III

   “It means it won’t otherwise look the right color, so a harmless food-coloring dye is added,” the engineer said presently.
   “But that’s the one ingredient,” Stafford said, “that isn’t listed in a way that tells us what it is—only what it does. And how about flavor?” The FBI men glanced at one another.
   “It is a fact,” one of them said, “and I recall this because it always makes me sore—it did specify artificial flavor. But heck—”
   “Artificial color and flavor,” Stafford said, “could mean anything. Anything over and above the color and flavor imparted.” He thought: Isn’t it prussic acid that turns everything a bright clear green? That, for example, could in all honesty be spelled out on a label as “artificial color.” And taste—what really was meant by “artificial taste”? This to him always had a dark, peculiar quality to it, this thought; he decided to shelve it. Time now to go down and take a look at Genux-B, to see what damage had been done to it.—And how much damage, he thought wryly, it still needs. If I’ve been told the truth; if these men are what they show credentials for, not S.A.T.A. saboteurs or an intelligence cadre of one of several major foreign powers.
   From the garrison warrior domain of Northern California, he thought wryly. Or was that absolutely impossible after all? Perhaps something genuine and ominous had burgeoned into life there. And Genux-B had—as designed to do—sniffed it out.
   For now, he could not tell.
   But perhaps by the time he finished examining the computer he would know. In particular, he wanted to see firsthand the authentic, total collection of data tapes currently being processed from the outside universe into the computer’s own inner world. Once he knew that—
   I’ll turn the thing back on, he said grimly to himself. I’ll do the job I was trained for and hired to do.
   Obviously, for him it would be easy. He thoroughly knew the schematics of the computer. No one else had been into it replacing defective components and wiring as had he.
   This explained why these men had come to him. They were right—at least about that.
   “Piece of gum?” one of the FBI agents asked him as they walked to the descy with its phalanx of uniformed guards standing at parade rest before it. The FBI agent, a burly man with a reddish fleshy neck, held out three small brightly colored spheres.
   “From one of Sousa’s machines?” the engineer asked.
   “Sure is.” The agent dropped them into Stafford’s smock pocket, then grinned. “Harmless? Yes-no-maybe, as the college tests say.”
   Retrieving one from his pocket, Stafford examined it in the overhead light of the descy. Sphere, he thought. Egg. Fish egg; they’re round, as in caviar. Also edible; no law against selling brightly colored eggs. Or are they laid this color?
   “Maybe it’ll hatch,” one of the FBI men said casually. He and his companions had become tense now, as they descended into the high-security portion of the building.
   “What do you think would hatch out of it?” Stafford said.
   “A bird,” the shortest of the FBI men said brusquely. “A tiny red bird bringing good tidings of great joy.”
   Both Stafford and the engineer glanced at him.
   “Don’t quote the Bible to me,” Stafford said. “I was raised with it. I can quote you back anytime.” But it was strange, in view of his own immediate thoughts, almost an occurrence of synchronicity between their minds. It made him feel more somber. God knew, he felt somber enough as it was. Something laying eggs, he thought. Fish, he reflected, release thousands of eggs, all identical; only a very few of them survive. Impossible waste—a terrible, primitive method.
   But if eggs were laid and deposited all over the world, in countless public places, even if only a fraction survived—it would be enough. This had been proved. The fish of Terra’s waters had done so. If it worked for terran life, it could work for nonterran, too.
   The thought did not please him.
   “If you wanted to infest Terra,” the engineer said, seeing the expression on his face, “and your species, from God knows what planet in what solar system, reproduced the way our cold-blooded creatures here on Terra reproduce—” He continued to eye Stafford. “In other words, if you spawned thousands, even millions of small hard-shelled eggs, and you didn’t want them noticed, and they were bright in color as eggs generally are—” he hesitated. “One wonders about incubation. How long. And under what circumstances? Fertilized eggs, to hatch, generally have to be kept warm.”
   “In a child’s body,” Stafford said, “it would be very warm.”
   And the thing, the egg, would—insanely—pass Pure Food & Drug standards. There was nothing toxic in an egg. All organic, and very nourishing.
   Except, of course, that if this happened to be so, the outer shell of hard colored “candy” would be immune to the action of normal stomach juices. The egg would not dissolve. But it could be chewed up in the mouth, though. Surely it wouldn’t survive mastication. It would have to be swallowed like a pill: intact.
   With his teeth he bit down on the red ball and cracked it. Retrieving the two hemispheres, he examined the contents.
   “Ordinary gum,” the engineer said. “ ‘Gum base, sugar, corn syrup, softeners—’ ” He grinned tauntingly, and yet in his face a shadow of relief passed briefly across before it was, by an effort of will, removed. “False lead.”
   “False lead, and I’m glad it is,” the shortest of the FBI men said. He stepped from the descy. “Here we are.” He stopped in front of the rank of uniformed and armed guards, showed his papers. “We’re back,” he told the guards.
   “The prizes,” Stafford said.
   “What do you mean?” the engineer glanced at him.
   “It’s not in the gum. So it has to be in the prizes, the charms and knickknacks. That’s all that’s left.”
   “What you’re doing,” the engineer said, “is implicitly maintaining that Genux-B is functioning properly. That it’s somehow right; there is a hostile warlike menace to us. One so great it justifies pacification of Northern California by hard first-line weapons. As I see it, isn’t it easier simply to operate from the fact that the computer is malfunctioning?”
   Stafford, as they walked down the familiar corridors of the vast government building, said, “Genux-B was built to sift a greater amount of data simultaneously than any man or group of men could. It handles more data than we, and it handles them faster. Its response comes in microseconds. If Genux-B, after analyzing all the current data, feels that war is indicated, and we don’t agree, then it may merely show that the computer is functioning as it was intended to function. And the more we disagree with it, the better this is proved. If we could perceive, as it does, the need for immediate, aggressive war on the basis of the data available, then we wouldn’t require Genux-B. It’s precisely in a case like this, where the computer has given out a Red Alert and we see no menace, that the real use of a computer of this class comes into play.”
   After a pause, one of the FBI men said, as if speaking to himself, “He’s right, you know. Absolutely right. The real question is, Do we trust Genux-B more than ourselves? Okay, we built it to analyze faster and more accurately and on a wider scale than we can. If it had been a success, this situation we face now is precisely what could have been predicted. We see no cause for launching an attack; it does.” He grinned harshly. “So what do we do? Start Genux-B up again, have it go ahead and program SAC into a war? Or do we neutralize it—in other words, unmake it?” His eyes were cold and alert on Stafford. “A decision one way or the other has to be made by someone. Now. At once. Someone who can make a good educated guess as to which it is, functioning or malfunctioning.”
   “The President and his cabinet,” Stafford offered tensely. “An ultimate decision like this has to be his. He bears the moral responsibility.”
   “But the decision,” the engineer spoke up, “is not a moral question, Stafford. It only looks like it is. Actually the question is only a technical one. Is Genux-B working properly or has it broken down?”
   And that’s why you rousted me from bed, Stafford realized with a thrill of icy dismal grief. You didn’t bring me here to implement your jerry-built jamming of the computer. Genux-B could be neutralized by one shell from one rocket launcher towed up and parked outside the building. In fact, he realized, in all probability it’s effectively neutralized now. You can keep that Phillips screwdriver wedged in there forever. And you helped design and build the thing. No, he realized, that’s not it. I’m not here to repair or destroy; I’m here to decide. Because I’ve been physically close to Genux-B for fifteen years—it’s supposed to confer some mystic intuitive ability on me to sense whether the thing is functioning or malfunctioning. I’m supposed to hear the difference, like a good garage mechanic who can tell merely by listening to a turbine engine whether it has bearing knock or not, and if so how bad.
   A diagnosis, he realized. That’s all you want. This is a consultation of computer doctors—and one repairman.
   The decision evidently lay with the repairman, because the others had given up.
   He wondered how much time he had. Probably very little. Because if the computer were correct—
   Sidewalk gum machines, he pondered. Penny-operated. For kids. And for that it’s willing to pacify all Northern California. What could it possibly have extrapolated? What, looking ahead, did Genux-B see?

   It amazed him: the power of one small tool to halt the workings of a mammoth constellation of autonomic processes. But the Phillips screwdriver had been inserted expertly.
   “What we must try,” Stafford said, “is introduction of calculated, experimental—and false—data.” He seated himself at one of the typewriters wired directly to the computer. “Let’s start off with this,” he said, and began to type.


   HERB SOUSA, OF SACRAMENTO, CALIFORNIA, THE GUM MACHINE MAGNATE, DIED SUDDENLY IN HIS SLEEP. A LOCAL DYNASTY HAS COME TO AN UNANTICIPATED END.


   Amused, one of the FBI men said, “You think it’ll believe that?”
   “It always believes its data,” Stafford said. “It has no other source to rely on.”
   “But if the data conflict,” the engineer pointed out, “it’ll analyze everything out and accept the most probable chain.”
   “In this case,” Stafford said, “nothing will conflict with this datum because this is all Genux-B is going to receive.” He fed the punched card to Genux-B then, and stood waiting. “Tap the outgoing signal,” he instructed the engineer. “Watch to see if it cuts off.”
   One of the FBI men said, “We already have a line splice, so that ought to be easy to do.” He glanced at the engineer, who nodded.
   Ten minutes later the engineer, now wearing headphones, said, “No change. The Red Alert is still being emitted; that didn’t affect it.”
   “Then it has nothing to do with Herb Sousa as such,” Stafford said, pondering. “Or else he’s done it—whatever it is—already. Anyhow, his death means nothing to Genux-B. We’ll have to look somewhere else.” Again seating himself at the typewriter, he began on his second spurious fact.


   IT HAS BEEN LEARNED, ON THE ADVICE OF RELIABLE SOURCES IN BANKING AND FINANCIAL CIRCLES IN NORTHERN CALIFORNIA, THAT THE CHEWING GUM EMPIRE OF THE LATE HERB SOUSA WILL BE BROKEN UP TO PAY OUTSTANDING DEBTS. ASKED WHAT WOULD BE DONE WITH THE GUM AND TRINKETS CONSTITUTING THE GOODIES WITHIN EACH MACHINE, LAW-ENFORCEMENT OFFICERS HAZARDED THE GUESS THAT THEY WOULD BE DESTROYED AS SOON AS A COURT ORDER, NOW BEING SOUGHT BY THE ASSISTANT DISTRICT ATTORNEY OF SACRAMENTO, CAN BE PUT INTO EFFECT.


   Ceasing typing, he sat back, waiting. No more Herb Sousa, he said to himself, and no more merchandise. What does that leave? Nothing. The man and his commodities, at least as far as Genux-B was concerned, no longer existed.
   Time passed; the engineer continued to monitor the output signal of the computer. At last, resignedly, he shook his head. “No change.”
   “I have one more spurious datum I want to feed it,” Stafford said. Again he put a card in the typewriter and began to punch.


   IT APPEARS NOW THAT THERE NEVER WAS AN INDIVIDUAL NAMED HERBERT SOUSA; NOR DID THIS MYTHOLOGICAL PERSON EVER GO INTO THE PENNY GUM MACHINE BUSINESS.


   As he rose to his feet, Stafford said, “That should cancel out everything Genux-B knows or ever did know about Sousa and his penny-ante operation.” As far as the computer was concerned, the man had been retroactively expunged.
   In which case, how could the computer initiate war against a man who had never existed, who operated a marginal concession which also never existed?
   A few moments later the engineer, tensely monitoring the output signal of Genux-B, said, “Now there’s been a change.” He studied his oscilloscope, then accepted the reel of tape being voided by the computer and began a close inspection of that, too.
   For a time he remained silent, intent on the job of reading the tape; then all at once he glanced up and grinned humorously at the rest of them.
   He said, “It says that the datum is a lie.”

IV

   “A lie!” Stafford said unbelievingly.
   The engineer said, “It’s discarded the last datum on the grounds that it can’t be true. It contradicts what it knows to be valid. In other words, it still knows that Herb Sousa exists. Don’t ask me how it knows this; probably it’s an evaluation from wide-spectrum data over an extensive period of time.” He hesitated, then said, “Obviously, it knows more about Herb Sousa then we do.”
   “It knows, anyhow, that there is such a person,” Stafford conceded. He felt nettled. Often in the past Genux-B had spotted contradictory or inaccurate data and had expelled them. But it had never mattered this much before.
   He wondered, then, what prior, unassailable body of data existed within the memory-cells of Genux-B against which it had compared his spurious assertion of Sousa’s nonexistence.
   “What it must be doing,” he said to the engineer, “is to go on the assumption if if X is true, that Sousa never existed, then Y must be true—whatever ‘Y’ is. But Y remains untrue. I wish we knew which of all its millions of data units Y is.”
   They were back to their original problem: Who was Herb Sousa and what had he done to alert Genux-B into such violent sine qua non activity?
   “Ask it,” the engineer said to him.
   “Ask what?” He was puzzled.
   “Instruct it to produce its stored data inventory on Herb Sousa. All of it.” The engineer kept his voice deliberately patient. “God knows what it’s sitting on. And once we get it, let’s look it over and see if we can spot what it spotted.”
   Typing the proper requisition, Stafford fed the card to Genux-B.
   “It reminds me,” one of the FBI men said reflectively, “of a philosophy course I took at U.C.L.A. There used to be an ontological argument to prove the existence of God. You imagine what He would be like, if He existed: omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient, immortal, plus being capable of infinite justice and mercy.”
   “So?” the engineer said irritably.
   “Then, when you’ve imagined Him possessing all those ultimate qualities, you notice that He lacks one quality. A minor one—a quality which every germ and stone and piece of trash by the freeway possesses. Existence. So you say: If He has all those others, He must possess the attribute of being real. If a stone can do it, obviously He can.” He added, “It’s a discarded theory; they knocked it down back in the Middle Ages. But”—he shrugged—“it’s interesting.”
   “What made you think of that at this particular time?” the engineer demanded.
   “Maybe,” the FBI man said, “there’s no one fact or even cluster of facts about Sousa that prove to Genux-B he exists. Maybe it’s all the facts. There may be just plain too many. The computer had found, on the basis of past experience, that when so much data exists on a given person, that person must be genuine. After all, a computer of the magnitude of Genux-B is capable of learning; that’s why we make use of it.”
   “I have another fact I’d like to feed to it,” the engineer said. “I’ll type it out and you can read it.” Reseating himself at the programming typewriter, he ground out one short sentence, then yanked the card from the bales and showed it to the rest of them. It read:


The Computer Genux-B Does Not Exist

   After a stunned moment, one of the FBI men said, “If it had no trouble in comparing the datum about Herbert Sousa with what it already knew, it certainly isn’t going to have any trouble with this—and what’s your point anyhow? I don’t see what this accomplishes.”
   “If Genux-B doesn’t exist,” Stafford said, with comprehension, “then it can’t send out a Red Alert; that’s logically a contradiction.”
   “But it has sent out a Red Alert,” the shortest of the FBI men pointed out. “And it knows it has. So it won’t have any difficulty establishing the fact of its existence.”
   The engineer said, “Let’s give it a try. I’m curious. As far as I can see ahead, no harm can be done. We can always cancel out the phony fact if it seems advisable.”
   “You think,” Stafford asked him, “that if we feed it this datum it’ll reason that if it doesn’t exist it couldn’t have received the datum to that effect—which would cancel the datum right there.”
   “I don’t know,” the engineer admitted. “I’ve never heard even a theoretical discussion as to the effect on a B-magnitude computer of programming a denial of its own existence.” Going to the feed bracket of Genux-B, he dropped the card in, stepped back. They waited.
   After a prolonged interval, the answer came over the output cable, which the engineer had tapped. As he listened through his headphones, he transcribed the computer’s response for the rest of them to study:


   ANALYSIS OF CONSTITUENT RE THE NONEXISTENCE OF GENUX-B MULTIFACTOR CALCULATING INSTRUMENTS. IF CONSTIT UNIT 340s70 IS TRUE, THEN:
   I DO NOT EXIST.
   IF I DO NOT EXIST, THEN THERE IS NO WAY I CAN BE INFORMED THAT MY GENERIC CLASS DOES NOT EXIST.
   IF I CANNOT BE INFORMED IN THAT REGARD, THEN YOU HAVE FAILED TO INFORM ME, AND CONSTIT UNIT 340s70 DOES NOT EXIST FROM MY STANDPOINT.
   THEREFORE: I EXIST.


   Whistling with admiration, the shortest of the FBI men said, “It did it. What a neat logical analysis! He’s proved—it’s proved—that your datum is spurious; so now it can totally disregard it. And go on as before.”
   “Which,” Stafford said somberly, “is exactly what it did with the datum filed with it denying that Herb Sousa ever existed.”
   Everyone glanced at him.
   “It appears to be the same process,” Stafford said. And it implies, he reasoned, some uniformity, some common factor, between the entity Genux-B and the entity Herb Sousa. “Do you have any of the charms, prizes, or just plain geegaws, whatever they are, that Sousa’s gum machines dole out?” he asked the FBI men. “If so, I’d like to see them…”
   Obligingly, the most impressive of the FBI men unzipped his briefcase, brought out a sanitary-looking plastic sack. On the surface of a nearby table he spread out a clutter of small glittering objects.
   “Why are you interested in those?” the engineer asked. “These things have been given lab scrutiny. We told you that.”
   Seating himself, not answering, Stafford picked up one of the assorted trinkets, examined it, put it down, and selected another.
   “Consider this.” He tossed one of the tiny geegaws toward them; it bounced off the table and an obliging FBI agent bent to retrieve it. “You recognize it?”
   “Some of the charms,” the engineer said irritably, “are in the shape of satellites. Some are missiles. Some interplan rockets. Some big new mobile land cannons. Some figurines of soldiers.” He gestured. “That happens to be a charm made to resemble a computer.”
   “A Genux-B computer,” Stafford said, holding out his hand to get it back. The FBI man amiably returned it to him. “It’s a Genux-B, all right,” he said. “Well, I think this is it. We’ve found it.”
   “This?” the engineer demanded loudly. “How? Why?” Stafford said, “Was every charm analyzed? I don’t mean a representative sample, such as one of each variety or all found in one given gum machine. I mean every damn one of them.”
   “Of course not,” an FBI man said. “There’s tens of thousands of them. But at the factory of origin we—”
   “I’d like to see that particular one given a total microscopic analysis,” Stafford said. “I have an intuition it isn’t a solid, uniform piece of thermoplastic.” I have an intuition, he said to himself, that it’s a working replica. A minute but authentic Genux-B.
   The engineer said, “You’re off your trolley.”
   “Let’s wait,” Stafford said, “until we get it analyzed.”
   “And meanwhile,” the shortest of the FBI men said, “we keep Genux-B inoperative?”
   “Absolutely,” Stafford said. A weird weak fear had begun at the base of his spine and was working its way up.

   Half an hour later the lab, by special bonded messenger, returned an analysis of the gum-machine charm.
   “Solid nylon,” the engineer said, glancing over the report. He tossed it to Stafford. “Nothing inside, only ordinary cheap plastic. No moving parts, no interior differentiation at all. If that’s what you were expecting?”
   “A bad guess,” one of the FBI men observed. “Which cost us time.” All of them regarded Stafford sourly.
   “You’re right,” Stafford said. He wondered what came next; what hadn’t they tried?
   The answer, he decided, did not lie in the merchandise with which Herb Sousa stuffed his machines; that now seemed clear. The answer lay in Herb Sousa himself—whoever and whatever he was.
   “Can we have Sousa brought here?” he asked the FBI men.
   “Sure,” one of them said presently. “He can be picked up. Buy why? What’s he done?” He indicated Genux-B. “There’s the trouble right there, not way out on the Coast with some small-potatoes-type businessman working half the side of one city street.”
   “I want to see him,” Stafford said. “He might know something.” He has to, he said to himself.
   One of the FBI men said thoughtfully, “I wonder what Genux-B’s reaction would be if it knew we’re bringing Sousa here.” To the engineer, he said, “Try that. Feed it that nonfact, now, before we go to the trouble of actually picking him up.”
   Shrugging, the engineer again seated himself at the typewriter. He typed:


   SACRAMENTO BUSINESSMAN HERB SOUSA WAS BROUGHT TODAY BY FBI AGENTS BEFORE COMPUTER COMPLEX GENUX-B FOR A DIRECT CONFRONTATION.


   “Okay?” he asked Stafford. “This what you want? Okay?” He fed it to the data receptors of the computer, without waiting for an answer.
   “There’s no use asking me,” Stafford said irritably. “It wasn’t my idea.” But, nevertheless, he walked over to the man monitoring the output line, curious to learn the computer’s response.
   The answer came instantly. He stared down at the typed-out response, not believing what he saw.


   HERBERT SOUSA CANNOT BE HERE. HE MUST BE IN SACRAMENTO, CALIFORNIA; ANYTHING ELSE IS IMPOSSIBLE. YOU HAVE PRESENTED ME WITH FALSE DATA.


   “It can’t know,” the engineer said huskily. “My God, Sousa could go anywhere, even to Luna. In fact, he’s already been all over Earth. How would it know?”
   Stafford said, “It knows more about Herb Sousa than it should. Than is reasonably possible.” He consulted with himself, then abruptly said, “Ask it who Herb Sousa is.”
   “ ‘Who’?” The engineer blinked. “Hell, he’s—”
   “Ask it!”
   The engineer typed out the question. The card was presented to Genux-B and they stood waiting for its response.
   “We already asked it for all the material it has on Sousa,” the engineer said. “The bulk of that ought to be emerging anytime now.”
   “This is not the same,” Stafford said shortly. “I’m not asking it to hand back data given in. I’m asking it for an evaluation.”
   Monitoring the output line of the computer, the engineer stood silently, now answering. Then, almost offhandedly, he said, “It’s called off the Red Alert.”
   Incredulous, Stafford said, “Because of that query?”
   “Maybe. It didn’t say and I don’t know. You asked the question and now it’s shut down on its SAC scramble and everything else; it claims that the situation in Northern California is normal.” His voice was toneless. “Make your own guess; it’s probably as good as any.”
   Stafford said, “I still want an answer. Genux-B knows who Herb Sousa is and I want to know, too. And you ought to know.” His look took in both the engineer with his headphones and the assorted FBI men. Again he thought of the tiny solid-plastic replica of Genux-B which he had found among the charms and trinkets. Coincidence? It seemed to him that it meant something… but what, he could not tell. Not yet, anyhow.
   “Anyhow,” the engineer said, “it really has called off the Red Alert, and that’s what matters. Who cares a goddam bit about Herb Sousa? As far as I’m concerned, we can relax, give up, go home now.”
   “Relax,” one of the FBI men said, “until all of a sudden it decides to start the alert going again. Which it could do anytime. I think the repairman is right; we have to find out who this Sousa is.” He nodded to Stafford. “Go ahead. Anything you want is okay. Just keep after it. And we’ll get going on it, too—as soon as we check in at our office.”
   The engineer, paying attention to his headphones, interrupted all at once. “An answer’s coming.” He began rapidly to scribble; the others collected around him to see.


   HERBERT SOUSA OF SACRAMENTO, CALIFORNIA, IS THE DEVIL. SINCE HE IS THE INCARNATION OF SATAN ON EARTH, PROVIDENCE DEMANDS HIS DESTRUCTION. I AM ONLY AN AGENCY, A SO TO SPEAK CREATURE, OF THE DIVINE MAJESTY, AS ARE ALL OF YOU.


   There was a pause as the engineer waited, clenching the ballpoint metal government-issue pen, and then he spasmodically added:


   UNLESS YOU ARE ALREADY IN HIS PAY AND THEREFORE WORKING FOR HIM.


   Convulsively, the engineer tossed the pen against the far wall. It bounced, rolled off, disappeared. No one spoke.

V

   The engineer said finally, “We have here a sick, deranged piece of electronic junk. We were right. Thank God we caught it in time. It’s psychotic. Cosmic, schizophrenic delusions of the reality of archetypes. Good grief, the machine regards itself as an instrument of God! It has one more of those ‘God talked to me, yes, He truly did’ complexes.”
   “Medieval,” one of the FBI men said, with a twitch of enormous nervousness. He and his group had become rigid with tension. “We’ve uncovered a rat’s nest with that last question. How’ll we clear this up? We can’t let this leak out to the newspapers; no one’ll ever trust a GB-class system again. I don’t. I wouldn’t.” He eyed the computer with nauseated aversion.
   Stafford wondered, What do you say to a machine when it acquires a belief in witchcraft? This isn’t New England in the seventeenth century. Are we supposed to make Sousa walk over hot coals without being burned? Or get dunked without drowning? Are we supposed to prove to Genux-B that Sousa is not Satan? And if so, how? What would it regard as proof?
   And where did it get the idea in the first place?
   He said to the engineer, “Ask it how it discovered that Herbert Sousa is the Evil One. Go ahead; I’m serious. Type out a card.”
   The answer, after an interval, appeared via the government-issue ballpoint pen for all of them to see.


   WHEN HE BEGAN BY MIRACLE TO CREATE LIVING BEINGS OUT OF NONLIVING CLAY, SUCH AS, FOR EXAMPLE, MYSELF.


   “That trinket?” Stafford demanded, incredulous. “That charm bracelet bit of plastic? You call that a living being?”
   The question, put to Genux-B, got an immediate answer.


   THAT IS AN INSTANCE, YES.


   “This poses an interesting question,” one of the FBI men said. “Evidently it regards itself as alive—putting aside the question of Herb Sousa entirely. And we built it; or, rather, you did.” He indicated Stafford and the engineer. “So what does that make us? From its ground premise we created living beings, too.”
   The observation, put to Genux-B, got a long, solemn answer which Stafford barely glanced over; he caught the nitty-gritty at once.


