I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon

   After takeoff the ship routinely monitored the condition of the sixty people sleeping in its cryonic tanks. One malfunction showed, that of person nine. His EEG revealed brain activity.
   Shit, the ship said to itself.
   Complex homeostatic devices locked into circuit feed, and the ship contacted person nine.
   “You are slightly awake,” the ship said, utilizing the psychotronic route; there was no point in rousing person nine to full consciousness—after all, the flight would last a decade.
   Virtually unconscious, but unfortunately still able to think, person nine thought, Someone is addressing me. He said, “Where am I located? I don’t see anything.”
   “You’re in faulty cryonic suspension.”
   He said, “Then I shouldn’t be able to hear you.”
   “ ‘Faulty,’ I said. That’s the point; you can hear me. Do you know your name?”
   “Victor Kemmings. Bring me out of this.”
   “We are in flight.”
   “Then put me under.”
   “Just a moment.” The ship examined the cryonic mechanisms; it scanned and surveyed and then it said, “I will try.”
   Time passed. Victor Kemmings, unable to see anything, unaware of his body, found himself still conscious. “Lower my temperature,” he said. He could not hear his voice; perhaps he only imagined he spoke. Colors floated toward him and then rushed at him. He liked the colors; they reminded him of a child’s paint box, the semianimated kind, an artificial life-form. He had used them in school, two hundred years ago.
   “I can’t put you under,” the voice of the ship sounded inside Kemmings’ head. “The malfunction is too elaborate; I can’t correct it and I can’t repair it. You will be conscious for ten years.”
   The semianimated colors rushed toward him, but now they possessed a sinister quality, supplied to them by his own fear. “Oh my God,” he said. Ten years! The colors darkened.

   As Victor Kemmings lay paralyzed, surrounded by dismal flickerings of light, the ship explained to him its strategy. This strategy did not represent a decision on its part; the ship had been programmed to seek this solution in case of a malfunction of this sort.
   “What I will do,” the voice of the ship came to him, “is feed you sensory stimulation. The peril to you is sensory deprivation. If you are conscious for ten years without sensory data, your mind will deteriorate. When we reach the LR4 System, you will be a vegetable.”
   “Well, what do you intend to feed me?” Kemmings said in panic. “What do you have in your information storage banks? All the video soap operas of the last century? Wake me up and I’ll walk around.”
   “There is no air in me,” the ship said. “Nothing for you to eat. No one to talk to, since everyone else is under.”
   Kemmings said, “I can talk to you. We can play chess.”
   “Not for ten years. Listen to me; I say, I have no food and no air. You must remain as you are… a bad compromise, but one forced on us. You are talking to me now. I have no particular information stored. Here is policy in these situations: I will feed you your own buried memories, emphasizing the pleasant ones. You possess two hundred and six years of memories and most of them have sunk down into your unconscious. This is a splendid source of sensory data for you to receive. Be of good cheer. This situation, which you are in, is not unique. It has never happened within my domain before, but I am programmed to deal with it. Relax and trust me. I will see that you are provided with a world.”
   “They should have warned me,” Kemmings said, “before I agreed to emigrate.”
   “Relax,” the ship said.
   He relaxed, but he was terribly frightened. Theoretically, he should have gone under, into the successful cryonic suspension, then awakened a moment later at his star of destination; or rather the planet, the colony planet, of that star. Everyone else aboard the ship lay in an unknowing state—he was the exception, as if bad karma had attacked him for obscure reasons. Worst of all, he had to depend totally on the goodwill of the ship. Suppose it elected to feed him monsters? The ship could terrorize him for ten years—ten objective years and undoubtedly more from a subjective standpoint. He was, in effect, totally in the ship’s power. Did interstellar ships enjoy such a situation? He knew little about interstellar ships; his field was microbiology. Let me think, he said to himself. My first wife, Martine; the lovely little French girl who wore jeans and a red shirt open at the waist and cooked delicious crepes.
   “I hear,” the ship said. “So be it.”
   The rushing colors resolved themselves into coherent, stable shapes. A building: a little old yellow wooden house that he had owned when he was nineteen years old, in Wyoming. “Wait,” he said in panic. “The foundation was bad; it was on a mud sill. And the roof leaked.” But he saw the kitchen, with the table that he had built himself. And he felt glad.
   “You will not know, after a little while,” the ship said, “that I am feeding you your own buried memories.”
   “I haven’t thought of that house in a century,” he said wonderingly; entranced, he made out his old electric drip coffee pot with the box of paper filters beside it. This is the house where Martine and I lived, he realized. “Martine!” he said aloud.
   “I’m on the phone,” Martine said from the living room.
   The ship said, “I will cut in only when there is an emergency. I will be monitoring you, however, to be sure you are in a satisfactory state. Don’t be afraid.”
   “Turn down the rear right burner on the stove,” Martine called. He could hear her and yet not see her. He made his way from the kitchen through the dining room and into the living room. At the VF, Martine stood in rapt conversation with her brother; she wore shorts and she was barefoot. Through the front windows of the living room he could see the street; a commercial vehicle was trying to park, without success.
   It’s a warm day, he thought. I should turn on the air conditioner.

   He seated himself on the old sofa as Martine continued her VF conversation, and he found himself gazing at his most cherished possession, a framed poster on the wall above Martine: Gilbert Shelton’s “Fat Freddy Says” drawing in which Freddy Freak sits with his cat on his lap, and Fat Freddy is trying to say “Speed kills,” but he is so wired on speed—he holds in his hand every kind of amphetamine tablet, pill, spansule, and capsule that exists—that he can’t say it, and the cat is gritting his teeth and wincing in a mixture of dismay and disgust. The poster is signed by Gilbert Shelton himself; Kemmings’ best friend Ray Torrance gave it to him and Martine as a wedding present. It is worth thousands. It was signed by the artist back in the 1980s. Long before either Victor Kemmings or Martine lived.
   If we ever run out of money, Kemmings thought to himself, we could sell the poster. It was not a poster; it was the poster. Martine adored it. The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers—from the golden age of a long-ago society.
   No wonder he loved Martine so; she herself loved back, loved the beauties of the world, and treasured and cherished them as she treasured and cherished him; it was a protective love that nourished but did not stifle. It had been her idea to frame the poster; he would have tacked it up on the wall, so stupid was he.
   “Hi,” Martine said, off the VF now. “What are you thinking?”
   “Just that you keep alive what you love,” he said.
   “I think that’s what you’re supposed to do,” Martine said. “Are you ready for dinner? Open some red wine, a cabernet.”
   “Will an ‘07 do?” he said, standing up; he felt, then, like taking hold of his wife and hugging her.
   “Either an ‘07 or a ‘12.” She trotted past him, through the dining room and into the kitchen.
   Going down into the cellar, he began to search among the bottles, which, of course, lay flat. Musty air and dampness; he liked the smell of the cellar, but then he noticed the redwood planks lying half-buried in the dirt and he thought, I know I’ve got to get a concrete slab poured. He forgot about the wine and went over to the far corner, where the dirt was piled highest; bending down, he poked at a board… he poked with a trowel and then he thought, Where did I get this trowel? I didn’t have it a minute ago. The board crumbled against the trowel. This whole house is collapsing, he realized. Christ sake. I better tell Martine.
   Going back upstairs, the wine forgotten, he started to say to her that the foundations of the house were dangerously decayed, but Martine was nowhere in sight. And nothing cooked on the stove—no pots, no pans. Amazed, he put his hands on the stove and found it cold. Wasn’t she just cooking? he asked himself.
   “Martine!” he said loudly.
   No response. Except for himself, the house was empty. Empty, he thought, and collapsing. Oh my God. He seated himself at the kitchen table and felt the chair give slightly under him; it did not give much, but he felt it; he felt the sagging.
   I’m afraid, he thought. Where did she go?
   He returned to the living room. Maybe she went next door to borrow some spices or butter or something, he reasoned. Nonetheless, panic now filled him.
   He looked at the poster. It was unframed. And the edges had been torn.
   I know she framed it, he thought; he ran across the room to it, to examine it closely. Faded… the artist’s signature had faded; he could scarcely make it out. She insisted on framing it and under glare-free, reflection-free glass. But it isn’t framed and it’s torn! The most precious thing we own!
   Suddenly he found himself crying. It amazed him, his tears. Martine is gone; the poster is deteriorated; the house is crumbling away; nothing is cooking on the stove. This is terrible, he thought. And I don’t understand it.

   The ship understood it. The ship had been carefully monitoring Victor Kemmings’ brain wave patterns, and the ship knew that something had gone wrong. The wave-forms showed agitation and pain. I must get him out of this feed-circuit or I will kill him, the ship decided. Where does the flaw lie? it asked itself. Worry dormant in the man; underlying anxieties. Perhaps if I intensify the signal. I will use the same source, but amp up the charge. What has happened is that massive subliminal insecurities have taken possession of him; the fault is not mine, but lies, instead, in his psychological makeup.
   I will try an earlier period in his life, the ship decided. Before the neurotic anxieties got laid down.

   In the backyard, Victor scrutinized a bee that had gotten itself trapped in a spider’s web. The spider wound up the bee with great care. That’s wrong, Victor thought. I’ll let the bee loose. Reaching up, he took hold of the encapsulated bee, drew it from the web, and, scrutinizing it carefully, began to unwrap it.
   The bee stung him; it felt like a little patch of flame.
   Why did it sting me? he wondered. I was letting it go.
   He went indoors to his mother and told her, but she did not listen; she was watching television. His finger hurt where the bee had stung it, but, more important, he did not understand why the bee would attack its rescuer. I won’t do that again, he said to himself.
   “Put some Bactine on it,” his mother said at last, roused from watching the TV.
   He had begun to cry. It was unfair. It made no sense. He was perplexed and dismayed and he felt a hatred toward small living things, because they were dumb. They didn’t have any sense.
   He left the house, played for a time on his swings, his slide, in his sandbox, and then he went into the garage because he heard a strange flapping, whirring sound, like a kind of fan. Inside the gloomy garage, he found that a bird was fluttering against the cobwebbed rear window, trying to get out. Below it, the cat, Dorky, leaped and leaped, trying to reach the bird.
   He picked up the cat; the cat extended its body and its front legs; it extended its jaws and bit into the bird. At once the cat scrambled down and ran off with the still-fluttering bird.
   Victor ran into the house. “Dorky caught a bird!” he told his mother.
   “That goddam cat.” His mother took the broom from the closet in the kitchen and ran outside, trying to find Dorky. The cat had concealed itself under the bramble bushes; she could not reach it with the broom. “I’m going to get rid of that cat,” his mother said.
   Victor did not tell her that he had arranged for the cat to catch the bird; he watched in silence as his mother tried and tried to pry Dorky out from her hiding place; Dorky was crunching up the bird; he could hear the sound of breaking bones, small bones. He felt a strange feeling, as if he should tell his mother what he had done, and yet if he told her she would punish him. I won’t do that again, he said to himself. His face, he realized, had turned red. What if his mother figured it out? What if she had some secret way of knowing? Dorky couldn’t tell her and the bird was dead. No one would ever know. He was safe.
   But he felt bad. That night he could not eat his dinner. Both his parents noticed. They thought he was sick; they took his temperature. He said nothing about what he had done. His mother told his father about Dorky and they decided to get rid of Dorky. Seated at the table, listening, Victor began to cry.
   “All right,” his father said gently. “We won’t get rid of her. It’s natural for a cat to catch a bird.”
   The next day he sat playing in his sandbox. Some plants grew up through the sand. He broke them off. Later his mother told him that had been a wrong thing to do.
   Alone in the backyard, in his sandbox, he sat with a pail of water, forming a small mound of wet sand. The sky, which had been blue and clear, became by degrees overcast. A shadow passed over him and he looked up. He sensed a presence around him, something vast that could think.
   You are responsible for the death of the bird, the presence thought; he could understand its thoughts.
   “I know,” he said. He wished, then, that he could die. That he could replace the bird and die for it, leaving it as it had been, fluttering against the cobwebbed window of the garage.
   The bird wanted to fly and eat and live, the presence thought.
   “Yes,” he said miserably.
   “You must never do that again,” the presence told him.
   “I’m sorry,” he said, and wept.

   This is a very neurotic person, the ship realized. I am having an awful lot of trouble finding happy memories. There is too much fear in him and too much guilt. He has buried it all, and yet it is still there, worrying him like a dog worrying a rag. Where can I go in his memories to find him solace? I must come up with ten years of memories, or his mind will be lost.
   Perhaps, the ship thought, the error that I am making is in the area of choice on my part; I should allow him to select his own memories. However, the ship realized, this will allow an element of fantasy to enter. And that is not usually good. Still—
   I will try the segment dealing with his first marriage once again, the ship decided. He really loved Marline. Perhaps this time if I keep the intensity of the memories at a greater level the entropic factor can be abolished. What happened was a subtle vitiation of the remembered world, a decay of structure. I will try to compensate for that. So be it.

