50 in 50

And then there were the rest When I was putting together this collection I found that it was falling nicely into categories Which was a good thing to have happen since I could then organize this volume into some comprehensive form But there were a good many stories that just defied classification These were the head-scratchers, the undefinable, the works of fiction that just did not fit into any simple category.

I guess the only thing to call them are the one-offs Not a bad thing Upon rereading them I find that this difference makes them, many times, the best of the lot May you, gentle reader, agree.

Portrait of the Artist

"11 A.M.!!!" the note blared at him, pinned to the upper right corner of his drawing board. "MARTIN'S OFFICE!!" He had lettered it himself with a number 7 brush, funereal India ink on harsh yellow paper, big letters, big words.

Big end to everything. Pachs tried to make himself believe that this was just another one of Martin's royal commands: a lecture, a chewing-out, a complaint. That's what he had thought when he had knocked out the reminder for himself, before Miss Fink's large watery eyes had blinked at him and she had whispered hoarsely, "It's on order, Mr. Pachs, coming today, I saw the receipt on his desk. A Mark IX." She had blinked moistly again, rolled her eyes towards the closed door of Martin's office then scurried away.

A Mark IX. He knew that it would have to come someday, knew without wanting to admit it, and had only been kidding himself when he said they couldn't do without him. His hands spread out on the board before him, old hands, networked wrinkles and dark liver spots, always stained a bit with ink and marked with a permanent callus on the inside of his index finger. How many years had he held a pencil or a brush there? He didn't see them shaking.

There was almost an hour left before he had to see Martin, plenty of time to finish up the story he was working on. He pulled the sheet of illustration board from the top of the pile and found the script. Page 3 of a thing called "Prairie Love" for the July issue of Real Rangeland Romances. Love books with their heavy copy were always a snap. By the time Miss Fink had typed in the endless captions and dialogue on her big flatbed varityper at least half of every panel was full. The script, panel 1:

In house, Judy C/U cries and Robert in BG very angry.

A size 3 head for Judy in the foreground, he quickly drew the right size oval in blue pencil, then a stick figure for Robert in the background, hand raised, fist closed, to show anger. The Mark VIII Robot Comic Artist would do all the rest. Pachs slipped the sheet into the machine's holder — then quickly pulled it out again. He had forgotten the balloons. Sloppy, sloppy. He quickly blue-penciled their outlines and V's for tails.

When he thumbed the switch, the machine hummed to life, electronic tubes glowing inside its dark case. He punched the control button for the heads, first the girl — GIRL HEAD, FULL FRONT, SIZE 3, SAD HEROINE. Girls of course all had the same face in comic books, the HEROINE was just a note to the machine not to touch the hair. For a VILLAINESS it would be inked in black, all villainesses have black hair, just as all villains have moustaches as well as the black hair, to distinguish them from the hero. The machine buzzed and clattered to itself while it sorted through the stock cuts, then clicked and banged down a rubber stamp of the correct head over the blue circle he had drawn. MAN HEAD, FULL FRONT, SIZE 6, SAD, HERO brought a smaller stamp banging down on the other circle that topped the stick figure. Of course the script said "angry," but that was what the raised fist was for, since there are only sad and happy faces in comics.

Life isn't that simple, he thought to himself, a very unoriginal idea that he usually brought out at least once a day while sitting at the machine. MAN FIGURE, BUSINESS SUIT, he set on the dial, then hit the DRAW button. The pen-tipped arm dropped instantly and began to quickly ink in a suited man's figure over the blue direction lines he had put down. He blinked and watched it industriously knocking in a wrinkle pattern that hadn't varied a stroke in fifty years, then a collar and tie and two swift necklines to connect the neatly inked torso to the rubber-stamped head. The pen leaped out to the cuff end of the just-drawn sleeve and quivered there. A relay buzzed and a dusty red panel flashed INSTRUCTIONS PLEASE at him. With a savage jab he pushed the button labeled FIST. The light went out and the flashing pen drew a neat fist at the end of the arm.

