were employed by Six-planet at the time, on Ganymede. But the moral responsibility—” He broke off. “This is difficult to say, Mr. Cupertino. You pulled the trigger on the laser beam, so you have to take final moral responsibility.”
   “Carol was going to tell the local homeopapes that there was about to be an uprising to free Ganymede, and the bourgeois authority on Ganymede, consisting in the main of Six-planet, was involved; I told her that we couldn’t afford to have her say anything. She did it for petty, spiteful motives, for hatred of me; nothing to do with the actual issues involved. Like all women she was motivated by personal vanity and wounded pride.”
   “Go to that address in South Pasadena,” Dr. Hagopian urged. “See Carol. Convince yourself that you never killed her, that what happened on Ganymede that day three years ago was a—” He gestured, trying to find the right words.
   “Yes, doctor,” Cupertino said cuttingly. “Just what was it? Because that day—or rather that night—I got Carol right above the eyes with that laser beam, right in the frontal lobe; she was absolutely unmistakably dead before I left the conapt and got out of there, got to the spaceport and found an interplan ship to take me to Earth.” He waited; it was going to be hard on Hagopian, finding the right words; it would take quite some time.
   After a pause, Hagopian admitted, “Yes, your memory is detailed; it’s all in my file and I see no use in your repeating it—I frankly find it unpleasant at this hour of the morning. I don’t know why the memory is there; I know it’s false because I’ve met your wife, talked to her, carried on a correspondence with her; all subsequent to the date, on Ganymede, at which you remember killing her. I know that much, at least.”
   Cupertino said, “Give me one good reason for looking her up.” He made a motion to tear the slip of paper in half.
   “One?” Dr. Hagopian pondered. He looked gray and tired. “Yes, I can give you a good reason, but probably it’s one you’ll reject.”
   “Try me.”
   Dr. Hagopian said, “Carol was present that night on Ganymede, the night you recall killing her. Maybe she can tell you how you obtained the false memory; she implied in correspondence with me that she knows something about it.” He eyed Cupertino. “That’s all she would tell me.”
   “I’ll go,” Cupertino said. And walked swiftly to the door of Dr. Hagopian’s office. Strange, he thought, to obtain knowledge about a person’s death from that person. But Hagopian was right; Carol was the only other person who was present that night… he should have realized long ago that eventually he’d have to look her up.
   It was a crisis in his logic that he did not enjoy facing.

   At six in the morning he stood at Carol Holt Cupertino’s door. Many rings of the bell were required until at last the door of the small, single-unit dwelling opened; Carol, wearing a blue, pellucid nylon nightgown and white furry slippers, stood sleepily facing him. A cat hurried out past her.
   “Remember me?” Cupertino said, stepping aside for the cat.
   “Oh God.” She brushed the tumble of blonde hair back from her eyes, nodded. “What time is it?” Gray, cold light filled the almost deserted street; Carol shivered, folded her arms. “How come you’re up so early? You never used to be out of bed before eight.”
   “I haven’t gone to bed yet.” He stepped past her, entered the dark living room with its drawn shades. “How about some coffee?”
   “Sure.” Listlessly she made her way to the kitchen, pressed the HOT COFFEE button on the stove; first one, then a second cup appeared, giving off fragrant steam. “Cream for me,” she said, “cream and sugar for you. You’re more infantile.” She handed him his cup; the smell of her—warmth and softness and sleep—mixed with that of the coffee.
   Cupertino said, “You haven’t gotten a day older and it’s been well over three years.” In fact she was even more slender, more supple.
   Seating herself at the kitchen table, her arms still modestly folded, Carol said, “Is that suspicious?” Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes bright.
   “No. A compliment.” He, too, seated himself. “Hagopian sent me here; he decided I should see you. Evidently—”
   “Yes,” Carol said, “I’ve seen him. I was in Northern California several times on business; I stopped by… he had asked me to in a letter. I like him. In fact you should be about cured by now.”
   “ ‘Cured’?” He shrugged. “I feel I am. Except—”
   “Except that you still have your idée fixe. Your basic, delusional, fixed idea that no amount of psychoanalysis will help. Right?”
   Cupertino said, “If you mean my recollection of killing you, yes; I still have it—I know it happened. Dr. Hagopian thought you could tell me something about it; after all, as he pointed out—”
   “Yes,” she agreed, “but is it really worth going over this with you? It’s so tedious, and my God, it’s only six A.M. Couldn’t I go back to bed and then sometime later get together with you, maybe in the evening? No?” she sighed. “Okay. Well, you tried to kill me. You did have a laser beam. It was at our conapt in New Detroit-G, on Ganymede, on March 12, 2014.”
   “Why did I try to kill you?”
   “You know.” Her tone was bitter; her breasts pulsed with resentment.
   “Yes.” In all his thirty-five years he had never made another mistake as serious. In their divorce litigation his wife’s knowledge of the impending revolt had given her the dominant position; she had been able to dictate settlement terms to him precisely as she wished. At last the financial components had proved unbearable and he had gone to the conapt which they had shared—by then he had moved out, gotten a small conapt of his own at the other end of the city—and had told her simply and truthfully that he could not meet her demands. And so the threat by Carol to go to the homeopapes, the news-gathering extensors of the New York Times and Daily News which operated on Ganymede.
   “You got out your little laser beam,” Carol was saying, “and you sat with it, fooling with it, not saying much. But you got your message over to me; either I accepted an unfair settlement which—”
   “Did I fire the beam?”
   “Yes.”
   “And it hit you?”
   Carol said, “You missed and I ran out of the conapt and down the hall to the elevator. I got downstairs to the sergeant at arms’ room on floor one and called the police from there. They came. They found you still in the conapt.” Her tone was withering. “You were crying.”
   “Christ,” Cupertino said. Neither of them spoke for a time, then; they both drank their coffee. Across from him his wife’s pale hand shook and her cup clinked against its saucer.
   “Naturally,” Carol said matter of factly, “I went ahead with the divorce litigation. Under the circumstances—”
   “Dr. Hagopian thought you might know why I remember killing you that night. He said you hinted at it in a letter.”
   Her blue eyes glittered. “That night you had no false memory; you knew you had failed. Amboynton, the district attorney, gave you a choice between accepting mandatory psychiatric help or having formal charges filed of attempted first-degree murder; you took the former—naturally—and so you’ve been seeing Dr. Hagopian. The false memory—I can tell you exactly when that set in. You visited your employer, Six-planet Educational Enterprises; you saw their psychologist, a Dr. Edgar Green, attached to their personnel department. That was shortly before you left Ganymede and came here to Terra.” Rising she went to fill her cup; it was empty. “I presume Dr. Green saw to the implanting of the false memory of your having killed me.”
   Cupertino said, “But why?”
   “They knew you had told me of the plans for the uprising. You were supposed to commit suicide from remorse and grief, but instead you booked passage to Terra, as you had agreed with Amboynton. As a matter of fact you did attempt suicide during the trip… but you must remember this.”
   “Go on and say it.” He had no memory of a suicide attempt.
   “I’ll show you the clipping from the homeopape; naturally I kept it.” Carol left the kitchen; her voice came from the bedroom. “Out of misguided sentimentality. ‘Passenger on interplan ship seized as—’ ” Her voice broke off and there was silence.
   Sipping his coffee Cupertino sat waiting, knowing that she would find no such newspaper clipping. Because there had been no such attempt.
   Carol returned to the kitchen, a puzzled expression on her face. “I can’t locate it. But I know it was in my copy of War and Peace, in volume one; I was using it as a bookmark.” She looked embarrassed.
   Cupertino said, “I’m not the only one who has a false memory. If that’s what it is.” He felt, for the first time in over three years, that he was at last making progress.
   But the direction of that progress was obscured. At least so far. “I don’t understand,” Carol said. “Something’s wrong.”
   While he waited in the kitchen, Carol, in the bedroom, dressed. At last she emerged, wearing a green sweater, skirt, heels; combing her hair she halted at the stove and pressed the buttons for toast and two soft-boiled eggs. It was now almost seven; the light in the street outside was no longer gray but a faint gold. And more traffic moved; he heard the reassuring sound of commercial vehicles and private commute wheels.
   “How did you manage to snare this single-unit dwelling?” he asked. “Isn’t it as impossible in the Los Angeles area as in the Bay area to get anything but a conapt in a high-rise?”
   “Through my employers.”
   “Who’re your employers?” He felt at once cautious and disturbed; obviously they had influence. His wife had gone up in the world.
   “Falling Star Associates.”
   He had never heard of them; puzzled, he said, “Do they operate beyond Terra?” Surely if they were interplan—
   “It’s a holding company. I’m a consultant to the chairman of the board; I do marketing research.” She added, “Your old employer, Six-planet Educational Enterprises, belongs to us; we own controlling stock. Not that it matters. It’s just a coincidence.”
   She ate breakfast, offering him nothing; evidently it did not even occur to her to. Moodily he watched the familiar dainty movements of her cutlery. She was still ennobled by petite bourgeois gentility; that had not changed. In fact she was more refined, more feminine, than ever.
   “I think,” Cupertino said, “that I understand this.”
   “Pardon?” She glanced up, her blue eyes fixed on him intently. “Understand what, Johnny?”
   Cupertino said, “About you. Your presence. You’re obviously quite real—as real as everything else. As real as the city of Pasadena, as this table—” He rapped with brusque force on the plastic surface of the kitchen table. “As real as Dr. Hagopian or the two police who stopped me earlier this morning.” He added, “But how real is that? I think we have the central question there. It would explain my sensation of passing my hands through matter, through the dashboard of my wheel, as I did. That very unpleasant sensation that nothing around me was substantial, that I inhabited a world of shadows.” Staring at him Carol suddenly laughed. Then continued eating. “Possibly,” Cupertino said, “I’m in a prison on Ganymede, or in a psychiatric hospital there. Because of my criminal act. And I’ve begun, during these last years since your death, to inhabit a fantasy world.”
   “Oh God,” Carol said and shook her head. “I don’t know whether to laugh or feel sorry; it’s just too—” She gestured. “Too pathetic. I really feel sorry for you, Johnny. Rather than give up your delusional idea you’d actually prefer to believe that all Terra is a product of your mind, everyone and everything. Listen—don’t you agree it’d be more economical to give up the fixed idea? Just abandon the one idea that you killed me—” The phone rang.
   “Pardon me.” Carol hastily wiped her mouth, rose to go and answer it. Cupertino remained where he was, gloomily playing with a flake of toast which had fallen from her plate; the butter on it stained his finger and he licked it away, reflexively, then realized that he was gnawingly hungry; it was time for his own breakfast and he went to the stove to press buttons for himself, in Carol’s absence. Presently he had his own meal, bacon and scrambled eggs, toast and hot coffee, before him.
   But how can I live? he asked himself.—Gain substance, if this is a delusional world?
   I must be eating a genuine meal, he decided. Provided by the hospital or prison; a meal exists and I am actually consuming it—a room exists, walls and a floor… but not this room. Not these walls nor this floor.
   And—people exist. But not this woman. Not Carol Holt Cupertino. Someone else. An impersonal jailer or attendant. And a doctor. Perhaps, he decided, Dr. Hagopian.
   That much is so, Cupertino said to himself. Dr. Hagopian is really my psychiatrist.
   Carol returned to the kitchen, reseated herself at her now cold plate. “You talk to him. It’s Hagopian.”
   At once he went to the phone.
   On the small vidscreen Dr. Hagopian’s image looked taut and drawn. “I see you got there, John. Well? What took place?”
   Cupertino said, “Where are we, Hagopian?”
   Frowning, the psychiatrist said, “I don’t—“
   “We’re both on Ganymede, aren’t we?”
   Hagopian said, “I’m in San Jose; you’re in Los Angeles.”
   “I think I know how to test my theory,” Cupertino said. “I’m going to discontinue treatment with you; if I’m a prisoner on Ganymede I won’t be able to, but if I’m a free citizen on Terra as you maintain—”
   “You’re on Terra,” Hagopian said, “but you’re not a free citizen. Because of your attempt on your wife’s life you’re obliged to accept regular psychotherapy through me. You know that. What did Carol tell you? Could she shed any light on the events of that night?”
   “I would say so,” Cupertino said. “I learned that she’s employed by the parent company of Six-planet Educational Enterprises; that alone makes my trip down here worthwhile. I must have found out about her, that she was employed by Six-planet to ride herd over me.”
   “P-pardon?” Hagopian blinked.
   “A watchdog. To see that I remained loyal; they must have feared I was going to leak details of the planned uprising to the Terran authorities. So they assigned Carol to watch me. I told her the plans and to them that proved I was unreliable. So Carol probably received instructions to kill me; she probably made an attempt and failed, and everyone connected with it was punished by the Terran authorities. Carol escaped because she wasn’t officially listed as an employee of Six-planet.”
   “Wait,” Dr. Hagopian said. “It does sound somewhat plausible. But—” He raised his hand. “Mr. Cupertino, the uprising was successful; it’s a matter of historic fact. Three years ago Ganymede, Io and Callisto simultaneously threw off Terra and became self-governing, independent moons. Every child in school beyond the third grade knows that; it was the so-called Tri-Lunar War of 2014. You and I have never discussed it but I assumed you were aware of it as—” He gestured. “Well, as any other historic reality.”
   Turning from the telephone to Carol, John Cupertino said, “Is that so?”
   “Of course,” Carol said. “Is that part of your delusional system, too, that your little revolt failed?” She smiled. “You worked eight years for it, for one of the major economic cartels masterminding and financing it, and then for some occult reason you choose to ignore its success. I really pity you, Johnny; it’s too bad.”
   “There must be a reason,” Cupertino said. “Why I don’t know that. Why they decided to keep me from knowing that.” Bewildered, he reached out his hand…
   His hand, trembling, passed into the vidphone screen and disappeared. He drew it back at once; his hand reappeared. But he had seen it go. He had perceived and understood.
   The illusion was good—but not quite good enough. It simply was not perfect; it had its limitations.
   “Dr. Hagopian,” he said to the miniature image on the vidscreen, “I don’t think I’ll continue seeing you. As of this morning you’re fired. Bill me at my home, and thank you very much.” He reached to cut the connection.
   “You can’t,” Hagopian said instantly. “As I said, it’s mandatory. You must face it, Cupertino; otherwise you’ll have to go up before the court once more, and I know you don’t want to do that. Please believe me; it would be bad for you.”
   Cupertino cut the connection and the screen died.
   “He’s right, you know,” Carol said, from the kitchen.
   “He’s lying,” Cupertino said. And, slowly, walked back to seat himself across from her and resume eating his own breakfast.

   When he returned to his own conapt in Berkeley he put in a long distance vidcall to Dr Edgar Green at Six-planet Educational Enterprises on Ganymede. Within half an hour he had his party.
   “Do you remember me, Dr. Green?” he asked as he faced the image. To him the rather plump, middle-aged face opposite him was unfamiliar; he did not believe he had ever seen the man before in his life. However, at least one fundamental reality-configuration had borne the test: there was a Dr. Edgar Green in Six-planet’s personnel department; Carol had been telling the truth to that extent.
   “I have seen you before,” Dr. Green said, “but I’m sorry to say that the name does not come to mind, sir.”
   “John Cupertino. Now of Terra. Formerly of Ganymede. I was involved in a rather sensational piece of litigation slightly over three years ago, somewhat before Ganymede’s revolt. I was accused of murdering my wife, Carol. Does that help you, doctor?”
   “Hmm,” Dr. Green said, frowning. He raised an eyebrow. “Were you acquitted, Mr. Cupertino?”
   Hesitating, Cupertino said, “I—currently am under psychiatric care, here in the Bay area of California. If that’s any help.”
   “I presume you’re saying that you were declared legally insane. And therefore could not stand trail.”
   Cupertino, cautiously, nodded.
   “It may be,” Dr. Green said, “that I talked to you. Very dimly it rings a bell. But I see so many people… were you employed here?”
   “Yes,” Cupertino said.
   “What specifically, did you want from me, Mr. Cupertino? Obviously you want something; you’ve placed a rather expensive long distance call. I suggest for practical purposes—your pocketbook in particular—you get to the point.”
   “I’d like you to forward my case history,” Cupertino said. “To me, not to my psychiatrist. Can that be arranged?”
   “You want it for what purpose, Mr. Cupertino? For securing employment?”
   Cupertino, taking a deep breath, said, “No, doctor. So that I can be absolutely certain what psychiatric techniques were used in my case. By you and by members of your medical staff, those working under you. I have reason to believe I underwent major corrective therapy with you. Am I entitled to know that, doctor? It would seem to me that I am.” He waited, thinking, I have about one chance in a thousand of prying anything of worth out of this man. But it was worth the try.
   “ ‘Corrective therapy’? You must be confused, Mr. Cupertino; we do only aptitude testing, profile analysis—we don’t do therapy, here. Our concern is merely to analyze the job-applicant in order to—”
   “Dr. Green,” Cupertino said, “were you personally involved in the revolt of three years ago?”
   Green shrugged. “We all were. Everyone on Ganymede was filled with patriotism.” His voice was bland.
   “To protect that revolt,” Cupertino said, “would you have implanted a delusional idea in my mind for the purpose of—”
   “I’m sorry,” Green interrupted. “It’s obvious that you’re psychotic. There’s no point in wasting your money on this call; I’m surprised that they permitted you access to an outside vidline.”
   “But such a idea can be implanted,” Cupertino persisted. “It is possible, by current psychiatric technique. You admit that.”
   Dr. Green sighed. “Yes, Mr. Cupertino. It’s been possible ever since the mid-twentieth century; such techniques were initially developed by the Pavlov Institute in Moscow as early as 1940, perfected by the time of the Korean War. A man can be made to believe anything.”
   “Then Carol could be right.” He did not know if he was disappointed or elated. It would mean, he realized, that he was not a murderer; that was the cardinal point. Carol was alive, and his experience with Terra, with its people, cities and objects, was genuine. And yet—“If I came to Ganymede,” he said suddenly, “could I see my file? Obviously if I’m well enough to make the trip I’m not a psychotic under mandatory psychiatric care. I may be sick, doctor, but I’m not that sick.” He waited; it was a slim chance, but worth trying.
   “Well,” Dr. Green said, pondering, “there is no company rule which precludes an employee—or ex-employee—examining his personnel file; I suppose I could open it to you. However, I’d prefer to check with your psychiatrist first. Would you give me his name, please? And if he agrees I’ll save you a trip; I’ll have it put on the vidwires and in your hands by tonight, your time.”
   He gave Dr. Green the name of his psychiatrist, Dr. Hagopian. And then hung up. What would Hagopian say? An interesting question and one he could not answer; he had no idea which way Hagopian would jump.
   But by nightfall he would know; that much was certain.
   He had an intuition that Hagopian would agree. But for the wrong reasons.
   However, that did not matter; Hagopian’s motives were not important—all that he cared about was the file. Getting his hands on it, reading it and finding out if Carol was right.
   It was two hours later—actually an incredibly long time—that it came to him, all at once, that Six-planet Educational Enterprises could, with no difficulty whatsoever, tamper with the file, omit the pertinent information. Transmit to Earth a spurious, worthless document.
   Then what did he do next?
   It was a good question. And one—for the moment—which he could not answer.