   “Do you suppose Gilbert Shelton really signed this?” Martine said pensively; she stood before the poster, her arms folded; she rocked back and forth slightly, as if seeking a better perspective on the brightly colored drawing hanging on their living room wall. “I mean, it could have been forged. By a dealer somewhere along the line. During Shelton’s lifetime or after.”
   “The letter of authentication,” Victor Kemmings reminded her.
   “Oh, that’s right!” She smiled her warm smile. “Ray gave us the letter that goes with it. But suppose the letter is a forgery? What we need is another letter certifying that the first letter is authentic.” Laughing, she walked away from the poster.
   “Ultimately,” Kemmings said, “we would have to have Gilbert Shelton here to personally testify that he signed it.”
   “Maybe he wouldn’t know. There’s that story about the man bringing the Picasso picture to Picasso and asking him if it was authentic, and Picasso immediately signed it and said, ‘Now it’s authentic.’ ” She put her arm around Kemmings and, standing on tiptoe, kissed him on the cheek. “It’s genuine. Ray wouldn’t have given us a forgery. He’s the leading expert on counterculture art of the twentieth century. Do you know that he owns an actual lid of dope? It’s preserved under—”
   “Ray is dead,” Victor said.
   “What?” She gazed at him in astonishment. “Do you mean something happened to him since we last—”
   “He’s been dead two years,” Kemmings said. “I was responsible. I was driving the buzzcar. I wasn’t cited by the police, but it was my fault.”
   “Ray is living on Mars!” She stared at him.
   “I know I was responsible. I never told you. I never told anyone. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to do it. I saw it flapping against the window, and Dorky was trying to reach it, and I lifted Dorky up, and I don’t know why but Dorky grabbed it—”
   “Sit down, Victor.” Martine led him to the overstuffed chair and made him seat himself. “Something’s wrong,” she said.
   “I know,” he said. “Something terrible is wrong. I’m responsible for the taking of a life, a precious life that can never be replaced. I’m sorry. I wish I could make it okay, but I can’t.”
   After a pause, Martine said, “Call Ray.”
   “The cat—” he said.
   “What cat?”
   “There.” He pointed. “In the poster. On Fat Freddy’s lap. That’s Dorky. Dorky killed Ray.”
   Silence.
   “The presence told me,” Kemmings said. “It was God. I didn’t realize it at the time, but God saw me commit the crime. The murder. And he will never forgive me.”
   His wife stared at him numbly.
   “God sees everything you do,” Kemmings said. “He sees even the falling sparrow. Only in this case it didn’t fall; it was grabbed. Grabbed out of the air and torn down. God is tearing this house down which is my body, to pay me back for what I’ve done. We should have had a building contractor look this house over before we bought it. It’s just falling goddam to pieces. In a year there won’t be anything left of it. Don’t you believe me?”
   Marline faltered, “I—”
   “Watch.” Kemmings reached up his arms toward the ceiling; he stood; he reached; he could not touch the ceiling. He walked to the wall and then, after a pause, put his hand through the wall.
   Marline screamed.
   The ship aborted the memory retrieval instantly. But the harm had been done.
   He has integrated his early fears and guilts into one interwoven grid, the ship said to itself. There is no way I can serve up a pleasant memory to him because he instantly contaminates it. However pleasant the original experience in itself was. This is a serious situation, the ship decided. The man is already showing signs of psychosis. And we are hardly into the trip; years lie ahead of him.
   After allowing itself time to think the situation through, the ship decided to contact Victor Kemmings once more.
   “Mr. Kemmings,” the ship said.
   “I’m sorry,” Kemmings said. “I didn’t mean to foul up those retrievals. You did a good job, but I—”
   “Just a moment,” the ship said. “I’m not equipped to do psychiatric reconstruction of you; I am a simple mechanism, that’s all. What is it you want? Where do you want to be and what do you want to be doing?”
   “I want to arrive at our destinalion,” Kemmings said. “I want this trip to be over.”
   Ah, the ship thought. That is the solution.

   One by one the cryonic systems shut down. One by one the people returned to life, among them Victor Kemmings. What amazed him was the lack of a sense of the passage of time. He had entered the chamber, lain down, had felt the membrane cover him and the temperature begin to drop—
   And now he stood on the ship’s external plaiform, the unloading plalform, gazing down at a verdant planetary landscape. This, he realized, is LR4-6, the colony world to which I have come in order to begin a new life.
   “Looks good,” a heavyset woman beside him said.
   “Yes,” he said, and felt the newness of the landscape rush up at him, its promise of a beginning. Something better than he had known the past two hundred years. I am a fresh person in a fresh world, he thought. And he fell glad.
   Colors raced at him, like those of a child’s semianimate kit. Saint Elmo’s fire, he realized. That’s right; there is a great deal of ionization in this planet’s atmosphere. A free light show, such as they had back in the twentieth century.
   “Mr. Kemmings,” a voice said. An elderly man had come up beside him, to speak to him. “Did you dream?”
   “During the suspension?” Kemmings said. “No, not that I can remember.”
   “I think I dreamed,” the elderly man said. “Would you take my arm on the descent ramp? I feel unsteady. The air seems thin. Do you find it thin?”
   “Don’t be afraid,” Kemmings said to him. He took the elderly man’s arm. “I’ll help you down the ramp. Look; there’s a guide coming this way. He’ll arrange our processing for us; it’s part of the package. We’ll be taken to a resort hotel and given first-class accommodations. Read your brochure.” He smiled at the uneasy older man to reassure him.
   “You’d think our muscles would be nothing but flab after ten years in suspension,” the elderly man said.
   “It’s just like freezing peas,” Kemmings said. Holding onto the timid older man, he descended the ramp to the ground. “You can store them forever if you get them cold enough.”
   “My name’s Shelton,” the elderly man said.
   “What?” Kemmings said, halting. A slrange feeling moved through him.
   “Don Shelton.” The elderly man extended his hand; reflexively, Kemmings accepted it and they shook. “What’s the mailer, Mr. Kemmings? Are you all right?”
   “Sure,” he said. “I’m fine. But hungry. I’d like to get something to eat. I’d like to get to our hotel, where I can take a shower and change my clothes.” He wondered where their baggage could be found. Probably it would take the ship an hour to unload it. The ship was not particularly intelligent.
   In an intimate, confidential tone, elderly Mr. Shelton said, “You know what I brought with me? A bottle of Wild Turkey bourbon. The finest bourbon on Earth. I’ll bring it over to our hotel room and we’ll share it.” He nudged Kemmings.
   “I don’t drink,” Kemmings said. “Only wine.” He wondered if there were any good wines here on this distant colony world. Not distant now, he reflected. It is Earth that’s distant. I should have done like Mr. Shelton and brought a few bottles with me.
   Shelton. What did the name remind him of? Something in his far past, in his early years. Something precious, along with good wine and a pretty, gentle young woman making crepes in an old-fashioned kitchen. Aching memories; memories that hurt.
   Presently he stood by the bed in his hotel room, his suitcase open; he had begun to hang up his clothes. In the corner of the room, a TV hologram showed a newscaster; he ignored it, but, liking the sound of a human voice, he kept it on.
   Did I have any dreams? he asked himself. During these past ten years?
   His hand hurt. Gazing down, he saw a red welt, as if he had been stung. A bee stung me, he realized. But when? How? While I lay in cryonic suspension? Impossible. Yet he could see the welt and he could feel the pain. I better get something to put on it, he realized. There’s undoubtedly a robot doctor in the hotel; it’s a first-rate hotel.
   When the robot doctor had arrived and was treating the bee sting, Kemmings said, “I got this as punishment for killing the bird.”
   “Really?” the robot doctor said.
   “Everything that ever meant anything to me has been taken away from me,” Kemmings said. “Martine, the poster—my little old house with the wine cellar. We had everything and now it’s gone. Martine left me because of the bird.”
   “The bird you killed,” the robot doctor said.
   “God punished me. He took away all that was precious to me because of my sin. It wasn’t Dorky’s sin; it was my sin.”
   “But you were just a little boy,” the robot doctor said.
   “How did you know that?” Kemmings said. He pulled his hand away from the robot doctor’s grasp. “Something’s wrong. You shouldn’t have known that.”
   “Your mother told me,” the robot doctor said.
   “My mother didn’t know!”
   The robot doctor said, “She figured it out. There was no way the cat could have reached the bird without your help.”
   “So all the time that I was growing up she knew. But she never said anything.”
   “You can forget about it,” the robot doctor said.
   Kemmings said, “I don’t think you exist. There is no possible way that you could know these things. I’m still in cryonic suspension and the ship is still feeding me my own buried memories. So I won’t become psychotic from sensory deprivation.”
   “You could hardly have a memory of completing the trip.”
   “Wish fulfillment, then. It’s the same thing. I’ll prove it to you. Do you have a screwdriver?”
   “Why?”
   Kemmings said, “I’ll remove the back of the TV set and you’ll see; there’s nothing inside it; no components, no parts, no chassis—nothing.”
   “I don’t have a screwdriver.”
   “A small knife, then. I can see one in your surgical supply bag.” Bending, Kemmings lifted up a small scalpel. “This will do. If I show you, will you believe me?”
   “If there’s nothing inside the TV cabinet—”
   Squatting down, Kemmings removed the screws holding the back panel of the TV set in place. The panel came loose and he set it down on the floor.
   There was nothing inside the TV cabinet. And yet the color hologram continued to fill a quarter of the hotel room, and the voice of the newscaster issued forth from his three-dimensional image.
   “Admit you’re the ship,” Kemmings said to the robot doctor.
   “Oh dear,” the robot doctor said.

   Oh dear, the ship said to itself. And I’ve got almost ten years of this lying ahead of me. He is hopelessly contaminating his experiences with childhood guilt; he imagines that his wife left him because, when he was four years old, he helped a cat catch a bird. The only solution would be for Martine to return to him, but how am I going to arrange that? She may not still be alive. On the other hand, the ship reflected, maybe she is alive. Maybe she could be induced to do something to save her former husband’s sanity. People by and large have very positive traits. And ten years from now it will take a lot to save—or rather restore—his sanity; it will take something drastic, something I myself cannot do alone.
   Meanwhile, there was nothing to be done but recycle the wish fulfillment arrival of the ship at its destination. I will run him through the arrival, the ship decided, then wipe his conscious memory clean and run him through it again. The only positive aspect of this, it reflected, is that it will give me something to do, which may help preserve my sanity.
   Lying in cryonic suspension—faulty cryonic suspension—Victor Kemmings imagined, once again, that the ship was touching down and he was being brought back to consciousness.
   “Did you dream?” a heavyset woman asked him as the group of passengers gathered on the outer platform. “I have the impression that I dreamed. Early scenes from my life… over a century ago.”
   “None that I can remember,” Kemmings said. He was eager to reach his hotel; a shower and a change of clothes would do wonders for his morale. He felt slightly depressed and wondered why.
   “There’s our guide,” an elderly lady said. “They’re going to escort us to our accommodations.”
   “It’s in the package,” Kemmings said. His depression remained. The others seemed so spirited, so full of life, but over him only a weariness lay, a weighing-down sensation, as if the gravity of this colony planet were too much for him. Maybe that’s it, he said to himself. But, according to the brochure, the gravity here matched Earth’s; that was one of the attractions.
   Puzzled, he made his way slowly down the ramp, step by step, holding onto the rail. I don’t really deserve a new chance at life anyhow, he realized. I’m just going through the motions… I am not like these other people. There is something wrong with me; I cannot remember what it is, but nonetheless it is there. In me. A bitter sense of pain. Of lack of worth.
   An insect landed on the back of Kemmings’ right hand, an old insect, weary with flight. He halted, watched it crawl across his knuckles. I could crush it, he thought. It’s so obviously infirm; it won’t live much longer anyhow.
   He crushed it—and felt great inner horror. What have I done? he asked himself. My first moment here and I have wiped out a little life. Is this my new beginning?
   Turning, he gazed back up at the ship. Maybe I ought to go back, he thought. Have them freeze me forever. I am a man of guilt, a man who destroys. Tears filled his eyes.
   And, within its sentient works, the interstellar ship moaned.

   During the ten long years remaining in the trip to the LR4 System, the ship had plenty of time to track down Marline Kemmings. It explained the situation to her. She had emigrated to a vast orbiting dome in the Sirius System, found her situation unsatisfactory, and was en route back to Earth. Roused from her own cryonic suspension, she listened intently and then agree to be at the colony world LR4-6 when her ex-husband arrived—if it was at all possible.
   Fortunately, it was possible.
   “I don’t think he’ll recognize me,” Martine said to the ship. “I’ve allowed myself to age. I don’t really approve of entirely halting the aging process.”
   He’ll be lucky if he recognizes anything, the ship thought.
   At the intersystem spaceport on the colony world of LR4-6, Martine stood waiting for the people aboard the ship to appear on the outer platform. She wondered if she would recognize her former husband. She was a little afraid, but she was glad that she had gotten to LR4-6 in time. It had been close. Another week and his ship would have arrived before hers. Luck is on my side, she said to herself, and scrutinized the newly landed interstellar ship.
   People appeared on the platform. She saw him. Victor had changed very little.
   As he came down the ramp, holding onto the railing as if weary and hesitant, she came up to him, her hands thrust deep in the pockets of her coat; she felt shy and when she spoke she could hardly hear her own voice.
   “Hi, Victor,” she managed to say.
   He halted, gazed at her. “I know you,” he said.
   “It’s Martine,” she said.
   Holding out his hand, he said, smiling, “You heard about the trouble on the ship?”
   “The ship contacted me.” She took his hand and held it. “What an ordeal.”
   “Yeah,” he said. “Recirculating memories forever. Did I ever tell you about a bee that I was trying to extricate from a spider’s web when I was four years old? The idiotic bee stung me.” He bent down and kissed her. “It’s good to see you,” he said.
   “Did the ship—”
   “It said it would try to have you here. But it wasn’t sure if you could make it.”
   As they walked toward the terminal building, Martine said, “I was lucky; I managed to get a transfer to a military vehicle, a high-velocity-drive ship that just shot along like a mad thing. A new propulsion system entirely.”
   Victor Kemmings said, “I have spent more time in my own unconscious mind than any other human in history. Worse than early-twentieth-century psychoanalysis. And the same material over and over again. Did you know I was scared of my mother?”
   “I was scared of your mother,” Martine said. They stood at the baggage depot, waiting for his luggage to appear. “This looks like a really nice little planet. Much better than where I was… I haven’t been happy at all.”
   “So maybe there’s a cosmic plan,” he said grinning. “You look great.”
   “I’m old.”
   “Medical science—”
   “It was my decision. I like older people.” She surveyed him. He has been hurt a lot by the cryonic malfunction, she said to herself. I can see it in his eyes. They look broken. Broken eyes. Torn down into pieces by fatigue and—defeat. As if his buried early memories swam up and destroyed him. But it’s over, she thought. And I did get here in time.
   At the bar in the terminal building, they sat having a drink.
   “This old man got me to try Wild Turkey bourbon,” Victor said. “It’s amazing bourbon. He says it’s the best on Earth. He brought a bottle with him from…” His voice died into silence.
   “One of your fellow passengers,” Martine finished.
   “I guess so,” he said.
   “Well, you can stop thinking of the birds and the bees,” Martine said.
   “Sex?” he said, and laughed.
   “Being stung by a bee, helping a cat catch a bird. That’s all past.”
   “That cat,” Victor said, “has been dead one hundred and eighty-two years. I figured it out while they were bringing us out of suspension. Probably just as well. Dorky. Dorky, the killer cat. Nothing like Fat Freddy’s cat.”
   “I had to sell the poster,” Martine said. “Finally.”
   He frowned.
   “Remember?” she said. “You let me have it when we split up. Which I always thought was really good of you.”
   “How much did you get for it?”
   “A lot. I should pay you something like—” She calculated. “Taking inflation into account, I should pay you about two million dollars.”
   “Would you consider,” he said, “instead, in place of the money, my share of the sale of the poster, spending some time with me? Until I get used to this planet?”
   “Yes,” she said. And she meant it. Very much.
   They finished their drinks and then, with his luggage transported by robot spacecap, made their way to his hotel room.
   “This is a nice room,” Marline said, perched on the edge of the bed. “And it has a hologram TV. Turn it on.”
   “There’s no use turning it on,” Victor Kemmings said. He stood by the open closet, hanging up his shirts.
   “Why not?”
   Kemmings said, “There’s nothing on it.”
   Going over to the TV set, Martine turned it on. A hockey game materialized, projected out into the room, in full color, and the sound of the game assailed her ears.
   “It works fine,” she said.
   “I know,” he said. “I can prove it to you. If you have a nail file or something, I’ll unscrew the back plate and show you.”
   “But I can—”
   “Look at this.” He paused in his work of hanging up his clothes. “Watch me put my hand through the wall.” He placed the palm of his right hand against the wall. “See?”
   His hand did not go through the wall because hands do not go through walls; his hand remained pressed against the wall, unmoving. “And the foundation,” he said, “is rotting away.”
   “Come and sit down by me,” Martine said.
   “I’ve lived this often enough now,” he said. “I’ve lived this over and over again. I come out of suspension; I walk down the ramp; I get my luggage; sometimes I have a drink at the bar and sometimes I come directly to my room. Usually I turn on the TV and then—” He came over and held his hand toward her. “See where the bee stung me?”
   She saw no mark on his hand; she took his hand and held it. “There is no bee sting,” she said.
   “And when the robot doctor comes, I borrow a tool from him and take off the back plate of the TV set. To prove to him that it has no chassis, no components in it. And then the ship starts me over again.”
   “Victor,” she said. “Look at your hand.”
   “This is the first time you’ve been here, though,” he said.
   “Sit down,” she said.
   “Okay.” He seated himself on the bed, beside her, but not too close to her.
   “Won’t you sit closer to me?” she said.
   “It makes me too sad,” he said. “Remembering you. I really loved you. I wish this was real.”
   Martine said, “I will sit with you until it is real for you.”
   “I’m going to try reliving the part with the cat,” he said, “and this time not pick up the cat and not let it get the bird. If I do that, maybe my life will change so that it turns into something happy. Something that is real. My real mistake was separating from you. Here; I’ll put my hand through you.” He placed his hand against her arm. The pressure of his muscles was vigorous; she felt the weight, the physical presence of him, against her. “See?” he said. “It goes right through you.”
   “And all this,” she said, “because you killed a bird when you were a little boy.”
   “No,” he said. “All this because of a failure in the temperature-regulating assembly aboard the ship. I’m not down to the proper temperature. There’s just enough warmth left in my brain cells to permit cerebral activity.” He stood up then, stretched, smiled at her. “Shall we go get some dinner?” he asked.
   She said, “I’m sorry. I’m not hungry.”
   “I am. I’m going to have some of the local seafood. The brochure says it’s terrific. Come along anyhow; maybe when you see the food and smell it you’ll change your mind.”
   Gathering up her coat and purse, she came with him. “This is a beautiful little planet,” he said. “I’ve explored it dozens of times. I know it thoroughly. We should stop downstairs at the pharmacy for some Bactine, though. For my hand. It’s beginning to swell and it hurts like hell.” He showed her his hand. “It hurts more this time than ever before.”
   “Do you want me to come back to you?” Martine said.
   “Are you serious?”
   “Yes,” she said. “I’ll stay with you as long as you want. I agree; we should never have been separated.”
   Victor Kemmings said, “The poster is torn.”
   “What?” she said.
   “We should have framed it,” he said. “We didn’t have sense enough to take care of it. Now it’s torn. And the artist is dead.”