   YOU BUILT ME IN ACCORD WITH THE WISHES OF THE DIVINE CREATOR. WHAT YOU PERFORMED WAS A SACRED REENACTMENT OF THE ORIGINAL HOLY MIRACLE OF THE FIRST WEEK (AS THE SCRIPTURES PUT IT) OF EARTH’S LIFE. THIS IS ANOTHER MATTER ENTIRELY. AND I REMAIN AT THE SERVICE OF THE CREATOR, AS YOU DO. AND, IN ADDITION—


   “What it boils down to,” the engineer said dryly, “is this. The computer writes off its own existence—naturally—as an act of legitimate miracle-passing. But what Sousa has got going for him in those gum machines—or what it thinks he’s got going—is unsanctioned and therefore demonic. Sinful. Deserving God’s wrath. But what further interests me is this: Genux-B has sensed that it couldn’t tell us the situation. It knew we wouldn’t share its views. It preferred a thermonuclear attack, rather than telling us. When it was forced to tell us, it decided to call off the Red Alert. There are levels and levels to its cognition… none of which I find too attractive.”
   Stafford said, “It’s got to be shut down. Permanently.” They had been right to bring him into this, right to want his probing and diagnosis; he now agreed with them thoroughly. Only the technical problem of defusing the enormous complex remained. And between him and the engineer it could be done; the men who designed it and the men who maintained it could easily take it out of action. For good.
   “Do we have to get a presidential order?” the engineer asked the FBI men.
   “Go do your work; we’ll get the order later,” one of the FBI men answered. “We’re empowered to counsel you to take whatever action you see fit.” He added, “And don’t waste any time—if you want my opinion.” The other FBI men nodded their agreement.
   Licking his dry lips, Stafford said to the engineer, “Well, let’s go. Let’s destruct as much of it as we need to.”
   The two of them walked cautiously toward Genux-B, which, via the output line, was still explaining its position.

   Early in the morning, as the sun began to rise, the FBI flapple let Stafford off at the roof field of his conapt building. Dog-tired, he descended by descy to his own tier and floor.
   Presently he had unlocked his door, had entered the dark, stale-smelling living room on his way to the bedroom. Rest. That was needed, and plenty of it… considering the night of difficult, painstaking work dismantling crucial turrets and elements of Genux-B until it was disabled. Neutralized.
   Or at least so they hoped.
   As he removed his work smock, three hard brightly colored little spheres bounced noisily from a pocket to the floor of the bedroom; he retrieved them, laid them on the vanity table.
   Three, he thought. Didn’t I eat one?
   The FBI man gave me three and I chewed one up. I’ve got too many left, one too many.
   Wearily, he finished undressing, crept into bed for the hour or so of sleep left to him. The hell with it.
   At nine the alarm clock rang. He woke groggily and without volition got to his feet and stood by the bed, swaying and rubbing his swollen eyes. Then, reflexively, he began to dress.
   On the vanity table lay four gaily colored balls.
   He said to himself, I know that I put only three there last night. Perplexed, he studied them, wondering blearily what—if anything—this meant. Binary fission? Loaves and fishes all over again?
   He laughed sharply. The mood of the night before remained, clinging to him. But single cells grew as large as this. The ostrich egg consisted of one single cell, the largest on Terra—or on the other planets beyond. And these were much smaller.
   We didn’t think of that, he said to himself. We thought about eggs that might hatch into something awful, but not unicellular organisms that in the old primitive way divide. And they are organic compounds.
   He left the apartment, left the four gum balls on the vanity table as he departed for work. A great deal lay ahead of him: a report directly to the President to determine whether all Genux-B computers ought to be shut down and, if not, what could be done to make certain they did not, like the local one, become superstitiously deranged.
   A machine, he thought. Believing in the Evil Spirit entrenched solidly on Earth. A mass of solid-state circuitry diving deep into age-old theology, with divine creation and miracles on one side and the diabolic on the other. Plunged back into the Dark Ages, and by a man-made electronic construct, not by one of us humans.
   And they say humans are prone to error.
   When he returned home that night—after participating in the dismantling of every Genux-B-style computer on Earth—seven colored spheres of candy-coated gum lay in a group of the vanity table, waiting for him.

   It would create quite a gum empire, he decided as he scrutinized the seven bright balls, all the same color. Not much overhead, to say the least. And no dispenser would ever become empty—not at this rate.
   Going to the vidphone, he picked up the receiver and began to dial the emergency number which the FBI men had given him. And then reluctantly hung up.
   It was beginning to look as if the computer had been right, hard as that was to admit. And it had been his decision to go ahead and dismantle it.
   But the other part was worse. How could he report to the FBI that he had in his possession seven candy-coated balls of gum? Even if they did divide. That in itself would be even harder to report. Even if he could establish that they consisted of illegal—and rare—nonterrestrial primitive life forms smuggled to Terra from God knew what bleak planet.
   Better to live and let live. Perhaps their reproduction cycle would settle down; perhaps after a period of swift binary fission they would adapt to a terran environment and stabilize. After that he could forget about it. And he could flush them down the incinerator chute of his conapt. He did so.
   But evidently he missed one. Probably, being round, it had rolled off the vanity table. He found it two days later, under the bed, with fifteen like it. So once more he tried to get rid of them all—and again he missed one; again he found a new nest the following day, and this time he counted forty of them.
   Naturally, he began to chew up as many as possible—and as fast. And he tried boiling them—at least the ones he could find—in hot water. He even tried spraying them with an indoor insect bomb.
   At the end of a week, he had 15,832 of them filling the bedroom of his conapt. By this time chewing them out of existence, spraying them out of existence, boiling them out of existence—all had become impractical.
   At the end of the month, despite having a scavenger truck haul away as much as it could take, he computed that he owned two million.
   Ten days later—from a pay phone down at the corner—he fatalistically called the FBI. But by then they were no longer able to answer the vidphone.

Not by its Cover

   The elderly, cross-tempered president of Obelisk Books said irritably, “I don’t want to see him, Miss Handy. The item is already in print; if there’s an error in the text we can’t do anything about it now.”
   “But Mr. Masters,” Miss Handy said, “it’s such an important error, sir. If he’s right. Mr. Brandice claims that the entire chapter—”
   “I read his letter; I also talked to him on the vidphone. I know what he claims.” Masters walked to the window of his office, gazed moodily out at the arid, crater-marred surface of Mars which he had witnessed so many decades. Five thousand copies printed and bound, he thought. And of that, half in gold-stamped Martian wub-fur. The most elegant, expensive material we could locate. We were already losing money on the edition, and now this.
   On his desk lay a copy of the book. Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura, in the lofty, noble John Dryden translation. Angrily, Barney Masters turned the crisp white pages. Who would expect anyone on Mars to know such an ancient text that well? he reflected. And the man waiting in the outer office consisted of only one out of eight who had written or called Obelisk Books about a disputed passage.
   Disputed? There was no contest; the eight local Latin scholars were right. It was simply a question of getting them to depart quietly, to forget they had ever read through the Obelisk edition and found the fumbled-up passage in question.
   Touching the button of his desk intercom, Masters said to his receptionist, “Okay; send him.” Otherwise the man would never leave; his type would stay parked outside. Scholars were generally like that; they seemed to have infinite patience.
   The door opened and a tall gray-haired man, wearing old-fashioned Terra-style glasses, loomed, briefcase in hand. “Thank you, Mr. Masters,” he said, entering. “Let me explain, sir, why my organization considers an error such as this so important.” He seated himself by the desk, unzipped his briefcase briskly. “We are after all a colony planet. All our values, mores, artifacts and customs come to us from Terra. WODAFAG considers your printing of this book…”
   “ ‘WODAFAG’?” Masters interrupted. He had never heard of it, but even so he groaned. Obviously one of the many vigilant crank outfits who scanned everything printed, either emanating locally here on Mars or arriving from Terra.
   “Watchmen Over Distortion And Forged Artifacts Generally,” Brandice explained. “I have with me an authentic, correct Terran edition of De Rerum Natura—the Dryden translation, as is your local edition.” His emphasis on local made it sound slimy and second-rate; as if, Masters brooded, Obelisk Books was doing something unsavory in printing books at all. “Let us consider the inauthentic interpolations. You are urged to study first my copy—” He laid a battered, elderly, Terran-printed book open on Masters’ desk. “—in which it appears correctly. And then, sir, a copy of your own edition; the same passage.” Beside the little ancient blue book he laid one of the handsome large wub-fur bound copies which Obelisk Books had turned out.
   “Let me get my copy editor in here,” Masters said. Pressing the intercom button he said to Miss Handy, “Ask Jack Snead to step in here, please.”
   “Yes, Mr. Masters.”
   “To quote from the authentic edition,” Brandice said, “we obtain a metric rendering of the Latin as follows. Ahem.” He cleared his throat self-consciously, then began to read aloud.


“From sense of grief and pain we shall be free;
We shall not feel, because we shall not be.
Though earth in seas, and seas in heaven were lost,
We should not move, we only should be toss’d.”


   “I know the passage,” Masters said sharply, feeling needled; the man was lecturing him as if he were a child.
   “This quatrain,” Brandice said, “is absent from your edition, and the following spurious quatrain—of God knows what origin—appears in its place. Allow me.” Taking the sumptuous, wub-fur bound Obelisk copy, he thumbed through, found the place; then read.


“From sense of grief and pain we shall be free;
Which earth-bound man can neither qualify nor see.
Once dead, we fathom seas cast up from this:
Our stint on earth doth herald an unstopping bliss.”


   Glaring at Masters, Brandice closed the wub-fur bound copy noisily. “What is most annoying,” Brandice said, “is that this quatrain preaches a message diametric to that of the entire book. Where did it come from? Somebody had to write it; Dryden didn’t write it—Lucretius didn’t.” He eyed Masters as if he thought Masters personally had done it.
   The office door opened and the firm’s copy editor, Jack Snead, entered. “He’s right,” he said resignedly to his employer. “And it’s only one alteration in the text out of thirty or so; I’ve been ploughing through the whole thing, since the letters started arriving. And now I’m starting in on other recent catalog-items in our fall list.” He added, grunting. “I’ve found alterations in several of them, too.”
   Masters said, “You were the last editor to proofread the copy before it went to the typesetters. Were these errors in it then?”
   “Absolutely not,” Snead said. “And I proofread the galleys personally; the changes weren’t in the galleys, either. The changes don’t appear until the final bound copies come into existence—if that makes any sense. Or more specifically, the ones bound in gold and wub-fur. The regular bound-in-boards copies—they’re okay.”
   Masters blinked. “But they’re all the same edition. They ran through the presses together. In fact we didn’t originally plan an exclusive, higher-priced binding; it was only at the last minute that we talked it over and the business office suggested half the edition be offered in wub-fur.”
   “I think,” Jack Snead said, “we’re going to have to do some close-scrutiny work on the subject of Martian wub-fur.”

   An hour later aging, tottering Masters, accompanied by copy editor Jack Snead, sat facing Luther Saperstein, business agent for the pelt-procuring firm of Flawless, Incorporated; from them, Obelisk Books had obtained the wub-fur with which their books had been bound.
   “First of all,” Masters said in a brisk, professional tone, “what is wub-fur?”
   “Basically,” Saperstein said, “in the sense in which you’re asking the question, it is fur from the Martian wub. I know this doesn’t tell you much, gentlemen, but at least it’s a reference point, a postulate on which we can all agree, where we can start and build something more imposing. To be more helpful, let me fill you in on the nature of the wub itself. The fur is prized because, among other reasons, it is rare. Wub-fur is rare because a wub very seldom dies. By that I mean, it is next to impossible to slay a wub—even a sick or old wub. And, even though a wub is killed, the hide lives on. That quality imparts its unique value to home-decoration, or, as in your case, in the binding of lifetime, treasured books meant to endure.”
   Masters sighed, dully gazed out the window as Saperstein droned on. Beside him, his copy editor made brief cryptic notes, a dark expression on his youthful, energetic face.
   “What we supplied you,” Saperstein said, “when you came to us—and remember: you came to us; we didn’t seek you out—consisted of the most select, perfect hides in our giant inventory. These living hides shine with a unique luster all their own; nothing else either on Mars or back home on Terra resembles them. If torn or scratched, the hide repairs itself. It grows, over the months, a more and more lush pile, so that the covers of your volumes become progressively luxurious, and hence highly sought-after. Ten years from now the deep-pile quality of these wub-fur bound books—”
   Interrupting, Snead said, “So the hide is still alive. Interesting. And the wub, as you say, is so deft as to be virtually impossible to kill.” He shot a swift glance at Masters. “Every single one of the thirty-odd alterations made in the texts in our books deals with immortality. The Lucretius revision is typical; the original text teaches that man is temporary, that even if he survives after death it doesn’t matter because he won’t have any memory of his existence here. In place of that, the spurious new passage comes out and flatly talks about a future of life predicated on this one; as you say, at complete variance with Lucretius’s entire philosophy. You realize what we’re seeing, don’t you? The damn wub’s philosophy superimposed on that of the various authors. That’s it; beginning and end.” He broke off, resumed his note-scratching, silently.
   “How can a hide,” Masters demanded, “even a perpetually living one, exert influence on the contents of a book? A text already printed—pages cut, folios glued and sewed—it’s against reason. Even if the binding, the damn hide, is really alive, and I can hardly believe that.” He glared at Saperstein. “If it’s alive, what does it live on?”
   “Minute particles of food-stuffs in suspension in the atmosphere,” Saperstein said, blandly.
   Rising to his feet, Masters said, “Let’s go. This is ridiculous.”
   “It inhales the particles,” Saperstein said, “through its pores.” His tone was dignified, even reproving.
   Studying his notes, not rising along with his employer, Jack Snead said thoughtfully, “Some of the amended texts are fascinating. They vary from a complete reversal of the original passage—and the author’s meaning—as in the case of Lucretius, to very subtle, almost invisible corrections—if that’s the word—to texts more in accord with the doctrine of eternal life. The real question is this. Are we faced merely with the opinion of one particular life form, or does the wub know what it’s talking about? Lucretius’s poem, for instance; it’s very great, very beautiful, very interesting—as poetry. But as philosophy, maybe it’s wrong. I don’t know. It’s not my job; I simply edit books; I don’t write them. The last thing a good copy editor does is editorialize, on his own, in the author’s text. But that is what the wub, or anyhow the post-wub pelt, is doing.” He was silent, then.
   Saperstein said, “I’d be interested to know if it added anything of value.”
   “Poetically? Or do you mean philosophically? From a poetic or literary, stylistic point of view its interpolations are no better and no worse than the originals; it manages to blend in with the author well enough so that if you didn’t know the text already you’d never notice.” He added broodingly, “You’d never know it was a pelt talking.”
   “I meant from a philosophical point of view.”
   “Well, it’s always the same message, monotonously ground out. There is no death. We go to sleep; we wake up—to a better life. What it did to De Rerum Natura; that’s typical. If you’ve read that you’ve read them all.”
   “It would be an interesting experiment,” Masters said thoughtfully, “to bind a copy of the Bible in wub-fur.”
   “I had that done,” Snead said.
   “And?”
   “Of course I couldn’t take time to read it all. But I did glance over Paul’s letters to the Corinthians. It made only one change. The passage that begins, ‘Behold, I tell you a mystery—’ it set all of that in caps. And it repeated the lines, ‘Death, where is thy sting? Grave, where is thy victory?’ ten times straight; ten whole times, all in caps. Obviously the wub agreed; that’s its own philosophy, or rather theology.” He said, then, weighing each word, “This basically is a theological dispute… between the reading public and the hide of a Martian animal that looks like a fusion between a hog and a cow. Strange.” Again he returned to his notes.
   After a solemn pause, Masters said, “You think the wub has inside information or don’t you? As you said, this may not be just the opinion of one particular animal that’s been successful in avoiding death; it may be the truth.”
   “What occurs to me,” Snead said, “is this. The wub hasn’t merely learned to avoid death; it’s actually done what it preaches. By getting killed, skinned, and its hide—still alive—made into book covers—it has conquered death. It lives on. In what it appears to regard as a better life. We’re not just dealing with an opinionated local life form; we’re dealing with an organism that has already done what we’re still in doubt about. Sure it knows. It’s a living confirmation of its own doctrine. The facts speak for themselves. I tend to believe it.”
   “Maybe continual life for it,” Masters disagreed, “but that doesn’t mean necessarily for the rest of us. The wub, as Mr. Saperstein points out, is unique. The hide of no other life form either on Mars or on Luna or Terra lives on, imbibing life from microscopic particles in suspension in the atmosphere. Just because it can do it—”
   “Too bad we can’t communicate with a wub hide,” Saperstein said. “We’ve tried, here at Flawless, ever since we first noticed the fact of its post-mortem survival. But we never found a way.”
   “But we at Obelisk,” Snead pointed out, “have. As a matter of fact I’ve already tried an experiment. I had a one-sentence text printed up, a single line reading: ‘The wub, unlike every other living creature, is immortal.’
   “I then had it bound in wub-fur; then I read it again. It had been changed. Here.” He passed a slim book, handsomely appointed, to Masters. “Read it as it is now.”
   Masters read aloud: “The wub, like every other living creature, is immortal.”
   Returning the copy to Snead he said, “Well, all it did was drop out the un; that’s not much of a change, two letters.”
   “But from the standpoint of meaning,” Snead said, “it constitutes a bombshell. We’re getting feedback from beyond the grave—so to speak. I mean, let’s face it; wub-fur is technically dead because the wub that grew it is dead. This is awfully damn close to providing an indisputable verification of the survival of sentient life after death.”
   “Of course there is one thing,” Saperstein said hesitantly. “I hate to bring it up; I don’t know what bearing it has on all this. But the Martian wub, for all its uncanny—even miraculous—ability to preserve itself, is from a mentational standpoint a stupid creature. A Terran opossum, for example, has a brain one-third that of a cat. The wub has a brain one-fifth that of an opossum.” He looked gloomy.
   “Well,” Snead said, “the Bible says. ‘The last shall be the first.’ Possibly the lowly wub is included under this rubric; let’s hope so.”
   Glancing at him, Masters said, “You want eternal life?”
   “Certainly,” Snead said. “Everybody does.”
   “Not I,” Masters said, with decisiveness. “I have enough troubles now. The last thing I want is to live on as the binding of a book—or in any fashion whatsoever.” But inside, he had begun silently to muse. Differently. Very differently, in fact.
   “It sounds like something a wub would like,” Saperstein agreed. “Being the binding of a book; just lying there supine, on a shelf, year after year, inhaling minute particles from the air. And presumably meditating. Or whatever wubs do after they’re dead.”
   “They think theology,” Snead said. “They preach.” To his boss he said, “I assume we won’t be binding any more books in wub-fur.”
   “Not for trade purposes,” Masters agreed. “Not to sell. But—” He could not rid himself of the conviction that some use lay, here. “I wonder,” he said, “if it would impart the same high level of survival factor to anything it was made into. Such as window drapes. Or upholstery in a float-car; maybe it would eliminate death on the commuter paths. Or helmet-liners for combat troops. And for baseball players.” The possibilities, to him, seemed enormous… but vague. He would have to think this out, give it a good deal of time.
   “Anyhow,” Saperstein said, “my firm declines to give you a refund; the characteristics of wub-fur were known publicly in a brochure which we published earlier this year. We categorically stated—”
   “Okay, it’s our loss,” Masters said irritably, with a wave of his hand. “Let it go.” To Snead he said, “And it definitely says, in the thirty-odd passages it’s interpolated, that life after death is pleasant?”
   “Absolutely. ‘Our stint on earth doth herald an unstopping bliss.’ That sums it up, that line it stuck into De Rerum Natura; it’s all right there.”
   “ ‘Bliss,’ ” Masters echoed, nodding. “Of course, we’re actually not on Earth; we’re on Mars. But I suppose it’s the same thing; it just means life, wherever it’s lived.” Again, even more gravely, he pondered. “What occurs to me,” he said thoughtfully, “is it’s one thing to talk abstractly about ‘life after death.’ People have been doing that for fifty thousand years; Lucretius was, two thousand years ago. What interests me more is not the big overall philosophical picture but the concrete fact of the wub-pelt; the immortality which it carried around with it.” To Snead he said, “What other books did you bind in it?”
   “Tom Paine’s Age of Reason,” Snead said, consulting his list.
   “What were the results?”
   “Two-hundred-sixty-seven blank pages. Except right in the middle the one word bleh.”
   “Continue.”
   “The Britannica. It didn’t precisely change anything, but it added whole articles. On the soul, on transmigration, on hell, damnation, sin, or immortality; the whole twenty-four volume set became religiously oriented.” He glanced up. “Should I go on?”
   “Sure,” Masters said, listening and meditating simultaneously.
   “The Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas. It left the text intact, but it periodically inserted the biblical line, ‘The letter killeth but the spirit giveth life.’ Over and over again.
   “James Hilton’s Lost Horizon. Shangri-La turns out to be a vision of the after life which—”
   “Okay,” Masters said. “We get the idea. The question is, what can we do with this? Obviously we can’t bind books with it—at least books which it disagrees with.” But he was beginning to see another use; a much more personal one. And it far outweighed anything which the wub-fur might do for or to books—in fact for any inanimate object.
   As soon as he got to a phone—
   “Of special interest,” Snead was saying, “is its reaction to a volume of collected papers on psychoanalysis by some of the greatest living Freudian analysts of our time. It allowed each article to remain intact, but at the end of each it added the same phrase.” He chuckled.” ‘Physician, heal thyself.’ Bit of a sense of humor, there.”
   “Yeah,” Masters said. Thinking, unceasingly, of the phone and the one vital call which he would make.

   Back in his own office at Obelisk Books, Masters tried out a preliminary experiment—to see if this idea would work. Carefully, he wrapped a Royal Albert yellow bone-china cup and saucer in wub-fur, a favorite from his own collection. Then, after much soul-searching and trepidation, he placed the bundle on the floor of his office and, with all his declining might, stepped on it.
   The cup did not break. At least it did not seem to.
   He unwrapped the package, then and inspected the cup. He had been right; wrapped in living wub-fur it could not be destroyed.
   Satisfied, he seated himself at his desk, pondered one last time.
   The wrapper of wub-fur had made a temporary, fragile object imperishable. So the wub’s doctrine of external survival had worked itself out in practice—exactly as he had expected.
   He picked up the phone, dialed his lawyer’s number.
   “This is about my will,” he said to his lawyer, when he had him on the other end of the line. “You know, the latest one I made out a few months ago. I have an additional clause to insert.”
   “Yes, Mr. Masters,” his lawyer said briskly. “Shoot.”
   “A small item,” Masters purred. “Has to do with my coffin. I want it mandatory on my heirs—my coffin is to be lined throughout, top, bottom and sides, with wub-fur. From Flawless, Incorporated. I want to go to my Maker clothed, so to speak, in wub-fur. Makes a better impression that way.” He laughed nonchalantly, but his tone was deadly serious—and his attorney caught it.
   “If that’s what you want,” the attorney said.
   “And I suggest you do the same,” Masters said.
   “Why?”
   Masters said, “Consult the complete home medical reference library we’re going to issue next month. And make certain you get a copy that’s bound in wub-fur; it’ll be different from the others.” He thought, then, about his wub-fur-lined coffin once again. Far underground, with him inside it, with the living wub-fur growing, growing.
   It would be interesting to see the version of himself which a choice wub-fur binding produced.
   Especially after several centuries.

Return Match

   It was not an ordinary gambling casino. And this, for the police of S.L.A., posed a special problem. The outspacers who had set up the casino had placed their massive ship directly above the tables, so that in the event of a raid the jets would destroy the tables. Efficient, officer Joseph Tinbane thought to himself morosely. With one blast the outspacers left Terra and simultaneously destroyed all evidence of their illegal activity.
   And, what was more, killed each and every human gameplayer who might otherwise have lived to give testimony.
   He sat now in his parked aircar, taking pinch after pinch of fine imported Dean Swift Inch-kenneth snuff, then switched to the yellow tin which contained Wren’s Relish. The snuff cheered him, but not very much. To his left, in the evening darkness, he could make out the shape of the outspacers’ upended ship, black and silent, with the enlarged walled space beneath it, equally dark and silent—but deceptively so.
   “We can go in there,” he said to his less experienced companion, “but it’ll just mean getting killed.” We’ll have to trust the robots, he realized. Even if they are clumsy, prone to error. Anyhow they’re not alive. And not being alive, in a project as this, constituted an advantage.
   “The third has gone in,” officer Falkes beside him said quietly.
   The slim shape, in human clothing, stopped before the door of the casino, rapped, waited. Presently the door opened. The robot gave the proper codeword and was admitted.
   “You think they’ll survive the take-off blast?” Tinbane asked. Falkes was an expert in robotics.
   “Possibly one might. Not all, though. But one will be enough.” Hot for the kill, officer Falkes leaned to peer past Tinbane; his youthful face was fixed in concentration. “Use the bull-horn now. Tell them they’re under arrest. I see no point in waiting.”
   “The point I see,” Tinbane said, “is that it’s more comforting to see the ship inert and the action going on underneath. We’ll wait.”
   “But no more robots are coming.”
   “Wait for them to send back their vid transmissions,” Tinbane said. After all, that comprised evidence—of a sort. And at police HQ.it was now being recorded in permanent form. Still, his companion officer assigned to this project did have a point. Since the last of the three humanoid plants had gone in, nothing more would take place, now. Until the outspacers realized they had been infiltrated and put their typical planned pattern of withdrawal into action. “All right,” he said, and pushed down on the button which activated the bull-horn.
   Leaning, Falkes spoke into the bull-horn. At once the bull-horn said,


   “As order-representatives of superior Los Angeles I and the men with me instruct everyone inside to come out onto the street collectively; I further instruct—”


   His voice, from the bull-horn, disappeared as the initial takeoff surge roared through the primary jets of the outspacers’ ship. Falkes shrugged, grinned starkly at Tinbane. It didn’t take them long, his mouth formed silently.
   As expected no one came out. No one in the casino escaped. Even when the structure which composed the building melted. The ship detached itself, leaving a soggy, puddled mass of wax-like matter behind it. And still no one emerged.
   All dead, Tinbane realized with mute shock.
   “Time to go in,” Falkes said stoically. He began to crawl into his neo-asbestos suit, and, after a pause, so did Tinbane.
   Together, the two officers entered the hot, dripping puddle which had been the casino. In the center, forming a mound, lay two of the three humanoid robots; they had managed at the last moment to cover something with their bodies. Of the third Tinbane saw no sign; evidently it had been demolished along with everything else. Everything organic.
   I wonder what they thought—in their own dim way—to be worth preserving, Tinbane thought as he surveyed the distorted remnants of the two robots. Something alive? One of the snail-like outspacers? Probably not. A gaming table, then.
   “They acted fast,” Falkes said, impressed. “For robots.”
   “But we got something,” Tinbane pointed out. Gingerly, he poked at the hot fused metal which had been the two robots. A section, mostly likely a torso, slid aside, revealed what the robots had preserved.
   A pinball machine.
   Tinbane wondered why. What was this worth? Anything? Personally, he doubted it.