   That evening the file from Six-planet Educational Enterprises’ main personnel offices on Ganymede was delivered by Western Union Messenger to his conapt. He tipped the messenger, seated himself in his living room and opened the file.
   It took him only a few moments to certify the fact which he had suspected: the file contained no references to any implantation of a delusional idea. Either the file had been reconstructed or Carol was mistaken. Mistaken—or lying. In any case the file told him nothing.
   He phoned the University of California, and, after being switched from station to station, wound up with someone who seemed to know what he was talking about. “I want an analysis,” Cupertino explained, “of a written document. To find out how recently it was transcribed. This is a Western Union wire-copy so you’ll have to go on word anachronisms alone. I want to find out if the material was developed three years ago or more recently. Do you think you can analyze for so slight a factor?”
   “There’s been very little word-change in the past three years,” the university philologist said. “But we can try. How soon do you have to have the document back?”
   “As soon as possible,” Cupertino said.
   He called for a building messenger to take the file to the university, and then he took time to ponder another element in the situation.
   If his experience of Terra was delusional, the moment at which his perceptions most closely approximated reality occurred during his sessions with Dr. Hagopian. Hence if he were ever to break through the delusional system and perceive actual reality it would most likely take place then; his maximum efforts should be directed at that time. Because one fact seemed clearly established: he really was seeing Dr. Hagopian.
   He went to the phone and started to dial Hagopian’s number. Last night, after the arrest, Hagopian had helped him; it was unusually soon to be seeing the doctor again, but he dialed. In view of his analysis of the situation it seemed justified; he could afford the cost… And then something came to him.
   The arrest. All at once he remembered what the policeman had said; he had accused Cupertino of being a user of the Ganymedean drug Frohedadrine. And for a good reason: he showed the symptoms.
   Perhaps that was the modus operandi by which the delusional system was maintained; he was being given Frohedadrine in small regular doses, perhaps in his food.
   But wasn’t that a paranoid—in other words psychotic—concept?
   And yet paranoid or not, it made sense.
   What he needed was a blood fraction test. The presence of the drug would register in such a test; all he had to do was show up at the clinic of his firm in Oakland, ask for the test on the grounds that he had a suspected toxemia. And within an hour the test would be completed.
   And, if he was on Frohedadrine, it would prove that he was correct; he was still on Ganymede, not on Terra. And all that he experienced—or seemed to experience—a delusion, with the possible exception of his regular, mandatory visits to the psychiatrist.
   Obviously he should have the blood fraction test made—at once. And yet he shrank from it. Why? Now he had the means by which to make a possible absolute analysis, and yet he held back.
   Did he want to know the truth?
   Certainly he had to have the test made; he forgot temporarily the notion of seeing Dr. Hagopian, went to the bathroom to shave, then put on a clean shirt and tie and left the conapt, starting toward his parked wheel; in fifteen minutes he would be at his employer’s clinic.
   His employer. He halted, his hand touching the doorhandle of his wheel, feeling foolish.
   They had slipped up somehow in their presentation of his delusional system. Because he did not know where he worked. A major segment of the system simply was not there.
   Returning to his conapt he dialed Dr. Hagopian.
   Rather sourly Dr. Hagopian said, “Good evening, John. I see you’re back in your own conapt; you didn’t stay in Los Angeles long.”
   Cupertino said huskily, “Doctor, I don’t know where I work. Obviously something’s gone wrong; I must have known formerly—up until today, in fact. Haven’t I been going to work four days a week like everyone else?”
   “Of course,” Hagopian said, unruffled. “You’re employed by an Oakland firm, Triplan Industries, Incorporated, on San Pablo Avenue near Twenty-first Street. Look up the exact address in your phone book. But—I’d say go to bed and rest; you were up all last night and it seems obvious that you’re suffering a fatigue reaction.”
   “Suppose,” Cupertino said, “greater and greater sections of the delusional system begin to slip. It won’t be very pleasant for me.” The one missing element terrified him; it was as if a piece of himself had dissolved. Not to know where he worked—in an instant he was set apart from all other humans, thoroughly isolated. And how much else could he forget? Perhaps it was the fatigue; Hagopian might be right. He was, after all, too old to stay up all night; it was not as it had been a decade ago when such things were physically possible for both him and Carol.
   He wanted, he realized, to hang onto the delusional system; he did not wish to see it decompose around him. A person was his world; without it he did not exist.
   “Doctor,” he said, “may I see you this evening?”
   “But you just saw me,” Dr. Hagopian pointed out. “There’s no reason for another appointment so soon. Wait until later in the week. And in the meantime—”
   “I think I understand how the delusional system is maintained,” Cupertino said. “Through daily doses of Frohedadrine, administered orally, in my food. Perhaps by going to Los Angeles I missed a dose; that might explain why a segment of the system collapsed. Or else as you say it’s fatigue; in any case this proves that I’m correct: this is a delusional system, and I don’t need either the blood fraction test or the University of California to confirm it. Carol is dead—and you know it. You’re my psychiatrist on Ganymede and I’m in custody, have been now for three years. Isn’t that actually the case?” He waited, but Hagopian did not answer; the doctor’s face remained impassive. “I never was in Los Angeles,” Cupertino said. “In fact I’m probably confined to a relatively small area; I have no freedom of motion as it would appear. And I didn’t see Carol this morning, did I?”
   Hagopian said slowly, “What do you mean, ‘blood fraction test’? What gave you the idea of asking for that?” He smiled faintly. “If this is a delusional system, John, the blood fraction test would be illusory, too. So how could it help you?”
   He had not thought of that; stunned, he remained silent, unable to answer.
   “And that file which you asked Dr. Green for,” Hagopian said. “Which you received and then transferred to the University of California for analysis; that would be delusional, too. So how can the result of their tests—”
   Cupertino said, “There’s no way you could know of that, doctor. You conceivably might know that I talked to Dr. Green, asked for and received the file; Green might have talked to you. But not my request for analysis by the university; you couldn’t possibly know that. I’m sorry, doctor, but by a contradiction of internal logic this structure has proved itself unreal. You know too much about me. And I think I know what final, absolute test I can apply to confirm my reasoning.”
   “What test?” Hagopian’s tone was cold.
   Cupertino said, “Go back to Los Angeles. And kill Carol once more.”
   “Good God, how—”
   “A woman who has been dead for three years can’t die again,” Cupertino said. “Obviously it’ll prove impossible to kill her.” He started to break the phone connection.
   “Wait,” Hagopian said rapidly. “Look, Cupertino; I’ve got to contact the police now—you’ve forced me to. I can’t let you go down there and murder that woman for the—” He broke off. “Make a second try, I mean, on her life. All right, Cupertino; I’ll admit several things which have been concealed from you. To an extent you’re right; you are on Ganymede, not on Terra.”
   “I see,” Cupertino said, and did not break the circuit.
   “But Carol is real,” Dr. Hagopian continued. He was perspiring, now; obviously afraid that Cupertino would ring off he said almost stammeringly, “She’s as real as you or I. You tried to kill her and failed; she informed the homeopapes about the intended revolt—and because of that the revolt was not completely successful. We here on Ganymede are surrounded by a cordon of Terran military ships; we’re cut off from the rest of the Sol System, living on emergency rations and being pushed back, but still holding out.”
   “Why my delusional system?” He felt cold fright rise up inside him; unable to stifle it he felt it enter his chest, invade his heart. “Who imposed it on me?”
   “No one imposed it on you. It was a self-induced retreat syndrome due to your sense of guilt. Because, Cupertino, it was your fault that the revolt was detected; your telling Carol was the crucial factor—and you recognize it. You tried suicide and that failed, so instead you withdrew psychologically into this fantasy world.”
   “If Carol told the Terran authorities she wouldn’t now be free to—”
   “That’s right. Your wife is in prison and that’s where you visited her, at our prison in New Detroit-G, here on Ganymede. Frankly, I don’t know what the effect of my telling you this will have on your fantasy world; it may cause it to further disintegrate, in fact it may even restore you to a clear perception of the terribly difficult situation which we Ganys face vis-à-vis the Terran military establishment. I’ve envied you, Cupertino, during these last three years; you haven’t had to face the harsh realities we’ve had to. Now—“ He shrugged. “We’ll see.”
   After a pause Cupertino said, “Thanks for telling me.”
   “Don’t thank me; I did it to keep you from becoming agitated to the point of violence. You’re my patient and I have to think of your welfare. No punishment for you is now or ever was intended; the extent of your mental illness, your retreat from reality, fully demonstrated your remorse at the results of your stupidity.” Hagopian looked haggard and gray. “In any case leave Carol alone; it’s not your job to exact vengeance. Look it up in the Bible if you don’t believe me. Anyhow she’s being punished, and will continue to be as long as she’s physically in our hands.”
   Cupertino broke the circuit.
   Do I believe him? he asked himself.
   He was not certain. Carol, he thought. So you doomed our cause, out of petty, domestic spite. Out of mere female bitterness, because you were angry at your husband; you doomed an entire moon to three years of losing, hateful war.
   Going to the dresser in his bedroom he got out his laser beam; it had remained hidden there, in a Kleenex box, the entire three years since he had left Ganymede and come to Terra.
   But now, he said to himself, it’s time to use this.
   Going to the phone he dialed for a cab; this time he would travel to Los Angeles by public rocket express, rather than by his own wheel.
   He wanted to reach Carol as soon as humanly possible.
   You got away from me once, he said as he walked rapidly to the door of his conapt. But not this time. Not twice.
   Ten minutes later he was aboard the rocket express, on his way to Los Angeles and Carol.

   Before John Cupertino lay the Los Angeles Times; once more he leafed through it, puzzled, still unable to find the article. Why wasn’t it here? he asked himself. A murder committed, an attractive, sexy woman shot to death… he had walked into Carol’s place of work, found her at her desk, killed her in front of her fellow employees, then turned and, unhindered, walked back out; everyone had been too frozen with fear and surprise to interfere with him.
   And yet it was not in the pape. The homeopape made absolutely no mention of it.
   “You’re looking in vain,” Dr. Hagopian said, from behind his desk.
   “It has to be here,” Cupertino said doggedly. “A capital crime like that—what’s the matter?” He pushed the homeopape aside, bewildered. It made no sense; it defied obvious logic.
   “First,” Dr. Hagopian said wearily, “the laser beam did not exist; that was a delusion. Second, we did not permit you to visit your wife again because we knew you planned violence—you had made that perfectly clear. You never saw her, never killed her, and the homeopape before you is not the Los Angeles Times; it’s the New Detroit-G Star… which is limited to four pages because of the pulp-paper shortage here on Ganymede.”
   Cupertino stared at him.
   “That’s right,” Dr. Hagopian said, nodding. “It’s happened again, John; you have a delusional memory of killing her twice, now. And each event is as unreal as the other. You poor creature—you’re evidently doomed to try again and again, and each time fail. As much as our leaders hate Carol Holt Cupertino and deplore and regret what she did to us—” He gestured. “We have to protect her; it’s only just. Her sentence is being carried out; she’ll be imprisoned for twenty-two more years or until Terra manages to defeat us and releases her. No doubt if they get hold of her they’ll make her into a heroine; she’ll be in every Terran-controlled homeopape in the Sol System.”
   “You’d let them get her alive?” Cupertino said, presently.
   “Do you think we should kill her before they take her?” Dr. Hagopian scowled at him. “We’re not barbarians, John; we don’t commit crimes of vengeance. She’s suffered three years of imprisonment already; she’s being punished sufficiently.” He added, “And so are you as well. I wonder which of you is suffering the more.”
   “I know I killed her,” Cupertino persisted. “I took a cab to her place of employment, Falling Star Associates, which controls Six-planet Educational Enterprises, in San Francisco; her office was on the sixth floor.” He remembered the trip up in the elevator, even the hat which the other passenger, a middle-aged woman, had worn. He remembered the slender, red-haired receptionist who had contacted Carol by means of her desk intercom; he remembered passing through the busy inner offices, suddenly finding himself face to face with Carol. She had risen, stood behind her desk, seeing the laser beam which he had brought out; understanding had flashed across her features and she had tried to run, to get away… but he had killed her anyhow, as she reached the far door, her hand clutching for the knob.
   “I assure you,” Dr. Hagopian said. “Carol is very much alive.” He turned to the phone on his desk, dialed. “Here, I’ll call her, get her on the line; you can talk to her.”
   Numbly, Cupertino waited until at last the image on the vidscreen formed. It was Carol.
   “Hi,” she said, recognizing him.
   Haltingly he said, “Hi.”
   “How are you feeling?” Carol asked.
   “Okay.” Awkwardly he said, “And you?”
   “I’m fine,” Carol said. “Just a little sleepy because of being woken up so early this morning. By you.”
   He rang off, then. “All right,” he said to Dr. Hagopian. “I’m convinced.” It was obviously so; his wife was alive and untouched; in fact she evidently had no knowledge even of an attempt by him on her life this time. He had not even come to her place of business; Hagopian was telling the truth.
   Place of business? Her prison cell, rather. If he was to believe Hagopian. And evidently he had to.
   Rising, Cupertino said, “Am I free to go? I’d like to get back to my conapt; I’m tired too. I’d like to get some sleep tonight.”
   “It’s amazing you’re able to function at all,” Hagopian said, “after having had no sleep for almost fifty hours. By all means go home and go to bed. We’ll talk later.” He smiled encouragingly.
   Hunched with fatigue John Cupertino left Dr. Hagopian’s office; he stood outside on the sidewalk, hands in his pockets, shivering in the night cold, and then he got unsteadily into his parked wheel.
   “Home,” he instructed it.
   The wheel turned smoothly away from the curb, to join traffic.
   I could try once more, Cupertino realized suddenly. Why not? And this time I might be successful. Just because I’ve failed twice—that doesn’t mean I’m doomed
   always to fail.
   To the wheel he said, “Head toward Los Angeles.”
   The autonomic circuit of the wheel clicked as it contacted the main route to Los Angeles, U.S. Highway 99.
   She’ll be asleep when I get there, Cupertino realized. Probably because of that she’ll be confused enough to let me in. And then—
   Perhaps now the revolt will succeed.
   There seemed to him to be a gap, a weak point, in his logic. But he could not quite put his finger on it; he was too tired. Leaning back he tried to make himself comfortable against the seat of the wheel; he let the autonomic circuit drive and shut his eyes in an attempt to catch some much-needed sleep. In a few hours he would be in South Pasadena, at Carol’s one-unit dwelling. Perhaps after he killed her he could sleep; he would deserve it, then.
   By tomorrow morning, he thought, if all goes well she’ll be dead. And then he thought once more about the homeopape, and wondered why there had been no mention of the crime in its columns. Strange, he thought. I wonder why not. The wheel, at one hundred and sixty miles an hour—after all, he had removed the speed governor—hurtled toward what John Cupertino believed to be Los Angeles and his sleeping wife.

A Tehran Odyssey

   Orion Stroud, Chairman of the West Marin school board, turned up the Coleman gasoline lantern so that the utility school room in the white glare became clearly lit, and all four members of the board could make out the new teacher.
   “I’ll put a few questions to him,” Stroud said to the others. “First, this is Mr. Barnes and he comes from Oregon. He tells me he’s a specialist in science and natural edibles. Right, Mr. Barnes?”
   The new teacher, a short, young-looking man wearing a khaki shirt and work pants, nervously cleared his throat and said, “Yes, I am familiar with chemicals and plants and animal-life, especially whatever is found out in the woods such as berries and mushrooms.”
   “We’ve recently had bad luck with mushrooms,” Mrs. Tallman said, the elderly lady who had been a member of the board even in the old days before the Emergency. “It’s been our tendency to leave them alone, now.”
   “I’ve looked through your pastures and woods in this area,” Mr. Barnes said, “and I’ve seen some fine examples of nutritious mushrooms; you can supplement your diet without taking any chances. I even know their Latin names.”
   The board stirred and murmured. That had impressed them, Stroud realized, that about the Latin names.
   “Why did you leave Oregon?” George Keller, the principal, asked bluntly.
   The new teacher faced him and said, “Politics.”
   “Yours or theirs?”
   “Theirs,” Barnes said. “I have no politics. I teach children how to make ink and soap and how to cut the tails from lambs even if the lambs are almost grown. And I’ve got my own books.” He picked up a book from the small stack beside him, showing the board in what good shape they were. “I’ll tell you something else: you have the means here in this part of California to make paper. Did you know that?”
   Mrs. Tallman said, “We knew it, Mr. Barnes, but we don’t know quite how. It has to do with bark of trees, doesn’t it?”
   On the new teacher’s face appeared a mysterious expression, one of concealment. Stroud knew that Mrs. Tallman was correct, but the teacher did not want to let her know; he wanted to keep the knowledge to himself because the West Marin trustees had not yet hired him. His knowledge was not yet available—he gave nothing free. And that of course was proper; Stroud recognized that, respected Barnes for it. Only a fool gave something away for nothing.
   Mrs. Tallman was scrutinizing the new teacher’s stack of books. “I see that you have Carl Jung’s Psychological Types. Is one of your sciences psychology? How nice, to acquire a teacher for our school who can tell edible mushrooms and also is an authority on Freud and Jung.”
   “There’s no value in such stuff,” Stroud said, with irritation. “We need useful science, not academic hot air.” He felt personally let down; Mr. Barnes had not told him about that, about his interest in mere theory. “Psychology doesn’t dig any septic tanks.”
   “I think we’re ready to vote on Mr. Barnes,” Miss Costigan, the youngest member of the board, said. “I for one am in favor of accepting him, at least on a provisional basis. Does anyone feel otherwise?”
   Mrs. Tallman said to Mr. Barnes, “We killed our last teacher, you know. That’s why we need another. That’s why we sent Mr. Stroud out looking up and down the Coast until he found you.”
   “We killed him because he lied to us,” Miss Costigan said. “You see, his real reason for coming here had nothing to do with teaching. He was looking for some man named Jack Tree, who it turned out lived in this area. Our Mrs. Keller, a respected member of this community and the wife of George Keller, here, our principal, is a dear friend of Mr. Tree, and she brought the news of the situation to us and of course we acted, legally and officially, through our chief of police, Mr. Earl Colvig.”
   “I see,” Mr. Barnes said woodenly, listening without interrupting.
   Speaking up, Orion Stroud said, “The jury which sentenced and executed him was composed of myself, Cas Stone, who’s the largest land-owner in West Marin, Mrs. Tallman and Mrs. June Raub. I say ‘executed’ but you understand that the act—when he was shot, the shooting itself—was done by Earl. That’s Earl’s job, after the West Marin Official Jury has made its decision.” He eyed the new teacher.
   “It sounds,” Mr. Barnes said, “very formal and law-abiding to me. Just what I’d be interested in.” He smiled at them all, and the tension in the room relaxed; people murmured.
   A cigarette—one of Andrew Gill’s special deluxe Gold Labels—was lit up; its good, rich smell wafted to them all, cheering them and making them feel more friendly to the new teacher and to one another.
   Seeing the cigarette, Mr. Barnes got a strange expression on his face and he said in a husky voice, “You’ve got tobacco up here? After seven years?” He clearly could not believe it.
   Smiling in amusement, Mrs. Tallman said, “We don’t have any tobacco, Mr. Barnes, because of course no one does. But we do have a tobacco expert. He fashions these special deluxe Gold Labels for us out of choice, aged vegetable and herbal materials the nature of which remains—and justly so—his individual secret.”
   “How much do they cost?” Mr. Barnes asked.
   “In terms of State of California boodle money,” Orion Stroud said, “about a hundred dollars apiece. In terms of pre-war silver, a nickel apiece.”
   “I have a nickel,” Mr. Barnes said, reaching shakily into his coat pocket; he fished about, brought up a nickel and held it toward the smoker, who was George Keller, leaning back in his chair with his legs crossed to make himself comfortable.
   “Sorry,” George said, “I don’t want to sell. You better go directly to Mr. Gill; you can find him during the day at his shop. It’s here in Point Reyes Station but of course he gets all around; he has a horse-drawn VW minibus.”
   “I’ll make a note of that,” Mr. Barnes said. He put his nickel away, very carefully.