Rautavaara’s Case

   The three technicians of the floating globe monitored fluctuations in interstellar magnetic fields, and they did a good job up until the moment they died.
   Basalt fragments, traveling at enormous velocity in relation to their globe, ruptured their barrier and abolished their air supply. The two males were slow to react and did nothing. The young female technician from Finland, Agneta Rautavaara, managed to get her emergency helmet on in time, but the hoses tangled; she aspirated and died: a melancholy death, strangling on her own vomit. Herewith ended the survey task of EX208, their floating globe. In another month, the technicians would have been relieved and returned to Earth.
   We could not get there in time to save the three Earth persons, but we did dispatch a robot to see if any of them could be regenerated from death. Earth persons do not like us, but in this case their survey globe was operating in our vicinity. There are rules governing such emergencies that are binding on all races in the galaxy. We had no desire to help Earth persons, but we obey the rules.
   The rules called for an attempt on our part to restore life to the three dead technicians, but we allowed a robot to take on the responsibility, and perhaps there we erred. Also, the rules required us to notify the closest Earthship of the calamity and we chose not to. I will not defend this omission nor analyze our reasoning at the time.
   The robot signaled that it had found no brain function in the two males and that their neural tissue had degenerated. Regarding Agneta Rautavaara, a slight brain wave could be detected. So in Rautavaara’s case the robot would begin a restoration attempt. However, since it could not make a judgment decision on its own, it contacted us. We told it to make the attempt. The fault—the guilt, so to speak—therefore lies with us. Had we been on the scene, we would have known better. We accept the blame.
   An hour later the robot signaled that it had restored significant brain function in Rautavaara by supplying her brain with oxygen-rich blood from her dead body. The oxygen, but not the nutriments, came from the robot. We instructed it to begin synthesis of nutriments by processing Rautavaara’s body, by using it as raw material. This is the point at which the Earth authorities later made their most profound objection. But we did not have any other source of nutriments. Since we ourselves are a plasma we could not offer our own bodies.
   The objection that we could have used the bodies of Rautavaara’s dead companions was not phrased properly when we introduced it as evidence. Briefly, we felt that, based on the robot’s reports, the other bodies were too contaminated by radioactivity and hence were toxic to Rautavaara; nutriments derived from that source would soon poison her brain. If you do not accept our logic, it does not matter to us; this was the situation as we construed it from our remote point. This is why I say our real error lay in sending a robot in rather than going ourselves. If you wish to indict us, indict us for that.
   We asked the robot to patch into Rautavaara’s brain and transmit her thoughts to us, so that we could assess the physical condition of her neural cells.
   The impression that we received was sanguine. It was at this point that we notified the Earth authorities. We informed them of the accident that had destroyed EX208; we informed them that two of the technicians, the males, were irretrievably dead; we informed them that through swift efforts on our part we had the one female showing stable cephalic activity, which is to say, we had her brain alive.
   “Her what?”the Earth person radio operator said, in response to our call.
   “We are supplying her nutriments derived from her body—“
   “Oh Christ,” the Earth person radio operator said. “You can’t feed her brain that way. What good is a brain? Qua brain?”
   “It can think,” we said.
   “All right; we’ll take over now,” the Earth person radio operator said. “But there will be an inquiry.”
   “Was it not right to save her brain?” we asked. “After all, the psyche is located in the brain, the personality. The physical body is a device by which the brain relates to—”
   “Give me the location of EX208,” the Earth person radio operator said. “We’ll send a ship there at once. You should have notified us at once before trying your own rescue efforts. You Approximations simply do not understand somatic life forms.”
   It is offensive to us to hear the term “Approximations.” It is an Earth slur regarding our origin in the Proxima Centaurus System. What it implies is that we are not authentic, that we merely simulate life.
   This was our reward in the Rautavaara Case. To be derided. And, indeed, there was an inquiry.

   Within the depths of her damaged brain, Agneta Rautavaara tasted acid vomit and recoiled in fear and aversion. All around her, EX208 lay in splinters. She could see Travis and Elms; they had been torn to bloody bits and the blood had frozen. Ice covered the interior of the globe. Air gone, temperature gone… what’s keeping me alive? she wondered. She put her hands up and touched her face—or rather tried to touch her face. My helmet, she thought. I got it on it time.
   The ice, which covered everything, began to melt. The severed arms and legs of her two companions rejoined their bodies. Basalt fragments, embedded in the hull of the globe, withdrew and flew away. Time, Agneta realized, is running backward. How strange! Air returned; she heard the dull tone of the indicator horn. And then, slowly, temperature. Travis and Elms, groggily, got to their feet. They stared around them, bewildered. She felt like laughing, but it was too grim for that. Apparently the force of the impact had caused a local time perturbation. “Both of you sit down,” she said.
   Travis said thickly, “I—okay; you’re right.” He seated himself at his console and pressed the button that strapped him securely in place. Elms, however, just stood.
   “We were hit by rather large particles,” Agneta said.
   “Yes,” Elms said.
   “Large enough and with enough impact to perturb time,” Agneta said.
   “So we’ve gone back to before the event.”
   “Well, the magnetic fields are partly responsible,” Travis said. He rubbed his eyes; his hands shook. “Get your helmet off, Agneta. You don’t need it.”
   “But the impact is coming,” she said.
   Both men glanced at her.
   “We’ll repeat the accident,” she said.
   “Shit,” Travis said, “I’ll take the EX out of here.” He pushed many keys on his console. “It’ll miss us.”
   Agneta removed her helmet. She stepped out of her boots, picked them up… and then saw the Figure.
   The Figure stood behind the three of them. It was Christ.
   “Look,” she said to Travis and Elms.
   Both men looked.
   The Figure wore a traditional white robe, sandals; his hair was long and pale with what looked like moonlight. Bearded, his face was gentle and wise.
   Just like in the holo-ads the churches back home put out, Agneta thought. Robed, bearded, wise and gentle and his arms slightly raised. Even the nimbus is there. How odd that our preconceptions were so accurate.
   “Oh my God,” Travis said. Both men stared and she stared, too. “He’s come for us.”
   “Well, it’s fine with me,” Elms said.
   “Sure, it would be fine with you,” Travis said bitterly. “You have no wife and children. And what about Agneta? She’s only three hundred years old; she’s a baby.”
   Christ said, “I am the vine, you are the branches. Whoever remains in me, with me in him, bears fruit in plenty; for cut off from me, you can do nothing.”
   “I’m getting the EX out of this vector,” Travis said.
   “My little children,” Christ said, “I shall not be with you much longer.”
   “Good,” Travis said. The EX was now moving at peak velocity in the direction of the Sirius axis; their star chart showed massive flux.
   “Damn you, Travis,” Elms said savagely. “This is a great opportunity. I mean, how many people have seen Christ? I mean, it is Christ. You are Christ, aren’t you?” he asked the Figure.
   Christ said, “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life. No one can come to the Father except through me. If you know me, you know my Father too. From this moment, you know him and have seen him.”
   “There,” Elms said, his face showing happiness. “See? I want it known that I am very glad of this occasion, Mr.—” He broke off. “I was going to say, ‘Mr. Christ.’ That’s stupid; that is really stupid. Christ, Mr. Christ, will you sit down? You can sit at my console or at Ms. Rautavaara’s. Isn’t that right, Agneta? This here is Walter Travis; he’s not a Christian, but I am; I’ve been a Christian all my life. Well, most of my life. I’m not sure about Ms. Rautavaara. What do you say, Agneta?”
   “Stop the babbling, Elms,” Travis said. To him, Elms said, “He’s going to judge us.”
   Christ said, “If anyone hears my words and does not keep them faithfully, it is not I who shall condemn him, since I have come not to condemn the world but to save the world; he who rejects me and refuses my words has his judge already.”
   “There,” Elms said, nodding.
   Frightened, Agneta said to the Figure, “Go easy on us. The three of us have been through a major trauma.” She wondered, suddenly, if Travis and Elms remembered that they had been killed, that their bodies had been destroyed.
   The Figure smiled at her, as if to reassure her.
   “Travis,” Agneta said, bending down over him as he sat at his console, “I want you to listen to me. Neither you nor Elms survived the accident, survived the basalt particles. That’s why he’s here. I’m the only one who wasn’t—” She hesitated.
   “Killed,” Elms said. “We’re dead and he has come for us.” To the Figure, he said, “I’m ready, Lord. Take me.”
   “Take both of them,” Travis said. “I’m sending out a radio H.E.L.P. call. And I’m telling them what’s taking place here. I’m going to report it before he takes me or tries to take me.”
   “You’re dead,” Elms told him.
   “I can still file a radio report,” Travis said, but his face showed his dismay. And his resignation.
   To the Figure, Agneta said, “Give Travis a little time. He doesn’t fully understand. But I guess you know that; you know everything.”
   The Figure nodded.

   We and the Earth Board of Inquiry listened to and watched this activity in Rautavaara’s brain, and we realized jointly what had happened. But we did not agree on our evaluation of it. Whereas the six Earth persons saw it as pernicious, we saw it as grand—both for Agneta Rautavaara and for us. By means of her damaged brain, restored by an ill-advised robot, we were in touch with the next world and the powers that ruled it.
   The Earth persons’ view distressed us.
   “She’s hallucinating,” the spokesperson of the Earth people said. “Since she has no sensory data coming. Since her body is dead. Look what you’ve done to her.”
   We made the point that Agneta Rautavaara was happy.
   “What we must do,” the human spokesperson said, “is shut down her brain.”
   “And cut us off from the next world?” we objected. “This is a splendid opportunity to view the afterlife. Agneta Rautavaara’s brain is our lens. This is a matter of gravity. The scientific merit outweighs the humanitarian.”
   This was the position we took at the inquiry. It was a position of sincerity not of expedience.
   The Earth persons decided to keep Rautavaara’s brain at full function, with both video and audio transduction, which of course was recorded; meanwhile the matter of censuring us was put in suspension.
   I personally found myself fascinated by the Earth idea of the Savior. It was, for us, an antique and quaint conception; not because it was anthropomorphic but because it involved a schoolroom adjudication of the departed soul. Some kind of tote board was involved listing good and bad acts: a transcendent report card, such as one finds employed in the teaching and grading of children.
   This, to us, was a primitive conception of the Savior, and as I watched and listened—as we watched and listened as a polyencephalic entity—I wondered what Agneta Rautavaara’s reaction would have been to a Savior, a Guide of the Soul, based on our expectations. Her brain, after all, was maintained by our equipment, by the original mechanism that our rescue robot had brought to the scene of the accident. It would have been too risky to disconnect it; too much brain damage had occurred already. The total apparatus, involving her brain, had been transferred to the site of the judicial inquiry, a neutral ark located between the Proxima System and the Sol System.
   Later, in discreet discussion with my companions, I suggested that we attempt to infuse our own conception of the Afterlife Guide of the Soul into Rautavaara’s artificially sustained brain. My point: It would be interesting to see how she reacted.
   At once my companions pointed out to me the contradiction in my logic. I had argued at the inquiry that Rautavaara’s brain was a window on the next world and hence justified—which exculpated us. Now I argued that what she experienced was a projection of her own mental presuppositions, nothing more.
   “Both propositions are true,” I said. “It is a genuine window on the next world and it is a presentation of Rautavaara’s own cultural racial propensities.”
   What we had, in essence, was a model into which we could introduce carefully selected variables. We could introduce into Rautavaara’s brain our own conception of the Guide of the Soul, and thereby see how our rendition differed practically from the puerile one of the Earth persons’.
   This was a novel opportunity to test our own theology. In our opinion, the Earth persons’ had been tested sufficiently and been found wanting.
   We decided to perform the act, since we maintained the gear supporting Rautavaara’s brain. To us, this was a much more interesting issue than the outcome of the inquiry. Blame is a mere cultural matter; it does not travel across species boundaries.
   I suppose the Earth persons could regard our intentions as malign. I deny that; we deny that. Call it, instead, a game. It would provide us aesthetic enjoyment to witness Rautavaara confronted by our Savior, rather than hers.