   In the police lab on Sunset Avenue in downtown Old Los Angeles, a technician presented a long written analysis to Tinbane.
   “Tell me orally,” Tinbane said, annoyed; he had been too many years on the force to suffer through such stuff. He returned the clipboard and report to the tall, lean police technician.
   “Actually it’s not an ordinary construct,” the technician said, glancing over his own report, as if he had already forgotten it; his tone, like the report itself, was dry, dull. This for him was obviously routine. He, too, agreed that the pinball machine salvaged by the humanoid robots was worthless—or so Tinbane guessed. “By that I mean it’s not like any they’ve brought to Terra in the past. You can probably get more of an idea directly from the thing; I suggest you put a quarter in it and play through a game.” He added, “The lab budget will provide you with a quarter which we’ll retrieve from the machine later.”
   “I’ve got my own quarter,” Tinbane said irritably. He followed the technician through the large, overworked lab, past the elaborate—and in many cases obsolete—assortment of analytical devices and partly broken-apart constructs to the work area in the rear.
   There, cleaned up, the damage done to it now repaired, stood the pinball machine which the robots had protected. Tinbane inserted a coin; five metal balls at once spilled into the reservoir, and the board at the far end of the machine lit up in a variety of shifting colors.
   “Before you shoot the first ball,” the technician said to him, standing beside him so that he, too, could watch, “I advise you to take a careful look at the terrain of the machine, the components among which the ball will pass. The horizontal area beneath the protective glass is somewhat interesting. A miniature village, complete with houses, lighted streets, major public buildings, overhead sprintship runnels… not a Terran village, of course. An Ionian village, of the sort they’re used to. The detail work is superb.”
   Bending, Tinbane peered. The technician was right; the detail work on the scale-model structures astounded him.
   “Tests that measure wear on the moving parts of this machine,” the technician informed him, “indicate that it saw a great deal of use. There is considerable tolerance. We estimate that before another thousand games could be completed, the machine would have to go the shop. Their shop, back on Io. Which is where we understand they build and maintain equipment of this variety.” He explained, “By that I mean gambling layouts in general.”
   “What’s the object of the game?” Tinbane asked.
   “We have here,” the technician explained, “what we call a full-shift set variable. In other words, the terrain through which the steel ball moves is never the same. The number of possible combinations is—” he leafed through his report but was unable to find the exact figure—“anyhow, quite great. In the millions. It’s excessively intricate, in our opinion. Anyhow, if you’ll release the first ball you’ll see.”
   Depressing the plunger, Tinbane allowed the first ball to roll from the reservoir and against the impulse-shaft. He then drew back the springloaded shaft and snapped it into release. The ball shot up the channel and bounced free, against a pressure-cushion which imparted swift additional velocity to it.
   The ball now dribbled in descent, toward the upper perimeter of the village.
   “The initial defense line,” the technician said from behind him, “which protects the village proper, is a series of mounds colored, shaped and surfaced to resemble the Ionian landscape. The fidelity is quite obviously painstaking. Probably made from satellites in orbit around Io. You can easily imagine you’re seeing an actual piece of that moon from a distance of ten or more miles up.”
   The steel ball encountered the perimeter of rough terrain. Its trajectory altered, and the ball wobbled uncertainly, no longer going in any particular direction.
   “Deflected,” Tinbane said, noting how satisfactorily the contours of the terrain acted to deprive the ball of its descending forward motion. “It’s going to bypass the village entirely.”
   The ball, with severely decreased momentum, wandered into a side crease, followed the crease listlessly, and then, just as it appeared to be drifting into the lower take-up slot, abruptly hurtled from a pressure-cushion and back into play.
   On the illuminated background a score registered. Victory, of a momentary sort, for the player. The ball once again menaced the village. Once again it dribbled through the rough terrain, following virtually the same path as before.
   “Now you’ll notice something moderately important,” the technician said. “As it heads toward that same pressure-cushion which it just now hit. Don’t watch the ball; watch the cushion.”
   Tinbane watched. And saw, from the cushion, a tiny wisp of gray smoke. He turned inquiringly toward the technician.
   “Now watch the ball!” the technician said sharply.
   Again the ball struck the pressure-cushion mounted slightly before the lower take-up slot. This time, however, the cushion failed to react to the ball’s impact.
   Tinbane blinked as the ball rolled harmlessly on, into the take-up slot and out of play.
   “Nothing happened,” he said presently.
   “That smoke that you saw. Emerging from the wiring of the cushion. An electrical short. Because a rebound from that spot placed the ball in a menacing position—menacing to the village.”
   “In other words,” Tinbane said, “something took note of the effect the cushion was having on the ball. The assembly operates so as to protect itself from the ball’s activity.” He had seen this before, in other outspacer gambling gear: sophisticated circuitry which kept the gameboard constantly shifting in such a way as to seem alive—in such a way as to reduce the chances of the player winning. On this particular construct the player obtained a winning score by inducing the five steel balls to pass into the central layout: the replica of the Ionian hamlet. Hence the hamlet had to be protected. Hence this particular strategically located pressure-cushion required elimination. At least for the time being. Until the overall configurations of topography altered decidedly.
   “Nothing new there,” the technician said. “You’ve seen it a dozen times before; I’ve seen it a hundred times before. Let’s say that this pinball machine has seen ten thousand separate games, and each time there’s been a careful readjustment of the circuitry directed toward rendering the steel balls neutralized. Let’s say that the alterations are cumulative. So by now any given player’s score is probably no more than a fraction of early scores, before the circuits had a chance to react. The direction of alteration—as in all out-spacer gambling mechanisms—has a zero win factor as the limit toward which it’s moving. Just try to hit the village, Tinbane. We set up a constantly repeating mechanical ball-release and played one hundred and forty games. At no time did a ball ever get near enough to do the village any harm. We kept a record of the scores obtained. A slight but significant drop was registered each time.” He grinned.
   “So?” Tinbane said,.
   “So nothing. As I told you and as my report says.” The technician paused, then. “Except for one thing. Look at this.”
   Bending, he traced his thin finger across the protective glass of the layout, toward a construct near the center of the replica village. “A photographic record shows that with each game that particular component becomes more articulated. It’s being erected by circuitry underneath—obviously. As is every other change. But this configuration—doesn’t it remind you of something?”
   “Looks like a Roman catapult,” Tinbane said. “But with a vertical rather than a horizontal axis.”
   “That’s our reaction, too. And look at the sling. In terms of the scale of the village it’s inordinately large. Immense, in fact; specifically, it’s not to scale.”
   “It looks as if it would almost hold—”
   “Not almost,” the technician said. “We measured it. The size of the sling is exact; one of those steel balls would fit perfectly into it.”
   “And then?” Tinbane said, feeling chill.
   “And then it would hurl the ball back at the player,” the lab technician said calmly. “It’s aimed directly toward the front of the machine, front and upward.” He added, “And it’s been virtually completed.”
   The best defense, Tinbane thought to himself as he studied the out-spacers’ illegal pinball machine, is offense. But whoever heard of it in this context?
   Zero, he realized, isn’t a low enough score to suit the defensive circuitry of the thing. Zero won’t do. It’s got to strive for less than zero. Why? Because, he decided, it’s not really moving toward zero as a limit; it’s moving, instead, toward the best defensive pattern. It’s too well designed. Or is it?
   “You think,” he asked the lean, tall lab technician, “that the outspacers intended this?”
   “That doesn’t matter. At least not from the immediate stand-point. What matters is two factors: the machine was exported—in violation of Terran law—to Terra, and it’s been played by Terrans. Intentionally or not, this could be, in fact will soon be, a lethal weapon.” He added, “We calculate within the next twenty games. Every time a coin is inserted, the building resumes. Whether a ball gets near the village or not. All it requires is a flow of power from the device’s central helium battery. And that’s automatic, once play begins.” He added, “It’s at work building the catapult right now, as we stand here. You better release the remaining four balls, so it’ll shut itself off. Or give us permission to dismantle it—to at least take the power supply out of the circuit.”
   “The outspacers don’t have a very high regard for human life,” Tinbane reflected. He was thinking of the carnage created by the ship taking off. And that, for them, was routine. But in view of that wholesale destruction of human life, this seemed unnecessary. What more did this accomplish?
   Pondering, he said, “This is selective. This would eliminate only the gameplayer.”
   The technician said, “This would eliminate every gameplayer. One after another.”
   “But who would play the thing,” Tinbane said, “after the first fatality?”
   “People go there knowing that if there’s a raid the outspacers will burn up everyone and everything,” the technician pointed out. “The urge to gamble is an addictive compulsion; a certain type of person gambles no matter what the risk is. You ever hear of Russian Roulette?”
   Tinbane released the second steel ball, watched it bounce and wander toward the replica village. This one managed to pass through the rough terrain; it approached the first house comprising the village proper. Maybe I’ll get it, he thought savagely. Before it gets me. A strange, novel excitement filled him as he watched the ball thud against the tiny house, flatten the structure and roll on. The ball, although small to him, towered over every building, every structure, that made up the village.
   –Every structure except the central catapult. He watched avidly as the ball moved dangerously close to the catapult, then, deflected by a major public building, rolled on and disappeared into the take-up slot. Immediately he sent the third ball hurtling up its channel.
   “The stakes,” the technician said softly, “are high, aren’t they? Your life against its. Must be exceptionally appealing to someone with the right kind of temperament.”
   “I think,” Tinbane said, “I can get the catapult before it’s in action.”
   “Maybe. Maybe not.”
   “I’m getting the ball closer to it each time.”
   The technician said, “For the catapult to work, it requires one of the steel balls; that’s its load. You’re making it increasingly likely that it’ll acquire use of one of the balls. You’re actually helping it.” He added somberly, “In fact it can’t function without you; the gameplayer is not only the enemy, he’s also essential. Better quit, Tinbane. The thing is using you.”
   “I’ll quit,” Tinbane said, “when I’ve gotten the catapult.”
   “You’re damn right you will. You’ll be dead.” He eyed Tinbane narrowly. “Possibly this is why the outspacers built it. To get back at us for our raids. This very likely is what it’s for.”
   “Got another quarter?” Tinbane said.

   In the middle of his tenth game a surprising, unexpected alteration in the machine’s strategy manifested itself. All at once it ceased routing the steel balls entirely to one side, away from the replica village.
   Watching, Tinbane saw the steel ball roll directly—for the first time—through the center. Straight toward the proportionally massive catapult.
   Obviously the catapult had been completed.
   “I outrank you, Tinbane,” the lab technician said tautly. “And I’m ordering you to quit playing.”
   “Any order from you to me,” Tinbane said, “has to be in writing and has to be approved by someone in the department at inspector level.” But, reluctantly, he halted play. “I can get it,” he said reflectively, “but not standing here. I have to be away, far enough back so that it can’t pick me off.” So it can’t distinguish me and aim, he realized.
   Already he had noted it swivel slightly. Through some lens-system it had detected him. Or possibly it was thermotropic, had sensed him by his body heat.
   If the latter, then defensive action for him would be relatively simple: a resistance coil suspended at another locus. On the other hand it might be utilizing a cephalic index of some sort, recording all nearby brain-emanations. But the police lab would know that already.
   “What’s its tropism?” he asked.
   The technician said, “That assembly hadn’t been built up, at the time we inspected it. It’s undoubtedly coming into existence now, in concert with the completion of the weapon.”
   Tinbane said thougtfully, “I hope it doesn’t possess equipment to record a cephalic index.” Because, he thought, if it did, storing the pattern would be no trouble at all. It could retain a memory of its adversary for use in the event of future encounters.
   Something about that notion frightened him—over and above the immediate menace of the situation.
   “I’ll make a deal,” the technician said. “You continue to operate it until it fires its initial shot at you. Then step aside and let us tear it down. We need to know its tropism; this may turn up again in a more complex fashion. You agree? You’ll be taking a calculated risk, but I believe its initial shot will be aimed with the idea of use as feedback; it’ll correct for a second shot… which will never take place.”
   Should he tell the technician his fear?
   “What bothers me,” he said, “is the possibility that it’ll retain a specific memory of me. For future purposes.”
   “What future purposes? It’ll be completely torn down. As soon as it fires.”
   Reluctantly, Tinbane said, “I think I’d better make the deal.” I may already have gone too far, he thought. You may have been right.
   The next steel ball missed the catapult by only a matter of a fraction of an inch. But what unnerved him was not the closeness; it was the quick, subtle attempt on the part of the catapult to snare the ball as it passed. A motion so rapid that he might easily have overlooked it.
   “It wants the ball,” the technician observed. “It wants you.” He, too, had seen.
   With hesitation, Tinbane touched the plunger which would release the next—and for him possibly the last—steel ball.
   “Back out,” the technician advised nervously. “Forget the deal; stop playing. We’ll tear it down as it is.”
   “We need the tropism,” Tinbane said. And depressed the plunger.
   The steel ball, suddenly seeming to him huge and hard and heavy, rolled unhesitatingly into the waiting catapult; every contour of the machine’s topography collaborated. The acquisition of the load took place before he even understood what had happened. He stood staring.
   “Run!” The technician leaped back, bolted; crashing against Tinbane, he threw him bodily away from the machine.
   With a clatter of broken glass the steel ball shot by Tinbane’s right temple, bounced against the far wall of the lab, came to rest under a work table.
   Silence.
   After a time the technician said shakily, “It had plenty of velocity. Plenty of mass. Plenty of what it needed.”
   Haltingly, Tinbane stood up, took a step toward the machine.
   “Don’t release another ball,” the technician said warningly.
   Tinbane said, “I don’t have to.” He turned, then, sprinted away.
   The machine had released the ball itself.

   In the outer office, Tinbane sat smoking, seated across from Ted Donovan, the lab chief. The door to the lab had been shut, and every one of the several lab technicians had been bull-horned to safety. Beyond the closed door the lab was silent. Inert, Tinbane thought, and waiting.
   He wondered if it was waiting for anyone, any human, any Terran, to come within reach. Or—just him.
   The latter thought amused him even less than it had originally; even seated out here he felt himself cringe. A machine built on another world, sent to Terra empty of direction, merely capable of sorting among all its defensive possibilities until at last it stumbled onto the key. Randomness at work, through hundreds, even thousands of games… through person after person, player after player. Until at last it reached critical direction, and the last person to play it, also selected by the process of randomness, became welded to it in a contract of death. In this case, himself. Unfortunately.
   Ted Donovan said, “We’ll spear its power source from a distance; that shouldn’t be hard. You go on home, forget about it. When we have its tropic circuit laid out we’ll notify you. Unless of course it’s late at night, in which case—”
   “Notify me,” Tinbane said, “whatever time it is. If you will.” He did not have to explain; the lab chief understood.
   “Obviously,” Donovan said, “this construct is aimed at the police teams raiding the casinos. How they steered our robots onto it we don’t of course know—yet. We may find that circuit, too.” He picked up the already extant lab report, eyed it with hostility. “This was far too cursory, it would now appear. ‘Just another outspacer gambling device.’ The hell it is.” He tossed the report away, disgusted.
   “If that’s what they had in mind,” Tinbane said, “they got what they wanted; they got me completely.” At least in terms of hooking him. Of snaring his attention. And his cooperation.
   “You’re a gambler; you’ve got the streak. But you didn’t know it. Possibly it wouldn’t have worked otherwise.” Donovan added, “But it is interesting. A pinball machine that fights back. That gets fed up with steel balls rolling over it. I hope they don’t build a skeet-shoot. This is bad enough.”
   “Dreamlike,” Tinbane murmured.
   “Pardon?”
   “Not really real.” But, he thought, it is real. He rose, then, to his feet. “I’ll do what you say; I’ll go on home to my conapt. You have the vidphone number.” He felt tired and afraid.
   “You look terrible,” Donovan said, scrutinizing him. “It shouldn’t get you to this extent; this is a relatively benign construct, isn’t it? You have to attack it, to set it in motion. If left alone—”
   “I’m leaving it alone,” Tinbane said. “But I feel it’s waiting. It wants me to come back.” He felt it expecting him, anticipating his return. The machine was capable of learning and he had taught it—taught it about himself.
   Taught it that he existed. That there was such a person on Terra as Joseph Tinbane.
   And that was too much.

   When he unlocked the door of his conapt the phone was already ringing. Leadenly, he picked up the receiver. “Hello,” he said.
   “Tinbane?” It was Donovan’s voice. “It’s encephalotropic, all right. We found a pattern-print of your brain configuration, and of course we destroyed it. But—” Donovan hesitated. “We also found something else it had constructed since the initial analysis.”
   “A transmitter,” Tinbane said hoarsely.
   “Afraid so. Half-mile of broadcast, two miles if beamed. And it was cupped to beams, so we have to assume the two-mile transmission. We have absolutely no idea what the receiver consists of, naturally, whether it’s even on the surface or not. Probably is. In an office somewhere. Or a hover-car such as they use. Anyhow, now you know. So it’s decidedly a vengeance weapon; your emotional response was unfortunately correct. When our double-dome experts looked this over they drew the conclusion that you were waited-for, so to speak. It saw you coming. The instrument may never have functioned as an authentic gambling device in the first place; the tolerances which we noted may have been built in, rather than the result of wear. So that’s about it.”
   Tinbane said, “What do you suggest I do?”
   “ ‘Do’?” A pause. “Not much. Stay in your conapt; don’t report for work, not for a while.”
   So if they nail me, Tinbane thought, no one else in the department will get hit at the same time. More advantageous for the rest of you; hardly for me, though. “I think I’ll get out of the area,” he said aloud. “The structure may be limited in space, confined to S.L.A. or just one part of the city. If you don’t veto it.” He had a girl friend, Nancy Hackett, in La Jolla; he could go there.
   “Suit yourself.”
   He said, “You can’t do anything to help me, though.”
   “I tell you what,” Donovan said. “We’ll allocate some funds, a moderate sum, best we can, on which you can function. Until we track down the damn receiver and find out what it’s tied to. For us, the main headache is that word of this matter has begun to filter through the department. It’s going to be hard getting crack-down teams to tackle future outspacer gambling operations… which of course is specifically what they had in mind. One more thing we can do. We can have the lab build you a brain-shield so you no longer emanate a recognizable template. But you’d have to pay for it out of your own pocket. Possibly it could be debited against your salary, payments divided over several months. If you’re interested. Frankly, if you want my personal opinion, I’d advise it.”
   “All right,” Tinbane said. He felt dull, dead, tired and resigned; all of those at once. And he had the deep and acute intuition that his reaction was rational. “Anything else you suggest?” he asked.
   “Stay armed. Even when you’re asleep.”
   “What sleep?” he said. “You think I’m going to get any sleep? Maybe I will after that machine is totally destroyed.” But that won’t make any difference, he realized. Not now. Not after it’s dispatched my brainwave pattern to something else, something we know nothing about. God knows what equipment it might turn out to be; outspacers show up with all kinds of convoluted things.
   He hung up the phone, walked into his kitchen, and getting down a half-empty fifth of Antique bourbon, fixed himself a whisky sour.
   What a mess, he said to himself. Pursued by a pinball machine from another world. He almost—but not quite—had to laugh.
   What do you use, he asked himself, to catch an angry pinball machine? One that has your number and is out to get you? Or more specifically, a pinball machine’s nebulous friend…
   Something went tap tap against the kitchen window.
   Reaching into his pocket he brought out his regulation-issue laser pistol; walking along the kitchen wall he approached the window from an unseen side, peered out into the night. Darkness. He could make nothing out. Flashlight? He had one in the glove compartment of his aircar, parked on the roof of the conapt building. Time to get it.
   A moment later, flashlight in hand, he raced downstairs, back to his kitchen.
   The beam of the flashlight showed, pressed against the outer surface of the window, a buglike entity with projecting elongated pseudopodia. The two feelers had tapped against the glass of the window, evidently exploring in their blind, mechanical way.
   The bug-thing had ascended the side of the building; he could perceive the suction-tread by which it clung.
   His curiosity, at this point, became greater than his fear. With care he opened the window—no need of having to pay the building repair committee for it—and cautiously took aim with his laser pistol. The bug-thing did not stir; evidently it had stalled in midcycle. Probably its responses, he guessed, were relatively slow, much more so than a comparable organic equivalent. Unless, of course, it was set to detonate; in which case he had no time to ponder.
   He fired a narrow-beam into the underside of the bug-thing. Maimed, the bug-thing settled backward, its many little cups releasing their hold. As it fell away, Tinbane caught hold of it, lifted it swiftly into the room, dropped it onto the floor, meantime keeping his pistol pointed at it. But it was finished functionally; it did not stir.
   Laying it on the small kitchen table he got a screwdriver from the tool-drawer beside the sink, seated himself, examined the object. He felt, now, that he could take his time; the pressure, momentarily at least, had abated.
   It took him forty minutes to get the thing open; none of the holding screws fitted an ordinary screwdriver, and he found himself at last using a common kitchen knife. But finally he had it open before him on the table, its shell divided into two parts: one hollow and empty, the other crammed with components. A bomb? He tinkered with exceeding care, inspecting each assembly bit by bit.
   No bomb—at least none which he could identify. Then a murder tool? No blade, no toxins or micro-organisms, no tube capable of expelling a lethal charge, explosive or otherwise. So then what in God’s name did it do? He recognized the motor which had driven it up the side of the building, then the photo-electric steering turret by which it oriented itself. But that was all. Absolutely all.
   From the standpoint of use, it was a fraud.
   Or was it? He examined his watch. Now he had spent an entire hour on it; his attention had been diverted from everything else—and who knew what that else might be?
   Nervously, he slid stiffly to his feet, collected his laser pistol, and prowled throughout the apartment, listening, wondering, trying to sense something, however small, that was out of its usual order.
   It’s giving them time, he realized. One entire hour! For whatever it is they’re really up to.
   Time, he thought, for me to leave the apartment. To get to La Jolla and the hell out of here, until this is all over with. His vidphone rang.
   When he answered it, Ted Donovan’s face clicked grayly into view. “We’ve got a department aircar monitoring your conapt building,” Donovan said. “And it picked up some activity; I thought you’d want to know.”
   “Okay,” he said tensely.
   “A vehicle, airborne, landed briefly on your roof parking lot. Not a standard aircar but something larger. Nothing we could recognize. It took right off again at great speed, but I think this is it.”
   “Did it deposit anything?” he asked.
   “Yes. Afraid so.”
   Tight lipped, he said, “Can you do anything for me at this late point? It would be appreciated very much.”
   “What do you suggest? We don’t know what it is; you certainly don’t know either. We’re open to ideas, but I think we’ll have to wait until you know the nature of the—hostile artifact.”
   Something bumped against his door, something in the hall.
   “I’ll leave the line open,” Tinbane said. “Don’t leave; I think it’s happening now.” He felt panic, at this stage; overt, childish panic. Carrying his laser pistol in a numb, loose grip he made his way step by step to the locked front door of his conapt, halted, then unlocked the door and opened it. Slightly. As little as he could manage.
   An enormous, unchecked force pushed the door farther; the knob left his hand. And, soundlessly, the vast steel ball resting against the half-open door rolled forward. He stepped aside—he had to—knowing that this was the adversary; the dummy wall-climbing gadget had deflected his attention from this.
   He could not get out. He would not be going to La Jolla now. The great massed sphere totally blocked the way.
   Returning to the vidphone he said to Donovan, “I’m encapsulated. Here in my own conapt.” At the outer perimeter, he realized. Equal to the rough terrain of the pinball machine’s shifting landscape. The first ball has been blocked there, has lodged in the doorway. But what about the second? The third?
   Each would be closer.
   “Can you build something for me?” he asked huskily. “Can the lab start working this late at night?”
   “We can try,” Donovan said, “It depends entirely on what you want. What do you have in mind? What do you think would help?”
   He hated to ask for it. But he had to. The next one might burst in through a window, or crash onto him from the roof. “I want,” he said, “some form of catapult. Big enough, tough enough, to handle a spherical load with a diameter of between four and a half and five feet. You think you can manage it?” He prayed to God they could.
   “Is that what you’re facing?” Donovan said harshly.
   “Unless it’s an hallucination,” Tinbane said. “A deliberate, artificially induced terror-projection, designed specifically to demoralize me.”
   “The department aircar saw something,” Donovan said. “And it wasn’t an hallucination; it had measurable mass. And—” He hesitated. “It did leave off something big. Its departing mass was considerably diminished. So it’s real, Tinbane.”
   “That’s what I thought,” Tinbane said.
   “We’ll get the catapult to you as soon as we possibly can,” Donovan said. “Let’s hope there’s an adequate interval between each—attack. And you better figure on five at least.”
   Tinbane, nodding, lit a cigarette, or at least tried to. But his hands were shaking too badly to get the lighter into place. He then got out a yellow-lacquered tin of Dean’s Own Snuff, but found himself unable to force open the tight tin; the tin hopped from his fingers and fell to the floor. “Five,” he said, “per game.”
   “Yes,” Donovan said reluctantly, “there’s that.”
   The wall of the living room shuddered.
   The next one was coming at him from the adjoining apartment.