Pachs looked at the neatly drawn panel and sighed. The girl wasn't unhappy enough; he dipped his crow quill into the inkpot and knocked in two tears, one in the corner of each eye. Better. But the background was still pretty empty in spite of the small dictionary in each balloon. BALLOONS he punched automatically while he thought, and the machine pen darted down and inked the outlines of the balloons that held the lettering, ending each tail the correct distance from the speaker's mouth. A little background, it needed a touch. He pressed code 473 which he knew from long experience stood for HOME WINDOW WITH LACE CURTAINS. It appeared on the paper quickly, automatically scaled by the machine to be in perspective with the man's figure before it. Pachs picked up the script and read panel 2:

Judy falls on couch Robert tries to console her mother rushes in angrily wearing apron.

There was a four-line caption in this panel and after the three balloons had been lettered as well, the total space remaining was just about big enough for a single closeup, a small one. Pachs didn't labor this panel, as he might have, but took the standard way out. He was feeling tired today, very tired. HOUSE, SMALL FAMILY produced a small cottage from which emerged the trails of the three balloons and let the damn reader figure out who was talking.

The story was finished just before eleven and he stacked the pages neatly, put the script into the file and cleaned the ink out of the pen in the Mark VIII; it always clogged if he left it to dry.

Then it was eleven and time to see Martin. Pachs fussed a bit, rolling down his sleeves and hanging his green eyeshade from the arm of his dazor lamp; yet the moment could not be avoided. Pulling his shoulders back a bit he went out past Miss Fink hammering away industriously on the varityper, and walked in through the open door to Martin's voice.

"Come on, Louis.” Martin wheedled into the phone in his most syrupy voice. "If it's a matter of taking the word of some two-bit shoestring salesman in Kansas City, or of taking my word, who you gonna doubt?. . That's right. . Okay. . Right Louis. I'll call you back in the morning. . Right, you too. . my best to Helen." He banged the phone back onto the desk and glared up at Pachs with his hard beebee eyes.

"What do you want?"

"You told me you wanted to see me, Mr. Martin."

"Yeah, yeah," Martin mumbled half to himself. He scratched flakes of dandruff loose from the back of his head with the chewed end of a pencil, and rocked from side to side in his chair.

"Business is business, Pachs, you know that, and expenses go up all the time. Paper — you know how much it costs a ton? So we gotta cut corners…"

"If you're thinking of cutting my salary again, Mr. Martin, I don't think I could. . well, maybe not much…"

"I'm gonna have to let you go, Pachs. I've bought a Mark IX to cut expenses and I already hired some kid to run it."

"You don't have to do that, Mr. Martin," Pachs said hurriedly, aware that his words were tumbling one over the other and that he was pleading, but not caring. "I could run the machine I'm sure, just give me a few days to catch on…"

"Outta the question. In the first place I'm paying the kid beans because she's just a kid and that's the starting salary, and in the other place she's been to school about this thing and can really grind the stuff out. You know I'm no bastard, Pachs, but business is business. And I'll tell you what, this is only Tuesday and I'll pay you for the rest of the week. How's that? And you can take off right now."

"Very generous, particularly after eight years," Pachs said, forcing his voice to be calm.

"That's all right, it's the least I could do." Martin was congenitally immunje to sarcasm.

The lost feeling hit Pachs then, a dropping away of his stomach, a sensation that everything was over. Martin was back on the phone again and there was really nothing that Pachs could say. He walked out of the office, walking very straight, and behind him he heard the banging of Miss Fink's machine halt for a instant. He did not want to see her, to face those tender and damp eyes, not now. Instead of turning to go back to the studio, where he would have to pass her desk, he opened the hall door and stepped out. He closed it slowly behind him and stood with his back to it for an instant, until he realized it was frosted glass and she could see his figure from the inside: he moved hurriedly away.

There was a cheap bar around the corner where he had a beer every payday, and he went there now. "Good morning and top of the morning to you. . Mr. Pachs," the robot bartender greeted him with recorded Celtic charm, hesitating slightly between the stock phrase and the search of the customer-tapes for his name. "And will you be having the usual?"

"No I will not be having the usual, you plastic and gaspipe imitation of a cheap stage Irishman, I'll be having a double whiskey."

"Sure and you are the card, sir," the electronically affable bartender nodded, horsehair spitcurl bobbing, as it produced a glass and bottle and poured a carefully measured drink.