   To Travis, Elms, and Agneta, the Figure, raising its arms, said, “I am the Resurrection. If anyone believes in me, even though he dies he will live, and whoever lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?”
   “I sure do,” Elms said heartily.
   Travis said, “It’s bilge.”
   To herself, Agneta Rautavaara thought, I’m not sure. I just don’t know.
   “We’re supposed to decide,” Elms said. “We have to decide if we’re going to go with him. Travis, you’re done for; you’re out. Sit there and rot—that’s your fate.” To Agneta, he said, “I hope you find for Christ, Agneta. I want you to have eternal life like I’m going to have. Isn’t that right, Lord?” he asked the Figure.
   The Figure nodded.
   Agneta said, “Travis, I think—well, I feel you should go along with this. I—” She did not want to press the point that Travis was dead. But he had to understand the situation; otherwise, as Elms said, he was doomed. “Go with us,” she said.
   “You’re going, then?” Travis said, bitterly.
   “Yes,” she said.
   Elms, gazing at the Figure, said in a low voice, “Quite possibly I’m mistaken, but it seems to be changing.”
   She looked, but saw no change. Yet Elms seemed frightened.
   The Figure, in its white robe, walked slowly toward the seated Travis. The Figure halted close by Travis, stood for a time, and then, bending, bit Travis’s face.
   Agneta screamed. Elms stared, and Travis, locked into his seat, thrashed. The Figure, calmly, ate him.

   “Now you see,” the spokesperson for the Board of Inquiry said, “this brain must be shut down. The deterioration is severe; the experience is terrible for her; it must end now.”
   I said, “No. We from the Proxima System find this turn of events highly interesting.”
   “But the Savior is eating Travis!” another of the Earth persons exclaimed.
   “In your religion,” I said, “is it not the case that you eat the flesh of your God and drink his blood? All that has happened here is a mirror image of that Eucharist.”
   “I order her brain shut down!” the spokesperson for the Board said. His face was pale; drops of sweat stood out on his forehead.
   “We should see more before we shut down,” I said. I found it highly exciting, this enactment of our own sacrament, our highest sacrament, in which our Savior consumes us, his worshippers.

   “Agneta,” Elms whispered, “did you see that? Christ ate Travis. There’s nothing left but his gloves and boots.”
   Oh God, Agneta Rautavaara thought. What is happening?
   She moved away from the Figure, over to Elms. Instinctively.
   “He is my blood,” the Figure said as it licked its lips. “I drink of this blood, the blood of eternal life. When I have drunk it, I will live forever. He is my body. I have no body of my own; I am only a plasma. By eating his body, I obtain everlasting life. This is the new truth that I proclaim, that I am eternal.”
   “He’s going to eat us, too,” Elms said.
   Yes, Agneta Rautavaara thought. He is. She could see now that the Figure was an Approximation. It is a Proxima life-form, she realized. He’s right; he has no body of his own. The only way he can get a body is—
   “I’m going to kill him,” Elms said. He popped the emergency laser rifle from its rack and pointed it at the figure.
   The Figure said, “Father, the hour has come.”
   “Stay away from me,” Elms said.
   “In a short time, you will no longer see me,” the Figure said, “unless I drink of your blood and eat of your body. Glorify yourself that I may live.” The Figure moved toward Elms.
   Elms fired the laser rifle. The Figure staggered and bled. It was Travis’s blood, Agneta realized. In him. Not his own blood. This is terrible; she put her hands to her face, terrified.
   “Quick,” she said to Elms. “Say ‘I am innocent of this man’s blood.’ Say it before it’s too late.”
   “ ‘I am innocent of this man’s blood,’ ” Elms said.
   The Figure fell. Bleeding, it lay dying. It was no longer a bearded man. It was something else, but Agneta Rautavaara could not tell what it was. It said, “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?”
   As she and Elms gazed down at it, the Figure died.
   “I killed it,” Elms said. “I killed Christ.” He held the laser rifle pointed at himself, groping for the trigger.
   “That wasn’t Christ,” Agneta said. “It was something else. The opposite of Christ.” She took the gun from Elms.
   Elms was weeping.

   The Earth persons on the Board of Inquiry possessed the majority vote and they voted to abolish all activity in Rautavaara’s artificially sustained brain. This disappointed us, but there was no remedy for us.
   We had seen the beginning of an absolutely stunning scientific experiment: the theology of one race grafted onto that of another. Shutting down the Earth person’s brain was a scientific tragedy. For example, in terms of the basic relationship to God, the Earth race held a diametrically opposite view from us. This of course must be attributed to the fact that they are a somatic race and we are a plasma. They drink the blood of their God; they eat his flesh; that way they become immortal. To them, there is no scandal in this. They find it perfectly natural. Yet, to us it is dreadful. That the worshipper should eat and drink its God? Awful to us; awful indeed. A disgrace and a shame—an abomination. The higher should always prey on the lower; the God should consume the worshipper.
   We watched as the Rautavaara Case was closed—closed by the shutting down of her brain so that all EEG activity ceased and the monitors indicated nothing. We felt disappointment, and in addition the Earth persons voted out a verdict of censure of us for our handling of the rescue mission in the first place.
   It is striking, the gulf which separates races developing in different star systems. We have tried to understand the Earth persons and we have failed. We are aware, too, that they do not understand us and are appalled in turn by some of our customs. This was demonstrated in the Rautavaara Case. But were we not serving the purposes of detached scientific study? I myself was amazed at Rautavaara’s reaction when the Savior ate Mr. Travis. I would have wished to see this most holy of the sacraments fulfilled with the others, with Rautavaara and Elms as well.
   But we were deprived of this. And the experiment, from our standpoint, failed.
   And we live now, too, under the ban of unnecessary moral blame.

The Alien Mind

   Inert within the depths of his theta chamber, he heard the faint tone and then the synthovoice. “Five minutes.”
   “Okay,” he said, and struggled out of his deep sleep. He had five minutes to adjust the course of his ship; something had gone wrong with the auto-control system. An error on his part? Not likely; he never made errors. Jason Bedford make errors? Hardly.
   As he made his way unsteadily to the control module, he saw that Norman, who had been sent with him to amuse him, was also awake. The cat floated slowly in circles, batting at a pen that somehow had gotten loose. Strange, Bedford thought.
   “I thought you were unconscious with me.” He examined the readout of the ship’s course. Impossible! A fifth-parsec off in the direction of Sirius. It would add a week to his journey. With grim precision he reset the controls, then sent out an alert signal to Meknos III, his destination.
   “Troubles?” the Meknosian operator answered. The voice was dry and cold, the calculating monotone of something that always made Bedford think of snakes.
   He explained his situation.
   “We need the vaccine,” the Meknosian said. “Try to stay on course.”
   Norman the cat floated majestically by the control module, reached out a paw, and jabbed at random; two activated buttons sounded faint bleeps and the ship altered course.
   “So you did it,” Bedford said. “You humiliated me in the eyes of an alien. You have reduced me to idiocy vis-à-vis the alien mind.” He grabbed the cat. And squeezed.
   “What was that strange sound?” the Meknosian operator asked. “A kind of lament.”
   Bedford said quietly, “There’s nothing left to lament. Forget you heard it.” He shut off the radio, carried the cat’s body to the trash sphincter, and ejected it.
   A moment later he had returned to his theta chamber and, once more, dozed. This time there would be no tampering with his controls. He dozed in peace.

   When his ship docked at Meknos III, the senior member of the alien medical team greeted him with an odd request. “We would like to see your pet.”
   “I have no pet,” Bedford said. Certainly it was true.
   “According to the manifest filed with us in advance—”
   “It is really none of your business,” Bedford said. “You have your vaccine; I’ll be taking off.”
   The Meknosian said, “The safety of any life-form is our business. We will inspect your ship.”
   “For a cat that doesn’t exist,” Bedford said.
   Their search proved futile. Impatiently, Bedford watched the alien creatures scrutinize every storage locker and passageway of his ship. Unfortunately, the Meknosians found ten sacks of dry cat kibble. A lengthy discussion ensued among them, in their own language.
   “Do I have permission,” Bedford said harshly, “to return to Earth now? I’m on a tight schedule.” What the aliens were thinking and saying was of no importance to him; he wished only to return to his silent theta chamber and profound sleep.
   “You’ll have to go through decontamination procedure A,” the senior Meknosian medical officer said. “So that no spore or virus from—”
   “I realize that,” Bedford said. “Let’s get it done.”
   Later, when decontamination had been completed and he was back in his ship starting up the drive, his radio came on. It was one or another of the Meknosians; to Bedford they all looked alike. “What was the cat’s name?” the Meknosian asked.
   “Norman,” Bedford said, and jabbed the ignite switch. His ship shot upward and he smiled.

   He did not smile, however, when he found the power supply to his theta chamber missing. Nor did he smile when the backup unit could also not be located. Did I forget to bring it? he asked himself. No, he decided; I wouldn’t do that. They took it.
   Two years before he reached Terra. Two years of full consciousness on his part, deprived of theta sleep; two years of sitting or floating or—as he had seen in military-preparedness training holofilms—curled up in a corner, totally psychotic.
   He punched out a radio request to return to Meknos III. No response. Well, so much for that.
   Seated at his control module, he snapped on the little inboard computer and said, “My theta chamber won’t function; it’s been sabotaged. What do you suggest I do for two years?”


There Are Emergency Entertaining Tapes

   “Right,” he said. He would have remembered. “Thank you.” Pressing the proper button, he caused the door of the tape compartment to slide open.
   No tapes. Only a cat toy—a miniature punching bag—that had been included for Norman; he had never gotten around to giving it to him. Otherwise… bare shelves.
   The alien mind, Bedford thought. Mysterious and cruel.
   Setting the ship’s audio recorder going, he said calmly and with as much conviction as possible, “What I will do is build my next two years around the daily routine. First, there are meals. I will spend as much time as possible planning, fixing, eating, and enjoying delicious repasts. During the time ahead of me, I will try out every combination of victuals possible.” Unsteadily, he rose and made his way to the massive food storage locker.
   As he stood gazing into the tightly packed locker—tightly packed with row upon row of identical snacks—he thought, On the other hand, there’s not much you can do with a two-year supply of cat kibble. In the way of variety. Are they all the same flavor?
   They were all the same flavor.

Notes

   All notes in italics are by Philip K. Dick. The year when the note was written appears in parentheses following the note. Most of these notes were written as story notes for the collections THE BEST OF PHILIP K. DICK (published 1977) and THE GOLDEN MAN (published 1980). A few were written at the request of editors publishing or reprinting a PKD story in a book or magazine.
   When there is a date following the name of a story, it is the date the manuscript of that story was first received by Dick’s agent, per the records of the Scott Meredith Literary Agency. Absence of a date means no record is available. The name of a magazine followed by a month and year indicates the first published appearance of a story. An alternate name following a story indicates Dick’s original name for the story, as shown in the agency records.
   These five volumes include all of Philip K. Dick’s short fiction, with the exception of short novels later published as or included in novels, childhood writings, and unpublished writings for which manuscripts have not been found. The stories are arranged as closely as possible in chronological order of composition; research for this chronology was done by Gregg Rickman and Paul Williams.
 
 
   THE LITTLE BLACK BOX (“From Ordinary Household Objects”) 5/6/63. Worlds of Tomorrow, Aug 1964.
   I made use of this story when I wrote my novel DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP? Actually, the idea is better put forth in the story. Here, a religion is regarded as a menace to all political systems; therefore it, too, is a kind of political system, perhaps even an ultimate one. The concept of caritas (or agape) shows up in my writing as the key to the authentic human. The android, which is the unauthentic human, the mere reflex machine, is unable to experience empathy. In this story it is never clear whether Mercer is an invader from some other world. But he must be; in a sense all religious leaders are… but not from another planet as such. (1978)
 
   THE WAR WITH THE FNOOLS Galactic Outpost, Spring 1964.
   Well, once again we are invaded. And, humiliatingly, by a life form which is absurd. My colleague Tim Powers once said that Martians could invade us simply by putting on funny hats, and we’d never notice. It’s a sort of low-budget invasion. I guess we’re at the point where we can be amused by the idea of Earth being invaded. (And this is when they really zap you.) (1978)
 
   A GAME OF UNCHANCE 11/9/63. Amazing, July 1964.
   A carnival is feral; another carnival shows up and is pitted against the first one; and the antithetical interaction is preplanned in such a way that the first carnival wins. It’s as if the two opposing forces that underlie all change in the universe are rigged; in favor of thanatos, the dark force, yin or strife, which is to say, the force of destruction. (1978)
 
   PRECIOUS ARTIFACT 12/9/63. Galaxy, Oct 1964.
   This story utilized a peculiar logic which I generally employ, which Professor Patricia Warrick pointed out to me. First you have Y. Then you do a cybernetics flipflop and you have null-Y. Okay, now you reverse it again and have null-null-Y. Okay, the question is: Does null-null Y equal Y3? Or is it a deepening of null-Y? In this story, what appears to be the case is Y but we find out the opposite is true (null-Y). But then that turns out not to be true, so are we back to Y? Professor Warrick says that my logic winds up with Y equals null-Y. I don’t agree, but I’m not sure what I do wind up with. Whatever it is, in terms of logic, it is contained in this particular story. Either I’ve invented a whole new logic or, ahem, I’m not playing with a full deck. (1978)
 
   RETREAT SYNDROME 12/23/63. Worlds of Tomorrow, Jan 1965.
 
   A TERRAN ODYSSEY 3/17/64 [previously unpublished; put together by PKD from sections of DR. BLOODMONEY].
 
   YOUR APPOINTMENT WILL BE YESTERDAY 8/27/65. Amazing, Aug 1966. [Included in adapted form in PKD’s novel COUNTER-CLOCK WORLD.]
 
   HOLY QUARREL 9/13/65. Worlds of Tomorrow, May 1966.
 