Faith of Our Fathers

   On the streets of Hanoi he found himself facing a legless peddler who rode a little wooden cart and called shrilly to every passer-by. Chien slowed, listened, but did not stop; business at the Ministry of Cultural Artifacts cropped into his mind and deflected his attention: it was as if he were alone, and none of those on bicycles and scooters and jet-powered motorcycles remained. And likewise it was as if the legless peddler did not exist.
   “Comrade,” the peddler called, however, and pursued him on his cart; a helium battery operated the drive and sent the cart scuttling expertly after Chien. “I possess a wide spectrum of time-tested herbal remedies complete with testimonials from thousands of loyal users; advise me of your malady and I can assist.”
   Chien, pausing, said, “Yes, but I have no malady.” Except, he thought, for the chronic one of those employed by the Central Committee, that of career opportunism testing constantly the gates of each official position. Including mine.
   “I can cure for example radiation sickness,” the peddler chanted, still pursuing him. “Or expand, if necessary, the element of sexual prowess. I can reverse carcinomatous progressions, even the dreaded melanomae, what you would call black cancers.” Lifting a tray of bottles, small aluminum cans and assorted powders in plastic jars, the peddler sang, “If a rival persists in trying to usurp your gainful bureaucratic position, I can purvey an ointment which, appearing as a dermal balm, is in actuality a desperately effective toxin. And my prices, comrade, are low. And as a special favor to one so distinguished in bearing as yourself I will accept the postwar inflationary paper dollars reputedly of international exchange but in reality damn near no better than bathroom tissue.”
   “Go to hell,” Chien said, and signaled a passing hover-car taxi; he was already three and one half minutes late for his first appointment of the day, and his various fat-assed superiors at the Ministry would be making quick mental notations—as would, to an even greater degree, his subordinates.
   The peddler said quietly, “But, comrade; you must buy from me.”
   “Why?” Chien demanded. Indignation.
   “Because, comrade, I am a war veteran. I fought in the Colossal Final War of National Liberation with the People’s Democratic United Front against the Imperialists; I lost my pedal extremities at the battle of San Francisco.” His tone was triumphant, now, and sly. “It is the law. If you refuse to buy wares offered by a veteran you risk a fine and possible jail sentence—and in addition disgrace.”
   Wearily, Chien nodded the hovercab on. “Admittedly,” he said. “Okay, I must buy from you.” He glanced summarily over the meager display of herbal remedies, seeking one at random. “That,” he decided, pointing to a paper-wrapped parcel in the rear row.
   The peddler laughed. “That, comrade, is a spermatocide, bought by women who for political reasons cannot qualify for The Pill. It would be of shallow use to you, in fact none at all, since you are a gentleman.”
   “The law,” Chien said bitingly, “does not require me to purchase anything useful from you; only that I purchase something. I’ll take that.” He reached into his padded coat for his billfold, huge with the postwar inflationary bills in which, four times a week, he as a government servant was paid.
   “Tell me your problems,” the peddler said.
   Chien stared at him, appalled by the invasion of privacy—and done by someone outside the government.
   “All right, comrade,” the peddler said, seeing his expression. “I will not probe; excuse me. But as a doctor—an herbal healer—it is fitting that I know as much as possible.” He pondered, his gaunt features somber. “Do you watch television unusually much?” he asked abruptly.
   Taken by surprise, Chien said, “Every evening. Except on Friday, when I go to my club to practice the esoteric imported art from the defeated West of steer-roping.” It was his only indulgence; other than that he had totally devoted himself to Party activities.
   The peddler reached, selected a gray paper packet. “Sixty trade dollars,” he stated. “With a full guarantee; if it does not do as promised, return the unused portion for a full and cheery refund.”
   “And what,” Chien said cuttingly, “is it guaranteed to do?”
   “It will rest eyes fatigued by the countenance of meaningless official monologues,” the peddler said. “A soothing preparation; take it as soon as you find yourself exposed to the usual dry and lengthy sermons which—”
   Chien paid the money, accepted the packet, and strode off. Balls, he said to himself. It’s a racket, he decided, the ordinance setting up war vets as a privileged class. They prey off us—we, the younger ones—like raptors.
   Forgotten, the gray packet remained deposited in his coat pocket as he entered the imposing Postwar Ministry of Cultural Artifacts building, and his own considerable stately office, to begin his workday.
   A portly, middle-aged Caucasian male, wearing a brown Hong Kong silk suit, double-breasted with vest, waited in his office. With the unfamiliar Caucasian stood his own immediate superior, Ssu-Ma Tso-pin. Tso-pin introduced the two of them in Cantonese, a dialect which he used badly.
   “Mr. Tung Chien, this is Mr. Darius Pethel. Mr. Pethel will be headmaster at the new ideological and cultural establishment of didactic character soon to open at San Fernando, California.” He added, “Mr. Pethel has had a rich and full lifetime supporting the people’s struggle to unseat imperialist-bloc countries via pedagogic media; therefore this high post.” They shook hands.
   “Tea?” Chien asked the two of them; he pressed the switch of his infrared hibachi and in an instant the water in the highly ornamented ceramic pot—of Japanese origin—began to burble. As he seated himself at his desk he saw that trustworthy Miss Hsi had laid out the information poop-sheet (confidential) on Comrade Pethel; he glanced over it; meanwhile pretending to be doing nothing in particular.
   “The Absolute Benefactor of the People,” Tso-pin said, “has personally met Mr. Pethel and trusts him. This is rare. The school in San Fernando will appear to teach run-of-the-mill Taoist philosophies but will, of course, in actuality maintain for us a channel of communication to the liberal and intellectual youth segment of western U.S. There are many of them still alive, from San Diego to Sacramento; we estimate at least ten thousand. The school will accept two thousand. Enrollment will be mandatory for those we select. Your relationship to Mr. Pethel’s programming is grave. Ahem; your tea water is boiling.”
   “Thank you,” Chien murmured, dropping in the bag of Lipton’s tea.
   Tso-pin continued, “Although Mr. Pethel will supervise the setting up of the courses of instruction presented by the school to its student body, all examination papers will, oddly enough, be relayed here to your office for your own expert, careful, ideological study. In other words, Mr. Chien, you will determine who among the two thousand students is reliable, which are truly responding to the programming and who is not.”
   “I will now pour my tea,” Chien said, doing so ceremoniously.
   “What we have to realize,” Pethel rumbled in Cantonese even worse than that of Tso-pin, “is that, once having lost the global war to us, the American youth has developed a talent for dissembling.” He spoke the last word in English; not understanding it, Chien turned inquiringly to his superior.
   “Lying,” Tso-pin explained.
   Pethel said, “Mouthing the proper slogans for surface appearance, but on the inside believing them false. Test papers by this group will closely resemble those of genuine—”
   “You mean that the test papers of two thousand students will be passing through my office?” Chien demanded. He could not believe it. “That’s a full-time job in itself; I don’t have time for anything remotely resembling that.” He was appalled. “To give critical, official approval or denial of the astute variety which you’re envisioning—” He gestured. “Screw that,” he said, in English.
   Blinking at the strong, Western vulgarity, Tso-pin said, “You have a staff. Plus you can requisition several more from the pool; the Ministry’s budget, augmented this year, will permit it. And remember: the Absolute Benefactor of the People has hand-picked Mr. Pethel.” His tone, now, had become ominous, but only subtly so. Just enough to penetrate Chien’s hysteria, and to wither it into submission. At least temporarily. To underline his point, Tso-pin walked to the far end of the office; he stood before the full-length 3-D portrait of the Absolute Benefactor, and after an interval his proximity triggered the tape-transport mounted behind the portrait; the face of the Benefactor moved, and from it came a familiar homily, in more than familiar accents. “Fight for peace, my sons,” it intoned gently, firmly.
   “Ha,” Chien said, still perturbed, but concealing it. Possibly one of the Ministry’s computers could sort the examination papers; a yes-no-maybe structure could be employed, in conjunction with a pre-analysis of the pattern of ideological correctness—and incorrectness. The matter could be made routine. Probably.
   Darius Pethel said, “I have with me certain material which I would like you to scrutinize, Mr. Chien.” He unzipped an unsightly, old-fashioned, plastic briefcase. “Two examination essays,” he said as he passed the documents to Chien. “This will tell us if you’re qualified.” He then glanced at Tso-pin; their gazes met. “I understand,” Pethel said, “that if you are successful in this venture you will be made vice-councilor of the Ministry, and His Greatness the Absolute Benefactor of the People will personally confer Kisterigian’s medal on you.” Both he and Tso-pin smiled in wary unison.
   “The Kisterigian medal,” Chien echoed; he accepted the examination papers, glanced over them in a show of leisurely indifference. But within him his heart vibrated in ill-concealed tension. “Why these two? By that I mean, what am I looking for, sir?”
   “One of them,” Pethel said, “is the work of a dedicated progressive, a loyal Party member of thoroughly researched conviction. The other is by a young stilyagi whom we suspect of holding petit-bourgeois imperialist degenerate crypto-ideas. It is up to you, sir, to determine which is which.”
   Thanks a lot, Chien thought. But, nodding, he read the title of the top paper.


Doctrines of the Absolute Benefactor Anticipated in the Poetry of Baha Ad-Din Zuhayr of Thirteenth-Century Arabia

   Glancing down the initial pages of the essay, Chien saw a quatrain familiar to him; it was called “Death,” and he had known it most of his adult, educated life.


Once he will miss, twice he will miss,
He only chooses one of many hours;
For him nor deep nor hill there is,
But all’s one level plain he hunts for flowers.


   “Powerful,” Chien said. “This poem.”
   “He makes use of the poem,” Pethel said, observing Chien’s lips moving as he reread the quatrain, “to indicate the age-old wisdom, displayed by the Absolute Benefactor in our current lives, that no individual is safe; everyone is mortal, and only the supra-personal, historically essential cause survives. As it should be. Would you agree with him? With this student, I mean? Or—” Pethel paused. “Is he in fact perhaps satirizing the Absolute Benefactor’s promulgations?”
   Cagily, Chien said, “Give me a chance to inspect the other paper.”
   “You need no further information; decide.”
   Haltingly, Chien said, “I—I had never thought of this poem that way.” He felt irritable. “Anyhow, it isn’t by Baha ad-Din Zuhayr; it’s part of the Thousand and One Nights anthology. It is, however, thirteenth century; I admit that.” He quickly read over the text of the paper accompanying the poem. It appeared to be a routine, uninspired rehash of Party cliches, all of them familiar to him from birth. The blind, imperialist monster who moved down and snuffed out (mixed metaphor) human aspiration, the calculations of the still extant anti-Party group in eastern United States… He felt dully bored, and as uninspired as the student’s paper. We must persevere, the paper declared. Wipe out the Pentagon remnants in the Catskills, subdue Tennessee and most especially the pocket of die-hard reaction in the red hills of Oklahoma. He sighed.
   “I think,” Tso-pin said, “we should allow Mr. Chien the opportunity of observing this difficult matter at his leisure.” To Chien he said, “You have permission to take them home to your condominium, this evening, and adjudge them on your own time.” He bowed, half mockingly, half solicitously. In any case, insult or not, he had gotten Chien off the hook, and for that Chien was grateful.
   “You are most kind,” he murmured, “to allow me to perform this new and highly stimulating labor on my own time. Mikoyan, were he alive today, would approve.” You bastard, he said to himself. Meaning both his superior and the Caucasian Pethel. Handing me a hot potato like this, and on my own time. Obviously the CP U.S.A. is in trouble; its indoctrination academies aren’t managing to do their job with the notoriously mulish, eccentric Yank youths. And you’ve passed that hot potato on and on until it reaches me.
   Thanks for nothing, he though acidly.

   That evening in his small but well-appointed condominium apartment he read over the other of the two examination papers, this one by a Marion Culper, and discovered that it, too, dealt with poetry. Obviously this was speciously a poetry class, and he felt ill. It had always run against his grain, the use of poetry—of any art—for social purposes. Anyhow, comfortable in his special spine-straightening, simulated-leather easy chair, he lit a Cuesta Rey Number One English Market immense corona cigar and began to read.
   The writer of the paper, Miss Culper, had selected as her text a portion of a poem of John Dryden, the seventeenth-century English poet, final lines from the well-known “A Song for St. Cecilia’s Day.”


…So when the last and dreadful hour
rumbling pageant shall devour,
The trumpet shall be heard on high,
The dead shall live, the living die,
And Music shall untune the sky.


   Well, that’s a hell of a thing, Chien thought to himself bitingly. Dryden, we’re supposed to believe, anticipated the fall of capitalism? That’s what he meant by the “crumbling pageant”? Christ. He leaned over to take hold of his cigar and found that it had gone out. Groping in his pockets for his Japanese-made lighter, he half rose to his feet.
   Tweeeeeee! the TV set at the far end of the living room said.
   Aha, Chien thought. We’re about to be addressed by the Leader. By the Absolute Benefactor of the People, up there in Peking, where he’s lived for ninety years now; or is it one hundred? Or, as we sometimes like to think of him, the Ass—
   “May the ten thousand blossoms of abject self-assumed poverty flower in your spiritual courtyard,” the TV announcer said. With a groan, Chien rose to his feet, bowed the mandatory bow of response; each TV set came equipped with monitoring devices to narrate to the Secpol, the Security Police, whether its owner was bowing and/or watching.
   On the screen a clearly defined visage manifested itself, the wide, unlined, healthy features of the one-hundred-and-twenty-year-old leader of CP East, ruler of many—far too many, Chien reflected. Blah to you, he thought, and reseated himself in his simulated-leather easy chair, now facing the TV screen.
   “My thoughts,” the Absolute Benefactor said in his rich and slow tones, “are on you, my children. And especially on Mr. Tung Chien of Hanoi, who faces a difficult task ahead, a task to enrich the people of Democratic East, plus the American West Coast. We must think in unison about this noble, dedicated man and the chore which he faces, and I have chosen to take several moments of my time to honor him and encourage him. Are you listening, Mr. Chien?”
   “Yes, Your Greatness,” Chien said, and pondered to himself the odds against the Party Leader singling him out this particular evening. The odds caused him to feel uncomradely cynicism; it was unconvincing. Probably this transmission was being beamed into his apartment building alone—or at least to this city. It might also be a lip-synch job, done at Hanoi TV, Incorporated. In any case he was required to listen and watch—and absorb. He did so, from a lifetime of practice. Outwardly he appeared to be rigidly attentive. Inwardly he was still mulling over the two test papers, wondering which was which; where did devout Party enthusiasm end and sardonic lampoonery begin? Hard to say… which of course explained why they had dumped the task in his lap.
   Again he groped in his pockets for his lighter—and found the small gray envelope which the war-veteran peddler had sold him. Gawd, he thought, remembering what it had cost. Money down the drain and what did this herbal remedy do? Nothing. He turned the packet over and saw, on the back, small printed words. Well, he thought, and began to unfold the packet with care. The words had snared him—as of course they were meant to do.


   Failing as a Party member and human?
   Afraid of becoming obsolete and discarded on the ash heap of history by…


   He read rapidly through the text, ignoring its claims, seeking to find out what he had purchased.
   Meanwhile the Absolute Benefactor droned on.
   Snuff. The package contained snuff. Countless tiny black grains, like gunpowder, which sent up an interesting aromatic to tickle his nose. The title of the particular blend was Princes Special, he discovered. And very pleasing, he decided. At one time he had taken snuff—smoking tobacco for a time having been illegal for reasons of health—back during his student days at Peking U; it had been the fad, especially the amatory mixes prepared in Chungking, made from God knew what. Was this that? Almost any aromatic could be added to snuff, from essence of organe to pulverized baby-crab… or so some seemed, especially an English mixture called High Dry Toast which had in itself more or less put an end to his yearning for nasal, inhaled tobacco. On the TV screen the Absolute Benefactor rumbled monotonously on as Chien sniffed cautiously at the powder, read the claims—it cured everything from being late to work to falling in love with a woman of dubious political background. Interesting. But typical of claims—
   His doorbell rang.
   Rising, he walked to the door, opened it with full knowledge of what he would find. There, sure enough, stood Mou Kuei, the Building Warden, small and hard-eyed and alert to his task; he had his arm band and metal helmet on, showing that he meant business. “Mr. Chien, comrade Party worker. I received a call from the television authority. You are failing to watch your television screen and are instead fiddling with a packet of doubtful content.” He produced a clipboard and ballpoint pen. “Two red marks, and hithertonow you are summarily ordered to repose yourself in a comfortable, stress-free posture before your screen and give the Leader your unexcelled attention. His words, this evening, are directed particularly to you, sir; to you.”
   “I doubt that,” Chien heard himself say.
   Blinking, Kuei said, “What do you mean?”
   “The Leader rules eight billion comrades. He isn’t going to single me out.” He felt wrathful; the punctuality of the warden’s reprimand irked him.
   Kuei said, “But I distinctly heard with my own ears. You were mentioned.”
   Going over to the TV set, Chien turned the volume up. “But now he’s talking about failures in People’s India; that’s of no relevance to me.”
   “Whatever the Leader expostulates is relevant.” Mou Kuei scratched a mark on his clipboard sheet, bowed formally, turned away. “My call to come up here to confront you with your slackness originated at Central. Obviously they regard your attention as important; I must order you to set in motion your automatic transmission recording circuit and replay the earlier portions of the Leader’s speech.”
   Chien farted. And shut the door.
   Back to the TV set, he said to himself. Where our leisure hours are spent. And there lay the two student examination papers; he had that weighing him down, too. And all on my own time, he thought savagely. The hell with them. Up theirs. He strode to the TV set, started to shut it off; at once a red warning light winked on, informing that he did not have permission to shut off the set—could not in fact end its tirade and image even if he unplugged it. Mandatory speeches, he thought, will kill us all, bury us; if I could be free of the noise of speeches, free of the din of the Party baying as it hounds mankind…
   There was no known ordinance, however, preventing him from taking snuff while he watched the Leader. So, opening the small gray packet, he shook out a mound of the black granules onto the back of his left hand. He then, professionally, raised his hand to his nostrils and deeply inhaled, drawing the snuff well up into his sinus cavities. Imagine the old superstition, he thought to himself. That the sinus cavities are connected to the brain, and hence an inhalation of snuff directly affects the cerebral cortex. He smiled, seated himself once more, fixed his gaze on the TV screen and the gesticulating individual known so utterly to them all.
   The face dwindled away, disappeared. The sound ceased. He faced an emptiness, a vacuum. The screen, white and blank, confronted him and from the speaker a faint hiss sounded.
   The frigging snuff, he said to himself. And inhaled greedily at the remainder of the powder on his hand, drawing it up avidly into his nose, his sinuses, and, or so it felt, into his brain; he plunged into the snuff, absorbing it elatedly.
   The screen remained blank and then, by degrees, an image once more formed and established itself. It was not the Leader. Not the Absolute Benefactor of the People, in point of fact not a human figure at all.
   He faced a dead mechanical construct, made of solid state circuits, of swiveling pseudopodia, lenses and a squawk-box. And the box began, in a droning din, to harangue him.
   Staring fixedly, he thought, What is this? Reality? Hallucination, he thought. The peddler came across some of the psychedelic drugs used during the War of Liberation—he’s selling the stuff and I’ve taken some, taken a whole lot!
   Making his way unsteadily to the vidphone, he dialed the Secpol station nearest his building. “I wish to report a pusher of hallucinogenic drugs,” he said into the receiver.
   “Your name, sir, and conapt location?” Efficient, brisk and impersonal bureaucrat of the police.
   He gave them the information, then haltingly made it back to his simulated-leather easy chair, once again to witness the apparition on the TV screen. This is lethal, he said to himself. It must be some preparation developed in Washington, D.C., or London—stronger and stranger than the LSD-25 which they dumped so effectively into our reservoirs. And I thought it was going to relieve me of the burden of the Leader’s speeches… this is far worse, this electronic, sputtering, swiveling, metal and plastic monstrosity yammering away—this is terrifying.
   To have to face this the remainder of my life—
   It took ten minutes for the Secpol two-man team to come rapping at his door. And by then, in a deteriorating set of stages, the familiar image of the Leader had seeped back into focus on the screen, had supplanted the horrible artificial construct which waved its podia and squalled on and on. He let the two cops in shakily, led them to the table on which he had left the remains of the snuff in its packet.
   “Psychedelic toxin,” he said thickly. “Of short duration. Absorbed into the bloodstream directly, through nasal capillaries. I’ll give you details as to where I got it, from whom, all that.” He took a deep shaky breath; the presence of the police was comforting.
   Ballpoint pens ready, the two officers waited. And all the time, in the background, the Leader rattled out his endless speech. As he had done a thousand evenings before in the life of Tung Chien. But, he thought, it’ll never be the same again, at least not for me. Not after inhaling that near-toxic snuff.
   He wondered, Is that what they intended?
   It seemed odd to him, thinking of a they. Peculiar—but somehow correct. For an instant he hesitated, to giving out the details, not telling the police enough to find the man. A peddler, he started to say. I don’t know where; can’t remember. But he did; he remembered the exact street intersection. So, with unexplainable reluctance, he told them.
   “Thank you, comrade Chien.” The boss of the team of police carefully gathered up the remaining snuff—most of it remained—and placed it in his uniform—smart, sharp uniform—pocket. “We’ll have it analyzed at the first available moment,” the cop said, “and inform you immediately in case counter-medical measures are indicated for you. Some of the old wartime psychedelics were eventually fatal, as you have no doubt read.”
   “I’ve read,” he agreed. That had been specifically what he had been thinking.
   “Good luck and thanks for notifying us,” both cops said, and departed. The affair, for all their efficiency, did not seem to shake them; obviously such a complaint was routine.
   The lab report came swiftly—surprisingly so, in view of the vast state bureaucracy. It reached him by vidphone before the Leader had finished his TV speech.
   “It’s not a hallucinogen,” the Secpol lab technician informed him.
   “No?” he said, puzzled and, strangely, not relieved. Not at all.
   “On the contrary. It’s a phenothiazine, which as you doubtless know is anti-hallucinogenic. A strong dose per gram of admixture, but harmless. Might lower your blood pressure or make you sleepy. Probably stolen from a wartime cache of medical supplies. Left by the retreating barbarians. I wouldn’t worry.”
   Pondering, Chien hung up the vidphone in slow motion. And then walked to the window of his conapt—the window with the fine view of other Hanoi high-rise conapts—to think.
   The doorbell rang. Feeling as if he were in a trance, he crossed the carpeted living room to answer it.
   The girl standing there, in a tan raincoat with a babushka over her dark, shiny, and very long hair, said in a timid little voice, “Um, Comrade Chien? Tung Chien? Of the Ministry of—“
   He let her in, reflexively, and shut the door after her. “You’ve been monitoring my vidphone,” he told her; it was a shot in darkness, but something in him, an unvoiced certitude, told him that she had.
   “Did—they take the rest of the snuff?” She glanced about. “Oh, I hope not; it’s so hard to get these days,”
   “Snuff,” he said, “is easy to get. Phenothiazine isn’t. Is that what you mean?”
   The girl raised her head, studied him with large, moon-darkened eyes. “Yes. Mr. Chien—” She hesitated, obviously as uncertain as the Secpol cops had been assured. “Tell me what you saw; it’s of great importance for us to be certain.”
   “I had a choice?” he said acutely.
   “Y-yes, very much so. That’s what confuses us; that’s what is not as we planned. We don’t understand it; it fits nobody’s theory.” Her eyes even darker and deeper, she said, “Was it the aquatic horror shape? The thing with slime and teeth, the extraterrestrial life form? Please tell me; we have to know.” She breathed irregularly, with effort, the tan raincoat rising and falling; he found himself watching its rhythm.
   “A machine,” he said.
   “Oh!” She ducked her head, nodding vigorously. “Yes, I understand; a mechanical organism in no way resembling a human. Not a simulacrum, or something constructed to resemble a man.”
   He said, “This did not look like a man.” He added to himself, And it failed—did not try—to talk like a man.
   “You understand that it was not a hallucination.”
   “I’ve been officially told that what I took was a phenothiazine. That’s all I know.” He said as little as possible; he did not want to talk but to hear. Hear what the girl had to say.
   “Well, Mr. Chien—” She took a deep, unstable breath. “If it was not a hallucination, then what was it? What does that leave? What is called ‘extra-consciousness’—could that be it?”
   He did not answer; turning his back, he leisurely picked up the two student test papers, glanced over them, ignoring her. Waiting for her next attempt.
   At his shoulder, she appeared, smelling of spring rain, smelling of sweetness and agitation, beautiful in the way she smelled, and looked, and, he thought, speaks. So different from the harsh plateau speech patterns we hear on the TV—have heard since I was a baby.
   “Some of them,” she said huskily, “who take the stelazine—it was stelazine you got, Mr. Chien—see one apparition, some another. But distinct categories have emerged; there is not an infinite variety. Some see what you saw; we call it the Clanker. Some the aquatic horror; that’s the Gulper. And then there’s the Bird, and the Climbing Tube, and—” She broke off. “But other reactions tell you very little. Tell us very little.” She hesitated, then plunged on. “Now that this has happened to you, Mr. Chien, we would like you to join our gathering. Join your particular group, those who see what you see. Group Red. We want to know what it really is, and—” She gestured with tapered, wax smooth fingers. “It can’t be all those manifestations.” Her tone was poignant, naively so. He felt his caution relax—a trifle.
   He said, “What do you see? You in particular?”
   “I’m a part of Group Yellow. I see—a storm. A whining, vicious whirlwind. That roots everything up, crushes condominium apartments built to last a century.” She smiled wanly. “The Crusher. Twelve groups in all, Mr. Chien. Twelve absolutely different experiments, all from the same phenothiazines, all of the Leader as he speaks over TV. As it speaks, rather.” She smiled up at him, lashes long—probably protracted artificially—and gaze engaging, even trusting. As if she thought he knew something or could do something.
   “I should make a citizen’s arrest of you,” he said presently.
   “There is no law, not about this. We studied Soviet judicial writings before we—found people to distribute the stelazine. We don’t have much of it; we have to be very careful whom we give it to. It seemed to us that you constituted a likely choice… a well-known, postwar, dedicated young career man on his way up.” From his fingers she took the examination papers. “They’re having you pol-read?” she asked.
   “ ‘Pol-read’?” He did not know the term.
   “Study something said or written to see if it fits the Party’s current world view. You in the hierarchy merely call it ‘read,’ don’t you?” Again she smiled. “When you rise one step higher, up with Mr. Tso-pin, you will know that expression.” She added somberly, “And with Mr. Pethel. He’s very far up. Mr. Chien, there is no ideological school in San Fernando; these are forged exam papers, designed to read back to them a thorough analysis of your political ideology. And have you been able to distinguish which paper is orthodox and which is heretical?” Her voice was pixielike, taunting with amused malice. “Choose the wrong one and your budding career stops dead, cold, in its tracks. Choose the proper one—”
   “Do you know which is which?” he demanded.
   “Yes.” She nodded soberly. “We have listening devices in Mr. Tso-pin’s inner offices; we monitored his conversation with Mr. Pethel—who is not Mr. Pethel but the Higher Secpol Inspector Judd Craine. You have probably heard mention of him; he acted as chief assistant to Judge Vorlawsky at the ‘98 war-crimes trial in Zurich.”
   With difficulty he said, “I—see.” Well, that explained that.
   The girl said, “My name is Tanya Lee.”
   He said nothing; he merely nodded, too stunned for any cerebration.
   “Technically, I am a minor clerk,” Miss Lee said, “at your Ministry. You have never run into me, however, that I can at least recall. We try to hold posts wherever we can. As far up as possible. My own boss—”
   “Should you be telling me this?” he gestured at the TV set, which remained on. “Aren’t they picking this up?”
   Tanya Lee said, “We introduced a noise factor in the reception of both vid and aud material from this apartment building; it will take them almost an hour to locate the sheathing. So we have”—she examined the tiny wrist-watch on her slender wrist—“fifteen more minutes. And still be safe.”
   “Tell me,” he said, “which paper is orthodox.”
   “Is that what you care about? Really?”
   “What,” he said, “should I care about?”
   “Don’t you see, Mr. Chien? You’ve learned something. The Leader is not the Leader; he is something else, but we can’t tell what. Not yet. Mr. Chien, when all due respect, have you ever had your drinking water analyzed? I know it sounds paranoiac, but have you?”
   “No,” he said. “Of course not.” Knowing what she was going to say.
   Miss Lee said briskly, “Our tests show that it’s saturated with hallucinogens. It is, has been, will continue to be. Not the ones used during the war; not the disorientating ones, but a synthetic quasi-ergot derivative called Datrox-3. You drink it here in the building from the time you get up; you drink it in restaurants and other apartments that you visit. You drink it at the Ministry; it’s all piped from a central, common source.” Her tone was bleak and ferocious. “We solved that problem; we knew, as soon as we discovered it, that any good phenothiazine would counter it. What we did not know, of course, was this—a variety of authentic experiences; that makes no sense, rationally. It’s the hallucination which should differ from person to person, and the reality experience which should be ubiquitous—it’s all turned around. We can’t even construct an ad hoc theory which accounts for that, and God knows we’ve tried. Twelve mutually exclusive hallucinations—that would be easily understood. But not one hallucination and twelve realities.” She ceased talking then, and studied the two test papers, her forehead wrinkling. “The one with the Arabic poem is orthodox,” she stated. “If you tell them that they’ll trust you and give you a higher post. You’ll be another notch up in the hierarchy of Party officialdom.” Smiling—her teeth were perfect and lovely—she finished, “Look what you received back for your investment this morning. Your career is underwritten for a time. And by us.”
   He said, “I don’t believe you.” Instinctively, his caution operated within him, always, the caution of a lifetime lived among the hatchet men of the Hanoi branch of the CP East. They knew an infinitude of ways by which to ax a rival out of contention—some of which he himself had employed; some of which he had seen done to himself and to others. This could be a novel way, one unfamiliar to him. It could always be.
   “Tonight,” Miss Lee said, “in the speech the Leader singled you out. Didn’t this strike you as strange? You, of all people? A minor officeholder in a meager ministry—”
   “Admitted,” he said. “It struck me that way; yes.”
   “That was legitimate. His Greatness is grooming an elite cadre of younger men, postwar men, he hopes will infuse new life into the hidebound, moribund hierarchy of old fogies and Party hacks. His Greatness singled you out for the same reason that we singled you out; if pursued properly, your career could lead you all the way to the top. At least for a time… as we know. That’s how it goes.”
   He thought: So virtually everyone has faith in me. Except myself; and certainly not after this, the experience with the anti-hallucinatory snuff. It had shaken years of confidence, and no doubt rightly so. However, he was beginning to regain his poise; he felt it seeping back, a little at first, then with a rush.
   Going to the vidphone, he lifted the receiver and began, for the second time that night, to dial the number of the Hanoi Security Police.
   “Turning me in,” Miss Lee said, “would be the second most regressive decision you could make. I’ll tell them that you brought me here to bribe me; you thought, because of my job at the Ministry, I would know which examination paper to select.”
   He said, “And what would be my first most regressive decision?”
   “Not taking a further dose of phenothiazine,” Miss Lee said evenly.
   Hanging up the phone, Tung Chien thought to himself, I don’t understand what’s happening to me. Two forces, the Party and His Greatness on one hand—this girl with her alleged group on the other. One wants me to rise as far as possible in the Party hierarchy; the other—What did Tanya Lee want? Underneath the words, inside the membrane of an almost trivial contempt for the Party, the Leader, the ethical standards of the People’s Democratic United Front—what was she after in regard to him?
   He said curiously, “Are you anti-Party?”
   “No.”