   “Do you intend to board the ferry?” the Oakland official asked. “If not, I wish you’d move your car, because it’s blocking the gate.”
   “Sure,” Stuart McConchie said. He got back into his car, flicked the reins that made Edward Prince of Wales, his horse, begin pulling. Edward pulled, and the engineless 1975 Pontiac passed back through the gate and out onto the pier.
   The Bay, choppy and blue, lay on both sides, and Stuart watched through the windshield as a gull swooped to seize some edible from the pilings. Fishing lines, too… men catching their evening meals. Several of the men wore the remains of Army uniforms. Veterans who perhaps lived beneath the pier. Stuart drove on.
   If only he could afford to telephone San Francisco. But the underwater cable was out again, and the lines had to go all the way down to San Jose and up the other side, along the peninsula, and by the time the call reached San Francisco it would cost him five dollars in silver money. So, except for a rich person, that was out of the question; he had to wait the two hours until the ferry left… but could he stand to wait that long?
   He was after something important.
   He had heard a rumor that a huge Soviet guided missile had been found, one which had failed to go off; it lay buried in the ground near Belmont, and a farmer had discovered it while plowing. The farmer was selling it off in the form of individual parts, of which there were thousands in the guidance system alone. The farmer wanted a penny a part, your choice. And Stuart, in his line of work, needed many such parts. But so did lots of other people. So it was first come, first serve; unless he got across the Bay to Belmont fairly soon, it would be too late.
   He sold (another man made them) small electronic traps. Vermin had mutated and now could avoid or repel the ordinary passive trap, no matter how complicated. The cats in particular had become different, and Mr. Hardy built a superior cat trap, even better than his rat and dog traps. The vermin were dangerous; they killed and ate small children almost at will—or at least so one heard. And of course wherever possible they themselves were caught and eaten in return. Dogs in particular, if stuffed with rice, were considered delicious; the little local Berkeley newspaper which came out once a week had recipes for dog soup, dog stew, even dog pudding.
   Meditating about dog pudding made Stuart realize how hungry he was. It seemed to him that he had not stopped being hungry since the first bomb fell; his last really adequate meal had been the lunch at Fred’s Fine Foods that day he had run into Hoppy Harrington the phocomelus doing his phony vision act. And where, he wondered suddenly, was that little phoce now? He hadn’t thought of him in years.
   Now, of course, one saw many phoces, and almost all of them on their ‘mobiles, exactly as Hoppy had been, placed dead center each in his own little universe, like an armless, legless god. The sight still repelled Stuart, but there were so many repellent sights these days…
   On the surface of the Bay to his right a legless veteran propelled himself out onto the water aboard a raft, rowing himself toward a pile of debris that was undoubtedly a sunken ship. On the hulk a number of fishing lines could be seen; they belonged to the veteran and he was in the process of checking them. Watching the raft go, Stuart wondered if it could reach the San Francisco side. He could offer the man fifty cents for a one-way trip; why not? Stuart got out of his car and walked to the edge of the pier.
   “Hey,” he yelled, “come here.” From his pocket he got a penny; he tossed it down onto the pier and the veteran saw it, heard it. At once he spun the raft about and came paddling rapidly back, straining to make speed, his face streaked with perspiration. He grinned up friendlily at Stuart, cupping his ear.
   “Fish?” he called. “I don’t have any yet today, but maybe later on how about a small shark? Guaranteed safe.” He held up the battered Geiger counter which he had connected to his waist by a length of rope—in case it fell from the raft or someone tried to steal it, Stuart realized.
   “No,” Stuart said, squatting down at the edge of the pier. “I want to get over to San Francisco; I’ll pay you a quarter for one way.”
   “But I got to leave my lines to do that,” the veteran said, his smile fading. “I got to collect them all or somebody’d steal them while I was gone.”
   “Thirty-five cents,” Stuart said.
   In the end they agreed, at a price of forty cents. Stuart locked the legs of Edward Prince of Wales together so no one could steal him, and presently he was out on the Bay, bobbing up and down aboard the veteran’s raft, being rowed across to San Francisco.
   “What field are you in?” the veteran asked him. “You’re not a tax collector, are you?” He eyed him calmly.
   “Naw,” Stuart said. “I’m a small trap man.”
   “Listen, my friend,” the veteran said, “I got a pet rat lives under the pilings with me? He’s smart; he can play the flute. I’m not putting you under an illusion, it’s true. I made a little wooden flute and he plays it, through his nose… it’s practically an Asiatic nose-flute like they have in India. Well, I did have him, but the other day he got run over. I saw the whole thing happen; I couldn’t go get him or nothing. He ran across the pier to get something, maybe a piece of cloth… he has this bed I made him but he gets—I mean he got—cold all the time because they mutated, this particular line, they lost their hair.”
   “I’ve seen those,” Stuart said, thinking how well the hairless brown rat evaded even Mr. Hardy’s electronic vermin traps. “Actually I believe what you said,” he said. “I know rats pretty well. But they’re nothing compared to those little striped gray-brown tabby cats… I’ll bet you had to make the flute, he couldn’t construct it himself.”
   “True,” the veteran said. “But he was an artist. You ought to have heard him play; I used to get a crowd at night, after we were finished with the fishing. I tried to teach him the Bach ‘Chaconne in D.’ ”
   “I caught one of those tabby cats once,” Stuart said, “that I kept for a month until it escaped. It could make little sharp-pointed things out of tin can lids. It bent them or something; I never did see how it did it, but they were wicked.”
   The veteran, rowing, said, “What’s it like south of San Francisco these days? I can’t come up on land.” He indicated the lower part of his body. “I stay on the raft. There’s a little trap door, when I have to go to the bathroom. What I need is to find a dead phoce sometime and get his cart. They call them phocomobiles.”
   “I knew the first phoce,” Stuart said, “before the war. He was brilliant; he could repair anything.” He lit up an imitation-tobacco cigarette; the veteran gaped at it longingly. “South of San Francisco it’s as you know all flat. So it got hit bad and it’s just farmland now. Nobody ever rebuilt there, and it was mostly those little tract houses so they left hardly any decent basements. They grow peas and corn and beans down there. What I’m going to see is a big rocket a farmer just found; I need relays and tubes and other electronic gear for Mr. Hardy’s traps.” He paused. “You ought to have a Hardy trap.”
   “Why? I live on fish, and why should I hate rats? I like them.”
   “I like them, too,” Stuart said, “but you have to be practical; you have to look to the future. Someday America may be taken over by rats if we aren’t wary. We owe it to our country to catch and kill rats, especially the wiser ones that would be natural leaders.”
   The veteran glared at him. “Sales talk, that’s all.”
   “I’m sincere.”
   “That’s what I have against salesmen; they believe their own lies. You know that the best rats can ever do, in a million years of evolution, is maybe be useful as servants to we human beings. They could carry messages maybe and do a little manual work. But dangerous—” He shook his head. “How much does one of your traps sell for?”
   “Ten dollars silver. No State boodle accepted; Mr. Hardy is an old man and you know how old people are, he doesn’t consider boodle to be real money.” Stuart laughed.
   “Let me tell you about a rat I once saw that did a heroic deed,” the veteran began, but Stuart cut him off.
   “I have my own opinions,” Stuart said. “There’s no use arguing about it.” They were both silent, then. Stuart enjoyed the sight of the Bay on all sides; the veteran rowed. It was a nice day, and as they bobbed along toward San Francisco, Stuart thought of the electronic parts he might be bringing back to Mr. Hardy and the factory on San Pablo Avenue, near the ruins of what had once been the west end of the University of California.
   “What kind of cigarette is that?” the veteran asked presently.
   “This?” Stuart examined the butt; he was almost ready to put it out and stick it away in the metal box in his pocket. The box was full of butts, which would be opened and made into new cigarettes by Tom Grandi, the local cigarette man in South Berkeley. “This,” he said, “is imported. From Marin County. It’s a deluxe Gold Label made by—” He paused for effect. “I guess I don’t have to tell you.”
   “By Andrew Gill,” the veteran said. “Say, I’d like to buy a whole one from you; I’ll pay you a dime.”
   “They’re worth fifteen cents apiece,” Stuart said. “They have to come all the way around Black Point and Sears’ Point and along the Lucas Valley Road, from beyond Nicasio somewhere.”
   “I had one of those Andrew Gill deluxe special Gold Labels one time,” the veteran said. “It fell out of the pocket of some man who was getting on the ferry; I fished it out of the water and dried it.” All of a sudden Stuart handed him the butt.
   “For God’s sake,” the veteran said, not looking directly at him. He rowed rapidly, his lips moving, his eyelids blinking.
   “I got more,” Stuart said.
   The veteran said, “I’ll tell you what else you got; you got real humanity, mister, and that’s rare today. Very rare.”
   Stuart nodded. He felt the truth of the veteran’s words.

   The little Keller girl sat shivering on the examination table, and Doctor Stockstill, surveying her thin, pale body, thought of a joke which he had seen on television years ago, long before the war. A Spanish ventriloquist, speaking through a chicken… the chicken had produced an egg.
   “My son,” the chicken said, meaning the egg.
   “Are you sure?” the ventriloquist asked. “It’s not your daughter?”
   And the chicken, with dignity, answered, “I know my business.”
   This child was Bonny Keller’s daughter, but, Doctor Stockstill thought, it isn’t George Keller’s daughter; I am certain of that… I know my business. Who had Bonny been having an affair with, seven years ago? The child must have been conceived very close to the day the war began. But she had not been conceived before the bombs fell; that was clear. Perhaps it was on that very day, he ruminated. Just like Bonny, to rush out while the bombs were falling, while the world was coming to an end, to have a brief, frenzied spasm of love with someone, perhaps with some man she did not even know, the first man she happened onto… and now this.
   The child smiled at him and he smiled back. Superficially, Edie Keller appeared normal; she did not seem to be a funny child. How he wished, God damn it, that he had an x-ray machine. Because—
   He said aloud, “Tell me more about your brother.”
   “Well,” Edie Keller said in her frail, soft voice, “I talk to my brother all the time and sometimes he answers for a while but more often he’s asleep. He sleeps almost all the time.”
   “Is he asleep now?”
   For a moment the child was silent. “No,” she answered.
   Rising to his feet and coming over to her, Doctor Stockstill said, “I want you to show me exactly where he is.”
   The child pointed to her left side, low down; near, he thought, the appendix. The pain was there. That had brought the child in; Bonny and George had become worried. They knew about the brother, but they assumed him to be imaginary, a pretend playmate which kept their little daughter company. He himself had assumed so at first; the chart did not mention a brother, and yet Edie talked about him. Bill was exactly the same age as she. Born, Edie had informed the doctor, at the same time as she, of course.
   “Why of course?” he had asked, as he began examining her—he had sent the parents into the other room because the child seemed reticent in front of them.
   Edie had answered in her calm, solemn way. “Because he’s my twin brother. How else could he be inside me?” And, like the Spanish ventriloquist’s chicken, she spoke with authority, with confidence; she, too, knew her business.
   In the seven years since the war Doctor Stockstill had examined many hundreds of funny people, many strange and exotic variants on the human life form which flourished now under a much more tolerant—although smokily veiled—sky. He could not be shocked. And yet, this—a child whose brother lived inside her body, down in the inguinal region. For seven years Bill Keller had dwelt inside there, and Doctor Stockstill, listening to the girl, believed her; he knew it was possible. It was not the first case of this kind. If he had his x-ray machine he would be able to see the tiny, wizened shape, probably no larger than a baby rabbit. In fact, with his hands he could feel the outline… he touched her side, carefully noting the firm cyst-like sack within. The head in a normal position, the body entirely within the abdominal cavity, limbs and all. Someday the girl would die and they would open her body, perform an autopsy; they would find a little wrinkled male figure, perhaps with a snowy beard and blind eyes… her brother, still no larger that a baby rabbit.
   Meanwhile, Bill slept mostly, but now and then he and his sister talked. What did Bill have to say? What possibly could he know?
   To the question, Edie had an answer. “Well, he doesn’t know very much. He doesn’t see anything but he thinks. And I tell him what’s going on so he doesn’t miss out.”
   “What are his interests?” Stockstill asked.
   Edie considered and said, “Well, he, uh, likes to hear about food.”
   “Food!” Stockstill said, fascinated.
   “Yes. He doesn’t eat, you know. He likes me to tell him over and over again what I had for dinner, because he does get it after a while… I think he does, anyhow. Wouldn’t he have to, to live?”
   “Yes,” Stockstill agreed.
   “He especially likes it if I have apples or oranges. And—he likes to hear stories. He always wants to hear about places, far-away especially like New York. I want to take him there someday, so he can see what it’s like. I mean, so I can see and then tell him.”
   “You take good care of him, don’t you?” Stockstill said, deeply touched. To the girl, it was normal; she had lived like this always—she did not know of any other existence.
   “I’m afraid,” she said suddenly, “that he might die someday.”
   “I don’t think he will,” Stockstill said. “What’s more likely to happen is that he’ll get larger. And that might pose a problem; it might be hard for your body to accommodate him.”
   “Would he be born, then?” Edie regarded him with large, dark eyes.
   “No,” Stockstill said. “He’s not located that way. He’d have to be removed—surgically. But he wouldn’t live. The only way he can live is as he is now, inside you.” Parasitically, he thought, not saying the word. “We’ll worry about that when the time comes, if it ever does.”
   Edie said, “I’m glad I have a brother; he keeps me from being lonely. Even when he’s asleep I can feel him there, I know he’s there. It’s like having a baby inside me; I can’t wheel him around in a baby carriage or anything like that, or dress him, but talking to him is a lot of fun. For instance, I get to tell him about Mildred.”
   “Mildred!” He was puzzled.
   “You know.” The child smiled at his ignorance. “The woman that keeps coming back to Philip. And spoils his life. We listen every night. The satellite.”
   “Of course.” It was Walt Dangerfield’s reading of the Maugham book, the disc jockey as he passed in his daily orbit above their heads. Eerie, Doctor Stockstill thought, this parasite dwelling within her body, in unchanging moisture and darkness, fed by her blood, hearing from her in some unfathomable fashion a second-hand account of a famous novel… it makes Bill Keller part of our culture. He leads his grotesque social existence, too… God knows what he makes of the story. Does he have fantasies about it, about our life? Does he dream about us?
   Bending, Doctor Stockstill kissed the girl on her forehead. “Okay,” he said. “You can go, now. I’ll talk to your mother and father for a minute; there’re some very old genuine pre-war magazines out in the waiting room that you can read.”
   When he opened the door, George and Bonny Keller rose to their feet, faces taut with anxiety.
   “Come in,” Stockstill said to them. And shut the door after them. He had already decided not to tell them the truth about their daughter… and, he thought, about their son. Better they did not know.

   When Stuart McConchie returned to the East Bay from his trip to the peninsula he found that someone—no doubt a group of veterans living under the pier—had killed and eaten his horse, Edward Prince of Wales. All that remained was the skeleton, legs and head, a heap worthless to him or to anyone else. He stood by it, pondering. Well, it had been a costly trip. And he had arrived too late anyhow; the farmer, at a penny apiece, had already disposed of the electronic parts of his Soviet missile.
   Mr. Hardy would supply another horse, no doubt, but he had been fond of Edward. And it was wrong to kill a horse for food because they were so vitally needed for other purposes; they were the mainstay of transportation, now that most of the wood had been consumed by the wood-burning cars and by people in cellars using it in the winter to keep warm. And horses were needed in the job of reconstruction—they were the main source of power, in the absence of electricity. The stupidity of killing Edward Prince of Wales maddened him; it was, he thought, like barbarism, the thing they all feared. It was anarchy, and right in the middle of the city; right in downtown Oakland, in broad day. It was what he would expect the Red Chinese to do.
   Now, on foot, he walked slowly toward San Pablo Avenue. The sun had begun to descend into the lavish, extensive sunset which they had become accustomed to seeing in the years since the Emergency. He scarcely noticed it. Maybe I ought to go into some other business, he said to himself. Small animal traps—it’s a living, but there’s no advancement possible in it. I mean, where can you rise to in a business like that?
   The loss of his horse had depressed him; he gazed down at the broken, grass-infested sidewalk as he picked his way along, past the rubble which had once been factories. From a burrow in a vacant lot something with eager eyes noted his passing; something, he surmised gloomily, that ought to be hanging by its hind legs minus its skin.
   These ruins, the smoky, flickering pallor of the sky… the eager eyes still following him as the creature calculated whether it could safely attack him. Bending, he picked up a hunk of concrete and chucked it at the burrow—a dense layer of organic and inorganic material packed tightly, glued in place by some sort of white slime. The creature had emulsified debris lying around, had reformed it into a usable paste. Must be a brilliant animal, he thought. But he did not care.
   I’ve evolved, too, he said to himself. My wits are much clearer than they formerly were; I’m a match for you any time. So give up.
   Evolved, he thought, but no better off then I was before the goddam Emergency; I sold TV sets then and now I sell electronic vermin traps. What is the difference? One’s as bad as the other. I’m going downhill, in fact.
   A whole day wasted. In two hours it would be dark and he would be going to sleep, down in the cat-pelt-lined basement room which Mr. Hardy rented him for a dollar in silver a month. Of course, he could light his fat lamp; he could burn it for a little while, read a book or part of a book—most of his library consisted of merely sections of books, the remaining portions having been destroyed or lost. Or he could visit old Mr. and Mrs. Hardy and sit in on the evening transmission from the satellite.
   After all, he had personally radioed a request to Dangerfield just the other day, from the transmitter out on the mudflats in West Richmond. He had asked for “Good Rockin’ Tonight,” an old-fashioned favorite which he remembered from his childhood. It was not known if Dangerfield had that tune in his miles of tapes, however, so perhaps he was waiting in vain. As he walked along he sang to himself:


Oh I heard the news:
There’s good rockin’ tonight.
Oh I heard the news!
There’s good rockin’ tonight!
Tonight I’ll be a mighty fine man,
I’ll hold my baby as tight as I can—


   It brought tears to his eyes to remember one of the old songs, from the world the way it was. All gone now, he said to himself. And what do we have instead, a rat that can play the nose flute, and not even that because the rat got run over.
   I’ll bet the rat couldn’t play that, he said to himself. Not in a million years. That’s practically sacred music. Out of our past, that no brilliant animal and no funny person can share. The past belongs only to us genuine human beings.
   While he was thinking that he arrived on San Pablo Avenue with its little shops open here and there, little shacks which sold everything from coat hangers to hay. One of them, not far off, was Hardy’s Homeostatic Vermin Traps, and he headed in that direction.