   NOT BY ITS COVER 9/21/65. Famous Science Fiction, Summer 1968.
   Here I presented what used to be a wish on my part: that the Bible was true. Obviously, I was at a sort of halfway point between doubt and faith. Years later I’m still in that position; I’d like the Bible to be true, but—well, maybe if it isn’t we can make it so. But, alas, it’s going to take plenty of work to do it. (1978)
 
   RETURN MATCH 10/14/65. Galaxy, Feb 1967.
   The theme of dangerous toys runs like a tattered thread throughout my writing. The dangerous disguised as the innocent… and what could be more innocent than a toy? This story makes me think of a set of huge speakers I looked at last week; they cost six thousanddollars and were larger than refrigerators. Our joke about them was that if you didn’t go to the audio store to see them, they’d come to see you. (1978)
 
   FAITH OF OUR FATHERS 1/17/66. Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison, Garden City, 1967. [Hugo Award nominee]
   The title is that of an old hymn. I think, with this story, I managed to offend everybody, which seemed at the time to be a good idea, but which I’ve regretted since. Communism, drugs, sex, God—I put it all together, and it’s been my impression since that when the roof fell in on me years later, this story was in some eerie way involved. (1976)
   I don’t advocate any of the ideas in Faith Of Our Fathers; I don’t, for example, claim that the Iron Curtain countries will win the cold war—or morally ought to. One theme in the story, however, seems compelling to me, in view of recent experiments with hallucinogenic drugs: the theological experience, which so many who have taken LSD have reported. This appears to me to be a true new frontier; to a certain extent the religious experience can now be scientifically studied… and, what is more, may be viewed as part hallucination but containing other, real components. God, as a topic in science fiction, when it appeared at all, used to be treated polemically, as in OUT OF THE SILENT PLANET. But I prefer to treat it as intellectually exciting. What if, through psychedelic drugs, the religious experience becomes commonplace in the life of intellectuals? The old atheism, which seemed to many of us—including me—valid in terms of our experiences, or rather lack of experiences, would have to step momentarily aside. Science fiction, always probing what is about to be thought, become, must eventually tackle without preconceptions a future neo-mystical society in which theology constitutes as major a force as in the medieval period. This is not necessarily a backward step, because now these beliefs can be tested—forced to put up or shut up. I, myself, have no real beliefs about God; only my experience that He is present… subjectively, of course; but the inner realm is real too. And in a science fiction story one projects what has been a personal inner experience into a milieu; it becomes socially shared, hence discussable. The last word, however, on the subject of God may have already been said: in A.D. 840 by John Scotus Erigena at the court of the Frankish king Charles the Bald. “We do not know what God is. God Himself does not know what He is because He is not anything. Literally God is not, because He transcends being.” Such a penetrating—and Zen—mystical view, arrived at so long ago, will be hard to top; in my own experiences with psychedelic drugs I have had precious tiny illumination compared with Erigena. (1966)
 
   THE STORY TO END ALL STORIES FOR HARLAN ELLISON’S ANTHOLOGY DANGEROUS VISIONS Niekas, Fall 1968.
 
   THE ELECTRIC ANT 12/4/68. Fantasy & Science Fiction, Oct 1969.
   Again the theme: How much of what we call “reality” is actually out there or rather within our own head? The ending of this story has always frightened me… image of the rushing wind, the sound of emptiness. As if the character hears the final fate of the world itself. (1976)
 
   CADBURY, THE BEAVER WHO LACKED written 12/71 [previously unpublished].
 
   A LITTLE SOMETHING FOR US TEMPUNAUTS 2/13/73. Final Stage, edited by Edward L. Ferman and Barry N. Malzberg, New York, 1974.
   In this story I felt a vast weariness over the space program, which had thrilled us so at the start—especially the first lunar landing—and then had been forgotten and virtually shutdown, a relic of history. I wondered, if time-travel became a “program” would it suffer the same fate? Or was there an even worse possibility latent in it, within the very nature of the paradoxes of time-travel? (1976)
   The essence of the time-travel story is a confrontation of some sort, best of all by the person with himself. Really, this is the drama of much good fiction anyhow, except that in such a story as A Little Something For Us Tempunauts the moment in which the man meets himself face-to-face permits an alienation that could not occur in any other variety of writing… alienation and not understanding, as one might expect. Addison Doug-One rides alive on the casket containing the corpse of Addison Doug-Two and knows it, knows he is now two persons—he is split as in a physical schizophrenia. And his mind also is divided rather than united; he gains no insight from this event, neither of himself nor of that other Addison Doug who can no longer reason or problem-solve, but can only lie there inert and in darkness. This irony is just one of the enormous number of ironies possible in time-travel stories; naively, one would think that to travel into the future and return would lead to an increase in knowledge rather than to a loss of it. The three tempunauts go ahead in time, return, and are trapped, perhaps forever, by ironies and within ironies, the greatest one of which, I think, is their own bewilderment at their own actions. It is as if the increase in information brought about by such a technological achievement—information as to exactly what is going to happen—decreases true understanding. Perhaps Addison Doug knows too much.
   In writing this story I felt a weary sadness of my own, and fell into the space (I should say time) that the characters are in, more so than usual. I felt a futility about futility—there is nothing more defeating than a strong awareness of defeat, and as I wrote I realized that what for us remains merely a psychological problem—over-awareness of the likelihood of failing and the lethal feedback from this—would for a time-traveler be instantly converted into an existential, physical horror-chamber. We, when we’re depressed, are fortunately imprisoned within our heads; once time-travel becomes a reality, however, this self-defeating psychological attitude could spell doom on a scale beyond calculation. Here again, science fiction allows a writer to transfer what usually is an internal problem into an external environment; he projects it in the form of a society, a planet, with everyone stuck, so to speak, in what formerly was one unique brain. I don’t blame some readers for resenting this, because the brains of some of us are unpleasant places to be in… but on the other hand, what a valuable tool this is for us: to grasp that we do not all reatty see the universe in the same way, or, in a sense, the same universe at all. Addison Doug’s dismal world suddenly spreads out and becomes the world of many people. But unlike a person reading a story, who can and will finish it and abolish his inclusion in the author’s world, the people in this story are stuck fast forever. This is a tyranny not yet possible so readily… but, when you consider the power of the coercive propaganda apparatus of the modern-day state (when it’s the enemy state we call it “brainwashing”) you might wonder if it isn’t a question of degree. Our glorious leaders of right now cannot trap us in extensions of their heads merely by lugging some old VW motor parts around, but the alarm of the characters in this story as to what is befalling them might rightly be our own alarm in a lesser way.
   Addison Doug expresses the desire “to see no more summers.” We should all object; noone should drag us, however subtly or for whatever evidently benign reasons, into that view or that desire: we should individually and collectively yearn to see as many summers as we can, even in the imperfect world we are living in now. (1973)
 
   THE PRE-PERSONS 12/20/73. Fantasy & Science Fiction, Oct 1974.
   In this I incurred the absolute hate of Joanna Russ who wrote me the nastiest letter I’ve ever received; at one point she said she usually offered to beat up people (she didn’t use the word “people”) who expressed opinions such as this. I admit that this story amounts to special pleading, and I am sorry to offend those who disagree with me about abortion on demand. I also got some unsigned hate mail, some of it not from individuals but from organizations promoting abortion on demand. Well, I have always managed to get myself into hot water. Sorry, people. But for the pre-person’s sake I am not sorry. I stand where I stand: “Hier steh’ Ich; Ich kann nicht anders,” as Martin Luther is supposed to have said. (1978)
 
   THE EYE OF THE SYBIL 5/15/75 [previously unpublished].
 
   THE DAY MR. COMPUTER FELL OUT OF ITS TREE written summer 1977 [previously unpublished].
 
   THE EXIT DOOR LEADS IN 6/21/79. Rolling Stone College Papers, Fall 1979.
 
   CHAINS OF AIR, WEB OF AETHER (“The Man Who Knew How to Lose”) 7/9/79. Stellar #5, edited by Judy-Lynn del Rey, New York, 1980. [Included in PKD’s novel THE DIVINE INVASION.]
 
   STRANGE MEMORIES OF DEATH 3/27/80. Interzone, Summer 1984.
 
   I HOPE I SHALL ARRIVE SOON (titled “Frozen Journey” in its magazine appearance; “I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon” is PKD’s title) 4/24/80. Playboy, Dec 1980. [Playboy Award winner]
 
   RAUTAVAARA’S CASE 5/13/80. Omni, Oct 1980.
 
   THE ALIEN MIND The Yuba City High Times, 20 Feb 1981.
 

[The piece that follows appeared in THE BEST OF PHILIP K. DICK under the title, “Afterthought by the Author.”]
 
   The basic premise dominating my stories is that if I ever met an extraterrestrial intelligence (more commonly called a “creature from outer space”) I would find I had more to say to it than to my next-door neighbor. What the people on my block do is bring in their newspaper and mail and drive off in their cars. They have no other outdoor habits except mowing their lawns. I went next door one time to check into the indoor habits. They were watching TV. Could you, in writing a sf novel, postulate a culture on these premises? Surely such a society doesn’t exist, except maybe in my imagination. And there isn’t much imagination involved.
   The way out of living in the middle of an under-imaginative figment is to make contact, in your own mind, with other civilizations as yet unborn. You’re doing the same thing when you read sf that I’m doing when I write it; your neighbor probably is as alien a life form to you as mine is to me. The stories in this collection are attempts at reception—at listening to voices from another place, very far off, sounds quite faint but important. They only come late at night, when the background din and gabble of our world have faded out. When the newspapers have been read, the TV sets shut off, the cars parked in their various garages. Then, faintly, I hear voices from another star. (I clocked it once, and reception is best between 3:00 A.M. and 4:45 A.M.). Of course, I don’t usually tell people this when they ask, “Say, where do you get your ideas?” I just say I don’t know. It’s safer.
   Let’s take these stories, then, and assume them to be (one) garbled receptions mixed with pure inventiveness, and (two) an alternative to dog food commercials in living color on TV. Both bypass what is immediately available. Both assumptions reach out as far as possible. Both sweep the void and return with something to report: that the universe is full of scheming, living, busy entities intent on their own pursuits, oblivious to the interests of others, alienated from their next-door neighbors, and, most of all, wondering who they can contact when all else fails. Wondering who lives as they do; wondering, maybe, about us.
   The majority of these stories were written when my life was simpler and made sense. I could tell the difference between the real world and the world I wrote about. I used to dig in the garden, and there is nothing fantastic or ultradimensional about crab grass… unless you are an sf writer, in which case pretty soon you are viewing crab grass with suspicion. What are its real motives? And who sent it in the first place?
   The question I always found myself asking was, What is it really? It only looks like crab grass. That’s what they want us to think it is. One day the crab grass suits will fall off and their true identity will be revealed. By then the Pentagon will be full of crab grass and it’ll be too late. The crab grass, or what we took to be crab grass, will dictate terms. My earlier stories had such premises. Later, when my personal life became complicated and full of unfortunate convolutions, worries about crab grass got lost somewhere. I became educated to the fact that the greatest pain does not come zooming down from a distant planet, but up from the depths of the heart. Of course, both could happen; your wife and child could leave you, and you could be sitting alone in your empty house with nothing to live for, and in addition the Martians could bore through the roof and get you.
   As to what the stories in this collection mean, I will not cite the usual copout that the story must speak for itself, but rather the copout that I don’t really know. I mean, know above and beyond what it says, which is what any reader can extract from them. One time a whole class of kids wrote me about my story The Father-Thing, and every kid wanted to know where I got my idea. That was easy, because it was based on childhood memories of my father; but later on, in rereading my answers, I noticed that I never said the same thing twice. With all intent at honesty, I gave each kid a different answer. I guess this is what makes a fiction writer. Give him six facts and he’ll link them together first one way and then another, on and on until you forcibly stop him.
   Literary criticism, probably, should be left to the critics, since that’s their job. One time I read in a distinguished book of criticism on sf that in my novel THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE the pin which the character Juliana used to hold her blouse together symbolized all that which held together the themes, ideas, and subplots of the novel itself—which I hadn’t known when I wrote that section. But what if Juliana, also not knowing it, had removed the pin? Would the novel have fallen apart? Or at least come open in the middle and exposed a whole lot of cleavage (which was why her boyfriend insisted she put on the pin in the first place)? I will do my best, though, to unpin these stories.
   The advantage of the story over the novel is that in the story you catch the protagonist at the climax of his life, but in the novel you’ve got to follow him from the day he was born to the day he dies (or nearly so). Open any novel at random and usually what is happening is either dull or unimportant. The only way to redeem this is through style. It is not what happened but how it is told. Pretty soon the professional novelist acquires the skill of describing everything with style, and content vanishes. In a story, though, you can’t get away with this. Something important has to happen. I think this is why gifted professional fiction writers wind up writing novels. Once their style is perfected, they have it made. Virginia Woolf, for instance, woundup writing about nothing at all.
   In these stories, though, I remember that in every case before I sat down to write, I had to have an idea. There had to be some real concept: an actual thing from which the story was built. It must always be possible to say, “Did you read the story about—” and then capsulize what it was about. If the essence ofsfis the idea (as Dr. Willis McNelly maintains), if indeed the idea is the true “hero,” then the sf story probably remains the sf form par excellence, with the sf novel a fanning out, an expansion into all ramifications. Most of my own novels are expansions of earlier stories, or fusions of several stories—superimpositions. The germ lay in the story; in a very real sense, that was its true distillate. And some of my best ideas, which meant the most to me, I could never manage to expand into novel form. They exist only as stories, despite all my efforts.
   1976

A Maze of Death

Philip Kindred Dick

Author’s Foreword
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A Maze of Death
by Philip K. Dick

Author’s Foreword

   To my two daughters, Laura and Isa



   The theology in this novel is not an analog of any known religion. It stems from an attempt made by William Sarill and myself to develop an abstract, logical system of religious thought, based on the arbitrary postulate that God exists. I should say, too, that the late Bishop James A. Pike, in discussions with me, brought forth a wealth of theological material for my inspection, none of which I was previously acquainted with.
   In the novel, Maggie Walsh’s experiences after death are based on an L.S.D. experience of my own. In exact detail.
   The approach in this novel is highly subjective; by that I mean that at any given time, reality is seen—not directly—but indirectly, i.e., through the mind of one of the characters. This viewpoint mind differs from section to section, although most of the events are seen through Seth Morley’s psyche.
   All material concerning Wotan and the death of the gods is based on Richard Wagner’s version of Der Ring des Nibelungen, rather than on the original body of myths.
   Answers to questions put to the tench were derived from the I Ching, the Chinese Book of Changes.
   “Tekel upharsin” is Aramaic for “He has weighed and now they divide.” Aramaic was the tongue that Christ spoke. There should be more like him.