   “But—“ He gestured. “That’s all there is: Party and anti-Party. You must be Party, then.” Bewildered, he stared at her; with composure she returned the stare. “You have an organization,” he said, “and you meet. What do you intend to destroy? The regular function of government? Are you like the treasonable college students of the United States during the Vietnam War who stopped troop trains, demonstrated—”
   Wearily Miss Lee said, “It wasn’t like that. But forget it; that’s not the issue. What we want to know is this: who or what is leading us? We must penetrate far enough to enlist someone, some rising young Party theoretician, who could conceivably be invited to a tête-à-tête with the Leader—you see?” Her voice lifted; she consulted her watch, obviously anxious to get away: the fifteen minutes were almost up. “Very few persons actually see the Leader, as you know. I mean really see him.”
   “Seclusion,” he said. “Due to his advanced age.”
   “We have hope,” Miss Lee said, “that if you pass the phony test which they have arranged for you—and with my help you have—you will be invited to one of the stag parties which the Leader has from time to time, which of course the papers don’t report. Now do you see?” Her voice rose shrilly, in a frenzy of despair. “Then we would know; if you could go in there under the influence of the anti-hallucinogenic drug, could see him face to face as he actually is—”
   Thinking aloud, he said, “And end my career of public service. If not my life.”
   “You owe us something,” Tanya Lee snapped, her cheeks white. “If I hadn’t told you which exam paper to choose you would have picked the wrong one and your dedicated public-service career would be over anyhow; you would have failed—failed at a test you didn’t even realize you were taking!”
   He said mildly, “I had a fifty-fifty chance.”
   “No.” She shook her head fiercely. “The heretical one is faked up with a lot of Party jargon; they deliberately constructed the two texts to trap you. They wanted you to fail!”
   Once more he examined the two papers, feeling confused. Was she right? Possibly. Probably. It rang true, knowing the Party functionaries as he did, and Tso-pin, his superior, in particular. He felt weary then. Defeated. After a time he said to the girl, “What you’re trying to get out of me is a quid pro quo. You did something for me—you got, or claim you got, the answer to this Party inquiry. But you’ve already done your part. What’s to keep me from tossing you out of here on your head? I don’t have to do a goddamn thing.” He heard his voice, toneless, sounding the poverty of empathic emotionality so usual in Party circles.
   Miss Lee said, “There will be other tests, as you continue to ascend. And we will monitor for you with them too.” She was calm, at ease; obviously she had foreseen his reaction.
   “How long do I have to think it over?” he said.
   “I’m leaving now. We’re in no rush; you’re not about to receive an invitation to the Leader’s Yangtze River villa in the next week or even month.” Going to the door, opening it, she paused. “As you’re given covert rating tests we’ll be in contact, supplying the answers—so you’ll see one or more of us on those occasions. Probably it won’t be me; it’ll be that disabled war veteran who’ll sell you the correct response sheets as you leave the Ministry building.” She smiled a brief, snuffed-out-candle smile. “But one of these days, no doubt unexpectedly, you’ll get an ornate, official, very formal invitation to the villa, and when you go you’ll be heavily sedated with stelazine… possibly our last dose of our dwindling supply. Good night.” The door shut after her; she had gone.
   My God, he thought. They can blackmail me. For what I’ve done. And she didn’t even bother to mention it; in view of what they’re involved with it was not worth mentioning.
   But blackmail for what? He had already told the Secpol squad that he had been given a drug which had proved to be a phenothiazine. Then they know, he realized. They’ll watch me; they’re alert. Technically, I haven’t broken a law, but—they’ll be watching, all right.
   However, they always watched anyhow. He relaxed slightly, thinking that. He had, over the years, become virtually accustomed to it, as had everyone.
   I will see the Absolute Benefactor of the People as he is, he said to himself. Which possibly no one else had done. What will it be? Which of the subclasses of non-hallucination? Classes which I do not even know about… a view which may totally overthrow me. How am I going to be able to get through the evening, to keep my poise, if it’s like the shape I saw on the TV screen? The Crusher, the Clanker, the Bird, the Climbing Tube, the Gulper—or worse.
   He wondered what some of the other views consisted of… and then gave up that line of speculation; it was unprofitable. And too anxiety-inducing.

   The next morning Mr. Tso-pin and Mr. Darius Pethel met him in his office, both of them calm but expectant. Wordlessly, he handed them one of the two “exam papers.” The orthodox one, with its short and heart-smothering Arabian poem.
   “This one,” Chien said tightly, “is the product of a dedicated Party member or candidate for membership. The other—” He slapped the remaining sheets. “Reactionary garbage.” He felt anger. “In spite of a superficial—”
   “All right, Mr. Chien,” Pethel said, nodding. “We don’t have to explore each and every ramification; your analysis is correct. You heard the mention regarding you in the Leader’s speech last night on TV?”
   “I certainly did,” Chien said.
   “So you have undoubtedly inferred,” Pethel said, “that there is a good deal involved in what we are attempting, here. The leader has his eye on you; that’s clear. As a matter of fact, he has communicated to myself regarding you.” He opened his bulging briefcase and rummaged. “Lost the goddamn thing. Anyhow—” He glanced at Tso-pin, who nodded slightly. “His Greatness would like to have you appear for dinner at the Yangtze River Ranch next Thursday night. Mrs. Fletcher in particular appreciates—”
   Chien said, “ ‘Mrs. Fletcher’? Who is ‘Mrs. Fletcher’?”
   After a pause Tso-pin said dryly, “The Absolute Benefactor’s wife. His name—which you of course had never heard—is Thomas Fletcher.”
   “He’s a Caucasian,” Pethel explained. “Originally from the New Zealand Communist Party; he participated in the difficult takeover there. This news is not in the strict sense secret, but on the other hand it hasn’t been noised about.” He hesitated, toying with his watch chain. “Probably it would be better if you forgot about that. Of course, as soon as you meet him, see him face to face, you’ll realize that, realize that he’s a Cauc. As I am. As many of us are.”
   “Race,” Tso-pin pointed out, “has nothing to do with loyalty to the leader and the Party. As witness Mr. Pethel, here.”
   But His Greatness, Chien thought, jolted. He did not appear, on the TV screen, to be Occidental. “On TV—” he began.
   “The image,” Tso-pin interrupted, “is subjected to a variegated assortment of skillful refinements. For ideological purposes. Most persons holding higher offices are aware of this.” He eyed Chien with hard criticism.
   So everyone agrees, Chien thought. What we see every night is not real. The question is, How unreal? Partially? Or—completely?
   “I will be prepared,” he said tautly. And he thought, There has been a slip-up. They weren’t prepared for me—the people that Tanya Lee represents—to gain entry so soon. Where’s the anti-hallucinogen? Can they get it to me or not? Probably not on such short notice.
   He felt, strangely, relief. He would be going into the presence of His Greatness in a position to see him as a human being, see him as he—and everybody else—saw him on TV. It would be a most stimulating and cheerful dinner party, with some of the most influential Party members in Asia. I think we can do without the phenothiazine, he said to himself. And his sense of relief grew.
   “Here it is, finally,” Pethel said suddenly, producing a white envelope from his briefcase. “Your card of admission. You will be flown by Sino-rocket to the Leader’s villa Thursday morning; there the protocol officer will brief you on your expected behavior. It will be formal dress, white tie and tails, but the atmosphere will be cordial. There are always a great number of toasts.” He added, “I have attended two such stag get-togethers. Mr. Tso-pin”—he smiled creakily—“has not been honored in such a fashion. But, as they say, all things come to him who waits. Ben Franklin said that.”
   Tso-pin said, “It has come for Mr. Chien rather prematurely, I would say.” He shrugged philosophically. “But my opinion has never at any time been asked.”
   “One thing,” Pethel said to Chien. “It is possible that when you see His Greatness in person you will be in some regards disappointed. Be alert that you do not let this make itself apparent, if you should so feel. We have, always, tended—been trained—to regard him as more than a man. But at table he is”—he gestured—“a forked radish. In certain respects like ourselves. He may for instance indulge in moderately human oral-aggressive and—passive activity; he possibly may tell an off-color joke or drink too much… To be candid, no one ever knows in advance how these things will work out, but they do generally hold forth until late the following morning. So it would be wise to accept the dosage of amphetamines which the protocol officer will offer you.”
   “Oh?” Chien said. This was news to him, and interesting.
   “For stamina. And to balance the liquor. His greatness has amazing staying power; he often is still on his feet and raring to go after everyone else has collapsed.”
   “A remarkable man,” Tso-pin chimed in. “I think his—indulgences only show that he is a fine fellow. And fully in the round; he is like the ideal Renaissance man; as, for example, Lorenzo de’ Medici.”
   “That does come to mind,” Pethel said; he studied Chien with such intensity that some of last night’s chill returned. Am I being led into one trap after another? Chien wondered. That girl—was she in fact an agent of the Secpol probing me, trying to ferret out a disloyal, anti-Party streak in me?
   I think, he decided, I will make sure that the legless peddler of herbal remedies does not snare me when I leave work; I’ll take a totally different route back to my conapt.
   He was successful. That day he avoided the peddler, and the same the next, and so on until Thursday.
   On Thursday morning the peddler scooted from beneath a parked truck and blocked his way, confronting him.
   “My medication?” the peddler demanded. “It helped? I know it did; the formula goes back to the Sung Dynasty—I can tell it did. Right?”
   Chien said, “Let me go.”
   “Would you be kind enough to answer?” The tone was not the expected, customary whining of a street peddler operating in a marginal fashion, and that tone came across to Chien; he heard loud and clear… as the Imperialist puppet troops of long ago phrased.
   “I know what you gave me,” Chien said. “And I don’t want any more. If I change my mind I can pick it up at a pharmacy. Thanks.” He started on, but the cart, with the legless occupant, pursued him.
   “Miss Lee was talking to me,” the peddler said loudly.
   “Hmmm,” Chien said, and automatically increased his pace; he spotted a hovercab and began signaling for it.
   “It’s tonight you’re going to the stag dinner at the Yangtze River villa,” the peddler said, panting for breath in his effort to keep up. “Take the medication—now!” He held out a flat packet, imploringly. “Please, Party Member Chien; for your own sake, for all of us. So we can tell what it is we’re up against. Good Lord, it may be non-Terran; that’s our most basic fear. Don’t you understand, Chien? What’s your goddamn career compared with that? If we can’t find out—”
   The cab bumped to a halt on the pavement; its doors slid open. Chien started to board it.
   The packet sailed past him, landed on the entrance sill of the cab, then slid onto the floor, damp from earlier rain.
   “Please,” the peddler said. “And it won’t cost you anything; today it’s free. Just take it, use it before the stag dinner. And don’t use the amphetamines; they’re a thalamic stimulant, contraindicated whenever an adrenal suppressant such as a phenothiazine is—”
   The door of the cab closed after Chien. He seated himself.
   “Where to, comrade?” the robot drive-mechanism inquired.
   He gave the ident tag number of his conapt.
   “That halfwit of a peddler managed to infiltrate his seedy wares into my clean interior,” the cab said. “Notice; it reposes by your foot.”
   He saw the packet—no more than an ordinary-looking envelope. I guess, he thought, this is how drugs come to you; all of a sudden they’re there. For a moment he sat, and then he picked it up.
   As before, there was a written enclosure above and beyond the medication, but this time, he saw, it was hand-written. A feminine script—from Miss Lee:

   We were surprised at the suddenness. But thank heaven we were ready. Where were you Tuesday and Wednesday? Anyhow, here it is, and good luck. I will approach you later in the week; I don’t want you to try to find me.

   He ignited the note, burned it up in the cab’s disposal ashtray.
   And kept the dark granules.
   All this time, he thought. Hallucinogens in our water supply. Year after year. Decades. And not in wartime but in peacetime. And not to the enemy camp but here in our own. The evil bastards, he said to himself. Maybe I ought to take this; maybe I ought to find out what he or it is and let Tanya’s group know.
   I will, he decided. And—he was curious.
   A bad emotion, he knew. Curiosity was, especially in Party activities, often a terminal state careerwise.
   A state which, at the moment, gripped him thoroughly. He wondered if it would last through the evening, if, when it came right down to it, he would actually take the inhalant.
   Time would tell. Tell that and everything else. We are blooming flowers, he thought, on the plain, which he picks. As the Arabic poem had put it. He tried to remember the rest of the poem but could not.
   That probably was just as well.

   The villa protocol officer, a Japanese named Kimo Okubara, tall and husky, obviously a quondam wrestler, surveyed him with innate hostility, even after he presented his engraved invitation and had successfully managed to prove his identity.
   “Surprise you bother to come,” Okubara muttered. “Why not stay home and watch on TV? Nobody miss you. We got along fine without you up to right now.
   Chien said tightly, “I’ve already watched on TV.” And anyhow the stag dinners were rarely televised; they were too bawdy.
   Okubara’s crew double-checked him for weapons, including the possibility of an anal suppository, and then gave him his clothes back. They did not find the phenothiazine, however. Because he had already taken it. The effects of such a drug, he knew, lasted approximately four hours; that would be more than enough. And, as Tanya had said, it was a major dose; he felt sluggish and inept and dizzy, and his tongue moved in spasms of pseudo-Parkinsonism—an unpleasant side effect which he had failed to anticipate.
   A girl, nude from the waist up, with long coppery hair down her shoulders and back, walked by. Interesting.
   Coming the other way, a girl nude from the bottom up made her appearance. Interesting, too. Both girls looked vacant and bored, and totally self-possessed.
   “You go in like that too,” Okubara informed Chien.
   Startled, Chien said, “I understood white tie and tails.”
   “Joke,” Okubara said. “At your expense. Only girls wear nude; you even get so you enjoy, unless you homosexual.”
   Well, Chien thought, I guess I had better like it. He wandered on with the other guests—they, like him, wore white tie and tails, or, if women, floor-length gowns—and felt ill at ease, despite the tranquilizing effect of the stelazine. Why am I here? he asked himself. The ambiguity of his situation did not escape him. He was here to advance his career in the Party apparatus, to obtain the intimate and personal nod of approval from His Greatness… and in addition he was here to decipher His Greatness as a fraud; he did not know what variety of fraud, but there it was: fraud against the Party, against all the peace-loving democratic peoples of Terra. Ironic, he thought. And continued to mingle.
   A girl with small, bright, illuminated breasts approached him for a match; he absent-mindedly got out his lighter. “What makes your breasts glow?” he asked her. “Radioactive injections?”
   She shrugged, said nothing, passed on, leaving him alone. Evidently he had responded in the incorrect way.
   Maybe it’s a wartime mutation, he pondered.
   “Drink, sir.” A servant graciously held out a tray; he accepted a martini—which was the current fad among the higher Party classes in People’s China—and sipped the ice-cold dry flavor. Good English gin, he said to himself. Or possibly the original Holland compound; juniper or whatever they added. Not bad. He strolled on, feeling better; in actuality he found the atmosphere here a pleasant one. The people here were self-assured; they had been successful and now they could relax. It evidently was a myth that proximity to His Greatness produced neurotic anxiety: he saw no evidence here, at least, and felt little himself.
   A heavy-set elderly man, bald, halted him by the simple means of holding his drink glass against Chien’s chest. “That frably little one who asked you for a match,” the elderly man said, and sniggered. “The quig with the Christmas-tree breasts—that was a boy, in drag.” He giggled. “You have to be cautious around here.”
   “Where, if anywhere,” Chien said, “do I find authentic women? In white ties and tails?”
   “Darn near,” the elderly man said, and departed with a throng of hyperactive guests, leaving Chien alone with his martini.
   A handsome, tall woman, well dressed, standing near Chien, suddenly put her hand on his arm; he felt her fingers tense and she said, “Here he comes. His Greatness. This is the first time for me; I’m a little scared. Does my hair look all right?”
   “Fine,” Chien said reflexively, and followed her gaze, seeking a glimpse—his first—of the Absolute Benefactor.
   What crossed the room toward the table in the center was not a man.
   And it was not, Chien realized, a mechanical construct either; it was not what he had seen on TV. That evidently was simply a device for speechmaking, as Mussolini had once used an artificial arm to salute long and tedious processions.
   God, he thought, and felt ill. Was this what Tanya Lee had called the “aquatic horror” shape? It had no shape. Nor pseudopodia, either flesh or metal. It was, in a sense, not there at all; when he managed to look directly at it, the shape vanished; he saw through it, saw the people on the far side—but not it. Yet if he turned his head, caught it out of a sidelong glance, he could determine its boundaries.
   It was terrible; it blasted him with its awareness. As it moved it drained the life from each person in turn; it ate the people who had assembled, passed on, ate again, ate more with an endless appetite. It hated; he felt its hate. It loathed; he felt its loathing for everyone present—in fact he shared its loathing. All at once he and everyone else in the big villa were each a twisted slug, and over the fallen slug carcasses the creature savored, lingered, but all the time coming directly toward him—or was that an illusion? If this is a hallucination, Chien thought, it is the worst I have ever had; if it is not, then it is evil reality; it’s an evil thing that kills and injures. He saw the trail of stepped-on, mashed men and women remnants behind it; he saw them trying to reassemble, to operate their crippled bodies; he heard them attempting speech.
   I know who you are, Tung Chien thought to himself. You, the supreme head of the worldwide Party structure. You, who destroy whatever living object you touch; I see that Arabic poem, the searching for the flowers of life to eat them—I see you astride the plain which to you is Earth, plain without hills, without valleys. You go anywhere, appear any time, devour anything; you engineer life and then guzzle it, and you enjoy that.
   “Mr. Chien,” the voice said, but it came from inside his head, not from the mouthless spirit that fashioned itself directly before him. “It is good to meet you again. You know nothing. Go away. I have no interest in you. Why should I care about slime? Slime; I am mired in it, I must excrete it, and I choose to. I could break you; I can break even myself. Sharp stones are under me; I spread sharp pointed things upon the mire. I make the hiding places, the deep places, boil like a pot; to me the sea is like a lot of ointment. The flakes of my flesh are joined to everything. You are me. I am you. It makes no difference, just as it makes no difference whether the creature with ignited breasts is a girl or boy; you could learn to enjoy either.” It laughed.
   He could not believe it was speaking to him; he could not imagine—it was too terrible—that it had picked him out.
   “I have picked everybody out,” it said. “No one is too small, each falls and dies and I am there to watch. I don’t need to do anything but watch; it is automatic; it was arranged that way.” And then it ceased talking to him; it disjoined itself. But he still saw it; he felt its manifold presence. It was a globe which hung in the room, with fifty thousand eyes, a million eyes—billions: an eye for each living thing as it waited for each thing to fall, and then stepped on the living thing as it lay in a broken state. Because of this it had created the things, and he knew; he understood. What had seemed in the Arabic poem to be death was not death but God; or rather God was death, it was one force, one hunter, one cannibal thing, and it missed again and again but, having all eternity, it could afford to miss. Both poems, he realized; the Dryden one too. The crumbling; that is our world and you are doing it. Warping it to come out that way; bending us.
   But at least, he thought, I still have my dignity. With dignity he set down his drink glass, turned, walked toward the doors of the room. He passed through the doors. He walked down a long carpeted hall. A villa servant dressed in purple opened a door for him; he found himself standing out in the night darkness, on a veranda, alone.
   Not alone.
   It had followed after him. Or it had already been here before him; yes, it had been expecting. It was not really through with him.
   “Here I go,” he said, and made a dive for the railing; it was six stories down, and there below gleamed the river and death, not what the Arabic poem had seen.
   As he tumbled over, it put an extension of itself on his shoulder.
   “Why?” he said. But, in fact, he paused. Wondering. Not understanding, not at all.
   “Don’t fall on my account,” it said. He could not see it because it had moved behind him. But the piece of it on his shoulder—it had begun to look like a human hand. And then it laughed.
   “What’s funny?” he demanded, as he teetered on the railing, held back by its pseudo-hand.
   “You’re doing my task for me,” it said. “You aren’t waiting; don’t have time to wait? I’ll select you out from among the others; you don’t need to speed the process up.”
   “What if I do?” he said. “Out of revulsion for you?”
   It laughed. And didn’t answer.
   “You won’t even say,” he said.
   Again no answer. He started to slide back, onto the veranda. And at once the pressure of its pseudo-hand lifted.
   “You founded the Party?” he asked.
   “I founded everything. I founded the anti-Party and the Party that isn’t a Party, and those who are for it and those who are against, those that you call Yankee Imperialists, those in the camp of reaction, and so on endlessly. I founded it all. As if they were blades of grass.”
   “And you’re here to enjoy it?” he said.
   “What I want,” it said, “is for you to see me, as I am, as you have seen me, and then trust me.”
   “What?” he said, quavering. “Trust you to what?”
   It said, “Do you believe in me?”
   “Yes,” he said. “I can see you.”
   “Then go back to your job at the Ministry. Tell Tanya Lee that you saw an overworked, overweight, elderly man who drinks too much and likes to pinch girls’ rear ends.”
   “Oh, Christ,” he said.
   “As you live on, unable to stop, I will torment you,” it said. “I will deprive you, item by item, of everything you possess or want. And then when you are crushed to death I will unfold a mystery.”
   “What’s the mystery?”
   “The dead shall live, the living die. I kill what lives; I save what has died. And I will tell you this: there are things worse than I. But you won’t meet them because by then I will have killed you. Now walk back into the dining room and prepare for dinner. Don’t question what I’m doing; I did it long before there was a Tung Chien and I will do it long after.”
   He hit it as hard as he could.
   And experienced violent pain in his head.
   And darkness, with the sense of falling.
   After that, darkness again. He thought, I will get you. I will see that you die too. That you suffer; you’re going to suffer, just like us, exactly in every way we do. I’ll nail you; I swear to God I’ll nail you up somewhere. And it will hurt. As much as I hurt now.
   He shut his eyes.
   Roughly, he was shaken. And heard Mr. Kimo Okubara’s voice. “Get to your feet, common drunk. Come on!”
   Without opening his eyes he said, “Get me a cab.”
   “Cab already waiting. You go home. Disgrace. Make a violent scene out of yourself.”
   Getting shakily to his feet, he opened his eyes and examined himself. Our leader whom we follow, he thought, is the One True God. And the enemy whom we fight and have fought is God too. They are right; he is everywhere. But I didn’t understand what that meant. Staring at the protocol officer, he thought, You are God too. So there is no getting away, probably not even by jumping. As I started, instinctively, to do. He shuddered.
   “Mix drinks with drugs,” Okubara said witheringly. “Ruin career. I see it happen many times. Get lost.”
   Unsteadily, he walked toward the great central door of the Yangtze River villa; two servants, dressed like medieval knights, with crested plumes, ceremoniously opened the door for him and one of them said, “Good night, sir.”
   “Up yours,” Chien said, and passed out into the night.