   As he entered, Mr. Hardy glanced up from his assembly table in the rear; he worked under the white light of an arc lamp, and all around him lay heaps of electronic parts scavenged from every region of Northern California. Many had come from the ruins out in Livermore; Mr. Hardy had connections with State Officials and they had permitted him to dig there in the restricted deposits.
   In former times Dean Hardy had been an engineer for an AM radio station; he was a slender, quiet-spoken elderly man who wore a sweater and necktie even now—and a tie was rare, in these times.
   “They ate my horse.” Stuart seated himself opposite Hardy.
   At once Ella Hardy, his employer’s wife, appeared from the living quarters in the rear; she had been fixing dinner. “You left him?”
   “Yes,” he admitted. “I thought he was safe out on the City of Oakland public ferry pier; there’s an official there who—”
   “It happens all the time,” Hardy said wearily. “The bastards. Somebody ought to drop a cyanide bomb under that pier; those war vets are down there by the hundreds. What about the car? You had to leave it.”
   “I’m sorry,” Stuart said.
   “Forget it,” Hardy said. “We have more horses out at our Orinda store. What about parts from the rocket?”
   “No luck,” Stuart said. “All gone when I got there. Except for this.” He held up a handful of transistors. “The farmer didn’t notice these; I picked them up for nothing. I don’t know if they’re any good, though.” Carrying them over to the assembly table he laid them down. “Not much for an all-day trip.” He felt more glum than ever.
   Without a word, Ella Hardy returned to the kitchen; the curtain closed after her.
   “You want to have some dinner with us?” Hardy said, shutting off his light and removing his glasses.
   “I don’t know,” Stuart said. “I feel strange.” He roamed about the shop. “Over on the other side of the Bay I saw something I’ve heard about but didn’t believe. A flying animal like a bat but not a bat. More like a weasel, very skinny and long, with a big head. They call them tommies because they’re always gliding up against windows and looking in, like peeping toms.”
   Hardy said, “It’s a squirrel.” He leaned back in his chair, loosened his necktie. “They evolved from the squirrels in Golden Gate Park. I once had a scheme for them… they could be useful—in theory, at least—as message carriers. They can glide or fly or whatever they do for almost a mile. But they’re too feral. I gave it up after catching one.” He held up his right hand. “Look at the scar, there on my thumb. That’s from a tom.”
   “This man I talked to said they taste good. Like old-time chicken. They sell them at stalls in downtown San Francisco; you see old ladies selling them cooked for a quarter apiece, still hot, very fresh.”
   “Don’t try one,” Hardy said. “Many of them are toxic. It has to do with their diet.”
   “Hardy,” Stuart said suddenly, “I want to get out of the city and out into the country.”
   His employer regarded him.
   “It’s too brutal here,” Stuart said.
   “It’s brutal everywhere.” He added, “And out in the country it’s hard to make a living.”
   “Do you sell any traps in the country?”
   “No,” Hardy said. “Vermin live in towns, where there’s ruins. You know that. Stuart, you’re a woolgatherer. The country is sterile; you’d miss the flow of ideas that you have here in the city. Nothing happens, they just farm and listen to the satellite.”
   “I’d like to take a line of traps out say around Napa and Sonoma,” Stuart persisted. “I could trade them for wine, maybe; they grow grapes up there, I understand, like they used to.”
   “But it doesn’t taste the same,” Hardy said. “The ground is too altered.” He shook his head. “Really awful. Foul.”
   “They drink it, though,” Stuart said. “I’ve seen it here in town, brought in on those old wood-burning trucks.”
   “People will drink anything they can get their hands on now.” Hardy raised his head and said thoughtfully, “You know who has liquor? I mean the genuine thing; you can’t tell if it’s pre-war that he’s dug up or new that he’s made.”
   “Nobody in the Bay Area.”
   “Andrew Gill, the tobacco expert. Oh, he doesn’t sell much. I’ve seen one bottle, a fifth of brandy. I had one single drink from it.” Hardy smiled at him crookedly, his lips twitching. “You would have liked it.”
   “How much does he want for it?”
   “More than you have to pay.”
   I wonder what sort of a man Andrew Gill is, Stuart said to himself. Big, maybe, with a beard, a vest… walking with a silver-headed cane; a giant of a man with wavy hair, imported monocle—I can picture him.
   Seeing the expression on Stuart’s face, Hardy leaned toward him. “I can tell you what else he sells. Girly photos. In artistic poses—you know.”
   “Aw Christ,” Stuart said, his imagination boggling; it was too much. “I don’t believe it.”
   “God’s truth. Genuine pre-war girly calendars, from as far back as 1950. They’re worth a fortune, of course. I’ve heard of a thousand silver dollars changing hands over a 1963 Playboy calendar.” Now Hardy had become pensive; he gazed off into space.
   “Where I worked when the bomb fell,” Stuart said, “at Modern TV Sales & Service, we had a lot of girly calendars downstairs in the repair department. They were all incinerated, naturally.” At least so he had always assumed. “Suppose a person were poking around in the ruins somewhere and he came onto an entire warehouse full of girly calendars. Can you imagine that?” His mind raced. “How much could he get? Millions! He could trade them for real estate; he could acquire a whole county!”
   “Right,” Hardy said, nodding.
   “I mean, he’d be rich forever. They make a few in the Orient, in Tokyo, but they’re no good.”
   “I’ve seen them,” Hardy agreed. “They’re crude. The knowledge of how to do it has declined, passed into oblivion; it’s an art that has died out. Maybe forever.”
   “Don’t you think it’s partly because there aren’t the girls any more who look like that?” Stuart said. “Everybody’s scrawny now and have no teeth; the girls most of them now have burn-scars from radiation and with no teeth what kind of a girly calendar does that make?”
   Shrewdly, Hardy said, “I think the girls exist. I don’t know where, maybe in Sweden or Norway, maybe in out-of-the-way places like the Solomon Islands. I’m convinced of it from what people coming in by ship say. Not in the U.S. or Europe or Russia or China, any of the places that were hit—I agree with you there.”
   “Could we find them?” Stuart said. “And go into the business?”
   After considering for a little while Hardy said, “There’s no film. There’re no chemicals to process it. Most good cameras have been destroyed or have disappeared. There’s no way you could get your calendars printed in quantity. If you did print them—”
   “But if someone could find a girl with no burns and good teeth, the way they had before the war—”
   “I’ll tell you,” Hardy said, “what would be a good business. I’ve thought about it many times.” He faced Stuart meditatively. “Sewing machine needles. You could name your own price; you could have anything.”
   Gesturing, Stuart got up and paced about the shop. “Listen, I’ve got my eye on the big time; I don’t want to mess around with selling any more—I’m fed up with it. I sold aluminum pots and pans and encyclopedias and TV sets and now these vermin traps. They’re good traps and people want them, but I just feel there must be something else for me. I don’t mean to insult you, but I want to grow. I have to; you either grow or you go stale, you die on the vine. The war set me back years, it set us all back. I’m just where I was ten years ago, and that’s not good enough.”
   Scratching his nose, Hardy murmured, “What did you have in mind?”
   “Maybe I could find a mutant potato that would feed everybody in the world.”
   “Just one potato?”
   “I mean a type of potato. Maybe I could become a plant breeder, like Luther Burbank. There must be millions of freak plants growing around out in the country, like there’s all these freak animals and funny people here in the city.”
   Hardy said, “Maybe you could locate an intelligent bean.”
   “I’m not joking about this,” Stuart said quietly.
   They faced each other, neither speaking.
   “It’s a service to humanity,” Hardy said at last, “to make homeostatic vermin traps that destroy mutated cats and dogs and rats and squirrels. I think you’re acting infantile. Maybe your horse being eaten while you were over in South San Francisco—”
   Entering the room, Ella Hardy said, “Dinner is ready, and I’d like to serve it while it’s hot. It’s baked cod-head and rice and it took me three hours standing in line down at Eastshore Freeway to get the cod-head.”
   The two men rose to their feet. “You’ll eat with us?” Hardy asked Stuart. At the thought of the baked fish head, Stuart’s mouth watered. He could not say no and he nodded, following after Mrs. Hardy to the kitchen.

   Hoppy Harrington, the handyman phocomelus of West Marin, did an imitation of Walt Dangerfield when the transmission from the satellite failed; he kept the citizens of West Marin amused. As everyone knew, Dangerfield was sick and he often faded out, now. Tonight, in the middle of his imitation, Hoppy glanced up to see the Kellers, with their little girl, enter the Forresters’ Hall and take seats in the rear. About time, he said to himself, glad of a greater audience. But then he felt nervous, because the little girl was scrutinizing him. There was something in the way she looked; he ceased suddenly and the hall was silent.
   “Go ahead, Hoppy,” Cas Stone called.
   “Do that one about Kool-Ade,” Mrs. Tallman called. “Sing that, the little tune the Kool-Ade twins sing; you know.”
   “ ‘Kool-Ade, Kool-Ade, can’t wait,’ ” Hoppy sang, but once more he stopped. “I guess that’s enough for tonight,” he said.
   The room became silent once again.
   “My brother,” the little Keller girl spoke up, “he says that Mr. Dangerfield is somewhere in this place.”
   Hoppy laughed. “That’s right,” he said excitedly.
   “Has he done the reading?” Edie Keller asked. “Or was he too sick tonight to do it?”
   “Oh yeah, the reading’s in progress,” Earl Colvig said, “but we’re not listening; we’re tired of sick old Walt—we’re listening to Hoppy and watching what he does. He did funny things tonight, didn’t you, Hoppy?”
   “Show the little girl how you moved that coin from a distance,” June Raub said. “I think she’d enjoy that.”
   “Yes, do that again,” the pharmacist called from his seat. “That was good; we’d all like to see that again, I’m sure.” In his eagerness to watch he rose to his feet, forgetting that people were behind him.
   “My brother,” Edie said quietly, “wants to hear the reading. That’s what he came for.”
   “Be still,” Bonny, her mother, said to her.
   Brother, Hoppy thought. She doesn’t have any brother. He laughed out loud at that, and several people in the audience smiled. “Your brother?”he said, wheeling his phocomobile toward the child. “I can do the reading; I can be Philip and Mildred and everybody in the book; I can be Dangerfield. Sometimes I actually am. I was tonight, and that’s why your brother thinks Dangerfield’s in the room. What it is, it’s me.” He looked around at the people. “Isn’t that right, folks? Isn’t it actually me?”
   “That’s right, Hoppy,” Orion Shroud agreed. Everyone nodded.
   “You have no brother, Edie,” Hoppy said to the little girl. “Why do you say your brother wants to hear the reading when you have no brother?” He laughed and laughed. “Can I see him? Talk to him? Let me hear him talk and—I’ll do an imitation of him.”
   “That’ll be quite an imitation,” Cas Stone chuckled.
   “Like to hear that,” Earl Colvig said.
   “I’ll do it,” Hoppy said, “as soon as he says something to me.” He sat in the center of his ‘mobile, waiting. “I’m waiting,” he said.
   “That’s enough,” Bonny Keller said. “Leave my child alone.” Her cheeks were red with anger.
   “Lean down,” Edie said to Hoppy. “Toward me. And he’ll speak to you.” Her face, like her mother’s, was grim.
   Hoppy leaned toward her, cocking his head on one side, mockingly.
   A voice, speaking from inside him, as if it were part of the interior world, said, “How did you fix that record changer? How did you really do that?”
   Hoppy screamed.
   Everyone was staring at him, white-faced; they were on their feet, now, all of them rigid.
   “I heard Jim Fergesson,” Hoppy said. “A man I worked for, once. A man who’s dead.”
   The girl regarded him calmly. “Do you want to hear my brother say more? Say some more words to him, Bill; he wants you to say more.”
   And, in Hoppy’s interior mind, the voice said, “It looked like you healed it. It looked like instead of replacing that broken spring—”
   Hoppy wheeled his cart wildly, spun up the aisle to the far end of the room, wheeled again and sat panting, a long way from the Keller child; his heart pounded and he stared at her. She returned his stare silently.
   “Did he scare you?” Now the child was openly smiling at him, but her smile was empty and cold. “He paid you back because you were picking on me. It made him angry. So he did that.”
   Coming up beside Hoppy, George Keller said, “What happened, Hop?”
   “Nothing,” he said shortly. “Maybe we better listen to the reading.” Sending out his manual extensor, he turned up the volume of the radio.
   You can have what you want, you and your brother, he thought. Dangerfield’s reading or anything else. How long have you been in there? Only seven years? It seems more like forever. As if—you’ve always existed. It had been a terribly old, wizened, white thing that had spoken to him. Something hard and small, floating. Lips overgrown with downy hair that hung trailing, streamers of it, wispy and dry. I bet it was Fergesson, he said to himself; it felt like him. He’s in there, inside that child. I wonder. Can he get out?

   Edie Keller said to her brother, “What did you do to scare him like you did? He really was scared.”
   From within her the familiar voice said, “I was someone he used to know, a long time ago. Someone dead.”
   Amused, she said, “Are you going to do any more to him?”
   “If I don’t like him,” Bill said, “I may do more to him, a lot of different things, maybe.”
   “How did you know about the dead person?”
   “Oh,” Bill said, “because—you know why. Because I’m dead, too.” He chuckled, deep down inside her stomach; she felt him quiver.
   “No you’re not,” she disagreed. “You’re as alive as I am, so don’t say that; it isn’t right.” It frightened her.
   Bill said, “I was just pretending. I’m sorry. I wish I could have seen his face… how did it look?”
   “Awful,” Edie said. “It turned all inward, like a frog’s.”
   “I wish I could come out,” Bill said plaintively. “I wish I could be born like everybody else. Can’t I be born later on?”
   “Doctor Stockstill says you couldn’t.”
   “Maybe I could make Doctor Stockstill let me out. I can do that if I want.”
   “No,” she said. “You’re lying; you can’t do anything but sleep and talk to the dead and maybe do imitations like you did. That isn’t much.”
   There was no response from within.
   “If you did anything bad,” she said, “I could swallow something that would kill you. So you better behave.”
   She felt more and more afraid of him; she was talking to herself, trying to bolster her confidence. Maybe it would be a good thing if you did die, she thought. Only then I’d have to carry you around still, and it—wouldn’t be pleasant. I wouldn’t like that.
   She shuddered.
   “Don’t worry about me,” Bill said suddenly. “I know a lot of things; I can take care of myself. I’ll protect you, too. You better be glad about me because I can look at everyone who’s dead, like the man I imitated. There’re a whole lot of them, trillions and trillions of them and they’re all different. When I’m asleep I hear them muttering. They’re still around.”
   “Around where?” she asked.
   “Underneath us,” Bill said. “Down in the ground.”
   “Brrr,” she said.
   “It’s true. And we’re going to be there, too. And so is Mommy and Daddy and everyone else. You’ll see.”
   “I don’t want to see,” she said. “Please don’t say any more. I want to listen to the reading.”

   Andrew Gill glanced up from his task of rolling cigarettes to see Hoppy Harrington—whom he did not like—entering the factory with a man whom he did not know. At once Gill felt uneasy. He set down his tobacco paper and rose to his feet. Beside him at the long bench the other rollers, his employees, continued at their work.
   He employed, in all, eight men, and this was in the tobacco division alone. The distillery, which produced brandy, employed another twelve. His was the largest commercial enterprise in West Marin and he sold his products all over Northern California; his cigarettes had even gotten back to the East Coast and were known there.
   “Yes?” he said to Hoppy. He placed himself in front of the phoce’s cart, halting him.
   Hoppy stammered. “This m-man came up from Oakland to see you, Mr. Gill. He’s an important businessman, he says. Isn’t that right?” The phoce turned to the man beside him. “Isn’t that what you told me, Stuart?”
   Holding out his hand, the man said, “I represent the Hardy Homeostatic Vermin Trap Corporation of Berkeley, California. I’m here to acquaint you with an amazing proposition that could well mean tripling your profits within six months.” His eyes flashed.
   Gill repressed the impulse to laugh aloud. “I see,” he said, nodding. “Very interesting, Mr.—” He glanced questioningly at the phoce.
   “M-mr. Stuart McConchie,” the phoce stammered. “I knew him before the war; I haven’t seen him in all that time and now he’s migrated up here, the same as I did.”
   “My employer, Mr. Hardy,” Stuart McConchie said, “has empowered me to describe to you in detail the design of a fully-automated cigarette-making machine. We at Hardy Homeostatic are well aware of the fact that your cigarettes are rolled entirely in the old-fashioned way. By hand.” He pointed toward the employees at the long bench. “Such a method is a century out of date, Mr. Gill. You’ve achieved superb quality in your special deluxe Gold Label cigarettes—”
   “Which I intend to maintain,” Gill said quietly.
   Stuart McConchie said, “Our automated electronic equipment will in no way sacrifice quality for quantity. In fact—”
   “Wait,” Gill said. “I don’t want to discuss this now.” He glanced toward the phoce, who was parked close by, listening. The phoce flushed and at once spun his ‘mobile away.
   “I’m going,” Hoppy said sullenly. “This doesn’t interest me anyhow; goodbye.” He wheeled through the open door, out onto the street. The two of them watched him until he disappeared.
   “Our handy,” Gill said. “Fixes—heals, rather—everything that breaks. Hoppy Harrington, the human handless handy.”
   Strolling a few steps away, surveying the factory and the men at their work, McConchie said, “Nice place you have here, Gill. I want to state right now how much I admire your product; it’s first in its field.”
   I haven’t heard talk like that, Gill realized, in seven years. It was difficult to believe that it still existed in the world; so much had changed, and yet here, in this man McConchie, it remained intact. Gill felt a glow of pleasure. It reminded him of happier times, this salesman’s line of patter. He felt amiably inclined toward the man.
   “Thank you,” he said, and he meant it. Perhaps the world, at last, was really beginning to regain some of its old forms, its civilities and customs and preoccupations, all that had gone into it to make it what it was.
   “How about a cup of coffee?” Gill said. “I’ll take a break for ten minutes and you can tell me about this fully automated machine of yours.”
   “Real coffee?” McConchie said, and the pleasant, optimistic mask slid for an instant from his face; he gaped at Gill with naked hunger.
   “Sorry,” Gill said. “A substitute. But not bad; I think you’ll like it. Better than what’s sold in the city at those so-called ‘coffee’ stands.” He went to get the pot of water.
   “Coming here,” McConchie said, “is a long-time dream fulfilled. It took me a week to make the trip and I’ve been mulling about it ever since I smoked my first special deluxe Gold Label. It’s—” He groped for the words to express his thought. “An island of civilization in these barbaric times.” He roamed about the factory, hands in his pockets. “Life seems more peaceful here. In the city if you leave your horse—well, a while ago I left my horse to go across the Bay and when I got back someone had eaten it, and it’s things like that that make you disgusted with the city and want to move on.”
   “I know,” Gill said, nodding. “It’s brutal in the city because there’re still so many homeless and destitute people.”
   “I really loved that horse,” Stuart McConchie said, looking sad.
   “Well,” Gill said, “in the country you’re faced constantly with the death of animals. When the bombs fell, thousands of animals up here were horribly injured; sheep and cattle… but that can’t compare of course to the loss of human life down where you come from. You must have seen a good deal of human suffering since E-Day.”
   McConchie nodded. “That and the sporting. The freaks both as regards animals and people. Like my old buddy Hoppy Harrington, but of course he’s from before; at Modern TV Sales & Service where we worked we used to say Hoppy was from that drug, that thalidomide.”
   “What sort of vermin trap does your company make?” Gill asked.
   “It’s not a passive type. Being homeostatic, that is, self-notifying, it follows for instance a rat or a cat or dog down into the network of burrows such as now underlie Berkeley and Oakland… it pursues one vermin after another, killing one and going on to the next—until it runs out of power or by chance a brilliant vermin manages to destroy it. There are a few such brilliant rats that know how to lame a Hardy Homeostatic Vermin Trap. But not many.”
   “Impressive,” Gill murmured.
   “Now, our proposed cigarette-rolling machine—”
   “My friend,” Gill said, “I like you but—here’s the problem. I don’t have any money to buy your machine and I don’t have anything to trade you. And I don’t intend to let anyone enter my business as a partner. So what does that leave?” He smiled. “I must continue as I am.”
   “Wait,” McConchie said instantly. “There has to be a solution. Maybe we could lease you a Hardy cigarette-rolling machine in exchange for x-number of cigarettes, your special deluxe Gold Label variety, of course, delivered each week for x-number of weeks.” His face glowed with animation. “The Hardy Company for instance could become sole licensed distributors of your cigarette; we could represent you everywhere, develop a systematic program of outlets up and down California. What do you say to that?”
   “I must admit it does sound interesting. I admit that distribution has not been my cup of tea… I’ve thought on and off for several years about the need of getting an organization going, especially with my factory being located in a rural spot. I’ve even thought about moving back into the city, but the theft and vandalism is too great there. Anyhow I don’t want to move into the city; this is my home, here.”
   He did not say anything about Bonny Keller. That was his actual reason for remaining in West Marin; his affair with her had ended years ago but he was more in love with her now than ever—he had watched her go from man to man, becoming dissatisfied with each of them, and Gill believed in his own heart that someday he would get her back. And Bonny was the mother of his daughter; he was well aware that Edie Keller was his child.
   “Since you’re just up from the city,” he said aloud, “I will ask you this… is there any interesting national or international news, of late, that we might not have heard? We do get the satellite, but I’m frankly tired of disc jockey talk and music. And those endless readings.”
   They both laughed. “I know what you mean,” McConchie said, sipping his coffee and nodding. “Well, I understand that an attempt is being made to produce an automobile again, somewhere around the ruins of Detroit. It’s mostly made of plywood but it does run on kerosene.”
   “I don’t know where they’re going to get the kerosene,” Gill said. “Before they build a car they better get a few refineries operating again. And repair a few major roads.”
   “Oh, something else. The Government plans to reopen Route Forty across the Rockies sometime this year. For the first time since the war.”
   “That’s great news,” Gill said, pleased. “I didn’t know that.”
   “And the telephone company—”
   “Wait,” Gill said, rising. “How about a little brandy in your coffee? How long has it been since you’ve had a coffee royal?”
   “Years,” Stuart McConchie said.
   “This is Gill’s Five Star. My own. From the Sonoma Valley.” He poured from the squat bottle into McConchie’s cup.
   “Here’s something else that might interest you.” McConchie reached into his coat pocket and brought out something flat and folded. He opened it, spread it out, and Gill saw an envelope.
   Mail service. A letter from New York.
   “That’s right,” McConchie said. “Delivered to my boss, Mr. Hardy. All the way from the East Coast; it only took four weeks. The Government in Cheyenne, the military people; they’re responsible. It’s done partly by blimp, partly by truck, partly by horse. The last stage is by foot.”
   “Good Lord,” Gill said. And he poured some Gill’s Five Star into his coffee, too.