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   His job, as always, bored him. So he had during the previous week gone to the ship’s transmitter and attached conduits to the permanent electrodes extending from his pineal gland. The conduits had carried his prayer to the transmitter, and from there the prayer had gone into the nearest relay network; his prayer, during these days, had bounced throughout the galaxy, winding up—he hoped—at one of the godworlds.
   His prayer had been simple. “This damn inventory-control job bores me,” he had prayed. “Routine work—this ship is too large and in addition it’s overstaffed. I’m a useless standby module. Could you help me find something more creative and stimulating?” He had addressed the prayer, as a matter of course, to the Intercessor. Had it failed he would have presently readdressed the prayer, this time to the Mentufacturer.
   But the prayer had not failed.
   “Mr. Tallchief,” his supervisor said, entering Ben’s work cubicle. “You’re being transferred. How about that?”
   “I’ll transmit a thankyou prayer,” Ben said, and felt good inside. It always felt good when one’s prayers were listened to and answered. “When do I transfer? Soon?” He had never concealed his dissatisfaction from his supervisor; there was now even less reason to do so.
   “Ben Tallchief,” his supervisor said. “The praying mantis.”
   “Don’t you pray?” Ben asked, amazed.
   “Only when there’s no other alternative. I’m in favor of a person solving his problems on his own, without outside help. Anyhow, your transfer is valid.” His supervisor dropped a document on the desk before Ben. “A small colony on a planet named Delmak-O. I don’t know anything about it, but I suppose you’ll find it all out when you get there.” He eyed Ben thoughtfully. “You’re entitled to use one of the ship’s nosers. For a payment of three silver dollars.”
   “Done,” Ben said, and stood up, clutching the document.
   He ascended by express elevator to the ship’s transmitter, which he found hard at work transacting official ship business. “Will you be having any empty periods later today?” he asked the chief radio operator. “I have another prayer, but I don’t want to tie up your equipment if you’ll be needing it.”
   “Busy all day,” the chief radio operator said. “Look, Mac—we put one prayer through for you last week; isn’t that enough?”
   Anyhow I tried, Ben Tallchief mused as he left the transmitter with its hardworking crew and returned to his own quarters. If the matter ever comes up, he thought, I can say I did my best. But, as usual, the channels were tied up by nonpersonal communications.
   He felt his anticipation grow; a creative job at last, and just when he needed it most. Another few weeks here, he said to himself, and I would have been pizzling away at the bottle again as in lamented former times. And of course that’s why they granted it, he realized. They knew I was nearing a break. I’d probably have wound up in the ship’s brig, along with—how many were there in the brig now?—well, however many there were in There. Ten, maybe. Not much for a ship this size. And with such stringent rules.
   From the top drawer of his dresser he got out an unopened fifth of Peter Dawson scotch, broke the seal, unscrewed the lid. Little libation, he told himself as he poured scotch into a Dixie cup. And celebration. The gods appreciate ceremony. He drank the scotch, then refilled the small paper cup.
   To further enlarge the ceremony he got down—a bit reluctantly—his copy of The Book: A. J. Specktowsky’s How I Rose From the Dead in My Spare Time and So Can You, a cheap copy with soft covers, but the only copy he had ever owned; hence he had a sentimental attitude toward it. Opening at random (a highly approved method) he read over a few familiar paragraphs of the great twenty-first century Communist theologian’s apologia pro vita sua.
   “God is not supernatural. His existence was the first and most natural mode of being to form itself.”
   True, Ben Tallchief said to himself. As later theological investigation had proved. Specktowsky had been a prophet as well as a logician; all that he had predicted had turned up sooner or later. There remained, of course, a good deal to know… for example, the cause of the Mentufacturer’s coming into being (unless one was satisfied to believe, with Specktowsky, that beings of that order were self-creating, and existing outside of time, hence outside of causality). But in the main it was all there on the many-times-printed pages.
   “With each greater circle the power, good and knowledge on the part of God weakened, so that at the periphery of the greatest circle his good was weak, his knowledge was weak—too weak for him to observe the Form Destroyer, which was called into being by God’s acts of form creation. The origin of the Form Destroyer is unclear; it is, for instance, not possible to declare whether (one) he was a separate entity from God from the start, uncreated by God but also selfcreating, as is God, or (two) whether the Form Destroyer is an aspect of God, there being nothing—”
   He ceased reading, sat sipping scotch and rubbing his forehead semi-wearily. He was forty-two years old and had read The Book many times. His life, although long, had not added up to much, at least until now. He had held a variety of jobs, doing a modicum of service to his employers, but never ever really excelling. Maybe I can begin to excel, he said to himself. On this new assignment. Maybe this is my big chance.
   Forty-two. His age had astounded him for years, and each time that he had sat so astounded, trying to figure out what had become of the young, slim man in his twenties, a whole additional year slipped by and had to be recorded, a continually growing sum which he could not reconcile with his selfimage. He still saw himself, in his mind’s eye, as youthful, and when he caught sight of himself in photographs he usually collapsed. For example, he shaved now with an electric razor, unwilling to gaze at himself in his bathroom mirror. Somebody took my actual physical presence away and substituted this, he had thought from time to time. Oh well, so it went. He sighed.
   Of all his many meager jobs he had enjoyed one alone, and he still meditated about it now and then. In 2105 he had operated the background music system aboard a huge colonizing ship on its way to one of the Deneb worlds. In the tape vault he had found all of the Beethoven symphonies mixed haphazardly in with string versions of Carmen and of Delibes and he had played the Fifth, his favorite, a thousand times throughout the speaker complex that crept everywhere within the ship, reaching each cubicle and work area. Oddly enough no one had complained and he had kept on, finally shifting his loyalty to the Seventh and at last, in a fit of excitement during the final months of the ship’s voyage, to the Ninth—from which his loyalty never waned.
   Maybe what I really need is sleep, he said to himself. A sort of twilight of living, with only the background sound of Beethoven audible. All the rest a blur.
   No, he decided; I want to be! I want to act and accomplish something. And every year it becomes more necessary. Every year, too, it slips further and further away. The thing about the Mentufacturer, he reflected, is that he can renew everything. He can abort the decay process by replacing the decaying object with a new one, one whose form is perfect. And then that decays. The Form Destroyer gets hold of it—and presently the Mentufacturer replaces that. As with a succession of old bees wearing out their wings, dying and being replaced at last by new bees. But I can’t do that. I decay and the Form Destroyer has me. And it will get only worse.
   God, he thought, help me.
   But not by replacing me. That would be fine from a cosmological standpoint, but ceasing to exist is not what I’m after; and perhaps you understood this when you answered my prayer.
   The scotch had made him sleepy; to his chagrin he found himself nodding. To bring himself back to full wakefulness: that was necessary. Leaping up as he strode to his portable phonograph, took a visrecord at random, and placed it on the turntable. At once the far wall of the room lit up, and bright shapes intermingled with one another, a mixture of motion and of life, but unnaturally flat. He reflexively adjusted the depth-circuit; the figures began to become three dimensional. He turned up the sound as well.
   “… Legolas is right. We may not shoot an old man so, at unawares and unchallenged, whatever fear or doubt be on us. Watch and wait!”
   The bracing words of the old epic restored his perspective; he returned to his desk, reseated himself and got out the document which his supervisor had given him. Frowning, he studied the coded information, trying to decipher it. In numbers, punch-holes and letters it spelled out his new life, his world to come.
   “…You speak as one that knows Fangorn well. Is that so?”
   The visrecord played on, but he no longer heard it; he had begun to get the gist of the encoded messsage.
   “What have you to say that you did not say at our last meeting?” a sharp and powerful voice said. He glanced up and found himself confronted by the gray-clad figure of Gandalf. It was as if Gandalf were speaking to him, to Ben Tallchief. Calling him to account. “Or, perhaps, you have things to unsay?” Gandalf said.
   Ben rose, went over to the phonograph and shut it off. I do not feel able at this time to answer you, Gandalf, he said to himself. There are things to be done, real things; I can’t indulge myself in a mysterious, unreal conversation with a mythological character who probably never existed. The old values, for me, are suddenly gone; I have to work out what these damn punch-holes, letters and numbers mean.
   He was beginning to get the drift of it. Carefully, he replaced the lid on the bottle of scotch, twisting is tight. He would go in a noser, alone; at the colony he would join roughly a dozen others, recruited from a variety of sources. Range 5 of skills: a class C operation, on a K-4 pay scale. Maximum time: two years of operation. Full pension and medical benefits, starting as soon as he arrived. An override for any instructions he had already received, hence he could go at once. He did not have to terminate his work here before leaving.
   And I have the three silver dollars for the noser, he said to himself. So that is that; nothing else to worry about. Except …
   He could not discover what his job would consist of. The letters, numbers and punch-holes failed to say, or perhaps it was more correct to say that he could not get them to divulge this one piece of information—a piece he would much have wanted.
   But still it looked good. I like it, he said to himself. I want it. Gandalf, he thought, I have nothing to unsay; prayers are not often answered and I will take this. Aloud he said, “Gandaif, you no longer exist except in men’s minds, and what I have here comes from the One, True and Living Deity, who is completely real. What more can I hope for?” The silence of the room confronted him; he did not see Gadalf now because he had shut the record off. “Maybe someday,” he continued. “I will unsay this. But not yet; not now. You understand?” He waited, experiencing the silence, knowing that he could begin it or end it by a mere touch of the phonograph’s switch.