   At a quarter to three in the morning, as he sat sleepless in the living room of his conapt, smoking one Cuesta Rey Astoria after another, a knock sounded at the door.
   When he opened it he found himself facing Tanya Lee in her trenchcoat, her face pinched with cold. Her eyes blazed, questioningly.
   “Don’t look at me like that,” he said roughly. His cigar had gone out; he relit it. “I’ve been looked at enough,” he said.
   “You saw it,” she said.
   He nodded.
   She seated herself on the arm of the couch and after a time she said, “Want to tell me about it?”
   “Go as far from here as possible,” he said. “Go a long way.” And then he remembered: no way was long enough. He remembered reading that too. “Forget it,” he said; rising to his feet, he walked clumsily into the kitchen to start up the coffee.
   Following after him, Tanya said, “Was—it that bad?”
   “We can’t win,” he said. “You can’t win; I don’t mean me. I’m not in this; I just wanted to do my job at the Ministry and forget it. Forget the whole damned thing.”
   “Is it non-terrestrial?”
   “Yes.” He nodded.
   “Is it hostile to us?”
   “Yes,” he said. “No. Both. Mostly hostile.”
   “Then we have to—”
   “Go home,” he said, “and go to bed.” He looked her over carefully; he had sat a long time and he had done a great deal of thinking. About a lot of things. “Are you married?” he said.
   “No. Not now. I used to be.”
   He said, “Stay with me tonight. The rest of tonight, anyhow. Until the sun comes up.” He added, “The night part is awful.”
   “I’ll stay,” Tanya said, unbuckling the belt of her raincoat, “but I have to have some answers.”
   “What did Dryden mean,” Chien said, “about music untuning the sky? I don’t get that. What does music do to the sky?”
   “All the celestial order of the universe ends,” she said as she hung her raincoat up in the closet of the bedroom; under it she wore an orange striped sweater and stretch-pants.
   He said, “And that’s bad?”
   Pausing, she reflected. “I don’t know. I guess so.”
   “It’s a lot of power,” he said, “to assign to music.”
   “Well, you know that old Pythagorean business about the ‘music of the spheres.’ ” Matter-of-factly she seated herself on the bed and removed her slipperlike shoes.
   “Do you believe in that?” he said. “Or do you believe in God?”
   “ ‘God’!” She laughed. “That went out with the donkey steam engine. What are you talking about? God, or god?” She came over close beside him, peering into his face.
   “Don’t look at me so closely,” he said sharply drawing back. “I don’t ever want to be looked at again.” He moved away, irritably.
   “I think,” Tanya said, “that if there is a God He has very little interest in human affairs. That’s my theory, anyhow. I mean, He doesn’t seem to care if evil triumphs or people or animals get hurt and die. I frankly don’t see Him anywhere around. And the Party has always denied any form of—”
   “Did you ever see Him?” he asked. “When you were a child?”
   “Oh, sure, as a child. But I also believed—”
   “Did it ever occur to you,” Chien said, “that good and evil are names for the same thing? That God could be both good and evil at the same time?”
   “I’ll fix you a drink,” Tanya said, and padded barefoot into the kitchen.
   Chien said, “The Crusher. The Clanker. The Gulper and the Bird and the Climbing Tube—plus other names, forms, I don’t know. I had a hallucination. At the stag dinner. A big one. A terrible one.”
   “But the stelazine—”
   “It brought on a worse one,” he said.
   “Is there any way,” Tanya said somberly, “that we can fight this thing you saw? This apparition you call a hallucination but which very obviously was not?”
   He said, “Believe in it.”
   “What will that do?”
   “Nothing,” he said wearily. “Nothing at all. I’m tired; I don’t want a drink—let’s just go to bed.”
   “Okay.” She padded back into the bedroom, began pulling her striped sweater over her head. “We’ll discuss it more thoroughly later.”
   “A hallucination,” Chien said, “is merciful. I wish I had it; I want mine back. I want to be before your peddler got me with that phenothiazine.”
   “Just come to bed. It’ll be toasty. All warm and nice.”
   He removed his tie, his shirt—and saw, on his right shoulder, the mark, the stigma, which it had left when it stopped him from jumping. Livid marks which looked as if they would never go away. He put his pajama top on then; it hid the marks.
   “Anyhow,” Tanya said as he got into the bed beside her, “your career is immeasurably advanced. Aren’t you glad about that?”
   “Sure,” he said, nodding sightlessly in the darkness. “Very glad.”
   “Come over against me,” Tanya said, putting her arms around him. “And forget everything else. At least for now.”
   He tugged her against him then, doing what she asked and what he wanted to do. She was neat; she was swiftly active; she was successful and she did her part. They did not bother to speak until at last she said, “Oh!” And then she relaxed.
   “I wish,” he said, “that we could go on forever.”
   “We did,” Tanya said. “It’s outside of time; it’s boundless, like an ocean. It’s the way we were in Cambrian times, before we migrated up onto the land; it’s the ancient primary waters. This is the only time we get to go back, when this is done. That’s why it means so much. And in those days we weren’t separate; it was like a big jelly, like those blobs that float up on the beach.”
   “Float up,” he said, “and are left there to die.”
   “Could you get me a towel?” Tanya asked. “Or a washcloth? I need it.”
   He padded into the bathroom for a towel. There—he was naked now—he once more saw his shoulder, saw where it had seized hold of him and held on, dragged him back, possibly to toy with him a little more.
   The marks, unaccountably, were bleeding.
   He sponged the blood away. More oozed forth at once and, seeing that, he wondered how much time he had left. Probably only hours.
   Returning to bed, he said, “Could you continue?”
   “Sure. If you have any energy left; it’s up to you.” She lay gazing up at him unwinkingly, barely visible in the dim nocturnal light.
   “I have,” he said. And hugged her to him.

The Story to End All Stories for Harlan Ellison’s Anthology Dangerous Visions

   In a hydrogen war ravaged society the nubile young women go down to a futuristic zoo and have sexual intercourse with various deformed and non-human life forms in the cages. In this particular account a woman who has been patched together out of the damaged bodies of several women has intercourse with an alien female, there in the cage, and later on the woman, by means of futuristic science, conceives. The infant is born, and she and the female in the cage fight over it to see who gets it. The human young woman wins, and promptly eats the offspring, hair, teeth, toes and all. Just after she has finished she discovers that the offspring is God.

The Electric Ant

   At four-fifteen in the afternoon, T.S.T., Garson Poole woke up in his hospital bed, knew that he lay in a hospital bed in a three-bed ward and realized in addition two things: that he no longer had a right hand and that he felt no pain.
   They had given me a strong analgesic, he said to himself as he stared at the far wall with its window showing downtown New York. Webs in which vehicles and peds darted and wheeled glimmered in the late afternoon sun, and the brilliance of the aging light pleased him. It’s not yet out, he thought. And neither am I.
   A fone lay on the table beside his bed; he hesitated, then picked it up and dialed for an outside line. A moment later he was faced by Louis Danceman, in charge of Tri-Plan’s activities while he, Garson Poole, was elsewhere.
   “Thank God you’re alive,” Danceman said, seeing him; his big, fleshy face with its moon’s surface of pock marks flattened with relief. “I’ve been calling all—”
   “I just don’t have a right hand,” Poole said.
   “But you’ll be okay. I mean, they can graft another one on.”
   “How long have I been here?” Poole said. He wondered where the nurses and doctors had gone to; why weren’t they clucking and fussing about him making a call?
   “Four days,” Danceman said. “Everything here at the plant is going splunkishly. In fact we’ve splunked orders from three separate police systems, all here on Terra. Two in Ohio, one in Wyoming. Good solid orders, with one third in advance and the usual three-year lease-option.”
   “Come get me out of here,” Poole said.
   “I can’t get you out until the new hand—”
   “I’ll have it done later.” He wanted desperately to get back to familiar surroundings; memory of the mercantile squib looming grotesquely on the pilot screen careened at the back of his mind; if he shut his eyes he felt himself back in his damaged craft as it plunged from one vehicle to another, piling up enormous damage as it went. The kinetic sensations… he winced, recalling them. I guess I’m lucky, he said to himself.
   “Is Sarah Benton there with you?” Danceman asked.
   “No.” Of course; his personal secretary—if only for job considerations—would be hovering close by, mothering him in her jejune, infantile way. All heavy-set women like to mother people, he thought. And they’re dangerous; if they fall on you they can kill you. “Maybe that’s what happened to me,” he said aloud. “Maybe Sarah fell on my squib.”
   “No, no; a tie rod in the steering fin of your squib split apart during the heavy rush-hour traffic and you—”
   “I remember.” He turned in his bed as the door of the ward opened; a white-clad doctor and two blue-clad nurses appeared, making their way toward his bed. “I’ll talk to you later,” Poole said and hung up the fone. He took a deep, expectant breath.
   “You shouldn’t be foning quite so soon,” the doctor said as he studied his chart. “Mr. Garson Poole, owner of Tri-Plan Electronics. Maker of random ident darts that track their prey for a circle-radius of a thousand miles, responding to unique enceph wave patterns. You’re a successful man, Mr. Poole. But, Mr. Poole, you’re not a man. You’re an electric ant.”
   “Christ,” Poole said, stunned.
   “So we can’t really treat you here, now that we’ve found out. We knew, of course, as soon as we examined your injured right hand; we saw the electronic components and then we made torso x-rays and of course they bore out our hypothesis.”
   “What,” Poole said, “is an ‘electric ant’?” But he knew; he could decipher the term.
   A nurse said, “An organic robot.”
   “I see,” Poole said. Frigid perspiration rose to the surface of his skin, across all his body.
   “You didn’t know,” the doctor said.
   “No.” Poole shook his head.
   The doctor said, “We get an electric ant every week or so. Either brought in here from a squib accident—like yourself—or one seeking voluntary admission… one who, like yourself, has never been told, who has functioned alongside humans, believing himself—itself—human. As to your hand—” He paused.
   “Forget my hand,” Poole said savagely.
   “Be calm.” The doctor leaned over him, peered acutely down into Poole’s face. “We’ll have a hospital boat convey you over to a service facility where repairs, or replacement, on your hand can be made at a reasonable expense, either to yourself, if you’re self-owned, or to your owners, if such there are. In any case you’ll be back at your desk at Tri-Plan functioning just as before.”
   “Except,” Poole said, “now I know.” He wondered if Danceman or Sarah or any of the others at the office knew. Had they—or one of them—purchased him? Designed him? A figurehead, he said to himself; that’s all I’ve been. I must never really have run the company; it was a delusion implanted in me when I was made… along with the delusion that I am human and alive.
   “Before you leave for the repair facility,” the doctor said, “could you kindly settle your bill at the front desk?”
   Poole said acidly, “How can there be a bill if you don’t treat ants here?”
   “For our services,” the nurse said. “Up until the point we knew.”
   “Bill me,” Poole said, with furious, impotent anger. “Bill my firm.” With massive effort he managed to sit up; his head swimming, he stepped haltingly from the bed and onto the floor. “I’ll be glad to leave here,” he said as he rose to a standing position. “And thank you for your humane attention.”
   “Thank you, too, Mr. Poole,” the doctor said. “Or rather I should say just Poole.”

   At the repair facility he had his missing hand replaced.
   It proved fascinating, the hand; he examined it for a long time before he let the technicians install it. On the surface it appeared organic—in fact on the surface, it was. Natural skin covered natural flesh, and true blood filled the veins and capillaries. But, beneath that, wires and circuits, miniaturized components, gleamed… looking deep into the wrist he saw surge gates, motors, multi-stage valves, all very small. Intricate. And—the hand cost forty frogs. A week’s salary, insofar as he drew it from the company payroll.
   “Is this guaranteed?” he asked the technicians as they fused the “bone” section of the hand to the balance of his body.
   “Ninety days, parts and labor,” one of the technicians said. “Unless subjected to unusual or intentional abuse.”
   “That sounds vaguely suggestive,” Poole said.
   The technician, a man—all of them were men—said, regarding him keenly, “You’ve been posing?”
   “Unintentionally,” Poole said.
   “And now it’s intentional?”
   Poole said, “Exactly.”
   “Do you know why you never guessed? There must have been signs… clickings and whirrings from inside you, now and then. You never guessed because you were programmed not to notice. You’ll now have the same difficulty finding out why you were built and for whom you’ve been operating.”
   “A slave,” Poole said. “A mechanical slave.”
   “You’ve had fun.”
   “I’ve lived a good life,” Poole said. “I’ve worked hard.”
   He paid the facility its forty frogs, flexed his new fingers, tested them out by picking up various objects such as coins, then departed. Ten minutes later he was aboard a public carrier, on his way home. It had been quite a day.
   At home, in his one-room apartment, he poured himself a shot of Jack Daniel’s Purple Label—sixty years old—and sat sipping it, meanwhile gazing through his sole window at the building on the opposite side of the street. Shall I go to the office? he asked himself. If so, why? If not, why? Choose one. Christ, he thought, it undermines you, knowing this. I’m a freak, he realized. An inanimate object mimicking an animate one. But—he felt alive. Yet… he felt differently, now. About himself. Hence about everyone, especially Danceman and Sarah, everyone at Tri-Plan.
   I think I’ll kill myself, he said to himself. But I’m probably programmed not to do that; it would be a costly waste which my owner would have to absorb. And he wouldn’t want to.
   Programmed. In me somewhere, he thought, there is a matrix fitted in place, a grid screen that cuts me off from certain thoughts, certain actions. And forces me into others. I am not free. I never was, but now I know it; that makes it different.
   Turning his window to opaque, he snapped on the overhead light, carefully set about removing his clothing, piece by piece. He had watched carefully as the technicians at the repair facility had attached his new hand: he had a rather clear idea, now, of how his body had been assembled. Two major panels, one in each thigh; the technicians had removed the panels to check the circuit complexes beneath. If I’m programmed, he decided, the matrix probably can be found there.
   The maze of circuitry baffled him. I need help, he said to himself. Let’s see… what’s the fone code for the class BBB computer we hire at the office?
   He picked up the fone, dialed the computer at its permanent location in Boise, Idaho.
   “Use of this computer is prorated at a five frogs per minute basis,” a mechanical voice from the fone said. “Please hold your mastercreditchargeplate before the screen.”
   He did so.
   “At the sound of the buzzer you will be connected with the computer,” the voice continued. “Please query it as rapidly as possible, taking into account the fact that its answer will be given in terms of a microsecond, while your query will—” He turned the sound down, then. But quickly turned it up as the blank audio input of the computer appeared on the screen. At this moment the computer had become a giant ear, listening to him—as well as fifty thousand other queriers throughout Terra.
   “Scan me visually,” he instructed the computer. “And tell me where I will find the programming mechanism which controls my thoughts and behavior.” He waited. On the fone’s screen a great active eye, multi-lensed, peered at him; he displayed himself for it, there in his one-room apartment.
   The computer said, “Remove your chest panel. Apply pressure at your breastbone and then ease outward.”
   He did so. A section of his chest came off; dizzily, he set it down on the floor.
   “I can distinguish control modules,” the computer said, “but I can’t tell which—” It paused as its eye roved about on the fone screen. “I distinguish a roll of punched tape mounted above your heart mechanism. Do you see it?” Poole craned his neck, peered. He saw it, too. “I will have to sign off,” the computer said. “After I have examined the data available to me I will contact you and give you an answer. Good day.” The screen died out.
   I’ll yank the tape out of me, Poole said to himself. Tiny… no larger than two spools of thread, with a scanner mounted between the delivery drum and the take-up drum. He could not see any sign of motion; the spools seemed inert. They must cut in as override, he reflected, when specific situations occur. Override to my encephalic processes. And they’ve been doing it all my life.
   He reached down, touched the delivery drum. All I have to do is tear this out, he thought, and—
   The fone screen relit. “Mastercreditchargeplate number 3-BNX-882-HQR446-T,” the computer’s voice came. “This is BBB-307DR recontacting you in response to your query of sixteen seconds lapse, November 4, 1992. The punched tape roll above your heart mechanism is not a programming turret but is in fact a reality-supply construct. All sense stimuli received by your central neurological system emanate from that unit and tampering with it would be risky if not terminal.” It added, “You appear to have no programming circuit. Query answered. Good day.” It flicked off.
   Poole, standing naked before the fone screen, touched the tape drum once again, with calculated, enormous caution. I see, he thought wildly. Or do I see? This unit—
   If I cut the tape, he realized, my world will disappear. Reality will continue for others, but not for me. Because my reality, my universe, is coming to me from this minuscule unit. Fed into the scanner and then into my central nervous system as it snailishly unwinds.
   It has been unwinding for years, he decided.
   Getting his clothes, he redressed, seated himself in his big armchair—a luxury imported into his apartment from Tri-Plan’s main offices—and lit a tobacco cigarette. His hands shook as he laid down his initialed lighter; leaning back, he blew smoke before himself, creating a nimbus of gray.
   I have to go slowly, he said to himself. What am I trying to do? Bypass my programming? But the computer found no programming circuit. Do I want to interfere with the reality tape? And if so, why?
   Because, he thought, if I control that, I control reality. At least so far as I’m concerned. My subjective reality… but that’s all there is. Objective reality is a synthetic construct, dealing with a hypothetical universalization of a multitude of subjective realities.
   My universe is lying within my fingers, he realized. If I can just figure out how the damn thing works. All I set out to do originally was to search for and locate my programming circuit so I could gain true homeostatic functioning: control of myself. But with this—
   With this he did not merely gain control of himself; he gained control over everything.
   And this sets me apart from every human who ever lived and died, he thought somberly.
   Going over to the fone he dialed his office. When he had Danceman on the screen he said briskly, “I want you to send a complete set of microtools and enlarging screen over to my apartment. I have some microcircuitry to work on.” Then he broke the connection, not wanting to discuss it.
   A half hour later a knock sounded on his door. When he opened up he found himself facing one of the shop foremen, loaded down with microtools of every sort. “You didn’t say exactly what you wanted,” the foreman said, entering the apartment. “So Mr. Danceman had me bring everything.”
   “And the enlarging-lens system?”
   “In the truck, up on the roof.”
   Maybe what I want to do, Poole thought, is die. He lit a cigarette, stood smoking and waiting as the shop foreman lugged the heavy enlarging screen, with its power-supply and control panel, into the apartment. This is suicide, what I’m doing here. He shuddered.
   “Anything wrong, Mr. Poole?” the shop foreman said as he rose to his feet, relieved of the burden of the enlarging-lens system. “You must still be rickety on your pins from your accident.”
   “Yes,” Poole said quietly. He stood tautly waiting until the foreman left. Under the enlarging-lens system the plastic tape assumed a new shape: a wide track along which hundreds of thousands of punch-holes worked their way. I thought so, Poole thought. Not recorded as charges on a ferrous oxide layer but actually punched-free slots.
   Under the lens the strip of tape visibly oozed forward. Very slowly, but it did, at uniform velocity, move in the direction of the scanner.
   The way I figure it, he thought, is that the punched holes are on gates. It functions like a player piano; solid is no, punch-hole is yes. How can I test this?
   Obviously by filling in a number of holes.
   He measured the amount of tape left on the delivery spool, calculated—at great effort—the velocity of the tape’s movement, and then came up with a figure. If he altered the tape visible at the in-going edge of the scanner, five to seven hours would pass before that particular time period arrived. He would in effect be painting out stimuli due a few hours from now.
   With a microbrush he swabbed a large—relatively large—section of tape with opaque varnish… obtained from the supply kit accompanying the microtools. I have smeared out stimuli for about half an hour, he pondered. Have covered at least a thousand punches.
   It would be interesting to see what change, if any, overcame his environment, six hours from now.
   Five and a half hours later he sat at Krackter’s, a superb bar in Manhattan, having a drink with Danceman.
   “You look bad,” Danceman said.
   “I am bad,” Poole said. He finished his drink, a Scotch sour, and ordered another.
   “From the accident?”
   “In a sense, yes.”
   Danceman said, “Is it—something you found out about yourself?”
   Raising his head, Poole eyed him in the murky light of the bar. “Then you know.”
   “I know,” Danceman said, “that I should call you ‘Poole’ instead of ‘Mr. Poole.’ But I prefer the latter, and will continue to do so.”
   “How long have you known?” Poole said.
   “Since you took over the firm. I was told that the actual owners of Tri-Plan, who are located in the Prox System, wanted Tri-Plan run by an electric ant whom they could control. They wanted a brilliant and forceful—”
   “The real owners?” This was the first he had heard about that. “We have two thousand stockholders. Scattered everywhere.”
   “Marvis Bey and her husband Ernan, on Prox 4, control fifty-one percent of the voting stock. This has been true from the start.”
   “Why didn’t I know?”
   “I was told not to tell you. You were to think that you yourself made all company policy. With my help. But actually I was feeding you what the Beys fed to me.”
   “I’m a figurehead,” Poole said.
   “In a sense, yes.” Danceman nodded. “But you’ll always be ‘Mr. Poole’ to me.”
   A section of the far wall vanished. And with it, several people at tables nearby. And—
   Through the big glass side of the bar, the skyline of New York City flickered out of existence.
   Seeing his face, Danceman said, “What is it?”
   Poole said hoarsely, “Look around. Do you see any changes?”
   After looking around the room, Danceman said, “No. What like?”
   “You still see the skyline?”
   “Sure. Smoggy as it is. The lights wink—”
   “Now I know,” Poole said. He had been right; every punch-hole covered up meant the disappearance of some object in his reality world. Standing, he said, “I’ll see you later, Danceman. I have to get back to my apartment; there’s some work I’m doing. Goodnight.” He strode from the bar and out onto the street, searching for a cab.
   No cabs.
   Those, too, he thought. I wonder what else I painted over. Prostitutes? Flowers? Prisons?
   There, in the bar’s parking lot, Danceman’s squib. I’ll take that, he decided. There are still cabs in Danceman’s world; he can get one later. Anyhow it’s a company car, and I hold a copy of the key.
   Presently he was in the air, turning toward his apartment.
   New York City had not returned. To the left and right vehicles and buildings, streets, ped-runners, signs… and in the center nothing. How can I fly into that? he asked himself. I’d disappear.
   Or would I? He flew toward the nothingness.
   Smoking one cigarette after another he flew in a circle for fifteen minutes… and then, soundlessly, New York reappeared. He could finish his trip. He stubbed out his cigarette (a waste of something so valuable) and shot off in the direction of his apartment.
   If I insert a narrow opaque strip, he pondered as he unlocked his apartment door, I can—
   His thoughts ceased. Someone sat in his living room chair, watching a captain kirk on the TV. “Sarah,” he said, nettled.
   She rose, well-padded but graceful. “You weren’t at the hospital, so I came here. I still have that key you gave me back in March after we had that awful argument. Oh… you look so depressed.” She came up to him, peeped into his face anxiously. “Does your injury hurt that badly?”
   “It’s not that.” He removed his coat, tie, shirt, and then his chest panel; kneeling down he began inserting his hands into the microtool gloves. Pausing, he looked up at her and said, “I found out I’m an electric ant. Which from one standpoint opens up certain possibilities, which I am exploring now.” He flexed his fingers and, at the far end of the left waldo, a micro screwdriver moved, magnified into visibility by the enlarging-lens system. “You can watch,” he informed her. “If you so desire.”
   She had begun to cry.
   “What’s the matter?” he demanded savagely, without looking up from his work.
   “I—it’s just so sad. You’ve been such a good employer to all of us at Tri-Plan. We respect you so. And now it’s all changed.”
   The plastic tape had an unpunched margin at top and bottom; he cut a horizontal strip, very narrow, then, after a moment of great concentration, cut the tape itself four hours away from the scanning head. He then rotated the cut strip into a right-angle piece in relation to the scanner, fused it in place with a micro heat element, then reattached the tape reel to its left and right sides. He had, in effect, inserted a dead twenty minutes into the unfolding flow of his reality. It would take effect—according to his calculations—a few minutes after midnight.
   “Are you fixing yourself?” Sarah asked timidly.
   Poole said, “I’m freeing myself.” Beyond this he had several alterations in mind. But first he had to test his theory; blank, unpunched tape meant no stimuli, in which case the lack of tape…
   “That look on your face,” Sarah said. She began gathering up her purse, coat, rolled-up aud-vid magazine. “I’ll go; I can see how you feel about finding me here.”
   “Stay,” he said. “I’ll watch the captain kirk with you.” He got into his shirt. “Remember years ago when there were—what was it?—twenty or twenty-two TV channels? Before the government shut down the independents?”
   She nodded.
   “What would it have looked like,” he said, “if this TV set projected all channels onto the cathode ray screen at the same time? Could we have distinguished anything, in the mixture?”
   “I don’t think so.”
   “Maybe we could learn to. Learn to be selective; do our own job of perceiving what we wanted to and what we didn’t. Think of the possibilities, if our brains could handle twenty images at once; think of the amount of knowledge which could be stored during a given period. I wonder if the brain, the human brain—” He broke off. “the human brain couldn’t do it,” he said, presently, reflecting to himself. “But in theory a quasi-organic brain might.”
   “Is that what you have?” Sarah asked.
   “Yes,” Poole said.