   Bill Keller heard the small animal, the snail or slug near him, and at once he got into it. But he had been tricked; it was sightless. He was out but he could not see or hear this time, he could only move.
   “Let me back,” he called to his sister in panic. “Look what you did, you put me into something wrong.”You did it on purpose, he said to himself as he moved. He moved on and on, searching for her.
   If I could reach out, he thought. Reach—upward. But he had nothing to reach with, no limbs of any sort. What am I now that I’m out again? he asked himself as he tried to reach up. What do they call those things up there that shine? Those lights in the sky… can I see them without having eyes? No, he thought; I can’t.
   He moved on; raising himself now and then as high as possible and then sinking back, once more to crawl, to do the one thing possible for him in his born, outside life.
   In the sky, Walt Dangerfield moved, in his satellite, although he sat resting with his head in his hands. The pain inside him had grown, changed, absorbed him until, as so many times before, he could imagine nothing else.
   How long can I keep going? he asked himself. How long will I live?
   There was no one to answer.

   Edie Keller, with a delicious shiver of exultation, watched the angleworm crawling slowly across the ground and knew with certitude that her brother was in it.
   For inside her, down in her stomach, the mentality of the worm now resided; she heard its monotonous voice. “Boom, boom, boom,” it went, in echo of its own nondescript biological processes.
   “Get out of me, worm,” she giggled. What did the worm think about its new existence? Was it as dumbfounded as Bill probably was? I have to keep my eye on him, she realized, meaning the creature wriggling across the ground. For he might get lost. “Bill,” she said, bending over him, “you look funny. You’re all red and long; did you know that?” And then she thought, What I should have done was put him in the body of another human being. Why didn’t I do that? Then it would be like it ought to be; I would have a real brother, outside of me, who I could play with.
   But on the other hand she would have a strange, new person inside her. And that did not sound like much fun.
   Who would do? she asked herself. One of the kids at school? An adult? Mr. Barnes, my teacher, maybe. Or—
   Hoppy Harrington. Who is afraid of Bill anyhow.
   “Bill,” she said, kneeling down and picking up the angleworm; she held it in the palm of her hand. “Wait until you hear my plan.” She held the worm against her side, where the hard lump within lay. “Get back inside now. You don’t want to be a worm anyhow; it’s no fun.”
   Her brother’s voice once more came to her. “You—I hate you, I’ll never forgive you. You put me in a blind thing with no legs or nothing! All I could do was drag myself around!”
   “I know,” she said, rocking back and forth, cupping the now-useless worm in her hand still. “Listen, did you hear me? You want to do that, Bill, what I said? Shall I get near Hoppy Harrington? You’d have eyes and ears; you’d be a real outside person.”
   “It scares me.”
   “But I want to,” Edie said, rocking back and forth. “We’re going to, Bill; we’re going to give you eyes and ears—now.”
   There was no answer from Bill; he had turned his thoughts away from her and her world, into the regions which only he could reach. Talking to those old crummy, sticky dead, Edie said to herself. Those empty poo-poo dead that never had any fun or nothing.
   It won’t do you any good, Bill, she thought. Because I’ve decided.

   Hurrying down the path in her robe and slippers, through the night darkness, Edie Keller groped her way toward Hoppy Harrington’s house.
   “If you’re going to do it you have to hurry,” Bill cried, from deep within her. “He knows about us—they’re telling me, the dead are. They say we’re in danger. If we can get close enough to him I can do an imitation of someone dead that’ll scare him, because he’s afraid of dead people. That’s because to him the dead are like fathers, lots of fathers, and—”
   “Be quiet,” Edie said. “Let me think.” In the darkness she had gotten mixed up. She could not find the path through the oak forest, now, and she halted, breathing deeply, trying to orient herself by the dull gleam of the partial moon overhead.
   It’s to the left, she thought. Down a hill. I must not fall; he’d hear the noise, he can hear a long way, almost everything. Step by step she descended, holding her breath.
   “I’ve got a good imitation ready,” Bill was mumbling; he would not be quiet. “When I get near him I switch with someone dead, and you won’t like that because it’s—sort of squishy, but it’s just for a few minutes and then they can talk to him direct, from inside you. Is that—”
   “Shut up,” Edie said desperately. They were now above Hoppy’s house; she saw the lights below. “Please, Bill, please.”
   “But I have to explain to you,” Bill went on. “When I—”
   He stopped. Inside her there was nothing. She was empty.
   “Bill,” she said.
   He had gone.
   Before her eyes, in the dull moonlight, something she had never seen before bobbed. It rose, jiggled, its long pale hair streaming behind it like a tail; it rose until it hung directly before her face. It had tiny, dead eyes and a gaping mouth, it was nothing but a little hard round head, like a baseball. From its mouth came a squeak, and then it fluttered upward once more, released. She watched it as it gained more and more height, rising above the trees in a swimming motion, ascending in the unfamiliar atmosphere which he had never known before.
   “Bill,” she said, “Hoppy took you out of me. Hoppy put you outside.” And you are leaving, she realized; Hoppy is making you go. “Come back,” she said, but it didn’t matter because he could not live outside of her. She knew that. Doctor Stockstill had said that. He could not be born, and Hoppy had heard him and made him born, knowing that he would die.
   You won’t get to do your imitation, she realized. I told you to be quiet and you wouldn’t. Straining, she saw—or thought she saw—the hard little object with the streamers of hair, high now above her… and then it disappeared, silently. She was alone.
   Why go on now? It was over. She turned, walked back up the hillside, her head lowered, eyes shut, feeling her way. Back to her house, her bed. Inside she felt raw; she felt the tearing loose. If you only could have been quiet, she thought. He would not have heard you. I told you so.

   Floating in the atmosphere, Bill Keller saw a little, heard a little, felt the trees and the animals alive and moving among them. He felt the pressure at work on him, lifting him up, but he remembered his imitation and he said it. His voice came out tiny in the cold air; then his ears picked it up and he exclaimed.
   “We have been taught a terrible lesson for our folly,” he squeaked, and his voice echoed in his ears, delighting him.
   The pressure on him let go; he bobbed up, swimming happily, and then he dove. Down and down he went and just before he touched the ground he went sideways until, guided by the living presence within, he hung suspended above Hoppy Harrington’s house.
   “This is God’s way!” he shouted in his thin, tiny voice. “We can see by this awful example that it is time to call a halt to high-altitude nuclear testing. I want all of you to write letters to President Kennedy!” He did not know who President Kennedy was. A living person, perhaps. He looked around for him but he did not see him; he saw oak forests of animals, he saw a bird with noiseless wings that drifted, huge-beaked, eyes staring. Bill squeaked in fright as the noiseless, brown-feathered bird glided his way.
   The bird made a dreadful sound, of greed and the desire to rend.
   “All of you,” Bill cried, fleeing through the dark, chill air. “You must write letters in protest!”
   The glittering eyes of the bird followed behind him as he and it glided above the trees, in the dim moonlight.
   The owl reached him. And crunched him, in a single instant. Once more he was within. He could no longer see or hear; it had been for a short time and now it was over. The owl, hooting, flew on. Bill Keller said to the owl, “Can you hear me?”
   Maybe it could; maybe not. It was only an owl; it did not have any sense, as Edie had. Can I live inside you? he asked it, hidden away in here where no one knows… you have your flights that you make, your passes. With him, in the owl, were the bodies of mice and a thing that stirred and scratched, big enough to keep on wanting to live.
   Lower, he told the owl. He saw, by means of the owl, the oaks; he saw clearly, as if everything were full of light. Millions of individual objects lay immobile and then he spied one that crept—it was alive and the owl turned that way. The creeping thing, suspecting nothing, hearing no sound, wandered on, out into the open.
   An instant later it had been swallowed. The owl flew on. Good, he thought. And, is there more? This goes on all night, again and again, and then there is bathing when it rains, and the long, deep sleeps. Are they the best part? They are.
   He said, “Fergesson don’t allow his employees to drink; it’s against his religion, isn’t it?” And then he said, “Hoppy, what’s the light from? Is it God? You know, like in the Bible. I mean, is it true?” The owl hooted.
   A thousand dead things within him yammered for attention. He listened, repeated, picked among them. “You dirty little freak,” he said. “Now you listen. Stay down here; we’re below street-level, the bomb won’t get us. People upstairs, they’re going to die. Down here you clear. Space. For them.” Frightened, the owl flapped; it rose higher, trying to evade him. But he continued, sorting and picking and listening on.
   “Stay down here,” he repeated. Again the lights of Hoppy’s house came into view; the owl had circled, returned to it, unable to get away. He made it stay where he wanted it. He brought it closer and closer in its passes to Hoppy. “You moronic jackass,” he said. “Stay where you are.”
   The owl, with a furious effort, performed its regular technique; it coughed him up and he plummeted to the ground, trying to catch the currents of air. He crashed among humus and plant-growth; he rolled, giving little squeaks until finally he came to rest in a hollow.
   Released, the owl soared off and disappeared.
   “Let man’s compassion be witness to this,” he said as he lay in the hollow; he spoke in the minister’s voice from long ago, addressing the congregation of which Hoppy and his father had been a part. “It is ourselves who have done this; we see here only the results of mankind’s own folly.”
   Lacking the owl eyes he saw only vaguely; the immaculate illumination seemed to be gone and all that remained were several nearby shapes. They were trees.
   He saw, too, the form of Hoppy’s house outlined against the dim night sky.
   It was not far off.
   “Let me in,” Bill said, moving his mouth. He rolled about in the hollow; he thrashed until the leaves stirred. “I want to come in.”
   An animal, hearing him, moved farther off, warily.
   “In, in, in,” Bill said. “I can’t stay out here long; I’ll die. Edie, where are you?” He did not feel her nearby; he felt only the presence of the phocomelus within the house.
   As best he could he rolled that way.

   Early in the morning, Doctor Stockstill arrived at Hoppy Harrington’s house to make use of the transmitter in reaching the sick man in the sky, Walter Dangerfield. The transmitter, he noticed, was on, and so were lights here and there; puzzled, he knocked on the door.
   The door opened and there sat Hoppy Harrington in the center of his phocomobile. Hoppy regarded him in an odd, cautious, defensive way.
   “I want to make another try,” Stockstill said, knowing how hopeless it was but wanting to go ahead anyhow. “Is it okay?”
   “Yes sir,” Hoppy said.
   “Is Dangerfield still alive?”
   “Yes sir. I’d know if he was dead.” Hoppy wheeled aside to admit him. “He must still be up there.”
   “What’s happened?” Stockstill said. “Have you been up all night?”
   “Yes,” Hoppy said. “Learning to work things.” He wheeled the phocomobile about. “It’s hard,” he said, apparently preoccupied. Now the ‘mobile bumped into the end of a table. “I hit that by mistake,” Hoppy said. “I’m sorry; I didn’t mean to.”
   Stockstill said, “You seem different.”
   “I’m Bill Keller,” the phocomelus said. “Not Hoppy Harrington.” With his right manual extensor he pointed. “There’s Hoppy; that’s him, from now on.”
   In the corner lay a shriveled dough-like object several inches long; its mouth gaped in congealed emptiness. It had a human quality to it, and Stockstill went over to pick it up.
   “That was me,” the phocomelus said. “But I got close enough last night to switch. He fought a lot, but he was afraid, so I won. I kept doing one imitation after another. The minister-one got him.”
   Stockstill, holding the wizened little creature, said nothing.
   “Do you know how to work the transmitter?” the phocomelus asked, presently. “Because I don’t. I tried but I can’t. I got the lights to work; they turn on and off. I practiced that all night.” To demonstrate, he rolled his ‘mobile to the wall, where with his manual extensor he snapped the light switch up and down.
   After a time Stockstill said, looking down at the dead, tiny form he held in his hand, “I knew it wouldn’t survive.”
   “It did for a while,” the phocomelus said. “For around an hour; that’s pretty good, isn’t it? Part of that time it was in an owl; I don’t know if that counts.”
   “I—better get to work trying to contact Dangerfield,” Stockstill said finally. “He may die any time.”
   “Yes,” the phocomelus said, nodding. “Want me to take that?” He held out an extensor and Stockstill handed him the homunculus. “That owl ate me,” the phoce said. “I didn’t like that, but it sure had good eyes; I liked that part, using its eyes.”
   “Yes,” Stockstill said, reflexively. “Owls have tremendously good eyesight. That must have been quite an experience.” He seated himself at the transmitter. “What are you going to do now?” he asked.
   The phoce said, “I have to get used to this body; it’s heavy. I feel gravity… I’m used to just floating about. You know what? I think these extensors are swell. I can do a lot with them already.” The extensors whipped about, touched a picture on the wall, flicked in the direction of the transmitter. “I have to go find Edie,” the phoce said. “I want to tell her I’m okay; she probably thinks I died.”
   Turning on the microphone, Stockstill prepared to contact the satellite overhead. “Walt Dangerfield,” he said, “this is Doctor Stockstill in West Marin. Can you hear me? If you can, give me an answer.” He paused, then repeated what he had said.
   “Can I go?” Bill Keller asked. “Can I look for Edie now?”
   “Yes,” Stockstill said, rubbing his forehead; he drew his faculties together and said, “You’ll be careful, what you do… you may not be able to switch again.”
   “I don’t want to switch again,” Bill said. “This is fine, because for the first time there’s no one in here but me.” The thin phoce-face broke into a smile. “I’m not just part of someone else.”
   Stockstill pressed the mike button once more. “Walt Dangerfield,” he repeated. “Can you hear me?” Is it hopeless? he wondered. Is it worth keeping on?
   The phoce, rolling about the room on his ‘mobile, like a great trapped beetle, said, “Can I go to school now that I’m out?”
   “Yes,” Stockstill murmured.
   “But I know a lot of things already,” Bill said. “From listening with Edie when she was in school; I like Mr. Barnes, don’t you? He’s a very good teacher… I’m going to like being a pupil in his class.” The phoce added, “I wonder what my mother will say?”
   Jarred, Stockstill said, “What?” And then he realized who was meant. Bonny Keller. Yes, he thought, it will be interesting to see what Bonny says. This will be repayment in full for her many, many affairs… for her years of love-making with one man after another.
   Again he pressed the mike button. And tried once more.

   To Bonny Keller, Mr. Barnes said, “I had a talk with your daughter after school today. And I got the distinct impression that she knows about us.”
   “Oh Christ, how could she?” Bonny said. Groaning, she sat up; she rearranged her clothes, buttoned her blouse back up. What a contrast this man was to Andrew Gill, who always made love to her right out in the open, in broad daylight, along the oak-lined roads of West Marin, where anyone and anything might go past. Gill had seized her each time as he had the first time—yanking her into it, not babbling or quaking or mumbling… maybe I ought to go back to him, she thought.
   Maybe, she thought, I ought to leave them all, Barnes and George and that nutty daughter of mine; I ought to go live with Gill openly, defy the community and be happy for a change.
   “Well, if we’re not going to make love,” she said to Barnes, “then let’s walk down to the Forresters’ Hall and listen to the afternoon pass of the satellite.”
   Barnes, pleased, said, “Maybe we can find some edible mushrooms on the way.”
   “Are you serious?” Bonny said.
   “Of course.”
   “You fruit,” she said, shaking her head. “You poor fruit. Why did you come to West Marin from Oregon in the first place? Just to teach little kids and stroll around picking mushrooms?”
   “It’s not such a bad life,” Barnes said. “It’s better than any I’ve ever known before, even before the war. And—I also have you.”
   Gloomily, Bonny Keller rose to her feet; hands thrust deep in her coat pockets she plodded down the road. Barnes trailed along behind her, trying to keep up with her strides.
   “I’m going to remain here in West Marin,” Barnes said. “This is the end of my travels.” Puffing, he added, “Despite my experience with your daughter today—”
   “You had no experience,” Bonny said. “It was just your guilty conscience catching up with you. Let’s hurry—I want to hear Dangerfield; at least when he talks it’s fun to listen.”
   Behind her, Mr. Barnes found a mushroom; he had stopped to bend down. “It’s a chanterelle!” he exclaimed. “Savory and edible—” He picked it, close to the ground, and then began to search for another. “I’ll make you and George a stew,” he informed her as he found another.
   Waiting for him to finish, Bonny lit a special deluxe Gold Label cigarette of Andrew Gill’s manufacture, sighed, wandered a few steps along the grass-infested oak-lined country road.