Pachs drank it in a gulp and the unaccustomed warmth burned through the core of cold indifference that he had been holding on to. Christ, it was all over, all over. They would get him now with their Senior Citizens' Home and all the rest, he was good as dead.

There are some things that don't bear thinking about. This was one. Another double whiskey followed the first, the money for this was no longer important because he would be earning no more after this week. And the unusual dose of alcohol blurred some of the pain. Now, before he started thinking about it too much, he had to get back to the office. Clean his personal junk out of the taboret and pick up his paycheck from Miss Fink. It would be ready, he knew that; when Martin was through with you he liked to get you out of the way, quickly.

"Floor please?" the voice questioned from the top of the elevator.

"Go straight to hell!" he blurted out. He had never before realized how many robots there were around: Oh how he hated them today. "I'm sorry, that firm is not in this building, have you consulted the registry?"

"Twenty-three," he said and his voice quavered, and he was glad he was alone in the elevator. The doors closed.

There was a hall entrance to the studio and this door was standing open. He was halfway through the door before he realized why — then it was too late to turn back. The Mark VIII that he had nursed along and used for so many years lay on its side in the corner, uprooted and very dusty on the side that had stood against the wall.

Good, he thought to himself, and at the same time knew it was stupid to hate a machine, but still relishing the thought that it was being discarded too. In its place stood a columnar apparatus in a gray-crackle cabinet. It reached almost to the ceiling and appeared as ponderous as a safe.

"It's all hooked up now, Mr. Martin, ready to go with a hundred-percent lifetime guarantee, as you know. But I'll just sort of pre-flight it for you and give you an idea just how versatile this versatile machine is."

The speaker was dressed in gray coveralls of the exact same color as the machine's finish, and was pointing at it with a gleaming screwdriver. Martin watched, frowning, and Miss Fink fluttered in the background. There was someone else there, a thin young girl in a pink sweater who bovinely chewed at a cud of gum.

"Let's give Mark IX here a real assignment, Mr. Martin. A cover for one of your magazines, something I bet you never thought a machine could tackle before, and normal machines can't…"

"Fink!" Martin barked and she rambled over with a sheet of illustration board and a small color sketch.

"We got just one cover in the house to do, Mr. Martin," she said weakly. "You okayed it for Mr. Pachs to do…"

"The hell with all that," Martin growled, pulling it from her hand and looking at it closely. "This is for our best book, do you understand that, and we can't have no hack horsing around with rubber stamps. Not on the cover of Fighting Real War Battle Aces."

"You need not have the slightest worry, I assure you," the man in the overalls said, gently lifting the sketch from Martin's fingers. "I'm going to show you the versatility of the Mark IX, something that you might find it impossible to believe until you see it in action. A trained operator can cut a Mark IX tape from a sketch or a description. And the results are always dramatic to say the least." He seated himself at a console with typewriter keys that projected from the side of the machine, and while he typed a ribbon of punched tape collected in the basket at one side.

"Your new operator knows the machine code and breaks down any art concept into standard symbols, cut on tape. The tape can be examined or corrected, stored or modified and used over again if need be. There — I've recorded the essence of your sketch. Now I have one more question to ask you — in what style would you like it to be done?"

Martin |nade a porcine interrogative sound.

"Startled aren't you, sir — well I thought you would be. The Mark IX contains style tapes of all the great masters of the Golden Age. You can have Kubert or Caniff, Giunta or Barry. For figure work you can use Raymond, for your romances, capture the spirit of Drake."

"How's about Pachs?"

"I'm sorry, I'm afraid I don't know of—"

"A joke. Let's get going. Caniff, that's what I want to see."

Pachs felt himself go warm all over, then suddenly cold. Miss Fink looked over and caught his eyes, and looked down, away. He clenched his fists and shifted his feet to leave, but listened instead. He could not leave, not yet.

"… and the tape is fed into the machine, the illustration board centered on the impression table and the cycle button depressed. So simple, once a tape has been cut, that a child of three could operate it. A press on the button and just stand back. Within this genius of a machine the orders are being analyzed and a picture built up. Inside the memory circuits are bits and pieces of every object that man has ever imagined or seen and drawn for his own edification. These are assembled in the correct manner in the correct proportions and assembled on the collator's screen. When the final picture is complete the all-clear light flashes — there it goes — and we can examine the completed picture on the screen here."