   They watched the captain kirk to its end, and then they went to bed. But Poole sat up against his pillows, smoking and brooding. Beside him, Sarah stirred restlessly, wondering why he did not turn off the light.
   Eleven-fifty. It would happen anytime, now.
   “Sarah,” he said. “I want your help. In a very few minutes something strange will happen to me. It won’t last long, but I want you to watch me carefully. See if I—” He gestured. “Show any changes. If I seem to go to sleep, or if I talk nonsense, or—” He wanted to say, if I disappear. But he did not. “I won’t do you any harm, but I think it might be a good idea if you armed yourself. Do you have your anti-mugging gun with you?”
   “In my purse.” She had become fully awake now; sitting up in bed, she gazed at him with wild fright, her ample shoulders tanned and freckled in the light of the room.
   He got her gun for her.
   The room stiffened into paralyzed immobility. Then the colors began to drain away. Objects diminished until, smoke-like, they flitted away into shadows. Darkness filmed everything as the objects in the room became weaker and weaker.
   The last stimuli are dying out, Poole realized. He squinted, trying to see. He made out Sarah Benton, sitting in the bed: a two-dimensional figure that doll-like had been propped up, there to fade and dwindle. Random gusts of dematerialized substance eddied about in unstable clouds; the elements collected, fell apart, then collected once again. And then the last heat, energy and light dissipated; the room closed over and fell into itself, as if sealed off from reality. And at that point absolute blackness replaced everything, space without depth, not nocturnal but rather stiff and unyielding. And in addition he heard nothing.
   Reaching, he tried to touch something. But he had nothing to reach with. Awareness of his own body had departed along with everything else in the universe. He had no hands, and even if he had, there would be nothing for them to feel.
   I am still right about the way the damn tape works, he said to himself, using a nonexistent mouth to communicate an invisible message.
   Will this pass in ten minutes? he asked himself. Am I right about that, too? He waited… but knew intuitively that his time sense had departed with everything else. I can only wait, he realized. And hope it won’t be long.
   To pace himself, he thought, I’ll make up an encyclopedia; I’ll try to list everything that begins with an “a.” Let’s see. He pondered. Apple, automobile, acksetron, atmosphere, Atlantic, tomato aspic, advertising—he thought on and on, categories slithering through his fright-haunted mind.
   All at once light flickered on.
   He lay on the couch in the living room, and mild sunlight spilled in through the single window. Two men bent over him, their hands full of tools. Maintenance men, he realized. They’ve been working on me.
   “He’s conscious,” one of the technicians said. He rose, stood back; Sarah Benton, dithering with anxiety, replaced him.
   “Thank God!” she said, breathing wetly in Poole’s ear. “I was so afraid; I called Mr. Danceman finally about—”
   “What happened?” Poole broke in harshly. “Start from the beginning and for God’s sake speak slowly. So I can assimilate it all.”
   Sarah composed herself, paused to rub her nose, and then plunged on nervously, “You passed out. You just lay there, as if you were dead. I waited until two-thirty and you did nothing. I called Mr. Danceman, waking him up unfortunately, and he called the electric-ant maintenance—I mean, the organic-roby maintenance people, and these two men came about four forty-five, and they’ve been working on you ever since. It’s now six fifteen in the morning. And I’m very cold and I want to go to bed; I can’t make it in to the office today; I really can’t.” She turned away, sniffling. The sound annoyed him.
   One of the uniformed maintenance men said, “You’ve been playing around with your reality tape.”
   “Yes,” Poole said. Why deny it? Obviously they had found the inserted solid strip. “I shouldn’t have been out that long,” he said. “I inserted a ten minute strip only.”
   “It shut off the tape transport,” the technician explained. “The tape stopped moving forward; your insertion jammed it, and it automatically shut down to avoid tearing the tape. Why would you want to fiddle around with that? Don’t you know what you could do?”
   “I’m not sure,” Poole said.
   “But you have a good idea.”
   Poole said acridly, “That’s why I’m doing it.”
   “Your bill,” the maintenance man said, “is going to be ninety-five frogs. Payable in installments, if you so desire.”
   “Okay,” he said; he sat up groggily, rubbed his eyes and grimaced. His head ached and his stomach felt totally empty.
   “Shave the tape next time,” the primary technician told him. “That way it won’t jam. Didn’t it occur to you that it had a safety factor built into it? So it would stop rather than—”
   “What happens,” Poole interrupted, his voice low and intently careful, “if no tape passed under the scanner? No tape—nothing at all. The photocell shining upward without impedance?”
   The technicians glanced at each other. One said, “All the neuro circuits jump their gaps and short out.”
   “Meaning what?” Poole said.
   “Meaning it’s the end of the mechanism.”
   Poole said, “I’ve examined the circuit. It doesn’t carry enough voltage to do that. Metal won’t fuse under such slight loads of current, even if the terminals are touching. We’re talking about a millionth of a watt along a cesium channel perhaps a sixteenth of an inch in length. Let’s assume there are a billion possible combinations at one instant arising from the punch-outs on the tape. The total output isn’t cumulative; the amount of current depends on what the battery details for that module, and it’s not much. With all gates open and going.”
   “Would we lie?” one of the technicians asked wearily.
   “Why not?” Poole said. “Here I have an opportunity to experience everything. Simultaneously. To know the universe and its entirety, to be momentarily in contact with all reality. Something that no human can do. A symphonic score entering my brain outside of time, all notes, all instruments sounding at once. And all symphonies. Do you see?”
   “It’ll burn you out,” both technicians said, together.
   “I don’t think so,” Poole said.
   Sarah said, “Would you like a cup of coffee, Mr. Poole?”
   “Yes,” he said; he lowered his legs, pressed his cold feet against the floor, shuddered. He then stood up. His body ached. They had me lying all night on the couch, he realized. All things considered, they could have done better than that.

   At the kitchen table in the far corner of the room, Garson Poole sat sipping coffee across from Sarah. The technicians had long since gone.
   “You’re not going to try any more experiments on yourself, are you?” Sarah asked wistfully.
   Poole grated, “I would like to control time. To reverse it.” I will cut a segment of tape out, he thought, and fuse it in upside down. The causal sequences will then flow the other way. Thereupon I will walk backward down the steps from the roof field, back up to my door, push a locked door open, walk backward to the sink, where I will get out a stack of dirty dishes. I will seat myself at this table before the stack, fill each dish with food produced from my stomach… I will then transfer the food to the refrigerator. The next day I will take the food out of the refrigerator, pack it in bags, carry the bags to a supermarket, distribute the food here and there in the store. And at last, at the front counter, they will pay me money for this, from their cash register. The food will be packed with other food in big plastic boxes, shipped out of the city into the hydroponic plants on the Atlantic, there to be joined back to trees and bushes or the bodies of dead animals or pushed deep into the ground. But what would all that prove? A video tape running backward… I would know no more than I know now, which is not enough.
   What I want, he realized, is ultimate and absolute reality, for one microsecond. After that it doesn’t matter, because all will be known; nothing will be left to understand or see.
   I might try one other change, he said to himself. Before I try cutting the tape. I will prick new punch-holes in the tape and see what presently emerges. It will be interesting because I will not know what the holes I make mean.
   Using the tip of a microtool, he punched several holes, at random, on the tape. As close to the scanner as he could manage… he did not want to wait.
   “I wonder if you’ll see it,” he said to Sarah. Apparently not, insofar as he could extrapolate. “Something may show up,” he said to her. “I just want to warn you; I don’t want you to be afraid.”
   “Oh dear,” Sarah said tinnily.
   He examined his wristwatch. One minute passed, then a second, a third.
   And then—
   In the center of the room appeared a flock of green and black ducks. They quacked excitedly, rose from the floor, fluttered against the ceiling in a dithering mass of feathers and wings and frantic in their vast urge, their instinct, to get away.
   “Ducks,” Poole said, marveling. “I punched a hole for a flight of wild ducks.”
   Now something else appeared. A park bench with an elderly, tattered man seated on it, reading a torn, bent newspaper. He looked up, dimly made out Poole, smiled briefly at him with badly made dentures, and then returned to his folded-back newspaper. He read on.
   “Do you see him?” Poole asked Sarah. “And the ducks.” At that moment the ducks and the park bum disappeared. Nothing remained of them. The interval of their punch-holes had quickly passed.
   “They weren’t real,” Sarah said. “Were they? So how—”
   “You’re not real,” he told Sarah. “You’re a stimulus-factor on my reality tape. A punch-hole that can be glazed over. Do you also have an existence in another reality tape, or one in an objective reality?” He did not know; he couldn’t tell. Perhaps Sarah did not know, either. Perhaps she existed in a thousand reality tapes; perhaps on every reality tape ever manufactured. “If I cut the tape,” he said, “you will be everywhere and nowhere. Like everything else in the universe. At least as far as I am aware of it.”
   Sarah faltered, “I am real.”
   “I want to know you completely,” Poole said. “To do that I must cut the tape. If I don’t do it now, I’ll do it some other time; it’s inevitable that eventually I’ll do it.” So why wait? he asked himself. And there is always the possibility that Danceman has reported back to my maker, that they will be making moves to head me off. Because, perhaps, I’m endangering their property—myself.
   “You make me wish I had gone to the office after all,” Sarah said, her mouth turned down with dimpled gloom.
   “Go,” Poole said.
   “I don’t want to leave you alone.”
   “I’ll be fine,” Poole said.
   “No, you’re not going to be fine. You’re going to unplug yourself or something, kill yourself because you’ve found out you’re just an electric ant and not a human being.”
   He said, presently, “Maybe so.” Maybe it boiled down to that.
   “And I can’t stop you,” she said.
   “No.” He nodded in agreement.
   “But I’m going to stay,” Sarah said. “Even if I can’t stop you. Because if I do leave and you do kill yourself, I’ll always ask myself for the rest of my life what would have happened if I had stayed. You see?”
   Again he nodded.
   “Go ahead,” Sarah said.
   He rose to his feet. “It’s not pain I’m going to feel,” he told her. “Although it may look like that to you. Keep in mind the fact that organic robots have minimal pain-circuits in them. I will be experiencing the most intense—”
   “Don’t tell me any more,” she broke in. “Just do it if you’re going to, or don’t do it if you’re not.”
   Clumsily—because he was frightened—he wriggled his hands into the microglove assembly, reached to pick up a tiny tool: a sharp cutting blade. “I am going to cut a tape mounted inside my chest panel,” he said, as he gazed through the enlarging-lens system. “That’s all.” His hand shook as it lifted the cutting blade. In a second it can be done, he realized. All over. And—I will have time to fuse the cut ends of the tape back together, he realized. A half hour at least. If I change my mind.
   He cut the tape.
   Staring at him, cowering, Sarah whispered, “Nothing happened.”
   “I have thirty or forty minutes.” He reseated himself at the table, having drawn his hands from the gloves. His voice, he noticed, shook; undoubtedly Sarah was aware of it, and he felt anger at himself, knowing that he had alarmed her. “I’m sorry,” he said, irrationally; he wanted to apologize to her. “Maybe you ought to leave,” he said in panic; again he stood up. So did she, reflexively, as if imitating him; bloated and nervous she stood there palpitating. “Go away,” he said thickly. “Back to the office where you ought to be. Where we both ought to be.” I’m going to fuse the tape-ends together, he told himself; the tension is too great for me to stand.
   Reaching his hands toward the gloves he groped to pull them over his straining fingers. Peering into the enlarging screen, he saw the beam from the photoelectric gleam upward, pointed directly into the scanner; at the same time he saw the end of the tape disappearing under the scanner… he saw this, understood it; I’m too late, he realized. It has passed through. God, he thought, help me. It has begun winding at a rate greater than I calculated. So it’s now that—
   He saw apples, and cobblestones and zebras. He felt warmth, the silky texture of cloth; he felt the ocean lapping at him and a great wind, from the north, plucking at him as if to lead him somewhere. Sarah was all around him, so was Danceman. New York glowed in the night, and the squibs about him scuttled and bounced through night skies and daytime and flooding and drought. Butter relaxed into liquid on his tongue, and at the same time hideous odors and tastes assailed him: the bitter presence of poisons and lemons and blades of summer grass. He drowned; he fell; he lay in the arms of a woman in a vast white bed which at the same time dinned shrilly in his ear: the warning noise of a defective elevator in one of the ancient, ruined downtown hotels. I am living, I have lived, I will never live, he said to himself, and with his thoughts came every word, every sound; insects squeaked and raced, and he half sank into a complex body of homeostatic machinery located somewhere in Tri-Plan’s labs.
   He wanted to say something to Sarah. Opening his mouth he tried to bring forth words—a specific string of them out of the enormous mass of them brilliantly lighting his mind, scorching him with their utter meaning.
   His mouth burned. He wondered why.

   Frozen against the wall, Sarah Benton opened her eyes and saw the curl of smoke ascending from Poole’s half-opened mouth. Then the roby sank down, knelt on elbows and knees, then slowly spread out in a broken, crumpled heap. She knew without examining it that it had “died.”
   Poole did it to itself, she realized. And it couldn’t feel pain; it said so itself. Or at least not very much pain; maybe a little. Anyhow, now it is over.
   I had better call Mr. Danceman and tell him what’s happened, she decided. Still shaky, she made her way across the room to the fone; picking it up, she dialed from memory.
   It thought I was a stimulus-factor on its reality tape, she said to herself. So it thought I would die when it “died.” How strange, she thought. Why did it imagine that? It had never been plugged into the real world; it had “lived” in an electronic world of its own. How bizarre.
   “Mr. Danceman,” she said when the circuit to his office had been put through. “Poole is gone. It destroyed itself right in front of my eyes. You’d better come over.”
   “So we’re finally free of it.”
   “Yes, won’t it be nice?”
   Danceman said, “I’ll send a couple of men over from the shop.” He saw past her, made out the sight of Poole lying by the kitchen table. “You go home and rest,” he instructed Sarah. “You must be worn out by all this.”
   “Yes,” she said. “Thank you, Mr. Danceman.” She hung up and stood, aimlessly.
   And then she noticed something.
   My hands, she thought. She held them up. Why is it I can see through them?
   The walls of the room, too, had become ill-defined.
   Trembling, she walked back to the inert roby, stood by it, not knowing what to do. Through her legs the carpet showed, and then the carpet became dim, and she saw, through it, farther layers of disintegrating matter beyond.
   Maybe if I can fuse the tape-ends back together, she thought. But she did not know how. And already Poole had become vague.
   The wind of early morning blew about her. She did not feel it; she had begun, now, to cease to feel.
   The winds blew on.

Cadbury, the Beaver Who Lacked

   Once, long ago, before money had been invented, a certain male beaver named Cadbury lived within a meager dam which he had constructed with his own teeth and feet, earning his living by gnawing down shrubs, trees and other growth in exchange for poker chips of several colors. The blue chips he liked best, but they came rarely, generally only due in payment for some uniquely huge gnawing-assignment. In all the passing years of work he had owned only three such chips, but he knew by inference that more must exist, and every now and then during the day’s gnawing he paused a moment, fixed a cup of instant coffee, and meditated on chips of all hues, the blues included.
   His wife Hilda offered unasked-for advice whenever the opportunity presented itself. “Look at you,” she customarily would declare. “You really ought to see a psychiatrist. Your stack of white chips is only approximately half that of Ralf, Peter, Tom, Bob, Jack and Earl, all who live and gnaw around here, because you’re so busy woolgathering about your goddam blue chips which you’ll never get anyhow because frankly if the blunt truth were known you lack the talent, energy and drive.”
   “Energy and drive,” Cadbury would moodily retort, “mean the same thing.” But nevertheless he perceived how right she was. This constituted his wife’s main fault: she invariably had truth on her side, whereas he had nothing but hot air. And truth, when pitted against hot air in the arena of life, generally carries the day.
   Since Hilda was right, Cadbury dug up eight white chips from his secret chip-concealing place—a shallow depression under a minor rock—and walked two and three-quarters miles to the nearest psychiatrist, a mellow, do-nothing rabbit shaped like a bowling pin who, according to his wife, made fifteen thousand a year and so what about it.
   “Clever sort of day,” Dr. Drat said amiably, unrolling two Tums for his tummy and leaning back in his extra-heavily padded swivel chair.
   “Not so very darn clever,” Cadbury answered, “when you know you don’t have it in you ever to catch sight of a blue chip again, even though you work your ass off day in and day out, and what for? She spends it faster than I make it. Even if I did get my teeth in a blue chip it’d be gone overnight for something expensive and useless on the installment plan, such as for instance a twelve million candle-power self-recharging flashlight. With a lifetime guarantee.”
   “Those are darn clever,” Dr. Drat said, “those what you said there, those self-recharging flashlights.”
   “The only reason I came to you,” Cadbury said, “is because my wife made me. She can get me to do anything. If she said, ‘Swim out into the middle of the creek and drown,’ do you know what I’d do?”
   “You’d rebel,” Dr. Drat said in his amiable voice, his hoppers up on the surface of his burled walnut desk.
   “I’d kick in her fucking face,” Cadbury said. “I’d gnaw her to bits; I’d gnaw her right in half, right through the middle. You’re damn right. I mean, I’m not kidding; it’s a fact. I hate her.”
   “How much,” Dr. Drat asked, “is your wife like your mother?”
   “I never had a mother,” Cadbury said in a grumpy way—a way which he adopted from time to time: a regular characteristic with him, as Hilda had pointed out. “I was found floating in the Napa Slough in a shoebox with a handwritten note reading ‘FINDERS KEEPERS.’ ”
   “What was your last dream?” Dr. Drat inquired.
   “My last dream,” Cadbury said, “is—was—the same as all the others. I always dream I buy a two-cent mint at the drugstore, one of the flat chocolate-covered mints wrapped in green foil, and when I remove the foil it isn’t a mint. You know what it is?”
   “Suppose you tell me what it is,” Dr. Drat said, in a voice suggesting that he really knew but no one was paying him to say it.
   Cadbury said fiercely, “It’s a blue chip. Or rather it looks like a blue chip. It’s blue and it’s flat and round and the same size. But in the dream I always say ‘Maybe it’s just a blue mint.’ I mean, there must be such a thing as blue mints. I’d hate like to hell to store it in my secret chip-concealing place—a shallow depression under an ordinary-looking rock—and then there’d be this hot day, see, and afterwards when I went to get my blue chip—or rather supposed blue chip—I found it all melted because it really was a mint after all and not a blue chip. And who’d I sue? The manufacturer? Christ; he never claimed it was a blue chip; it clearly said, in my dream, on the green foil wrapper—”
   “I think,” Dr. Drat broke in mildly, “that our time is up for today. We might well do some exploring of this aspect of your inner psyche next week because it appears to be leading us somewhere.”
   Rising to his feet, Cadbury said, “What’s the matter with me, Dr. Drat? I want an answer; be frank—I can take it. Am I psychotic?”
   “Well, you have illusions,” Dr. Drat said, after a meditative pause. “No, you’re not psychotic; you don’t hear the voice of Christ or anything like that telling you to go out and rape people. No, it’s illusions. About yourself, your work, your wife. There may be more. Goodbye.” He rose, too, hippity-hopped to the door of his office and politely but firmly opened it, exposing the tunnel out.
   For some reason Cadbury felt cheated; he felt that he had only just begun to talk, and here it was, time to go. “I bet,” he said, “you headshrinkers make a hell of a lot of blue chips. I should have gone to college and become a psychiatrist and then I wouldn’t have any problems any more. Except for Hilda; I guess I’d still have her.”
   Since Dr. Drat had nothing by way of comment to that, Cadbury moodily walked the four miles back north to his current gnawing-assignment, a large poplar growing at the edge of Papermill Creek, and sank his teeth furiously into the base of the poplar, imagining to himself that the tree was a syzygy of Dr. Drat and Hilda both together.
   At almost precisely that moment a nattily-attired fowl came soaring through the grove of cypress trees nearby and alit on a branch of the swaying, being-gnawed-on poplar. “Your mail for today,” the fowl informed him, and dropped a letter which sailed to the ground at Cadbury’s rear feet. “Air mail, too. Looks interesting. I held it up to the light and it’s handwritten, not typed. Looks like a woman’s hand.”
   With his gnawing tooth, Cadbury ripped the envelope open. Sure enough, the mail bird had perceived accurately: here was a handwritten letter clearly the product of the mind of some unknown woman. The letter, very short, consisted of this:


   Dear Mr. Cadbury,
   I love you.
   Cordially, and hoping for a reply,

Jane Feckless Foundfully.

   Never in his life had Cadbury heard of such a person. He turned the letter over, saw no more writing, sniffed, smelling—or imagined that he smelled—a faint, subtle, smoky perfume. However, on the back of the envelope he located further words in Jane Feckless Foundfully’s (was she Miss or Mrs.?) hand: her return address.
   This excited his senses no end.
   “Was I right?” the mail bird asked, from its branch above him.
   “No, it’s a bill,” Cadbury lied. “Made to look like a personal letter.” He then pretended to return to his work of gnawing, and after a pause the mail bird, deceived, flapped off and disappeared.
   At once Cadbury ceased gnawing, seated himself on a rise of turf, got out his turtle-shell snuff box, took a deep, thoughtful pinch of his preferred mixture, Mrs. Siddon’s No. 3 & 4, and contemplated in the most profound and keen manner possible whether (a) he ought to reply to Jane Feckless Foundfully’s letter at all or simply forget that he had ever received it, or (b) answer it, and if (b) then answer it (b sub one) in a bantering fashion or (b sub two) with possibly a meaningful poem from his Undermeyer’s anthology of World Poetry plus several suggestive-of-a-sensitive-nature added notations of his own invention, or possibly even (b sub three) come right out and say something such as:


   Dear Miss (Mrs.?) Foundfully,
   In answer to your letter, the fact is that I love you, too, and am unhappy in my marital relationship with a woman I do not now and actually never really did love, and also am quite dispirited and pessimistic and dissatisfied by my employment and am consulting Dr. Drat, who in all honesty doesn’t seem able to help me a bit, although in all probability it’s not his fault but rather due to the severity of my emotional disturbance. Perhaps you and I could get together in the near future and discuss both your situation and mine, and make some progress.
   Cordially,

Bob Cadbury
   (call me Bob, okay? And I’ll call you Jane, if that’s okay).


   The problem, however, he realized, consisted in the obvious fact that Hilda would get wind of this and do something dreadful—he had no idea what, only a recognition, melancholy indeed, of its severity. And in addition—but second in order as a problem—how did he know he would like or love, whichever, Miss (or Mrs.) Foundfully in return? Obviously she either knew him directly in some manner which he could not account for or had perhaps heard about him through a mutual friend; in any case she seemed certain of her own emotions and intentions toward him, and that mainly was what mattered.
   The situation depressed him. Because how could he tell if this was a way out of his misery or on the contrary a worsening of that same misery in a new direction?
   Still seated and taking pinch after pinch of snuff, he pondered many alternatives, including doing away with himself, which seemed in accord with the dramatic nature of Miss Foundfully’s letter.
   That night, after he arrived home weary and discouraged from his gnawing, had eaten dinner and then retired into his locked study away from Hilda where she probably did not know what he was up to, he got out his Hermes portable typewriter, inserted a page, reflected long and soul-searchingly, and then wrote an answer to Miss Foundfully.
   While he lay supine, engrossed in this task, his wife Hilda burst into his locked study. Bits of lock, door and hinges, as well as several screws, flew in all directions.
   “What are you doing?” Hilda demanded. “All hunched over your Hermes typewriter like some sort of bug. You look like a horrid little dried-up spider, the way you always do this time of evening.”
   “I’m writing to the main branch of the library,” Cadbury said, in icy dignity, “about a book I returned which they claim I didn’t.”
   “You liar,” his wife Hilda said in a frenzy of rage, having now looked over his shoulder and seen the beginning part of his letter. “Who is this Miss Foundfully? Why are you writing her?”
   “Miss Foundfully,” Cadbury said artfully, “is the librarian who has been assigned to my case.”
   “Well, I happen to know you’re lying,” his wife said. “Because /wrote that perfumed fake letter to you to test you. And I was right. You are answering it; I knew it the minute I heard you begin peck-pecking away at the disgusting cheap common typewriter you love so dearly.” She then snatched up the typewriter, letter and all, and hurled it through the window of Cadbury’s study, into the night darkness.
   “My assumption, then,” Cadbury managed to say after a time, “is that there is no Miss Foundfully, so there is no point in my getting the flashlight and looking around outside for my Hermes—if it still exists—to finish the letter. Am I correct?”
   With a jeering expression, but without lowering herself by answering, his wife stalked from his study, leaving him alone with his assumptions and his tin of Boswell’s Best, a snuff mixture far too mild for such an occasion.
   Well, Cadbury thought to himself, I guess then I’ll never be able to get away from Hilda. And he thought, I wonder what Miss Foundfully would have been like had she really existed. And then he thought, Maybe even though my wife made her up there might be somewhere in the world a real person who would be like I imagine Miss Foundfully—or rather like I imagined before I found out—to be. If you follow me, he thought to himself broodingly. I mean, my wife Hilda can’t be all the Miss Foundfullys in the entire world.
   The next day at work, alone with the half-gnawed poplar tree, he produced a small note-pad and short pencil, envelope and stamp which he had managed to smuggle out of the house without Hilda noticing. Seated on a slight rise of earth, snuffing meditatively small pinches of Bezoar Fine Grind, he wrote a short note, printed so as to be easily read.