Your Appointment Will Be Yesterday

   Sunlight ascended and a penetrating mechanical voice declared, “All right, Lehrer. Time to get up and show ‘em who you are and what you can do. Big man, that Niehls Lehrer; everybody acknowledges it—I hear them talking. Big man, big talent, big job. Much admired by the public at large. You awake now?”
   Lehrer, from the bed, said, “Yes.” He sat up, batted the sharp-voiced alarm clock at his bedside into nullification. “Good morning,” he said to the silent apartment. “Slept well; I hope you did, too.”
   A press of problems tumbled about his disordered mind as he got grouchily from the bed, wandered to the closet for clothing adequately dirty. Supposed to nail down Ludwig Eng, he said to himself. The tasks of tomorrow become the worse tasks of today. Reveal to Eng that only one copy of his great-selling book is left in all the world; the time is coming soon for him to act, to do the job only he can do. How would Eng feel? After all, sometimes inventors refused to sit still and do their job. Well, he decided, that actually consisted of a syndicate-problem; theirs, not his. He found a stained, rumpled red shirt; removing his pajama top he got into it. The trousers were not so easy; he had to root through the hamper.
   And then the packet of whiskers.
   My ambition, Lehrer thought as he padded to the bathroom with the whisker packet, is to cross the W.U.S. by streetcar. Whee. At the bowl he washed his face, then lathered on foam-glue, opened the packet and with adroit slappings managed to convey the whiskers evenly to his chin, jowls, neck; in a moment he had expertly gotten the whiskers to adhere. I’m fit now, he decided as he reviewed his countenance in the mirror, to take that streetcar ride; at least as soon as I process my share of sogum.
   Switching on the sogum pipe he accepted a good masculine bundle, sighed contentedly as he glanced over the sports section of the San Francisco Chronicle, then at last walked to the kitchen and began to lay out soiled dishes. In no time at all he faced a bowl of soup, lambchops, green peas, Martian blue moss with egg sauce and a cup of hot coffee. These he gathered up, slid the dishes from beneath and around them—of course checking the windows of the room to be sure no one saw him—and briskly placed the assorted foods in their proper receptacles which he placed on shelves of the cupboard and in the refrigerator. The time was eight-thirty; he still had fifteen minutes to get to work. No need to kill himself hurrying; the People’s Topical Library section B would be there when he arrived.
   It had taken him years to work up to B. He did not perform routine work any longer, not at a section B desk, and he most certainly did not have to arrange for the cleaning of thousands of identical copies of a work in the early stages of eradication. In fact strictly speaking he did not have to participate in eradication at all; minions employed wholesale by the library took care of that coarse duty. But he did have to deal tête-à-tête with a vast variety of irritable, surly inventors who balked at their assigned—and according to the syndicate mandatory—final cleaning of the sole-remaining typescript copy of whatever work their name had become linked with—linked by a process which neither he nor the assorted inventors completely understood. The syndicate presumably understood why a particular given inventor received a particular assignment and not some other assignment entirely. For instance, Eng and HOW I MADE MY OWN SWABBLE OUT OF CONVENTIONAL HOUSEHOLD OBJECTS IN MY BASEMENT DURING MY SPARE TIME.
   Lehrer reflected as he glanced over the remainder of the newspaper. Think of the responsibility. After Eng finished, no more swabbles in all the world, unless those untrustworthy rogues in the F.N.M. had a couple illicitly tucked away. In fact, even though the ter-cop, the terminal copy, of Eng’s book still remained, he already found it difficult to recall what a swabble did and what it looked like. Square? Small? Or round and huge? Hmmm. He put down the newspaper and rubbed his forehead while he attempted to recall—tried to conjure up an accurate mental image of the device while it was still possible to do so. Because as soon as Eng reduced the ter-cop to a heavily inked silk ribbon, half a ream of bond paper and a folio of fresh carbon paper there existed absolutely no chance for him or for anyone else to recall either the book or the mechanism which the book described.
   That task, however, would probably occupy Eng the rest of the year. Cleaning of the ter-cop had to progress line by line, word by word; it could not be handled as were the assembled printed copies. So easy, up until the terminal typescript copy, and then… well, to make it worth it to Eng, to compensate him for the long, arduous work, a really huge bill would be served on him: the task would cost Eng something on the order of twenty-five thousand poscreds. And since eradication of the swabble book would make Eng a poor man, the task…
   By his elbow on the small kitchen table the receiver of the phone hopped from its mooring onto the table, and from it came a distant tiny shrill voice. “Goodbye, Niehls.” A woman’s voice.
   Lifting the receiver to his ear he said, “Goodbye.”
   “I love you, Niehls,” Charise McFadden stated in her breathless, emotion-saturated voice. “Do you love me?”
   “Yes, I love you, too,” he said. “When have I seen you last? I hope it won’t be long. Tell me it won’t be long.”
   “Most probably tonight,” Charise said. “After work. There’s someone I want you to meet, a virtually unknown inventor who’s desperately eager to get official eradication for his thesis on, ahem, the psychogenic origins of death by meteor-strike. I said that because you’re in section B—”
   “Tell him to eradicate his thesis himself.”
   “There’s no prestige in that.” Earnestly, Charise pleaded, “It’s really a dreadful piece of theorizing, Niehls; it’s as nutty as the day is long. This boy, this Lance Arbuthnot—”
   “That’s his name?” It almost persuaded him. But not quite. In the course of a single day he received many such requests, and every one, without exception came represented as a crank piece by a crank inventor with a crank name. He had held his chair at Section B too long to be easily snared. But still—he had to investigate this; his ethical structure insisted on it. He sighed.
   “I hear you groaning,” Charise said brightly.
   Lehrer said, “As long as he’s not from the F.N.M.”
   “Well—he is.” She sounded guilty. “I think they threw him out, though. That’s why he’s here and not there.”
   But that, Lehrer realized, proved nothing. Arbuthnot—possibly—did not share the fanatical militant convictions of the ruling elite of the Free Negro Municipality; possibly he was too moderate, too balanced for the Bards of the republic carved out of quondam Tennessee, Kentucky, Arkansas and Missouri. But then again he perhaps had too fanatical a view. One never knew; not until one met the person, and sometimes not even then. The Bards, being from the East, had managed to dribble a veil over the faces of three-fifths of mankind, a veil which successfully obscured motive, intention and God knew what else.
   “And what is more,” Charise continued, “he personally knew Anarch Peak before Peak’s sad shrinking.”
   “Sad!” Lehrer bristled. “Good riddance.” There: that had been the foremost eccentric and idiot of the world. All Lehrer needed was the opportunity to rub shoulders with a follower of the newly parasitic Anarch. He shivered, recalling from his professional eclectic books—examining at the library the accounts of mid-twentieth century race violence; out of the riots, lootings and killings of those days had come Sebastian Peak, originally a lawyer, then a master spellbinder, at last a religious fanatic with his own devout following… a following which extended over the planet, although operating primarily in the F.N.M. environs.
   “That could get you in trouble with God,” Charise said.
   “I have to get to work now,” Lehrer said. “I’ll phone you during my coffee break; meanwhile I’ll do some research on Arbuthnot in the files. My decision as regards his nut-head theory of psychosomatic meteor-strike deaths will have to wait until then. Hello.” He hung up the phone, then, and rose swiftly to his feet. His soiled garments gave off a truly gratifying odor of must as he made his way from his apartment to the elevator; satisfaction as to his grooming made him brighten. Possibly—despite Charise and this, her newest fad, the inventor Arbuthnot—today might be a good day after all.
   But, underneath, he doubted it.

   When Niehls Lehrer arrived at his section of the library, he found his slim blonde-haired secretary Miss Tomsen trying to rid herself—and him, too—of a tall, sloppily-dressed middle-aged gentleman with a briefcase under his arm.
   “Ah, Mr. Lehrer,” the individual said in a dry, hollow voice as he made out Lehrer, obviously recognizing him at once; he approached Niehls, hand extended. “How nice to meet you, sir. Goodbye, goodbye. As you people say out here.” He smiled a flashbulb instantly-vanishing smile at Niehls, who did not return it.
   “I’m quite a busy man,” Niehls said, and continued on past Miss Tomsen’s desk to open the inner door to his private suite. “If you wish to see me, you’ll have to make a regular appointment. Hello.” He started to shut the door after him.
   “This concerns the Anarch Peak,” the tall man with the briefcase said. “Whom I have reason to believe you’re interested in.”
   “Why do you say that?” He paused, irritated. “I don’t recall ever expressing any interest in anyone of Peak’s sort.”
   “You must recall. But that’s so. You’re under Phase, here. I’m oriented in the opposite, normal time-direction; therefore what for you will soon happen is for me an experience of the immediate past. My immediate past. May I take a few minutes of your time? I could well be of great use to you, sir.” The man chuckled.
   “ ‘Your time.’ Well-put, if I do say so. Yes, decidedly your time, not mine. Just consider that this visit by myself took place yesterday.” Again he smiled his mechanical smile—and mechanical it was; Niehls now perceived the small but brilliant yellow stripe sewed on the tall man’s sleeve. This person was a robot, required by law to wear the identifying swath so as not to deceive. Realizing this, Niehls’ irritation grew; he had a strict, deeply-imbedded prejudice against robies which he could not rid himself of; which he did not want to rid himself of, as a matter of fact.
   “Come in,” Niehls said, holding the door to his lavish suite open. The roby represented some human principal; it had not dispatched itself: that was the law. He wondered who had sent it. Some functionary of the syndicate? Possibly. In any case, better to hear the thing out and then tell it to leave.
   Together, in the main workchamber of the library suite, the two of them faced each other.
   “My card,” the roby said, extending its hand.
   He read the card, scowling.


Carl Gantrix
Attorney At Law W.U.S.

   “My employer,” the roby said. “So now you know my name. You may address me as Carl; that would be satisfactory.” Now that the door had shut, with Miss Tomsen on the other side, the roby’s voice had acquired a sudden and surprising authoritative tone.
   “I prefer,” Niehls said, cautiously, “to address you in the more familiar mode as Carl Junior. If that doesn’t offend you.” He made his own voice even more authoritative. “You know, I seldom grant audiences to robots. A quirk, perhaps, but one concerning which I am consistent.”
   “Until now,” the robot Carl Junior murmured; it retrieved its card and placed it back in its wallet. Then, seating itself, it began to unzip its briefcase. “Being in charge of section B of the library, you are of course an expert on the Hobart Phase. At least so Mr. Gantrix assumes. Is he correct, sir?” The robot glanced up keenly.
   “Well, I deal with it constantly.” Niehls affected a vacant, cavalier tone; it was always better to show a superior attitude when dealing with a roby. Constantly necessary to remind them in this particular fashion—as well as in countless others—of their place.
   “So Mr. Gantrix realizes. And it is to his credit that via such a realization he has inferred that you have, over the years, become something of an authority on the advantages, uses and manifold disadvantages of the Hobart reverse-time field. True? Not true? Choose one.”
   Niehls pondered. “I choose the first. Although you must take into account the fact that my knowledge is practical, not theoretical. But I can correctly deal with the vagaries of the Phase without explaining it. You see, I am innately an American; hence pragmatic.”
   “Certainly.” The roby Carl Junior nodded its plastic humanoid head. “Very good, Mr. Lehrer. Now down to business. His Mightiness, the Anarch Peak, has become infantile and will soon shrivel up entirely into a homunculus and re-enter a nearby womb. Correct? It is only a matter of time—your time, once again.”
   “I am aware,” Niehls said, “that the Hobart Phase obtains in most of the F.N.M. I am aware that His Mightiness will be within a handy nearby womb in no more than a matter of months. Frankly, this pleases me. His Mightiness is deranged. Beyond doubt; clinically so, in fact. The world, both that on Hobart Time and on Standard Time, will benefit. What more is there to say?”
   “A lot more,” Carl Junior answered gravely. Leaning forward he deposited a host of documents on Niehls’ desk. “I respectfully insist that you examine these.”
   Carl Gantrix, by means of the video circuit of the robot’s system, treated himself to a leisurely inspection of the top librarian Niehls Lehrer as that individual ploughed through the wearying stack of deliberately obscure pseudo documents which the robot had presented.
   The bureaucrat in Lehrer had been ensnared by the bait; his attention distracted, the librarian had become oblivious to the robot and to its actions. Therefore, as Lehrer read, the robot expertly slid its chair back and to the left side, close to a reference card case of impressive proportions. Lengthening its right arm, the robot crept its manual grippers of fingeroid shape into the nearest file of the case; this Lehrer did of course not see, and so the robot continued with its assigned task. It placed a miniaturized nest of embryonic robots, no larger than pinheads, within the card file, then a tiny find-circuit transmitter behind a subsequent card, then at last a potent detonating device set on a three-day command circuit.
   Watching, Gantrix grinned. Only one construct remained in the robot’s possession, and this now appeared briefly as the robot, eyeing Lehrer sideways and cautiously, edged its extensor once more toward the file, transferring this last bit of sophisticated hardware from its possession to the library’s.
   “Purp,” Lehrer said, without raising his eyes.
   The code signal, received by the aud chamber of the file, activated an emergency release; the file closed in upon itself in the manner of a bivalve seeking safety. Collapsing, the file retreated into the wall, burying itself out of sight. And at the same time it ejected the constructs which the robot had placed inside it; the objects, expelled with electronic neatness, bounced in a trajectory which deposited them at the robot’s feet, where they lay exposed in clear view.
   “Good heavens,” the robot said involuntarily, taken aback.
   Lehrer said, “Leave my office immediately.” He raised his eyes from the pseudo documents, and his expression was cold. As the robot reached down to retrieve the now-exposed artifacts he added, “And leave those items here; I want them subjected to lab analysis regarding purpose and source.” He reached into the top drawer of his desk, and when his hand emerged it held a weapon.
   In Carl Gantrix’s ears the phone-cable voice of the robot buzzed. “What should I do, sir?”
   “Leave presently.” Gantrix no longer felt amused; the fuddy-duddy librarian was equal to the probe, was capable in fact of nullifying it. The contact with Lehrer would have to be made in the open, and with that in mind Gantrix reluctantly picked up the receiver of the vidphone closest to him and dialed the library’s exchange.
   A moment later he saw, through the video scanner of the robot, the librarian Niehls Lehrer picking up his own phone in answer.
   “We have a problem,” Gantrix said. “Common to us both. Why, then, shouldn’t we work together?”
   Lehrer answered, “I’m aware of no problem.” His voice held ultimate calmness; the attempt by the robot to plant hostile hardware in his work-area had not ruffled him. “If you want to work together,” he added, “you’re off to a bad start.”
   “Admittedly,” Gantrix said. “But we’ve had difficulty in the past with you librarians.” Your exalted position, he thought. But he did not say it. “This has to do with the Anarch Peak. My superiors believe that there has been an attempt made to obliterate the Hobart Phase in regard to him—a clear violation of law, and one posing a great danger to society… in that, if successfully done, it would in effect create an immortal person by manipulation of known scientific laws. While we do not oppose the continual attempt to bring about an immortal person by use of the Hobart Phase, we do feel that the Anarch is not the person. If you follow.”
   “The Anarch is virtually reabsorbed.” Lehrer did not seem too sympathetic; perhaps, Gantrix decided, he doesn’t believe me. “I see no danger.” Coolly he studied the robot Carl Junior facing him. “If there is a menace it appears to me to lie—”
   “Nonsense. I’m here to help you; this is for the library’s benefit, as well as my own.”
   “Who do you represent?” Lehrer demanded.
   Gantrix hesitated, then said, “Bard Chai of the Supreme Clearness Council. I am following his orders.”
   “That puts a different light on matters.” The librarian’s voice had darkened; and, on the vidscreen, his expression had become harder. “I have nothing to do with the Clearness Council; my responsibility goes to the Erads entirely. As you certainly know.”
   “But are you aware—”
   “I am aware only of this.” Reaching into the drawer of his desk librarian Lehrer brought out a square gray box, which he opened; from it he produced a typed manuscript which he displayed for Gantrix’s attention. “The sole extant copy of HOW I MADE MY OWN SWABBLE OUT OF ORDINARY HOUSEHOLD OBJECTS IN MY BASEMENT DURING MY SPARE TIME. Eng’s masterpiece, which borders on the eradicated. You see?”
   Gantrix said, “Do you know where Ludwig Eng is, at the moment?”
   “I don’t care where he is; I only care where he’ll be a two-thirty yesterday afternoon—we have an appointment, he and I. Here in this office at section B of the library.
   “Where Ludwig Eng will be at two-thirty yesterday,” Gantrix said meditatively, half to himself, “depends a good deal on where he is right now.” He did not tell the librarian what he knew; that at this moment Ludwig Eng was somewhere in the Free Negro Municipality, possibly trying to obtain audience with the Anarch.
   Assuming that the Anarch, in his puerile, diminished state, could still grant audience to anyone.