Martin bent over and looked in through the hooded opening.

"Just perfect isn't it? But if for any reason the operator is dissatisfied the image can be changed now in any manner desired by manipulation of the editorial controls. And when satisfied the print button is depressed, the image is printed on a film of reusable plastic sheet, charged electrostatically in order to pick up the powdered ink and then the picture is printed in a single stroke onto the paper below."

A pneumatic groan echoed theatrically from the bowels of the machine as a rectangular box crept down on a shining plunger and pressed against the paper. It hissed and a trickle of vapor oozed out. The machine rose back to position and the man in the coveralls held up the paper, smiling.

"Now isn't that a fine piece of art?"

Martin grunted.

Pachs looked at it and couldn't take his eyes away: he was afraid he was going to be sick. The cover was not only good, it was good Caniff, just as the master might have drawn it himself. Yet the most horrible part was that it was Pachs' own cover, his own layout. Improved. He had never been what might be called a tremendous artist, but he wasn't a bad artist. He did all right in comics, and during the good years he was on top of the pack. But the field kept shrinking and when the machines came in it went bust. There was almost no spot for an artist now. Just a job here and there as sort of layout boy and machine minder. He had taken that — how many years now? — because old and dated as his work was he was still better than any machine that drew heads with a rubber stamp.

Not anymore. He could not even pretend to himself anymore that he was needed, or even useful.

The machine was better.

He realized then that he had been clenching his fists so tightly that his nails had sunk into the flesh of his palms. He opened and rubbed them together and noticed that they were shaking badly. The Mark IX was turned off and they were all gone: he could hear Miss Fink's machine takking away in the outer office. The little girl was telling Martin about the special supplies she would need to buy to operate the machine, and when Pachs closed the connecting door he cut off the grumbling reply about extra expenses not being mentioned.

Pachs warmed his fingers in his armpits until the worst of the tremors stopped. Then he carefully pinned a sheet of paper onto his drawing board and adjusted the light so it would not be in his eyes. With measured strokes he ruled out a standard comic page and separated it into six panels, making the sixth panel a big one, stretching the width of the page. He worked steadily at the penciling, stopping only once to stretch his back and walk over to the window and look out. Then he went back to the board and as the afternoon light faded he finished the inking. Very carefully he washed off his battered but still favorite Windsor & Newton brush and slipped it back into the spring holder.

There was a bustle in the outer office and it sounded like Miss Fink getting ready to leave, or maybe it was the new girl coming back with the supplies. In any case it was late, and he had to go now.

Quickly, before he could change his mind, he ran full tilt at the window, his weight bursting through the glass, and hurtled the twenty-three stories to the street below. Miss Fink heard the breaking glass and screamed, then screamed louder when she came into the room. Martin, complaining about the noise, followed her, but shut up when he saw what had happened. A bit of glass crunched under his shoes when he looked out the window. The doll-like figure of Pachs was visible in the center of the gathering crowd, sprawled from sidewalk to street and bent at an awful angle as it followed the step of the curb.

"Oh God, Mr. Martin, oh God look at this…" Miss Fink wailed.

Martin went and stood next to her in front of the drawing board and looked at the page still pinned there. It was neatly done, well drawn and carefully inked.

In the first panel was a self-portrait of Pachs working on a page, bent over this same drawing board. In the second panel he was sitting back and washing out his brush. In the third standing. In the fourth panel the artist stood before the window, nicely rendered in chiaroscuro with backlighting. Five was a forced perspective shot from above, down the vertical face of the building with the figure hurtling through the air towards the pavement below.

In the last panel, in clear and horrible detail, the old man was bent broken and bloody over the wrecked fender of the car that was parked there: the spectators looked on, horrified.

"Look at that will you," Martin said disgustedly, tapping the drawing with his thumb. "When he went out the window he missed the car by a good two yards. Didn't I always tell you he was no good at getting the details right?"