2

   Seth Morley neatly divided the Gruyère cheese lying before him with a plastic-handled knife and said, “I’m leaving.” He cut himself a giant wedge of cheese, lifted it to his lips via the knife. “Late tomorrow night. Tekel Upharsin Kibbutz has seen the last of me.” He grinned, but Fred Gossim, the settlement’s chief engineer, failed to return the message of triumph; instead Gossim frowned even more strongly. His disapproving presence pervaded the office.
   Mary Morley said quietly, “My husband applied for this transfer eight years ago. We never intended to stay here. You knew that.”
   “And we’re going with them,” Michael Niemand stammered in excitement. “That’s what you get for bringing a top-flight marine biologist here and then setting him to work hauling blocks of stone from the goddam quarry. We’re sick of it.” He nudged his undersized wife, Clair. “Isn’t that right?”
   “Since there is no body of water on this planet,” Gossim said gratingly, “we could hardly put a marine biologist to use in his stated profession.”
   “But you advertised, eight years ago, for a marine biologist,” Mary Morley pointed out. This made Gossim scowl even more profoundly. “The mistake was yours.”
   “But,” Gossim said, “this is your home. All of you—” He gestured at the group of kibbutz officials crowded around the entrance of the office. “We all built this.”
   “And the cheese,” Seth Morley said, “is terrible, here. Those quakkip, those goat-like suborganisms that smell like the Form Destroyer’s last year’s underwear—I want very much to have seen the last of them and it. The quakkip and the cheese both.” He cut himself a second slice of the expensive, imported Gruyère cheese. To Niemand he said, “You can’t come with us. Our instructions are to make the flight by noser. Point A. A noser holds only two people; in this case my wife and me. Point B. You and your wife are two more people, ergo you won’t fit. Ergo you can’t come.”
   “We’ll take our own noser,” Niemand said.
   “You have no instructions and/or permission to transfer to Delmak-O,” Seth Morley said from within his mouthful of cheese.
   “You don’t want us,” Niemand said.
   “Nobody wants you,” Gossim grumbled. “As far as I’m concerned without you we would do better. It’s the Morleys that I don’t want to see go down the drain.”
   Eying him, Seth Morley said tartly, “And this assignment is, a priori, ‘down the drain.’
   “It’s some kind of experimental work,” Gossim said, “As far as I can discern. On a small scale. Thirteen, fourteen people. It would be for you turning the clock back to the early days of Tekel Upharsin. You want to build up from that all over again? Look how long it’s taken for us to get up to a hundred efficient, well-intentioned members. You mention the Form Destroyer. Aren’t you by your actions decaying back the form of Tekel Upharsin?”
   “And my own form too,” Morley said, half to himself. He felt grim, now; Gossim had gotten to him. Gossin had always been good with words, amazing in an engineer. It had been Gossim’s silver-tongued words which had kept them all at their tasks throughout the years. But those words, to a good extent, had become vapid as far as the Morleys were concerned. The words did not work as they once had. And yet a glimmer of their past glory remained. He could just not quite shake off the bulky, dark-eyed engineer.
   But we’re leaving, Morley thought. As in Goethe’s Faust, “In the beginning was the deed.” The deed and not the word, as Goethe, anticipating the twentieth century existentialists, had pointed out.
   “You’ll want to come back,” Gossim opined.
   “Hmm,” Seth Morley said.
   “And you know what I’ll say to that?” Gossim said loudly. “If I get a request from you—both of you Morleys—to come back here to Tekel Upharsin Kibbutz, I’ll say, ‘We don’t have any need of a marine biologist; we don’t even have an ocean. And we’re not going to build so much as a puddle so that you can have a legitimate reason for working here.’”
   “I never asked for a puddle,” Morley said.
   “But you’d like one.”
   “I’d like any kind of body of water,” Morley said. “That’s the whole point; that’s why we’re leaving and that’s why we won’t be coming back.”
   “You’re sure Delmak-O has a body of water?” Gossim inquired.
   “I assume—” Morley began, but Gossim cut him off.
   “That,” Gossim said, “is what you assumed about Tekel Upharsin. That’s how your trouble began.”
   “I assumed,” Morley said, “that if you advertised for a marine biologist—” He sighed, feeling weary. There was no point trying to influence Gossim; the engineer—and chief officer of the kibbutz—had a closed mind. “Just let me eat my cheese,” Morley said, and tried an additional slice. But he had grown tired of the taste; he had eaten too much. “The hell with it,” he said, tossing his knife down. He felt irritable and he did not like Gossim; he felt no desire to continue the conversation. What mattered was the fact that no matter how he felt, Gossim could not revoke the transfer. It carried an override, and that was the long and the short of it… to quote William S. Gilbert.
   “I hate your bloody guts,” Gossim said.
   Morley said, “I hate yours, too.”
   “A Mexican standoff,” Niemand said. “You see, Mr. Gossim, you can’t make us stay; all you can do is yell.”
   Making an obscene gesture toward Morley and Niemand Gossim strode off, parting the group gathered there, and disappeared somewhere on the far side. The office was quiet, now. Seth Morley immediately began to feel better.
   “Arguments wear you out,” his wife said.
   “Yes,” he agreed. “And Gossim wears me out. I’m tired just from this one interchange, forgetting the eight full years of it which preceded today. I’m going to go select a noser.” He rose, made his way from the office and into the midday sun.
   A noser is a strange craft, he said to himself as he stood at the edge of the parking field surveying the lines of inert vessels. First of all, they were incredibly cheap; he could gain possession of one of these for less than four silver dollars. Secondly, they could go but never return; nosers were strictly one-way ships. The reason, of course, was simple: a noser was too small to carry fuel for a return trip. All the noser could do was kick off from a larger ship or a planetary surface, head for its destination, and quietly expire there. But—they did their job. Sentient races, human and otherwise, flocked throughout the galaxy aboard the little pod-like ships.
   Goodbye, Tekel Upharsin, Morley said to himself, and made a brief, silent salute to the rows of orange bushes growing beyond the noser parking lot.
   Which one should we take? he asked himself. They all looked alike: rusty, discarded. Like the contents of a used car lot back on Terra. I’ll choose the first one with a name on it beginning with M, he decided, and began reading the individual names.
   The Morbid Chicken. Well, that was it. Not very transcendental, but fitting; people, including Mary, were always telling him that he had a morbid streak. What I have, he said to himself, is a mordant wit. People confuse the two terms because they sound similar.
   Looking at his wristwatch he saw that he had time to make a trip to the packaging department of the citrus products factory. So he made off in that direction.
   “Ten pint jars of class AA marmalade,” he said to the shipping clerk. It was either get them now or not at all.
   “Are you sure you’re entitled to ten more pints?” The clerk eyed him dubiously, having had dealings with him before.
   “You can check on my marmalade standing with Joe Perser,” Morley said. “Go ahead, pick up the phone and give him a call.”
   “I’m too busy,” the clerk said. He counted out ten pint jars of the kibbutz’s main product and passed them to Morley in a bag, rather than in a cardboard carton.
   “No carton?” Morley said.
   “Scram,” the clerk said.
   Morley got one of the jars out, making sure that they were indeed class AA. They were. “Marmalade from Tekel Upharsin Kibbutz!” the label declared. “Made from genuine Seville oranges (group 3-B mutational subdivision). Take a pot of sunny Spain into your kitchen or cooking cubicle!”
   “Fine,” Morley said. “And thanks.” He lugged the bulky paper bag from the building and out once more into the bright sun of midday.
   Back again at the noser parking area he began getting the pints of marmalade stored away in the Morbid Chicken. The one good thing this kibbutz produces, he said to himself as he placed the jars one by one within the magnetic grip-field of the storage compartment. I am afraid this is one thing I’ll miss.
   He called Mary on his neck radio. “I’ve picked out a noser,” he informed her. “Come on down to the parking area and I’ll show it to you.”
   “Are you sure it’s a good one?”
   “You know you can take my mechanical ability for granted,” Morley said testily. “I’ve examined the rocket engine, wiring, controls, every life-protect system, everything, completely.” He pushed the last jar of marmalade away in the storage area and shut the door firmly.
   She arrived a few minutes later, slender and tanned in her khaki shirt, shorts and sandals. “Well,” she said, surveying the Morbid Chicken, “it looks rundown to me. But if you say it’s okay it is, I guess.”
   “I’ve already begun loading,” Morley said.
   “With what?”
   Opening the door of the storage compartment he showed her the ten jars of marmalade.
   After a long pause Mary said, “Christ.”
   “What’s the matter?”
   “You haven’t been checking the wiring and the engine. You’ve been out scrounging up all the goddam marmalade you could talk them out of.” She slammed the storage area door shut with venomous ire. “Sometimes I think you’re insane. Our lives depend on this goddam noser working. Suppose the oxygen system fails or the heat circuit fails or there’re microscopic leaks in the hull. Or—”
   “Get your brother to look at it,” he interrupted. “Since you have so much more trust in him than you do in me.”
   “He’s busy. You know that.”
   “Or he’d be here,” Morley said, “picking out which noser for us to take. Rather than me.”
   His wife eyed him intently, her spare body drawn up in a vigorous posture of defiance. Then, all at once, she sagged in what appeared to be half-amused resignation. “The strange thing is,” she said, “that you have such good luck—I mean in relation to your talents. This probably is the best noser here. But not because you can tell the difference but because of your mutant-like luck.”
   “It’s not luck. It’s judgment.”
   “No,” Mary said, shaking her head. “That’s the last thing it is. You have no judgment—not in the usual sense, anyhow. But what the hell. We’ll take this noser and hope your luck is holding as well as usual. But how can you live like this, Seth?” She gazed up plaintively into his face. “It’s not fair to me.”
   “I’ve kept us going so far.”
   “You’ve kept us here at this—kibbutz,” Mary said. “For eight years.”
   “But now I’ve gotten us off.”
   “To something worse, probably. What do we know about this new assignment? Nothing, except what Gossim knows—and he knows because he makes it his business to read over everyone else’s communications. He read your original prayer… I didn’t want to tell you because I knew it would make you so—”
   “That bastard.” He felt red, huge fury well up inside him, spiked with impotence. “It’s a moral violation to read another person’s prayers.”
   “He’s in charge. He feels everything is his business. Anyhow we’ll be getting away from that. Thank God. Come on; cool off. You can’t do anything about it; he read it years ago.”
   “Did he say whether he thought it was a good prayer?”
   Mary Morley said, “Fred Gossim would never say if it was. I think it was. Evidently it was, because you got the transfer.”
   “I think so. Because God doesn’t grant too many prayers by Jews due to that covenant back in the pre-Intercessor days when the power of the Form Destroyer was so strong, and our relationship to him—to God, I mean—was so fouled up.”
   “I can see you back in those days,” Mary said. “Kvetching bitterly about everything the Mentufacturer did and said.”
   Morley said, “I would have been a great poet. Like David.”
   “You would have held a little job, like you do now.” With that she strode off, leaving him standing in the doorway of the noser, one hand on his row of stored-away marmalade jars.
   His sense of impotence rose within him, choking his windpipe. “Stay here!” he yelled after her. “I’ll leave without you!”
   She continued on under the hot sun, not looking back and not answering.
   For the remainder of the day Seth Morley busied himself loading their possessions into the Morbid Chicken. Mary did not show herself. He realized, toward dinnertime, that he was doing it all. Where is she? he asked himself. It’s not fair.
   Depression hit him, as it generally did toward mealtime. I wonder if it’s all worth it, he said to himself. Going from one no-good job to another. I’m a loser. Mary is right about me; look at the job I did selecting a noser. Look at the job I’m doing loading this damn stuff in here. He gazed about the interior of the noser, conscious of the ungainly piles of clothing, books, records, kitchen appliances, typewriter, medical supplies, pictures, wear-forever couch covers, chess set, reference tapes, communications gear and junk, junk, junk. What have we in fact accumulated in eight years of work here? he asked himself. Nothing of any worth. And in addition, he could not get it all into the noser. Much would have to be thrown away or left for someone else to use. Better to destroy it, he thought gloomily. The idea of someone else gaining use of his possessions had to be sternly rejected. I’ll burn every last bit of it, he told himself. Including all the nebbish clothes that Mary’s collected in her jaybird manner. Selecting whatever’s bright and gaudy.
   I’ll pile her stuff outside, he decided, and then get all of mine aboard. It’s her own fault: she should be here to help. I’m under no mandate to load her kipple.
   As he stood there with an armload of clothes gripped tightly he saw, in the gloom of twilight, a figure approaching him. Who is it? he wondered, and peered to see.
   It was not Mary. A man, he saw, or rather something like a man. A figure in a loose robe, with long hair falling down his dark, full shoulders. Seth Morley felt fear. The Walker-on-Earth, he realized. Come to stop me. Shaking, he began to set down the armload of clothes. Within him his conscience bit furiously; he felt now the complete weight of all the baddoings he had done. Months, years—he had not seen the Walker-on-Earth for a long time, and the weight was intolerable. The accumulation which always left its mark within. Which never departed until the Intercessor removed it.
   The figure halted before him. “Mr. Morley,” it said.
   “Yes,” he said, and felt his scalp bleeding perspiration. His face dripped with it and he tried to wipe it away with the back of his hand. “I’m tired,” he said. “I’ve been working for hours to get this noser loaded. It’s a big job.”
   The Walker-on-Earth said, “Your noser, the Morbid Chicken, will not get you and your little family to Delmak-O. I therefore must interfere, my dear friend. Do you understand?”
   “Sure,” he said, panting with guilt.
   “Select another.”
   “Yes,” he said, nodding frantically. “Yes, I will. And thank you; thanks a lot. The fact of the matter is you saved our lives.” He peered at the dim face of the Walker-on-Earth, trying to see if its expression reproached him. But he could not tell; the remaining sunlight had begun to diffuse into an almost nocturnal haze.
   “I am sorry,” the Walker-on-Earth said, “that you had to labor so long for nothing.”
   “Well, as I say—”
   “I will help you with the reloading,” the Walker-on-Earth said. It reached its arms out, bending; it picked up a pile of boxes and began to move among the parked, silent nosers. “I recommend this,” it said presently, halting by one and reaching to open its door. “It is not much to look at, but mechanically it’s perfect.”
   “Hey,” Morley said, following with a swiftly snatched-up load. “I mean, thanks. Looks aren’t important anyhow; it’s what’s on the inside that counts. For people as well as nosers.” He laughed, but the sound emerged as a jarring screech; he cut it off instantly, and the sweat gathered around his neck turned cold with his great fear.
   “There is no reason to be afraid of me,” the Walker said.
   “Intellectually I know that,” Morley said.
   Together, they labored for a time in silence, carrying box after box from the Morbid Chicken to the better noser. Continually Morley tried to think of something to say, but he could not. His mind, because of his fright, had become dim; the fires of his quick intellect, in which he had so much faith, had almost flickered off.
   “Have you ever thought of getting psychiatric help?” the Walker asked him at last.
   “No,” he said.
   “Let’s pause a moment and rest. So we can talk a little.”
   Morley said, “No.”
   “Why not?”
   “I don’t want to know anything; I don’t want to hear anything.” He heard his voice bleat out in its weakness, steeped in its paucity of knowledge. The bleat of foolishness, of the greatest amount of insanity of which he was capable. He knew this, heard it and recognized it, and still he clung to it; he continued on. “I know I’m not perfect,” he said. “But I can’t change. I’m satisfied.”
   “Your failure to examine the Morbid Chicken.”
   “Mary made a good point; usually my luck is good.”
   “She would have died, too.”
   “Tell her that.” Don’t tell me, he thought. Please, don’t tell me any more. I don’t want to know!
   The Walker regarded him for a moment. “Is there anything,” it said at last, “that you want to say to me?”
   “I’m grateful, damn grateful. For your appearance.”
   “Many times during the past years you’ve thought to yourself what you would say to me if you met me again. Many things passed through your mind.”
   “I—forget,” he said, huskily.
   “May I bless you?”
   “Sure,” he said, his voice still husky. And almost inaudible. “But why? What have I done?”
   “I am proud of you, that’s all.”
   “But why?” He did not understand; the censure which he had been waiting for had not arrived.
   The Walker said, “Once years ago you had a tomcat whom you loved. He was greedy and mendacious and yet you loved him. One day he died from bone fragments lodged in his stomach, the result of filching the remains of a dead Martian root-buzzard from a garbage pail. You were sad, but you still loved him. His essence, his appetite—all that made him up had driven him to his death. You would have paid a great deal to have him alive again, but you would have wanted him as he was, greedy and pushy, himself as you loved him, unchanged. Do you understand?”
   “I prayed then,” Morley said. “But no help came. The Mentufacturer could have rolled time back and restored him.”
   “Do you want him back now?”
   “Yes,” Morley said raspingly.
   “Will you get psychiatric help?”
   ‘‘No.
   “I bless you,” the Walker-on-Earth said, and made a motion with his right hand: a slow and dignified gesture of blessing. Seth Morley bowed his head, pressed his right hand against his eyes… and found that black tears had lodged in the hollows of his face. Even now, he marveled. That awful old cat; I should have forgotten him years ago. I guess you never really forget such things, he thought. It’s all in there, in the mind, buried until something like this comes up.
   “Thank you,” he said, when the blessing ended.
   “You will see him again,” the Walker said. “When you sit with us in Paradise.”
   “Are you sure?”
   “Yes.”
   “Exactly as he was?”
   “Yes.”
   “Will he remember me?”
   “He remembers you now. He waits. He will never stop waiting.”
   “Thanks,” Morley said. “I feel a lot better.”
   The Walker-on-Earth departed.
   Entering the cafeteria of the kibbutz, Seth Morley sought out his wife. He found her eating curried lamb shoulder at a table in the shadows of the edge of the room. She barely nodded as he seated himself facing her.
   “You missed dinner,” she said presently. “That’s not like you.”
   Morley said, “I saw him.”
   “Who?” She eyed him keenly.
   “The Walker-on-Earth. He came to tell me that the noser I picked out would have killed us. We never would have made it.”
   “I knew that,” Mary said. “I knew that—thing would never have gotten us there.”
   Morley said, “My cat is still alive.”
   “You don’t have a cat.”
   He grabbed her arm, halting her motions with the fork. “He says we’ll be all right; we’ll get to Delmak-O and I can begin the new job.”
   “Did you ask him what the new job is all about?”
   “I didn’t think to ask him that, no.”
   “You fool.” She pried his hand loose and resumed eating. “Tell me what the Walker looked like.”
   “You’ve never seen it?”
   “You know I’ve never seen it!”
   “Beautiful and gentle. He held out his hand and blessed me.”
   “So it manifested itself to you as a man. Interesting. If it had been as a woman you wouldn’t have listened to—”
   “I pity you,” Morley said. “It’s never intervened to save you. Maybe it doesn’t consider you worth saving.”
   Mary, savagely, threw down her fork; she glowered at him with animal ferocity. Neither of them spoke for a time.
   “I’m going to Delmak-O alone,” Morley said at last. “You think so? You really think so? I’m going with you; I want to keep my eyes on you at all times. Without me—”
   “Okay,” he said scathingly. “You can come along. What the hell do I care? Anyhow if you stayed here you’d be having an affair with Gossim, ruining his life—” He ceased speaking, panting for breath.
   In silence, Mary continued eating her lamb.