   The now-tiny Anarch, wearing jeans and purple sneakers and a many-times-washed T-shirt, sat on the dusty grass studying intently a ring of marbles. His attention had become so complete that Ludwig Eng felt ready to give up; the boy opposite him no longer seemed conscious of his presence. All in all, the situation depressed Eng; he felt more helpless than before he had come.
   Nevertheless, he decided to try to continue. “Your Mightiness,” he said, “I only desire a few more moments of your time.”
   With reluctance the boy looked up. “Yes, sir,” he said in a sullen, muted voice.
   “My position is difficult,” Eng said, repeating himself; he had over and over again presented the childified Anarch with the identical material, and each time in vain. “If you as Anarch could telecast an appeal throughout the Western United States and the F.N.M. for people to build several swabbles here and there while the last copy of my book still survives—”
   “That’s right,” the boy murmured.
   “Pardon?” Eng felt a flicker of hope; he watched the small smooth face fixedly. Something had formed there.
   Sebastian Peak said, “Yes sir; I hope to become Anarch when I grow up. I’m studying for that right now.”
   “You are the Anarch. You were the Anarch.” He sighed, feeling crushed. It was clearly hopeless. No point in going on—and today was the final day, because yesterday he would meet with an official from the People’s Topical Library and that would be that.
   The boy brightened. He seemed, all at once, to take interest in what Eng had to say. “No kidding?”
   “God’s truth, son.” Eng nodded solemnly. “In fact, legally speaking you still hold the office.” He glanced up at the lean Negro with the overly-massive side arm who currently constituted the Anarch’s bodyguard. “Isn’t that so, Mr. Plaut?”
   “True, your Mightiness,” the Negro said to the boy. “You possess the power to arbitrate in this case, having to do with this gentleman’s manuscript.” Squatting on his lank haunches the bodyguard sought to engage the boy’s wandering attention. “Your Mightiness, this man is the inventor of the swabble.”
   “What’s that?” The boy glanced from one to the other of them, scowling with suspicion. “How much does a swabble cost? I only have fifty cents; I got it as my allowance. Anyhow I don’t think I want a swabble. I want some gum, and I’m going to the show.” His expression became fixed, rigidly in place. “Who cares about a swabble?” he said with disdain.
   “You have lived one hundred and sixty years,” the bodyguard Plaut told him. “Because of this man’s invention. From the swabble the Hobart Phase was inferred and finally established experimentally. I know that means nothing to you, but—” The bodyguard clasped his hands together earnestly, rocking on his hocks as he tried to keep the boy’s constantly dwindling attention focussed. “Pay attention to me, Sebastian; this is important. If you could sign a decree… while you can still write. That’s all. A public notice for people to—”
   “Aw, go on; beat it.” The boy glared at him with hostility. “I don’t believe you; something’s the matter.”
   Something is wrong, all right, Eng thought to himself as he rose stiffly to his feet. And there appears to be next to nothing that we can do about it. At least without your help. He felt defeated.
   “Try him again later,” the bodyguard said, also rising; he looked decidedly sympathetic.
   “He’ll be even younger,” Eng said bitterly. And anyhow there was no time; no later existed. He walked a few steps away, then, overcome with gloom.
   On a tree branch a butterfly had begun the intricate, mysterious process of squeezing itself into a dull brown cocoon, and Eng paused to inspect its slow, labored efforts. It had its task, too, but that task, unlike his, was not hopeless. However the butterfly did not know that; it continued mindlessly, a reflex machine obeying the urgings programmed into it from the remote future. The sight of the insect at work gave Eng something to ponder; he perceived the moral in it, and, turning, walked back to confront the child who squatted on the grass with his circle of gaily-colored luminous marbles.
   “Look at it this way,” he said to the Anarch Peak; this was probably his last try, and he meant to bring in everything available. “Even if you can’t remember what a swabble is or what the Hobart Phase does, all you need to do is sign; I have the document here.” Reaching into his inside coat pocket he brought the envelope out, opened it. “When you’ve signed this, it will appear on world-wide TV, at the six P.M. news in each time zone. I tell you what I’ll do. If you’ll sign this, I’ll triple what you’ve got in the way of money. You say you have fifty cents? I’ll give you an additional dollar, a genuine paper one. What do you say? And I’ll pay your way to the movies once a week, at the Saturday matinee for the balance of the year. Is it a deal?”
   The boy studied him acutely. He seemed almost convinced. But something—Eng could not fathom what—held him back.
   “I think,” the bodyguard said softly, “he wants to ask his dad’s permission. The old gentleman is now alive; his components migrated into a birth-container about six weeks ago, and he is currently in the Kansas City General Hospital’s birth ward undergoing revivification. He is already conscious, and His Mightiness has spoken with him several times. Is that not so, Sebastian?” He smiled gently at the boy, then grimaced as the boy nodded. “So that is it,” he said to Eng, then. “I was right. He’s afraid to take any initiative, now that his father’s alive. It’s very bad luck as far as you’re concerned, Mr. Eng; he’s just plain dwindled too much to perform his job. And everybody knows it as a fact.”
   “I refuse to give up,” Eng said. But the truth of the matter was that purely and simply he had already given up; he could see that the bodyguard, who spent all his waking time with the Anarch, was correct. It had become a waste of time. Had this meeting taken place two years from now, however…
   To the bodyguard he said heavily, “I’ll go away and let him play with his marbles.” He placed the envelope back in his pocket, started off; then, pausing, he added, “I’ll make one final try yesterday morning. Before I’m due at the library. If the boy’s schedule permits it.”
   “It surely does,” the bodyguard said. He explained, “Hardly anybody consults him any more, in view of his—condition.” His tone was sympathetic, and for that Eng felt appreciation.
   Turning wearily he trudged off, leaving the one-time Anarch of half the civilized world to play mindlessly in the grass.
   The previous morning, he realized. My last chance. Long time to wait and do nothing.
   In his hotel room he placed a phone call to the West Coast, to the People’s Topical Library. Presently he found himself facing one of the bureaucrats with whom, of late, he had had to deal so much. “Let me talk directly to Mr. Lehrer,” he grunted. Might as well go directly to the source, he decided; Lehrer had final authority in the matter of his book—now decayed to a mere typewritten manuscript.
   “Sorry,” the functionary told him, with a faint trace of disdain. “It is too early; Mr. Lehrer has already left the building.”
   “Could I catch him at home, do you think?”
   “He is probably having breakfast. I suggest you wait until late yesterday. After all, Mr. Lehrer needs some time for seclusive recreation; he has many heavy and difficult responsibilities to weigh him down.” Clearly, the minor functionary had no intention of cooperating.
   Dully depressed, Eng hung up without even saying hello. Well, perhaps it was for the better; undoubtedly Lehrer would refuse to grant him additional time. After all, as the library bureaucrat had said, Lehrer had pressures at work on him, too: in particular the Erads of the syndicate… those mysterious entities who saw to it that destruction of human inventions be painstakingly carried out. As witness his own book. Well, time to give up and head back west.
   As he started from his hotel room, he paused at the mirror of the vanity table to see whether his face had, during the day, absorbed the packet of whiskers which he had foam-glued onto it. Peering at his reflection, he rubbed his jowls…
   And screamed.
   All along his jaw-line the dark stubble of newly-grown facial hair could be seen. He was growing a beard; stubble was coming in—not being absorbed.
   What this meant he did not know. But it terrified him; he stood gaping, appalled now by the fright collected within his reflected features. The man in the mirror did look even vaguely familiar; some ominous underlying deformity of change had attacked it. But why? And—how?
   Instinct told him not to leave the hotel room.
   He seated himself. And waited. For what, he did not know. But one thing he did know. There would be no meeting with Niehls Lehrer of the People’s Topical Library at two-thirty yesterday afternoon. Because—
   He scented it, grasped it intuitively from the one single glance in the mirror of his hotel room’s vanity table. There would be no yesterday; not for him, anyhow.
   Would there be for anyone else?
   “I’ve got to see the Anarch again,” he said haltingly to himself. The hell with Lehrer; I don’t have any intention of trying to make that or any other appointment with him now. All that matters is seeing Sebastian Peak once more; in fact as soon as it’s possible. Perhaps earlier today.
   Because once he saw the Anarch he would know whether what he guessed were true. And if it were true, then his book, all at once, lay outside jeopardy. The syndicate with their inflexible program of eradication no longer menaced him—possibly. At least he hoped so.
   But only time would tell. Time. The entire Hobart Phase. It was somehow involved.
   And—possibly—not just for him.

   To his superior Bard Chai of the Clearness Council, Gantrix said, “We were right.” He recycled the tape recorder with shaking hands. “This is from our phone tap, video, to the library; the inventor of the swabble, Ludwig Eng, attempted to reach Lehrer and failed. There was therefore no conversation.”
   “Hence nothing to record,” the Bard purred cuttingly. His round green face sagged in pouting disappointment.
   “Not so. Look. It is Eng’s image that’s significant. He has spent the day with the Anarch—and as a consequence his age-flow has doubled back upon itself. See with your own eyes.”
   After a moment, in which he scrutinized the video image of Eng, the Bard leaned back in his chair, said, “The stigma. Heavy infestation of beard-stubble; certain index in a male, especially of the Cauc persuasion.”
   “Shall we rebirth him now?” Gantrix said. “Before he reaches Lehrer?” He had in his possession a superbly made gun which would dwindle any person in a matter of minutes—dwindle him directly into the nearest womb, and for good.
   “In my opinion,” Bard Chai said, “he has become harmless. The swabble is nonexistent; this will not restore it.” But within, Bard Chai felt doubt, if not concern. Perhaps Gantrix, his subordinate, correctly perceived the situation; he had done so in the past, on several critical occasions… which explained his current value to the Clearness Council.
   “But if the Hobart Phase has been cancelled out for Eng,” Gantrix said doggedly, “then the development of the swabble will start up again. After all, he possesses the original typed manuscript; his contact with the Anarch has taken place before the Eradicators of the syndicate induced the final stage of destruct.”
   That certainly was true; Bard Chai pondered and agreed. And yet despite this knowledge he had trouble taking Ludwig Eng seriously; the man did not look dangerous, bearded or otherwise. He turned to Gantrix, began to speak—then abruptly ceased.
   “Your expression strikes me as unusual,” Gantrix said, with palpable annoyance. “What’s wrong?” He seemed uneasy, as the Bard’s stare continued. Concern replaced displeasure.
   “Your face,” the Bard Chai said, keeping his composure with the greatest of effort.
   “What about my face?” Gantrix’s hand flew to his chin; he massaged briefly, then blinked. “My God.”
   “And you have not been near the Anarch. So that does not explain your condition.” He wondered, then, about himself; had the reversal of the Hobart Phase extended to his own person as well? Swiftly he explored his own jaw-line and dewlap. And distinctly felt burgeoning bristle. Perplexing, he thought wildly to himself. What can account for this? The reversal of the Anarch’s time-path might be only an effect of some prior cause involving them all. This put a new light on the Anarch’s situation; perhaps it had not been voluntary.
   “Can it be,” Gantrix said reflectively, “that the disappearance of Eng’s device could explain this? Except for mention in the typewritten manuscript there is no longer any reality connected with the swabble. Actually, we should have anticipated this, since the swabble is intimately associated with the Hobart Phase.”
   “I wonder,” Bard Chai said, still rapidly pondering. But the swabble had not strictly speaking created the Hobart Phase; it served to direct it, so that certain regions of the planet could evade the Phase entirely—whereas others had become completely mired in it. Still, the disappearance of the swabble from contemporary society must diffuse the Hobart Phase equally over everyone; and an outgrowth of this might be a diminution to beneath the level of effectiveness for those—such as himself and Carl Gantrix—who had participated in the Phase fully.
   “But now,” Gantrix said thoughtfully, “the inventor of the swabble, and first user of it, has returned to normal time; hence the development of the swabble has again manifested itself. We can expect Eng to build his first working model of the device at any time, now.”
   The difficulty of Eng’s situation had now become apparent to Bard Chai. As before, use of the man’s mechanism would spread throughout the world. But—as soon as Eng built and placed in operation his pilot swabble, the Hobart Phase would resume; once more Eng’s direction would reverse itself. The swabbles would then be abolished by the syndicate until, once again, all that remained was the original typewritten manuscript—at which point normal time would reestablish itself.
   It appeared to Bard Chai that Eng had gotten himself trapped in a closed loop. He would oscillate within a distinct small interval: between possessing only a theoretical account of the swabble and in actuality constructing and operating a functioning model. And tagging along with him would go a good portion of Terra’s population.
   We are caught with him, Bard Chai realized gloomily. How do we escape? What is our solution?
   “We must either force Eng back into complete obliteration of his manuscript, including the idea for the construct,” Gantrix said, “or—”
   “But that is impossible,” Bard Chai broke in impatiently. “At this point the Hobart Phase weakens automatically, since no working swabbles exist to sustain it. How, in their absence, can Eng be forced backward in time a single step farther?”
   It constituted a valid—and answerable—query; both men realized that, and neither spoke for a time. Gantrix morosely continued to rub his jaw, as if he could perceive the steady growth of beard-stubble. Bard Chai, on the other hand, had withdrawn into an intensive introverted state; he pondered and repondered the problem.
   No answer came. At least not yet. But, given time—
   “This is extremely difficult,” the Bard said, with agitation. “Eng will probably throw together his first swabble at any moment. And once more we will be cycled in a retrograde direction.” What worried him now was one terrible, swift insight. This would occur again and again, and each time the interval would be shortened further. Until, he ruminated, it becomes a stall within a single microsecond; no time-progression in either direction will be able to take place.
   A morbid prospect indeed. But one redemptive factor existed. Eng undoubtedly would perceive the problem, too. And he would seek a way out. Logically, it could be solved by him in at least one way: he could voluntarily abstain from inventing the swabble. The Hobart Phase, then, would never assert itself, at least not effectively
   But such a decision lay with Ludwig Eng alone. Would he cooperate, if the idea were presented to him?
   Probably not. Eng had always been a violent and autistic man; no one could influence him. This, of course, had helped him become an original personality; without this Eng would not have amounted to anything as an inventor, and the swabble, with its enormous effect on contemporary society, would never have come into existence.
   Which would have been a good thing, the Bard thought morosely. But until now we could not appreciate this.
   He appreciated it now.
   The solution which Gantrix had proposed, that of rebirthing Eng, did not appeal to him. But it looked more and more to his eyes as the only way out. And a way out had to be found.

   With profound irritation the librarian Niehls Lehrer inspected the clock on his desk, then his appointment book. Eng had not shown up; two-thirty had arrived, and Lehrer sat alone in his office. Carl Gantrix had been correct.
   While pondering the meaning of this he heard, dimly, the phone ringing. Probably Eng, he decided as he reached for the receiver. A long way off, phoning in to say that he can’t make it. I’ll have trouble with this; the syndicate won’t like it. And I’ll have to alert them; I have no choice.
   Into the phone he said, “Goodbye.”
   “I love you, Niehls.” A breathless feminine voice; this was not the call which he had anticipated. “Do you love me?”
   “Yes, Charise,” he said. “I love you, too. But dammit, don’t call me during business hours; I thought you knew that.”
   Contritely, Charise McFadden said, “Sorry, Niehls. But I keep thinking about poor Lance. Did you do the research on him that you promised? I bet you didn’t.”
   As a matter of fact he had; or more accurately he had instructed a minor employee of the library to do the task for him. Reaching into the top desk drawer he brought out Lance Arbuthnot’s folio. “Here it is,” he informed Charise. “I know all there is to know about this crank. All I care to know, more correctly.” He leafed among the sheets of paper within the file. “There’s not much here, actually. Arbuthnot hasn’t done much. You understand I can only take time to go into this matter because a major library client has failed—so far—to keep his two-thirty appointment. If he does show up, I’ll have to terminate this conversation.”
   “Did Arbuthnot know the Anarch Peak?”
   “That part of his account is true.”
   “And he is a genuine crank. So eradicating his thesis would be a distinct gain for society. It’s your duty.” Over the vid portion of the phone she batted her long lashes coaxingly. “Come on, Niehls, dear. Please.”
   “But,” Lehrer continued inflexibly, “there is nothing here suggesting that Arbuthnot spent any time concocting a paper dealing with the psychosomatic aspects of death by meteor-strike.”
   She colored, hesitated, then said in a low voice, “I, um, made that up.”
   “Why?”
   After a pause, Charise said, falteringly, “Well, h-h-he’s—the fact is, I’m his mistress.”
   “The fact is,” Lehrer said boring ahead with ruthless vigor, “you don’t really know what his thesis is about. It may be perfectly rational. A significant contribution to our society. Correct?” He did not wait for her reply; reaching, he started to break the phone circuit.
   “Wait.” She swallowed rapidly, ducked her head, then plunged on as his fingers touched the trip switch of the phone. “All right, Niehls; I admit it. Lance refuses to tell me what his thesis is about. He won’t tell anybody. But if you’ll undertake to eradicate it—don’t you see? He’ll have to reveal it to you; your analysis of it is required before the syndicate accepts it. Isn’t that so? And then you’ll tell me what it’s all about. I know you will.”
   Lehrer said, “What do you care what it’s about?”
   “I think,” Charise said, hesitating, “it has to do with me. Honest. There’s something strange about me, and Lance noticed it. I mean, that’s not so unusual when you consider how, um, close we two are; we see so much—if you’ll excuse the expression—of each other.”
   “I find this a dull topic,” Lehrer said frigidly. At this point, he said to himself, I wouldn’t accept Arbuthnot’s thesis at any cost to me. Even if they debited me to the tune often thousand poscreds. “I’ll talk to you some other time,” he said, and broke the phone circuit.
   “Sir,” his secretary Miss Tomsen said over the desk intercom, “there’s this man out here who’s been waiting since six this evening. He says he only wants a second or two of your time, and Miss McFadden led him to understand that you’d be glad to—”
   “Tell him I died in office,” Lehrer said harshly.
   “But you can’t die, sir. You’re under the Hobart Phase. And Mr. Arbuthnot knows that, because he mentioned it. He’s been sitting out here doing a Hobart type horoscope on you, and he predicts that great things have happened to you during the previous year. Frankly he makes me nervous; some of his predictions sound so accurate.”
   “Fortune-telling about the past doesn’t interest me,” Lehrer said. “In fact, as far as I’m concerned, it’s a hoax. Only the future is knowable.” The man is a crank, all right, Lehrer realized. Charise told me the truth in that respect. Imagine maintaining in all seriousness that what has already happened, what has vanished into the limbo of nebulous yesterday, can be predicted. There’s one killed every minute, as P.T. Barnum phrased it.
   Maybe I should see him, he reflected. Charise is right; ideas like this ought to be eradicated for the good of mankind, if not for my own peace of mind.
   But that was not all. Now a measure of curiosity overcame him. It would be interesting, in a feeble way, to hear the idiot out. See what he predicted, especially for the recent few weeks. And then accept his thesis for eradication. Be the first person he casts a Hobart type of horoscope for.
   Undoubtedly, Ludwig Eng did not intend to show up. The time, Lehrer said to himself, must be two o’clock by now. He glanced at his wristwatch. And blinked.
   The watch hands semaphored two-forty.
   “Miss Tomsen,” Lehrer said into the intercom, “What time do you have?”
   “Leaping J. Lizards,” Miss Tomsen said. “It’s earlier than I thought. I distinctly recall it being two-twenty just a moment ago. My watch must have stopped.”
   “You mean it’s later than you thought. Two-forty is later than two-thirty.”
   “No sir, if you don’t resent my disagreeing with you. I mean, it’s not my place to tell you what’s what, but I am right. You can ask anybody. I’ll ask this gentleman out here. Mr. Arbuthnot, isn’t two-forty earlier than two-twenty?”
   Over the intercom speaker came a masculine voice, dry and controlled. “I’m only interested in seeing Mr. Lehrer, not in holding academic discussions. Mr. Lehrer, if you will see me, I guarantee you’ll find my thesis the most flagrant piece of outright trash you’ve ever had brought to your attention; Miss McFadden will not mislead you.”
   “Send him in,” Lehrer reluctantly instructed Miss Tomsen. He felt perplexed. Something weird had begun to happen, something which was connected with the orderly flow of time. But he could not make out precisely what.
   A dapper young man, in the first stages of baldness, entered the office, a briefcase under his arm. He and Lehrer briefly shook and then Arbuthnot seated himself facing the desk.
   So this is the man Charise is having an affair with, Lehrer said to himself. Well, so it goes. “I’ll give you ten minutes,” he stated. “And then you’re out of here. You understand?”
   “I have concocted here,” Arbuthnot said, unzipping his briefcase, “the most outrageously impossible concept imaginable to my mind. And I think official eradication is absolutely essential, here, if this idea is to be kept from taking root and doing actual outright harm. There are people who pick up and act on any idea, no matter how contrary to rational good sense. You’re the only person I’ve shown this to, and I show it to you with grave reservations.” Arbuthnot then, in one brisk and spasmodic motion, dropped his typewritten work on the surface of Niehls Lehrer’s desk. And sat back, waiting.
   With professional caution, Lehrer surveyed the title of the paper, then shrugged. “This is nothing more than an inversion of Ludwig Eng’s famous work.” He slid his castered chair back from the desk, disavowing the manuscript; raising both hands he gestured in dismissal. “This is not so preposterous; it’s logically thinkable to reverse Eng’s title—anybody could do it at any time.”
   Arbuthnot said grimly, “But no one has. Until now. Read it once again and think out the implications.”
   Unimpressed, Lehrer once more examined the thick bundle of pages.
   “The implications,” Arbuthnot continued in a low, quiet, but tense voice, “of the eradication of this manuscript.”
   The title, still unimpressive to Lehrer, read:


How I Disassembled My Swabble into Ordinary Household Objects in My Basement During My Spare Time