Mute Milton

With ponderous smoothness the big Greyhound bus braked to a stop at the platform, and the door swung open. "Springville," the driver called out. "Last stop!" The passengers stirred in the aisle and climbed down the steps into the glare of the sun. Sam Morrison sat patiently, alone, on the wide rear seat, waiting until the last passengers were at the door before he put the cigar box under his arm, rose and followed them. The glare of sunlight blinded him after the tinted glass dimness of the bus, and the moist air held the breathless heat of Mississippi summer. Sam went carefully down the steps, one at a time, watching his feet, and wasn't aware of the man waiting there until something hard pushed at his stomach.

"What business yuh got in Springville, boy?"

Sam blinked through his steel-rimmed glasses at the big man in the gray uniform who stood before him, prodding him with a short, thick nightstick. He was fat as well as big, and the smooth melon of his stomach bulged out over his belt worn low about his hips.

"Just passing through, sir," Sam Morrison said and took his hat off with his free hand disclosing his cut-short grizzled hair. He let his glance slide across the flushed, reddened face and the gold badge on the shirt before him, then lowered his eyes.

"An' just where yuh going to, boy? Don' keep no secrets from me…" the voice rasped again.

"Carteret, sir, my bus leaves in an hour." The only answer was an uncommunicative grunt. The lead-weighted stick tapped on the cigar box under Sam's arm. "What yuh got in there — a gun?"

"No, sir, I wouldn't carry a gun." Sam opened the cigar box and held it out: it contained a lump of metal, a number of small electronic components and a two-inch speaker, all neatly wired and soldered together. "It's a… radio, sir."

"Turn it on."

Sam threw a switch and made one or two careful adjustments. The little speaker rattled, and there was the squeak of tinny music barely audible above the rumble of bus motors. The red-faced man laughed.

"Now that's what ah call a real nigger radio. . piece uh trash." His voice hardened again. "See that you're on that bus, hear?"

"Yes, sir," Sam said to the receding, sweat-stained back of the shirt, then carefully closed the box. He started towards the colored waiting room, but when he passed the window and looked in he saw that it was empty. And there were no dark faces visible anywhere on the street. Without changing pace Sam passed the waiting room and threaded his way between the buses in the cinder parking lot and out of the rear gate. He had lived all of his sixty-seven years in the State of Mississippi; so he knew at once that there was trouble in the air— and the only thing to do about trouble was to stay away from it. The streets became narrower and dirtier, and he trod their familiar sidewalks until he saw a field worker in patched overalls turn into a doorway ahead under the weathered BAR sign. Sam went in after him; he would wait here until a few minutes before the bus was due.

"Bottle of Jax, please." He spread his coins on the damp, scratched bar and picked up the cold bottle. There was no glass. The bartender said nothing. After ringing up the sale he retired to a chair at the far end of the bar with his head next to the murmuring radio and remained there, dark and impenetrable. The only light came from the street outside, and the high-backed booths in the rear looked cool and inviting. There were only a few other customers here, each of them sitting separately with a bottle of beer on the table before him. Sam threaded his way through the close-spaced tables and had already started to slide into the booth near the rear door when he noticed that someone was already there, seated on the other side of the table.

"I'm sorry, I didn't see you," he said and started to get up, but the man waved him back onto the bench and took an airline bag with TWA on it from the table and put it down beside him.

"Plenty of room for both," he said and raised his own bottle of beer. "Here's looking at you." Sam took a sip from his own bottle, but the other man kept drinking until he had drained half of his before he lowered it with a relaxed sigh. "That's what I call foul beer," he said.

"You seem to be enjoying it," Sam told him, but his slight smile took the edge from his words.

"Just because it's cold and wet — but I'd trade a case of it for a bottle of Bud or a Ballantine."

"Then you're from the North, I imagine?" Sam had thought so from the way he talked, sharp and clipped. Now that his eyes were getting used to the dimness, he could see that the other was a young man in his twenties with medium-dark skin, wearing a white shirt with rolled up sleeves. His face was taut and the frown wrinkles on his forehead seemed etched there.

"You are damned right, I'm from the North and I'm going back—" He broke off suddenly and took another swig of beer. When he spoke again his voice was cautious. "Are you from these parts?"