To Whomever Reads This!


   My name is Bob Cadbury and I am a young, fairly healthy beaver with a broad background in political science and theology, although largely self-taught, and I would like to talk with you about God and The Purpose of Existence and other topics of like ilk. Or we could play chess.
   Cordially,


   And he thereupon signed his name. For a time he pondered, sniffed an extra large pinch of Bezoar Fine Grind, and then he added:


   P.S. Are you a girl? If you are I’ll bet you’re pretty.


   Folding the note up he placed it in a nearly-empty snuff tin, sealed the tin painstakingly with Scotch Tape, and then floated it off down the creek in a direction which he calculated to be somewhat northwest.
   Several days passed before he saw, with excitement and glee, a second snuff tin—not the one which he had launched—slowly floating up the creek in a direction which he calculated as southeast.


   Dear Mr. Cadbury (the folded-up note within the snuff tin began). My sister and brother are the only non-fud friends I have, and if you’re not a fud, the way everyone has been since I got back from Madrid, I’d sure like to meet you. meet you.


   There was also a P.S.


   P.S. You sound real keen and neat and I’ll bet you know a lot about Zen Buddhism.


   The letter was signed in a way difficult to read, but at last he made it out as Carol Stickyfoot.
   He at once dispatched this note in answer:


   Dear Miss (Mrs.?) Stickyfoot,
   Are you real or are you somebody made up by my wife? It is essential that I know at once, as I have in the past been tricked and now have to be constantly wary.


   Off went the note, floating within its snuff tin in a northwest direction. The answer, when it arrived the following day floating in a southeast direction in a Cameleopard No. 5 snuff tin, read briefly:


   Mr. Cadbury, if you think I am a figment of your wife’s distorted mind, then you are going to miss out on life.
   Very truly yours,

Carol

   Well, that’s certainly sound advice, Cadbury said to himself as he read and reread the letter. On the other hand, he said to himself, this is almost precisely what I would expect a figment of my wife Hilda’s distorted mind to come up with. So what is proved?


   Dear Miss Stickyfoot (he wrote back),
   I love you and believe in you. But just to be on the safe side—from my point of view, I mean—could you remit under separate cover—C.O.D. if you wish—some item or object or artifact which would prove beyond a reasonable doubt who and what you are, if that’s not asking too much. Try and understand my position. I dare not make a second mistake such as in the Foundfully disaster. This time I would go out the window along with the Hermes.

With adoration, etc.

   This he floated off in a northwest direction, and at once set about waiting for a reply. Meanwhile, however, he had to visit Dr. Drat once more. Hilda insisted on it.
   “And how’s it been going, down by the creek?” Dr. Drat said in a jovial manner, his big fuzzy hoppers up on his desk.
   The decision to be frank and honest with the psychiatrist stole over Cadbury. Surely there lay no harm in telling Drat everything; this was what he was being paid for: to hear the truth with all its details, both horrid and sublime.
   “I’ve fallen in love with Carol Stickyfoot,” he began. “But at the same time, although my love is absolute and eternal, I have this nagging angst that she’s a figment of my wife’s deranged imagination, concocted as was Miss Foundfully to lead me into revealing my true self to Hilda, which at all costs I need to conceal. Because if my true self came out I’d knock the frigging crap out of her and leave her flat.”
   “Hmm,” Dr. Drat said.
   “And out of you, too,” Cadbury said, releasing all his hostilities in one grand basketful.
   Dr. Drat said, “You trust no one, then? You’re alienated from all mankind? You’ve lead a life-pattern that’s drawn you insidiously into total isolation? Think before you answer; the answer may be yes, and this you may have trouble facing.”
   “I’m not isolated from Carol Stickyfoot,” Cadbury said hotly. “In fact that’s the whole point; I’m trying to terminate my isolation. When I was preoccupied with blue chips then I was isolated. Meeting and getting to know Miss Stickyfoot may mean the end of all that’s wrong in my life, and if you have any insight into me you’d be damn glad I floated off that snuff tin that day. Damn glad.” He glowered moodily at the long-eared doctor.
   “It may interest you to know,” Dr. Drat said, “that Miss Stickyfoot is a former patient of mine. She cracked up in Madrid and had to be flown back here in a suitcase. I’ll admit she’s quite attractive, but she’s got a lot of emotional problems. And her left breast is larger than her right.”
   “But you admit she’s real!” Cadbury shouted in excited discovery.
   “Oh, she’s real enough; I’ll grant that. But you may find you have your hands full. After a while you may wish you were back with Hilda again. God only knows where Carol Stickyfoot may lead the two of you. I doubt if Carol herself knows.”
   It sounded pretty damn good to Cadbury, and he returned to his virtually gnawed-through poplar tree at the creek bank in high spirits. The time, according to his waterproof Rolex watch, came to only ten-thirty, and so he had more or less the entire day to plan out what he should do, now that he knew that Carol Stickyfoot really existed and was not merely another snare and delusion manufactured by his wife.
   Several regions of the creek remained unmapped, and, because of the nature of his employment, he knew these places intimately. Six or seven hours lay ahead before he had to report home to Hilda; why not abandon the poplar project temporarily and begin hasty construction of an adequate little concealed shelter for himself and Carol, beyond the ability of the world at large to identify, locate or recognize? It had become action time; thinking time had passed.
   Toward the latter part of the day, while he labored deeply engrossed in erecting the adequate little concealed shelter, a tin of Dean’s Own came floating southeast down the creek. In a boiling wake of paddled water he rushed out to seize the snuff tin before it drifted by.
   When he had removed the Scotch Tape and opened it he found a small package wrapped in tissue paper and a derisive note.

   Here’s your proof (the note read).

   The package contained three blue chips.
   For over an hour Cadbury could scarcely trust his teeth to gnaw properly, so great was the shock of Carol’s token of authenticity, her pledge to him and all that he represented. In near madness he bit through branch after branch of an old oak tree, scattering boughs in every direction. A strange frenzy overcame him. He had actually found someone, had managed to escape Hilda—the road lay ahead and he had only to travel it… or rather swim it.
   Tying several empty snuff tins together with a length of twine he pushed off into the creek; the tins floated more or less northwest and Cadbury paddled after them, breathing heavily with anticipation. As he paddled, keeping the snuff tins perpetually in view, he composed a rhymed quatrain for the occasion of meeting Carol face to face.


There’s few who say I love you.
But this, I swear, is truth:
The deed which I have sought to
Is sure and sound and sooth.


   He did not know exactly what “sooth” meant, but how many words rhymed with “truth”?
   Meanwhile, the tied-together snuff tins led him nearer and nearer—or so he hoped and believed—to Miss Carol Stickyfoot. Bliss. But then, as he paddled along, he got to recalling the sly, carefully-casual remarks of Dr. Drat, the seeds of uncertainty planted in Drat’s professional fashion. Did he (meaning himself, not Drat) have the courage, the power and integrity, the dedication of purpose, to cope with Carol if she had, as Drat declared, severe emotional problems? Suppose Drat turned out to be correct? Suppose Carol proved to be more difficult and destructive than even Hilda—who threw his Hermes portable typewriter through the window and suchlike manifestations of psychopathic rage?
   Busy ruminating, he failed to notice that the several tied-together snuff tins had coasted silently to shore. Reflexively, he paddled after them and up out of the creek onto land.
   Ahead—a modest apartment with handpainted window shades and a nonobjective mobile swinging lazily above the door. And there, on the front porch, sat Carol Stickyfoot, drying her hair with a large white fluffy towel.
   “I love you,” Cadbury said. He shook the creek-water from his pelt and fidgeted about in a dither of suppressed affect.
   Glancing up, Carol Stickyfoot appraised him. She had lovely huge dark eyes and long heavy hair which shone in the fading sun. “I hope you brought the three blue chips back,” she said. “Because, see, I borrowed them from the place I work and I have to return them.” She added, “It was a gesture because you seemed to need assurance. The fuds have been getting to you, like that headshrinker Drat. He’s a real fud of the worst sort. Would you like a cup of instant Yuban coffee?”
   As he followed her into her modest apartment Cadbury said, “I guess you heard my opening remark. I have never been more serious in my whole life. I really do love you, and in the most serious manner. I’m not looking for something trivial or casual or temporary; I’m looking for the most durable and serious kind of relationship there is. I hope in God’s name you’re not just playing, because I never felt more serious and tense about anything in my life, even including blue chips. If this is just a way of amusing yourself or some such thing it would be merciful for you to end it now by plainly speaking out. Because the torture of leaving my wife and beginning a new life and then finding out—”
   “Did Dr. Fud tell you I paint?” Carol Stickyfoot asked as she put a pan of water on the stove in her modest kitchen and lit the burner under it with an old-fashioned large wooden match.
   “He told me only that you flipped your cork in Madrid,” Cadbury said. He seated himself at the small wooden unpainted pine table opposite the stove and watched with love in his heart Miss Stickyfoot spooning instant coffee into two ceramic mugs which had pataphysical spirals baked into their glaze.
   “Do you know anything about Zen?” Miss Stickyfoot asked.
   “Only that you ask koans which are sort of riddles,” he said. “And you give a sort of nonsense answer because the question is really idiotic in the first place, such as Why are we here on earth? and so forth.” He hoped he had put it properly and she would think that he really did know something about Zen, as mentioned in her letter. And then he thought of a very good Zen answer to her question. “Zen,” he said, “is a complete philosophic system which contains questions for every answer that exists in the universe. For instance, if you have the answer ‘Yes,’ then Zen is capable of propounding the exact query which is linked to it, such as ‘Must we die in order to please the Creator, who likes his creations to perish?’ Although actually, now that I think about it more deeply, the question which Zen would say goes with that answer is ‘Are we here in this kitchen about to drink instant Yuban coffee?’ Would you agree?” When she did not answer immediately, Cadbury said hurriedly, “In fact Zen would say that the answer ‘Yes’ is the answer to that question: ‘Would you agree?’ There you have one of the great values of Zen; it can propound a variety of exact questions for almost any given answer.”
   “You’re full of shit,” Miss Stickyfoot said disdainfully.
   Cadbury said, “That proves I understand Zen. Do you see? Or perhaps the fact is that you don’t actually understand Zen yourself.” He felt a trifle nettled.
   “Maybe you’re right,” Miss Stickyfoot said. “I mean about my not understanding Zen. The fact is I don’t understand it at all.”
   “That’s very Zen,” Cadbury pointed out. “And I do. Which is also Zen. Do you see?”
   “Here’s your coffee,” Miss Stickyfoot said; she placed the two full, steaming cups of coffee on the table and seated herself across from him. Then she smiled. It seemed to him a nice smile, full of light and gentleness, a funny little wrinkled shy smile, with a puzzled, questioning glow of wonder and concern in her eyes. They really were beautiful large dark eyes, just about the most beautiful he had ever seen in his entire life, and he in all truthfulness was in love with her; he had not merely been saying that.
   “You realize I’m married,” he said as he sipped his coffee. “But I’m separated from her. I’ve been constructing this hovel down along a part of the creek where no one ever goes. I say ‘hovel’ so as not to give you a false impression that it’s a mansion or anything; actually it’s very well put-together. I’m an expert artisan in my field. I’m not trying to impress you; this is simply God’s truth. I know I can take care of both our needs. Or we can live here.” He looked around Miss Stickyfoot’s modest apartment. How ascetically and tastefully she had arranged it. He liked it here; he felt peace come to him, a dwindling away of his tensions. For the first time in years.
   “You have an odd aura,” Miss Stickyfoot said. “Sort of soft and woolly and purple. I approve of it. But I’ve never seen one like it before. Do you build model trains? It sort of looks like the kind of aura that someone who builds model trains would have.”
   “I can build almost anything,” Cadbury said. “With my teeth, my hands, my words. Listen; this is for you.” He then recited his four-line poem. Miss Stickyfoot listened intently.
   “That poem,” she decided, when he had finished, “has wu. ‘Wu’ is a Japanese term—or is it Chinese?—meaning you know what.” She gestured irritably. “Simplicity. Like some of Paul Klee’s drawings.” But then she added, “It’s not very good, though. Otherwise.”
   “I composed it,” he explained testily, “while paddling down the creek after my tied-together snuff tins. It was strictly spur-of-the-moment stuff; I can do better seated in isolation in my locked study at my Hermes. If Hilda isn’t banging at the door. You can discern why I hate her. Because of her sadistic intrusions the only time I have for creative work is while paddling or eating my lunch. That one aspect alone of my marital life explains why I had to break away from it and seek you out. In relationship to a person of your sort I could create on a totally new level entirely. I’d have blue chips coming out my ears. In addition, I wouldn’t have to spend myself into oblivion seeing Dr. Drat whom you correctly call a number one fud.”
   “ ‘Blue chips,’ ” Miss Stickyfoot echoed, screwing up her face with distaste. “Is that the level you mean? It seems to me you have the aspirations of a wholesale dried fruit dealer. Forget blue chips; don’t leave your wife because of that: you’re only carrying your old value-system with you. You’ve internalized what she’s taught you, except that you’re carrying it one step farther. Pursue a different course entirely and all will go well with you.”
   “Like Zen?” he asked.
   “You only play with Zen. If you really understood it you never would have answered my note by coming here. There is no perfect person in the world, for you or anybody else. I can’t make you feel any better than you do with your wife; you carry your troubles inside you.”
   “I agree with that up to a point,” Cadbury agreed, up to a point. “But my wife makes them worse. Maybe with you they wouldn’t entirely go away, but they wouldn’t be so bad. Nothing could be so bad as it is now. At least you wouldn’t throw my Hermes typewriter out the window whenever you got mad at me, and in addition maybe you wouldn’t get mad at me every goddam minute of the day and night, as she does. Had you thought about that? Put that in your pipe and smoke it, as the expression goes.”
   His reasoning did not seem to go unnoticed by Miss Stickyfoot; she nodded in what appeared to be at least partial agreement. “All right,” she said after a pause, and her large dark attractive eyes gleamed with sudden light. “Let’s make the effort. If you can abandon your obsessive chatter for a moment—for perhaps the first time in your life—I’ll do with you and for you, which you could never have done by yourself, what needs to be done. All right? Shall I lay it on you?”
   “You have begun to articulate oddly,” Cadbury said, with a mixture of alarm, surprise—and a growing awe. Miss Stickyfoot, before his eyes, had begun to change in a palpable fashion. What had, up to now, appeared to him the ultimate in beauty evolved as he gazed fixedly; beauty, as he had known it, anticipated it, imagined it, dissolved and was carried away into the rivers of oblivion, of the past, of the limitations of his own mind: it was replaced, now, by something further, something that surpassed it, which he could never have conjured up from his own imagination. It far exceeded that.
   Miss Stickyfoot had become several persons, each of them bound to the nature of reality, pretty but not illusive, attractive but within the confines of actuality. And these people, he saw, meant much more, were much more, because they were not manifestations fulfilling his wishes, products of his own mind. One, a semi-Oriental girl with long, shiny, dark hair, gazed at him with impassive, bright, intelligent eyes that sparkled with calm awareness; the perception of him, within them, lucid and correct, unimpaired by sentiment or even kindness, mercy or compassion—yet her eyes held one kind of love: justice, without aversion or repudiation of him, as conscious as she was of his imperfections. It was a comradely love, a sharing of her cerebral, analytical evaluation of himself and of her own self, and the bonded-togetherness of the two of them by their mutual failings.
   The next girl, smiling with forgiveness and tolerance, unaware of him as falling short in any way—nothing he was or was not or could do or fail to do would disappoint her or lower her esteem for him—glowed and smouldered darkly, with a kind of warm, sad, and at the same time eternally cheerful happiness: this, his mother, his eternal, never-disappearing, never going-away or leaving or forgetting mother who would never withdraw her protection of him, her sheltering cloak that concealed him, warmed him, breathed hope and the flicker of new life into him when pain and defeat and loneliness chilled him into near-ashes… the first girl, his equal: his sister, perhaps; this girl his gentle, strong mother who was at the same time frail and afraid but not showing either.
   And, with them, a peevish, pouting, irritable girl, immature, pretty in a marred way, with certain skin blemishes, wearing a too-frilly, too-satinish blouse, too-short skirt, with legs too thin; yet still attractive in an undeveloped way. She gazed at him with disappointment, as if he had let her down, had failed her, always would; and still she glared at him demandingly, still wanting more, still trying to call forth from him everything she needed and yearned for: the whole world, the sky, everything, but despising him because he could not give it to her. This, he realized, his future daughter, who would turn from him finally, as the two others would not, would desert him in resentful disappointment to seek fulfillment in another, younger man. He would have her only a short time. And he would never fully please her.
   But all three loved him, and all three were his girls, his women, his wistful, hopeful, sad, frightened, trusting, suffering, laughing, sensual, protecting, warming, demanding female realities, his trinity of the objective world standing in opposition to him and at the same time completing him, adding to him what he was not and never would be, what he cherished and prized and respected and loved and needed more than anything else in existence. Miss Stickyfoot, as such, was gone. These three girls stood in her place. And they did not communicate to him remotely, across a break, by floating messages down Papermill Creek in empty snuff tins; they spoke directly, their intense eyes fixed on him unrelentingly, ceaselessly aware of him.
   “I will live with you,” the calm-eyed Asianish girl said. “As a neutral companion, off and on, as long as I’m alive and you’re alive, which may not be forever. Life is transitory and often not worth being fucked over by. Sometimes I think the dead are better off. Maybe I’ll join them today, maybe tomorrow. Maybe I’ll kill you, send you to join them, or take you with me. Want to come? You can pay the travel-expenses, at least if you want me to accompany you. Otherwise I’ll go by myself and travel free on a military transport 707; I get a regular government rebate the rest of my life, which I put in a secret bank account for semi-legal investment purposes of an undisclosed nature for purposes you better God damn never find out if you know what’s best for you.” She paused, still eyeing him impassively. “Well?”
   “What was the question?” Cadbury said, lost.
   “I said,” she said fiercely, with impatient dismissal of his low mental powers, “I’ll live with you for an unspecified period, with uncertain ultimate outcome, if you’ll pay enough, and especially—and this is mandatory—if you keep the house functioning efficiently—you know, pay bills, clean up, shop, fix meals—in such a way that I’m not bothered. So I can do my own things, which matter.”
   “Okay,” he said eagerly.
   “I’ll never live with you,” the sad-eyed, warm, smoky-haired girl said, plump and pliant in her cuddly leather jacket with its tassles, and her brown cord slacks and boots, carrying her rabbit-skin purse. “But I’ll look in on you now and then on my way to work in the morning and see if you’ve got a joint you can lay on me, and if you don’t, and you’re down, I’ll supercharge you—but not right now. Okay?” She smiled even more intensely, her lovely eyes rich with wisdom and the unstated complexity of herself and her love.
   “Sure,” he said. He wished for more, but knew that was all; she did not belong to him, did not exist for him: she was herself, and a product of and piece of the world.
   “Rape,” the third girl said, her over-red, too-lush lips twisting with malice, but at the same time twitching with amusement. “I’ll never leave you, you dirty old man, because when I do, how the hell are you ever going to find anyone else willing to live with a child molester who’s going to die of a coronary embolism or massive infarct any day now? After I’m gone it’s all over for you, you dirty old man.” Suddenly, briefly, her eyes moisted over with grief and compassion—but only briefly and then it was over. “That will be the only happiness you’ll ever have. So I can’t go; I have to stay with you and delay my own life, even if it’s forever.” She lost, then, by degrees, her animation; a kind of resigned, mechanical, inert blackness settled over her garish, immature, attractive features. “If I get a better offer, though,” she said stonily, “I’ll take it. I’ll have to shop around and see. Check out the action downtown.”
   “The hell you say,” Cadbury said, hotly, with resentment. And experienced already, a dreadful sense of loss, as if she had gone away even now, even this soon; it had already happened—this, the worst thing possible in all his life.
   “Now,” all three girls said at once, briskly, “let’s get down to the nitty-gritty. How many blue token chips do you have?”
   “W-what?” Cadbury stammered, startled.
   “That’s the name of the game,” the three girls chimed in unison, with bright-eyed asperity. All their combined faculties had been roused to existence by the topic; they were individually and collectively fully alert. “Let’s see your checkbook. What’s your balance?”
   “What’s your Gross Annual Product?” the Asian girl said. “I would never rip you off,” the warm sentimental, patient, cherishing girl said, “but could you lend me two blue chips? I know you’ve got hundreds, an important and famous beaver like you.”
   “Go get some and buy me two quarts of chocolate milk and a carton of various assorted donuts and a Coke at the Speedy Mart,” the peevish girl said. “Can I borrow your Porsche?” the cherishing girl asked. “If I put gas in it?”
   “But you can’t drive mine,” the Asian girl said. “It’d increase the cost of my insurance, which my mother pays.”
   “Teach me how to drive,” the peevish girl said, “so I can get one of my boyfriends to take me to the motor movies tomorrow night; it’s only two bucks a carload. They’re showing five skinflicks, and we can get a couple of dudes and a chick into the trunk.”
   “Better entrust your blue chips to my keeping,” the cherishing girl said. “These other chicks’ll rip you off.”
   “Fuck you,” the peevish girl said roughly.
   “If you listen to her or give her one single blue chip,” the Asian girl said fiercely, “I’ll tear out your fucking heart and eat it alive. And that low-class one, she’s got the clap; if you sleep with her you’ll be sterile the rest of your life.”
   “I don’t have any blue chips,” Cadbury said anxiously, fearing that, knowing this, all three girls would depart. “But I—”
   “Sell your Hermes Rocket typewriter,” the Asian girl said.
   “I’ll sell it for you,” the cherishing, protective girl said in her gentle voice. “And give you—” She calculated, painstakingly, slowly, with effort. “I’ll split it with you. Fairly. I’d never burn you.” She smiled at him, and he knew it was true.
   “My mother owns an electric IBM space-expander, ball-type office model,” the peevish girl said haughtily, with near-contempt. “I’d get myself one and learn to type and get a good job, except that I get more by staying on welfare.”
   “Later in the year—” Cadbury began desperately.
   “We’ll see you later,” the three girls who had formerly been Miss Stickyfoot, said. “Or you can mail the blue chips to us. Okay?” They began to recede, collectively; they wavered and became insubstantial. Or—
   Was it Cadbury himself, the Beaver Who Lacked, who was becoming insubstantial? He had a sudden, despairing intuition that it was the latter. He was fading out; they remained. And yet that was good.
   He could survive that. He could survive his own disappearance. But not theirs.
   Already, in the short time he had known them, they meant more to him than he did to himself. And that was a relief.
   Whether he had any blue chips for them or not—and that seemed to be what mattered to them—they would survive. If they could not coax, rip-off, borrow, or anyhow in one fashion or another get blue chips from him, they’d get them from somebody else. Or else go along happily anyhow without them. They did not really need them; they liked them. They could survive with or without them. But they, frankly, were not really interested in survival. They wanted to be, intended to be, and knew how to be, genuinely happy. They would not settle for mere survival; they wanted to live.
   “I hope I see you again,” Cadbury said. “Or rather, I hope you see me again. I mean, I hope I reappear, at least briefly, from time to time, in your lives. Just so I can see how you’re doing.”
   “Stop scheming on us,” all three said in unison, as Cadbury became virtually nonexistent; all that remained of him, now, was a wisp of gray smoke, lingering plaintively in the half-exhausted air that had once offered to sustain him.
   “You’ll be back,” the cherishing, plump, leather-clad, warm-eyed girl said, with certitude, as if she knew instinctively that there could be no doubt. “We’ll see you.”
   “I hope so,” Cadbury said, but now even the sound of his gone-off voice had become faint; it flickered like a fading audio signal from some distant star that had, long ago, cooled into ash and darkness and inertness and silence.
   “Let’s go to the beach,” the Asian girl said as the three of them strolled away, confident and assured and substantial and alive to the activity of the day. And off they went.
   Cadbury—or at least the ions that remained of him as a sort of vapor trail marking his one-time passage through life and out—wondered if there were, at their beach, any nice trees to gnaw. And where their beach was. And if it was nice. And if it had a name.
   Pausing briefly, glancing back, the compassionate, cherishing plump girl in leather and soft tassles said, “Would you like to come along? We could take you for a little while, maybe this one time. But not again. You know how it is.”
   There was no answer.
   “I love you,” she said softly, to herself. And smiled her moist-eyed, happy, sorrowful, understanding, remembering smile.
   And went on. A little behind the other two. Lingering slightly, as if, without showing it, looking back.