   “So?” Lehrer said. “Anyone can disassemble a swabble; in fact it’s being done. In fact, thousands of swabbles are being eradicated; it’s the pattern. In fact, I doubt whether a single swabble is now to be found anywhere in—”
   “When this thesis is eradicated,” Arbuthnot said, “as I am certain it has been, and recently, what will the negation consist of? Think it out, Lehrer. You know the implications of cleaning out of existence Eng’s premise; it means the end of the swabble and therefore the Hobart Phase. In fact, we’ll see a return to normal time-flow throughout the Western United States and the Free Negro Municipality within the past forty-eight hours… as Eng’s manuscript nears syndicate jurisdiction. The eradication of my work, then, if you follow the same line of reasoning—” He paused, “You see what I’ve done, don’t you? I’ve found a way to preserve the swabble. And to maintain the now-disintegrating Hobart Phase, Without my thesis we’ll gradually lose all that the swabble has brought us. The swabble, Lehrer, eliminates death; the case of the Anarch Peak is only the beginning. But the only way to keep the cycle alive is to balance Eng’s paper with mine; Eng’s paper moves us in one direction; my paper reverses it, and then Eng’s becomes operative once more. Forever, if we want it. Unless—and I can’t imagine this happening, although admittedly it is theoretically possible—a hopeless fusion of the two time-flows results.”
   “You’re a crank,” Lehrer said thickly.
   “Exactly.” Arbuthnot nodded. “And that’s why you’ll accept my paper for official syndicate eradication. Because you don’t believe me. Because you think this is absurd.” He smiled slightly, his eyes gray, intelligent and penetrating. Pressing the on-button of his intercom, Lehrer said, “Miss Tomsen, notify the local outlet of the syndicate that I’d like an Erad sent to my office as soon as possible. I have some junk here that I want him to rule on. So we can begin the business of terminal copy extinction.” “Yes, Mr. Lehrer,” Miss Tomsen’s voice said.
   Leaning back in his chair, Lehrer surveyed the man seated across from him. “Does that suit you?”
   Still smiling, Arbuthnot said, “Perfectly.”
   “If I thought there was anything in your concept—”
   “But you don’t,” Arbuthnot said patiently. “So I’m going to get what I want; I’ll be successful. Sometime tomorrow or at the latest the day after.”
   “You mean yesterday,” Lehrer said. “Or the day before.” He examined his wristwatch. “The ten minutes are up,” he informed the crank inventor. “I’ll ask you now to leave.” He placed his hand on the bundle of papers. “This stays here.”
   Rising, Arbuthnot moved toward the door of the office. “Mr. Lehrer,” he said, pausing, “don’t be alarmed by this, but with all due respects, sir, you need a shave.”
   “I haven’t shaved in twenty-three years,” Lehrer said. “Not since the Hobart Phase first took effect in my area of Los Angeles.”
   “You will by this time tomorrow,” Arbuthnot said. And left the office; the door shut after him.
   After a moment of reflection, Lehrer touched the button of the intercom. “Miss Tomsen, don’t send anyone else in here; I’m cancelling my appointments for the balance of the day.”
   “Yes sir.” Hopefully, Miss Tomsen said, “He was a crank, wasn’t he? I thought so; I can always tell. You’re glad you saw him.”
   “Will see him,” he corrected.
   “I think you’re mistaken, Mr. Lehrer. The past tense—”
   “Even if Ludwig Eng shows up,” Lehrer said, “I don’t feel like seeing him. I’ve had enough for today.” Opening his desk drawer he carefully deposited Arbuthnot’s manuscript within it, then shut it once more. He reached toward the ash tray on the desk, selected the shortest—and hence best—cigarette butt, dabbed it against the ceramic surface until it began to burn, then lifted it to his lips. Puffing shreds of tobacco into it, he sat staring fixedly out the office window at the poplar trees that lined the walk to the parking lot.
   The wind, rushing about, gathered up a quantity of leaves, swirled them onto the branches of the trees, adhered them in a neat arrangement which decidedly added to the beauty of the trees.
   Already, some of the brown leaves had turned green. In a short while autumn would give way to summer, and summer to spring.
   He watched appreciatively. As he waited for the Erad sent out by the syndicate. Due to the crank’s deranged thesis, time had once more returned to normal. Except—
   Lehrer rubbed his chin. Bristles. He frowned.
   “Miss Tomsen,” he said into the intercom, “will you step in here and tell me whether or not I need a shave?”
   He had a feeling that he did. And soon.
   Probably within the previous half hour.

Holy Quarrel

I

   Sleep dissolved; he blinked as a dazzle of white artificial light hurt him. The light came from three rings which held a fixed location above the bed, midway to the ceiling.
   “Sorry to wake you, Mr. Stafford,” a man’s voice came from beyond the light. “You are Joseph Stafford, aren’t you?” Then, speaking to someone else, also unseen, the voice continued, “Would be a damn shame to wake somebody else up—somebody who didn’t deserve it.”
   Stafford sat up and croaked, “Who are you?”
   The bed creaked and one circle of light lowered. One of them had seated himself. “We’re looking for Joseph Stafford, of tier six, floor fifty, who’s the—what do you call it?”
   “Computer GB-class repairman,” a companion assisted him.
   “Yes, an expert, for example, in those new molten-plasma data storage cans. You could fix one like that if it broke, couldn’t you, Stafford?”
   “Sure he could,” another voice said calmly. “That’s why he’s rated as standby.” He explained, “That second vidphone line we cut did that; it kept him directly connected with his superiors.”
   “How long has it been since you got a call, repairman?” the first voice inquired.
   Stafford did not answer; he fished beneath the pillow of the bed, groped for the Sneek gun he generally kept there.
   “Probably hasn’t worked for a long time,” one of the visitors with flashlight said. “Probably needs the money. You need any money, Stafford? Or what do you need? You enjoy fixing computers? I mean, you’d be a sap to enter this line of work unless you liked it—with you on twenty-four-hour standby like it is. Are you good? Can you fix anything, no matter how ridiculous and remote it is, that happens to our Genux-B military planning programmer? Make us feel good; say yes.”
   “I—have to think,” Stafford said thickly. He still searched for the gun, but he had lost it; he felt its absence. Or possibly before awakening him they had taken it.
   “Tell you what, Stafford,” the voice went on.
   Interrupting, another voice said, “Mr. Stafford. Listen.” The far right nimbus of light also lowered; the man had bent over him. “Get out of bed, okay? Get dressed and we’ll drive you to where we need a computer fixed, and on the way when you have plenty of time you can decide how good you are. And then when we get there you can have a quick look at the Genux-B and see how long it’ll take you.”
   “We really want it fixed up,” the first man said plaintively. “As it is, it’s no good to us or anyone. The way it is now, data are piling up in mile-high mounds. And they’re not being—what do you say?—ingested. They just sit there, and Genux-B doesn’t process them, so naturally it can’t come up with any decision. So naturally all those satellites are just flying along there like nothing happened.”
   Getting slowly, stiffly from the bed, Stafford said, “What showed up first as a symptom?” He wondered who they were. And he wondered which Genux-B they were talking about. As far as he knew, there existed only three in North America—only eight throughout Terra.
   Watching him get into his work smock, the invisible shapes behind the flashlights conferred. At last one cleared his throat and said, “I understand that a tape take-up reel stopped spinning, so all the tape with all the data on it just keeps spinning onto the floor in a big heap.”
   “But tape tension on the take-up reels—” Stafford began.
   “In this case, it failed to be automatic. You see, we jammed the reel so it wouldn’t accept any more tape. Before that we tried cutting the tape, but as I guess you know it rethreads itself automatically. And we tried erasing the tape, but if the erase circuit comes on it starts an alarm going in Washington, D.C., and we didn’t want to get all those high-level people involved. But they—the computer designers—overlooked the take-up reel tension because that’s such a simple clutch arrangement. It can’t go wrong.”
   Trying to button his collar, Stafford said, “In other words, there’re data you don’t want it to receive.” He felt lucid now; at least he had more or less wakened up. “What kind of data?” He thought with chill foreboding that he knew. Data were coming in which would cause the big government-owned computer to declare a Red Alert. Of course, this crippling of Genux-B would have to occur before a hostile attack by the South African True Association manifested itself in real but minute individual symptoms which the computer, with its vast intake of seemingly unrelated data, would take note of—notice and add together into a meaningful pattern.
   Stafford thought bitterly, How many times we were warned about this! They would have to wipe out our Genux-B prior to its successful deploying of the SAC retaliatory satellites and bombers. And this was that event; these men, undercover extensions in North America of S.A.T.A., had rousted him to complete their job of making the computer inoperable.
   But—data might already have been received, might already have been transferred to the receptor circuits for processing and analysis. They had started to work too late; possibly by one day, possibly only by a few seconds. At least some of the meaningful data had gotten onto the tapes, and so he had to be called in. They couldn’t finish their job alone.
   The United States, then, would presently undergo a series of terror-weapon satellites bursting above it—as meantime the network of defensive machinery waited for a command from the cardinal computer. Waited in vain, since Genux-B knew of no trace harbingers of military assault—would still not ever really know until a direct hit on the national capital put an end to it and its emasculated faculties.
   No wonder they had jammed the take-up reel.

II

   “The war’s begun,” he said quietly to the four men with flashlights.
   Now that he had turned on the bedroom lamps, he could make them out. Ordinary men with an assigned task; these were not fanatics but functionaries. They could have worked equally well for any government, perhaps even the near-psychotic Chinese People’s. “The war has already broken out,” he guessed aloud, “and it’s essential that Genux-B not know—so it can neither defend us nor strike back. You want to see it get only data which indicate we’re at peace.” He—and no doubt they—recalled how swiftly in the two previous Interventions of Honor, one against Israel, one against France, Genux-B had reacted. Not one trained professional observer had seen the signs—or had seen to what the signs led, anyhow. As with Josef Stalin in 1941. The old tyrant had been shown evidence that the Third Reich intended to attack the U.S.S.R., but he simply would not or could not believe. Any more than the Reich had believed that France and Britain, in 1939, would honor their pact with Poland.
   In a compact group, the men with flashlights led him from the bedroom of his conapt, into the outer hall and to the escy which led to the roof field. As they emerged, the air smelled of mud and dampness. He inhaled, shivered, and involuntarily gazed up at the sky. One star moved: landing light on a flapple, which now set down a few feet from the five of them.
   As they sat within the flapple—rising swiftly from the roof and heading toward Utah to the west—one of the gray functionaries with Sneek gun, flashlight, and briefcase said to Stafford, “Your theory is good, especially considering that we woke you out of a sound sleep.”
   “But,” a companion put in, “it’s wrong. Show him the punched tape we hauled out.”
   Opening his briefcase, the man nearest Stafford brought out a wad of plastic tape, handed it mutely to Stafford.
   Holding it up against the dome light of the flapple, Stafford made out the punches. Binary system, evidently programming material for the Strategic Acquired-Space Command units which the computer directly controlled.
   “It was about to push the panic button and give them an order,” the man at the console of the flapple said, over his shoulder. “To all our military units linked to it. Can you read the command?”
   Stafford nodded, and returned the tape. He could read it, yes. The computer had formally notified SAC of a Red Alert. It had gone so far as to move H-bomb-carrying squadrons into scramble, and also was requesting that all ICBM missiles on their assorted pads be made ready for launch.
   “And also,” the man at the controls added, “it was sending out a command to defensive satellites and missile complexes to deploy themselves in response to an imminent H-bomb attack. We blocked all this, however, as you now are able to see. None of this tape got onto the co-ax lines.”
   After a pause, Stafford said huskily, “Then what data don’t you want Genux-B to receive?” He did not understand.
   “Feedback,” said the man at the controls. Obviously he was the leader of this unit of commandos. “Without feedback the computer does not possess any method of determining that there has been no counterattack by its military arm. In the abeyance it will have to assume that the counterattack has taken place, but that the enemy strike was at least partially successful.”
   Stafford said, “But there is no enemy. Who’s attacking us?”
   Silence.
   Sweat made Stafford’s forehead slick with moisture. “Do you know what would cause a Genux-B to conclude that we’re under attack? A million separate factors, all possible known data weighed, compared, analyzed—and then the absolute gestalt. In this case, the gestalt of an imminent attacking enemy. No one thing would have raised the threshold; it was quantitative. A shelter-building program in Asiatic Russia, unusual movements of cargo ships around Cuba, concentrations of rocket freight unloadings in Red Canada…”
   “No one,” the man at the controls of the flapple said placidly, “no nation or group of persons either on Terra or Luna or Domed Mars is attacking anybody. You can see why we’ve got to get you over there fast. You have to make it absolutely certain that no orders emanate from Genux-B to SAC. We want Genux-B sealed off so it can’t talk to anybody in a position of authority and it can’t hear anybody besides us. What we do after that we’ll worry about then. ‘But the evil of the day—’ ”
   “You assert that in spite of everything available to it, Genux-B can’t distinguish an attack on us?” Stafford demanded. “With its manifold data-collecting sweepers?” He thought of something then, that terrified him in a kind of hopeless, retrospective way. “What about our attack on France in ‘82 and then on little Israel in ‘89?”
   “No one was attacking us then either,” the man nearest Stafford said, as he retrieved the tape and again placed it within his briefcase. His voice, somber and morose, was the only sound; no one else stirred or spoke. “Same then as now. Only this time a group of us stopped Genux-B before it could commit us. We pray we’ve aborted a pointless, needless war.”
   “Who are you?” Stafford asked. “What’s your status in the federal government? And what’s your connection with Genux-B?” Agents, he thought, of the Blunk-rattling South African True Association. That still struck him as most likely. Or even zealots from Israel, looking for vengeance—or merely acting out the desire to stop a war: the most humanitarian motivation conceivable.
   But, nevertheless, he himself, like Genux-B, was under a loyalty oath to no larger political entity than the North American Prosperity Alliance. He still had the problem of getting away from these men and to his chain-of-command superiors so that he could file a report.
   The man at the controls of the flapple said, “Three of us are FBI.” He displayed credentials. “And that man there is an eleccom engineer, who, as a matter of fact, helped in the original design of this particular Genux-B.”
   “That’s right,” the engineer said. “I personally made it possible for them to jam both the outgoing programming and the incoming data feed. But that’s not enough.” He turned toward Stafford, his face serene, his eyes large and inviting. He was half-begging, half-ordering, using whatever tone would bring results. “But let’s be realistic. Every Genux-B has backup monitoring circuitry that’ll begin to inform it any time now that its programming to SAC isn’t being acted on, and in addition it’s not getting the data it ought to get. As with everything else it sinks its electronic circuits into, it’ll begin to introspect. And by that time we have to be doing something better than jamming a take-up reel with a Phillips screwdriver.” He paused. “So,” he finished more slowly, “that’s why we came to you.”
   Gesturing, Stafford said, “I’m just a repairman. Maintenance and service—not even malfunct analysis. I do only what I’m told.”
   “Then do what we’re telling you,” the FBI man closest to him spoke up harshly. “Find out why Genux-B decided to flash a Red Alert, scramble SAC, and begin a ‘counterattack.’ Find out why it did so in the case of France and Israel. Something made it add up its received data and get that answer. It’s not alive! It has no volition. It didn’t just feel the urge to do this.”
   The engineer said, “If we’re lucky, this is the last time Genux-B will malreact in this fashion. If we can spot the misfunction this time, we’ll perhaps have it pegged for all time. Before it starts showing up in the other seven Genux-B systems around the world.”
   “And you’re certain,” Stafford said, “that we’re not under attack?” Even if Genux-B had been wrong both times before, it at least theoretically could be right this time.
   “If we are about to be attacked,” the nearest FBI man said, “we can’t make out any indication of it—by human data processing, anyhow. I admit it’s logically thinkable that Genux-B could be correct. After all, as he pointed out—”
   “You may be in error because the S.A.T.A. has been hostile toward us so long we take it for granted. It’s a verity of modern life.”
   “Oh, it’s not the South African True Association,” the FBI man said briskly. “In fact, if it were we wouldn’t have gotten suspicious. We wouldn’t have begun poking around, interviewing survivors from the Israel War and French War and whatever else State’s done to follow this up.”
   “It’s Northern California,” the engineer said, and grimaced. “Not even all of California; just the part above Pismo Beach.”
   Stafford stared at them.
   “That’s right,” one of the FBI men said. “Genux-B was in the process of scrambling all SAC bombers and wep-sats for an all-out assault on the area around Sacramento, California.”
   “You asked it why?” Stafford said, speaking to the engineer.
   “Sure. Or rather, strictly speaking, we asked it to spell out in detail what the ‘enemy’ is up to.”
   One of the FBI men drawled, “Tell Mr. Stafford what Northern California is up to that makes it a hot-target enemy—that would have meant its destruction by SAC spearhead assaults if we hadn’t jammed the damn machinery… and still have it jammed.”
   “Some individual,” the engineer said, “has opened up a penny gum machine route in Castro Valley. You know. He has those bubble-headed dispensers outside supermarkets. The children put in a penny and get a placebo ball of gum and something additional occasionally—a prize such as a ring or a charm. It varies. That’s the target.”
   Incredulous, Stafford said, “You’re joking.”
   “Absolute truth. Man’s name is Herb Sousa. He owns sixty-four machines now in operation and plans expansion.”
   “I mean,” Stafford said thickly, “you’re joking about Genux-B’s response to that datum.”
   “Its response isn’t exactly to that datum per se,” the closest of the FBI men said. “For instance, we checked with both the Israeli and French governments. Nobody named Herb Sousa opened up a penny gum machine route in their countries, and that goes for chocolate-covered peanut vending machines or anything else remotely similar to it. And, contrarily, Herb Sousa maintained such a route in Chile and in the U.K. during the past two decades… without Genux-B taking any interest all those years.” He added, “He’s an elderly man.”
   “A sort of Johnny Apple Gum,” the engineer said, and tittered. “Looping the world, sending those gum machines swooping down in front of every gas—”
   “The triggering stimulus,” the engineer said, as the flapple began to drop toward a vast complex of illuminated public buildings below, “may lie in the ingredients of the merchandise placed in the machines. That’s what our experts have come up with; they studied all material available to Genux-B concerning Sousa’s gum concessions, and we know that all Genux-B has consists of a long, dry chemical analysis of the food product constituents with which Sousa loads his machines. In fact, Genux-B specifically requested more information on that angle. It kept grinding out ‘incomplete ground data’ until we got a thorough PF&D lab analysis.”
   “What did the analysis show?” Stafford asked. The flapple had now berthed on the roof of the installations housing the central component of the computer, and, as it was called these days, Mr. C-in-C of the North American Prosperity Alliance.
   “As regards foodstuffs,” an FBI man near the door said, as he stepped out onto the dimly illuminated landing strip, “nothing but gum base, sugar, corn syrup, softeners, and artificial flavor, all the way down the line. Matter of fact, that’s the only way you can make gum. And those dinky little prizes are vacuum-processed thermoplastics. Six hundred to the dollar will buy them from any of a dozen firms here and in Hong Kong and Japan. We even went so far as to trace the prizes down to the specific jobber, his sources, back to the factory, where a man from State actually stood and watched them making the damn little things. No, nothing there. Nothing at all.”
   “But,” the engineer said, half to himself, “when that data had been supplied to Genux-B—”
   “Then this,” the FBI man said, standing aside so that Stafford could disemflapple. “A Red Alert, the SAC scramble, the missiles up from their silos. Forty minutes away from thermonuclear war—the distance from us of one Phillips head screwdriver wedged in a tape drum of the computer.”
   To Stafford, the engineer said keenly, “Do you pick up anything odd or conceivably misleading in those data? Because if you do, for God’s sake speak up; all we can do this way is to dismantle Genux-B and put it out of action, so that when a genuine threat faces us—”
   “I wonder,” Stafford said slowly, pondering, “what’s meant by ‘artificial’ color.”