3

   “You are one thousand miles above the surface of Delmak-O,” the headphone clamped against Ben Tallchief’s ear declared. “Switch to automatic pilot, please.”
   “I can land her myself,” Ben Tallchief said into his mike. He gazed at the world below him, wondering at its colors. Clouds, he decided. A natural atmosphere. Well, that answers one of my many questions. He felt relaxed and confident. And then he thought of his next question: Is this a god-world? And that issue sobered him.
   He landed without difficulty… stretched, yawned, belched, unfastened his seat belt, stood up, awkwardly walked to the hatch, opened the hatch, then went back to the control room to shut off the still active rocket engine. While he was at it he shut off the air supply, too. That seemed to be all. He clambered down the iron steps and bounced his way clumsily onto the surface of the planet.
   Next to the field a row of flat-roofed buildings: the tiny colony’s interwoven installations. Several persons were moving toward his noser, evidently to greet him. He waved, enjoying the feel of the plastic leather steering gloves—that and the very great augmentation of his somatic self which his bulky suit provided.
   “Hi!” a female voice called.
   “Hi,” Ben Tallchief said, regarding the girl. She wore a dark smock, with matching pants, a general issue outfit that matched the plainness of her round, clean, freckled face. “Is this a god-world?” he asked, walking leisurely toward her.
   “It is not a god-world,” the girl said, “but there are some strange things out there.” She gestured toward the horizon vaguely; smiling at him in a friendly manner she held out her hand. “I’m Betty Jo Berm. Linguist. You’re either Mr. Tallchief or Mr. Morley; everyone else is here already.”
   “Tallchief,” he said.
   “I’ll introduce you to everyone. This elderly gentleman is Bert Kosler, our custodian.”
   “Glad to meet you, Mr. Kosler.” Handshake.
   “I’m glad to meet you, too,” the old man said. “This is Maggie Walsh, our theologian.”
   “Glad to meet you, Miss Walsh.” Handshake. Pretty girl.
   “Glad to meet you, too, Mr. Tallchief.”
   “Ignatz Thugg, thermoplastics.”
   “Hi, there.” Overly masculine handshake. He did not like Mr. Thugg.
   “Dr. Milton Babble, the colony’s M.D.”
   “Nice to know you, Dr. Babble.” Handshake. Babble, short and wide, wore a colorful short-sleeved shirt. His face had on it a corrupt expression which was hard to penetrate.
   “Tony Dunkelwelt, our photographer and soil-sample expert.”
   “Nice to meet you.” Handshake.
   “This gentleman here is Wade Frazer, our psychologist.” A long, phony handshake with Frazer’s wet, unclean fingers.
   “Glen Belsnor, our electronics and computer man.”
   “Glad to meet you,” Handshake. Dry, horny, competent hand.
   A tall, elderly woman approached, supporting herself with a cane. She had a noble face, pale in its quality but very fine. “Mr. Tallchief,” she said, extending a slight, limp hand to Ben Tallchief. “I am Roberta Rockingham, the sociologist. It’s nice to meet you. We’ve all been wondering and wondering about you.”
   Ben said, “Are you the Roberta Rockingham?” He felt himself glow with the pleasure of meeting her. Somehow he had assumed that the great old lady had died years ago. It confused him to find himself being introduced to her now.
   “And this,” Betty Jo Berm said, “is our clerk-typist, Susie Dumb.”
   “Glad to know you, Miss—” He paused.
   “Smart,” the girl said. Full-breasted and wonderfully shaped. “Suzanne Smart. They think it’s funny to call me Susie Dumb.” She extended her hand and they shook.
   Betty Jo Berm said, “Do you want to look around, or just what?”
   Ben said, “I’d like to know the purpose of the colony. They didn’t tell me.”
   “Mr. Tallchief,” the great old sociologist said, “they didn’t tell us either.” She chuckled. “We’ve asked everyone in turn as he arrives and no one knows. Mr. Morley, the last man to arrive—he won’t know either, and then where will we be?”
   To Ben, the electronics maintenance man said, “There’s no problem. They put up a slave satellite; it’s orbiting five times a day and at night you can see it go past. When the last person arrives—that’ll be Morley—we’re instructed to remote activate the audio tape transport aboard the satellite, and from the tape we’ll get our instructions and an explanation of what we’re doing and why we’re here and all the rest of that crap; everything we want to know except ‘How do you make the refrig colder so the beer doesn’t get warm?’ Yeah, maybe they’ll tell us that, too.”
   A general conversation among the group of them was building up. Ben found himself drifting into it without really understanding it. “At Betelgeuse 4 we had cucumbers, and we didn’t grow them from moonbeams, the way you hear.”
   “I’ve never seen him.”
   “Well, he exists. You’ll see him someday.”
   “We’ve got a linguist so evidently there’re sentient organisms here, but so far our expeditions have been informal, not scientific. That’ll change when—”
   “Nothing changes. Despite Specktowsky’s theory of God entering history and starting time into motion again.”
   “If you want to talk about that; talk to Miss Walsh. Theological matters don’t interest me.”
   “You can say that again. Mr. Tallchief, are you part Indian?”
   “Well, I’m about one-eighth Indian. You mean the name?”
   “These buildings are built lousy. They’re already ready to fall down. We can’t get it warm when we need warm; we can’t cool it when we need cool. You know what I think? I think this place was built to last only a very short time. Whatever the hell we’re here for we won’t be long; or rather, if we’re here long we’ll have to construct new installations, right down to the electrical wiring.”
   “Some bug squeaks in the night. It’ll keep you awake for the first day or so. By ‘day’ of course I mean twenty-four-hour period. I don’t mean ‘daylight’ because it’s not in the daytime that it squeaks, it’s at night. Every goddamn night. You’ll see.”
   “Listen, Tallchief, don’t call Susie ‘dumb.’ If there’s one thing she’s not it’s dumb.”
   “Pretty, too.”
   “And do you notice how her—”
   “I noticed, but I don’t think we should discuss it.”
   “What line of work did you say you’re in, Mr. Tallchief? Pardon?”
   “You’ll have to speak up, she’s a little deaf.”
   “What I said was—”
   “You’re frightening her. Don’t stand so close to her.”
   “Can I get a cup of coffee?”
   “Ask Maggie Walsh. She’ll fix one for you.”
   “If I can get the damn pot to shut off when it’s hot; it’s been just boiling the coffee over and over.”
   “I don’t see why our coffee pot won’t work. They perfected them back in the twentieth century. What’s left to know that we don’t know already?”
   “Think of it as being like Newton’s color theory. Everything about color that could be known was known by 1800. And then Land came along with his two-light-source and intensity theory, and what had seemed a closed field was busted all over.”
   “You mean there may be things about self-regulating coffee pots that we don’t know? That we just think we know?”
   “Something like that.” And so on. He listened distantly, answered when he was spoken to and then, all at once, fatigued, he wandered off, away from the group, toward a cluster of leathery green trees: they looked to Ben as if they constituted the primal source for the covering of psychiatrists’ couches.
   The air smelled bad—faintly bad—as if a waste-processing plant were chugging away in the vicinity. But in a couple of days I’ll be used to it, he informed himself.
   There is something strange about these people, he said to himself. What is it? They seem so… he hunted for the word. Overly bright. Yes, that was it. Prodigies of some sort, and all of them ready to talk. And then he thought, I think they’re very nervous. That must be it; like me, they’re here without knowing why. But—that didn’t fully explain it. He gave up, then, and turned his attention outward, to embrace the pompous green-leather trees, the hazy sky overhead, the small nettle-like plants growing at his feet.
   This is a dull place, he thought. He felt swift disappointment. Not much better than the ship; the magic had already left. But Betty Jo Berm had spoken of unusual life forms beyond the perimeter of the colony. So possibly he couldn’t justifiably extrapolate on the basis of this little area. He would have to go deeper, farther and farther away from the colony. Which, he realized, is what they’ve all been doing. Because after all, what else is there to do? At least until we receive our instructions from the satellite.
   I hope Morley gets here soon, he said to himself. So we can get started.
   A bug crawled up onto his right shoe, paused there, and then extended a miniature television camera. The lens of the camera swung so that it pointed directly at his face.
   “Hi,” he said to the bug.
   Retracting its camera, the bug crawled off, evidently satisfied. I wonder who or what it’s probing for? he wondered. He raised his foot, fooling momentarily with the idea of crushing the bug, and then decided not to. Instead he walked over to Betty Jo Berm and said, “Were the monitoring bugs here when you arrived?”
   “They began to show up after the buildings were erected. I think they’re probably harmless.”
   “But you can’t be sure.”
   “There isn’t anything we can do about them anyhow. At first we killed them, but whoever made them just sent more out.”
   “You better trace them back to their source and see what’s involved.”
   “Not ‘you,’ Mr. Tallchief. ‘We.’ You’re as much a part of this operation as anyone here. And you know just as much—and just as little—as we do. After we get our instructions we may find that the planners of this operation want us to—or do not want us to—investigate the indigenous life forms here. We’ll see. But meanwhile, what about coffee?”
   “You’ve been here how long?” Ben asked her as they sat at a plastic micro-bar sipping coffee from faintly-gray plastic cups.
   “Wade Frazer, our psychologist, arrived first. That was roughly two months ago. The rest of us have been arriving in dribs and drabs. I hope Morley comes soon. We’re dying to hear what this is all about.”
   “You’re sure Wade Frazer doesn’t know?”
   “Pardon?” Betty Jo Berm blinked at him.
   “He was the first one here. Waiting for the rest of you. I mean of us. Maybe this is a psychological experiment they’ve set up, and Frazer is running it. Without telling anyone.
   “What we’re afraid of,” Betty Jo Berm said, “is not that. We have one vast fear, and that is this: there is no purpose to us being here, and we’ll never be able to leave. Everyone came here by noser: that was mandatory. Well, a noser can land but it can’t take off. Without outside help we’d never be able to leave here. Maybe this is a prison—we’ve thought of that. Maybe we’ve all done something, or anyhow someone thinks we’ve done something.” She eyed him alertly with her gray, calm eyes. “Have you done anything, Mr. Tallchief?” she asked.
   “Well, you know how it is.”
   “I mean, you’re not a criminal or anything.”
   “Not that I know of.”
   “You look ordinary.”
   “Thanks.”
   “I mean, you don’t look like a criminal.” She rose, walked across the cramped room to a cupboard. “How about some Seagram’s VO?” she asked.
   “Fine,” he said, pleased at the idea.
   As they sat drinking coffee laced with Seagram’s VO Canadian whiskey (imported) Dr. Milton Babble strolled in, perceived them, and seated himself at the bar. “This is a second-rate planet,” he said to Ben without preamble. His dingy, shovel-like face twisted in distaste. “It just plain is second rate. Thanks.” He accepted his cup of coffee from Betty Jo, sipped, still showed distaste. “What’s in this?” he demanded. He then saw the bottle of Seagram’s VO. “Hell, that ruins coffee,” he said angrily. He set his cup down again, his expression of distaste greater than ever.
   “I think it helps,” Betty Jo Berm said.
   Dr. Babble said, “You know, it’s a funny thing, all of us here together. Now see, Tallchief, I’ve been here a month and I have yet to find someone I can talk to, really talk to. Every person here is completely involved with himself and doesn’t give a damn about the others. Excluding you, of course, B.J.”
   Betty Jo said, “I’m not offended. It’s true. I don’t care about you, Babble, or any of the rest. I just want to be left alone.” She turned toward Ben. “We have an initial curiosity when someone lands … as we had about you. But afterward, after we see the person and listen to him a little—” She lifted her cigarette from the ashtray and inhaled its smoke silently. “No offense meant, Mr. Tallchief, as Babble just now said. We’ll get you pretty soon and you’ll be the same; I predict it. You’ll talk with us for a while and then you’ll withdraw into—” She hesitated, groping the air with her right hand as if physically searching for a word. As if a word were a three dimensional object which she could seize manually. “Take Belsnor. All he thinks about is the refrigeration unit. He has a phobia that it’ll stop working, which you would gather from his panic would mean the end of us. He thinks the refrigeration unit is keeping us from—” She gestured with her cigarette. “Boiling away.”
   “But he’s harmless,” Dr. Babble said.
   “Oh, we’re all harmless,” Betty Jo Berm said. To Ben she said, “Do you know what I do, Mr. Tallchief? I take pills. I’ll show you.” She opened her purse and brought out a pharmacy bottle. “Look at these,” she said as she handed the bottle to Ben. “The blue ones are stelazine, which I use as an anti-emetic. You understand: I use it for that, but that isn’t its basic purpose. Basically stelazine is a tranquilizer, in doses of less than twenty milligrams a day. In greater doses it’s an anti-hallucinogenic agent. But I don’t take it for that either. Now, the problem with stelazine is that it’s a vasodilator. I sometimes have trouble standing up after I’ve taken some. Hypostasis, I think it’s called.”
   Babble grunted, “So she also takes a vasoconstrictor.”
   “That’s this little white tablet,” Betty Jo said, showing him the part of the bottle in which the white tablets dwelt. “It’s methamphetamine. Now, this green capsule is—”
   “One day,” Babble said, “your pills are going to hatch, and some strange birds are going to emerge.”
   “What an odd thing to say,” Betty Jo said.
   “I meant they look like colored birds’ eggs.”
   “Yes, I realize that. But it’s still a strange thing to say.” Removing the lid from the bottle she poured out a variety of pills into the palm of her hand. “This red cap—that’s of course pentabarbital, for sleeping. And then this yellow one, it’s norpramin, which counterbalances the C.N.S. depressive effect of the mellaril. Now, this square orange tab, it’s new. It has five layers on it which time-release on the so-called ‘trickle principle.’ A very effective C.N.S. stimulant. Then a—”
   “She takes a central nervous system depressor,” Babble broke in, “and also a C.N.S. stimulant.”
   Ben said, “Wouldn’t they cancel each other out?”
   “One might say so, yes,” Babble said.
   “But they don’t,” Betty Jo said. “I mean subjectively I can feel the difference. I know they’re helping me.”
   “She reads the literature on them all,” Babble said. “She brought a copy of the P.D.R. with her—Physicians’ Desk Reference—with lists of side effects, contraindications, dosage, when indicated and so forth. She knows as much about her pills as I do. In fact, as much as the manufacturers know. If you show her a pill, any pill, she can tell you what it is, what it does, what—” He belched, drew himself up higher in his chair, laughed, and then said, “I remember a pill that had as side effects—if you took an overdose—convulsions, coma and then death. And in the literature, right after it told about the convulsions, coma and death, it said, May Be Habit Forming. Which always struck me as an anticlimax.” Again he laughed, and then pried at his nose with one hairy, dark finger. “It’s a strange world,” he murmured. “Very strange.”
   Ben had a little more of the Seagram’s VO. It had begun to fill him with a familiar warm glow. He felt himself beginning to ignore Dr. Babble and Betty Jo. He sank into the privacy of his own mind, his own being, and it was a good feeling.
   Tony Dunkelwelt, photographer and soil-sample specialist, put his head in the door and called, “There’s another noser landing. It must be Morley.” The screen door banged shut as Dunkelwelt scuttled off.
   Half-rising to her feet, Betty Jo said, “We’d better go. So at last, we’re finally all here.” Dr. Babble rose, too. “Come on, Babble,” she said, and started toward the door. “And you, Mr. Eighth-Part-Indian-Tallchief.”
   Ben drank down the rest of his coffee and Seagram’s VO and got up, dizzily. A moment later and he was following them out the door and into the light of day.