"I was born not far from here, but right now I live in Carteret, just stopping off here between buses."

"Carteret — that's where the college is, isn't it?"

"That is correct. I teach there."

The younger man smiled for the first time. "That sort of puts us in the same boat; I go to NYU, majoring in economics." He put his hand out. "Charles Wright. Everyone but my mother calls me Charlie."

"Very pleased to meet you," Sam said in his slow, old-fashioned way. "I am Sam Morrison, and it is Sam on my birth certificate too."

"I'm interested in your college; I meant to step in there but—" He stopped talking at the sound of a car's engine in the street outside and leaned forward so that he could see out the front door, remaining there until the car ground into gear and moved away. When he dropped back onto the seat, Sam could see that there were fine beads of sweat in the lines of his forehead. He took a quick drink from his bottle.

"When you were at the bus station, you didn't happen to see a big cop with a big gut, red faced all the time?"

"Yes, I met him, — he talked to me when I got off the bus."

"The bastard!"

"Don't get worked up, Charles, — he is just a policeman doing his job."

"Just a----!" The young man spat a short, filthy word. "That's

Brinkley, — you must have heard of him, toughest man south of Bomb-ingham. He's going to be elected sheriff next fall, and he's already grand knight of the Klan, a real pillar of the community."

"Talking like that's not going to do you any good," Sam said mildly.

"That's what Uncle Tom said — and as I remember he was still a slave when he died. Someone has got to speak up, — you can't remain quiet forever."

"You talk like one of those Freedom Riders." Sam tried to look stern, but he was never very good at it.

"Well, I am, if you want to know the truth of it, but the ride ends right here. I'm going home. I'm scared and I'm not afraid to admit it. You people live in a jungle down here; I never realized how bad it could be until I came down. I've been working on the voters committee, and Brinkley got word of it and swore he was going to kill me or put me in jail for life. And you know what — I believe it. I'm leaving today, just waiting for the car to pick me up. I'm going back north where I belong."

"I understand you have your problems up there too…"

"Problems!" Charlie finished his beer and stood up. "I wouldn't even call them problems after what I've seen down here. It's no paradise iiK New York — but you stand a chance of living a bit longer.

Where I grew up in South Jamaica we had it rough, but we had our own house in a good neighborhood and — you take another beer?"

"No, one is enough for me thank you."

Charlie came back with a fresh beer and picked up where he had left off. "Maybe we're second-class citizens in the North — but at least we're citizens of some kind and can get some measure of happiness and fulfillment. Down here a man is a beast of burden, and that's all he is ever going to be — if he has the wrong color skin."

"I wouldn't say that; things get better all the time. My father was a field man, a son of a slave — and I'm a college teacher. That's progress of a sort."

"What sort?" Charlie pounded the table yet kept his voice in an angry whisper. "So one hundredth of one percent of the Negroes get a little education and pass it on at some backwater college. Look, I'm not running you down, — I know you do your best. But for every man like you there must be a thousand who are born and live and die in filthy poverty, year after year, without hope. Millions of people. Is that progress? And even yourself — are you sure you wouldn't be doing better if you were teaching in a decent university?"

"Not me," Sam laughed. "I'm just an ordinary teacher and I have enough trouble getting geometry and algebra across to my students without trying to explain topology or Boolean algebra or anything like that."

"What on earth is that Bool. . thing? I never heard of it."

"It's, well, an uninterpreted logical calculus, a special discipline. I warned you, — I'm not very good at explaining these things though I can work them out well enough on paper. That is my hobby, really, what some people call higher mathematics, and I know that if I were working at a big school I would have no time to devote to it."

"How do you know? Maybe they would have one of those big computers — wouldn't that help you?"

"Perhaps, of course, but I've worked out ways of getting around the need for one. It just takes a little more time, that's all."

"And how much time do you have left?" Charlie asked quietly, then was instantly sorry he had said it when he saw the older man lower his head without answering. "I take that back. I've got a big mouth. I'm sorry, but I get so angry. How do you know what you might have done if you had the training, the facilities…" He shut up, realizing he was getting in deeper every second.

There was only the murmur of distant traffic in the hot, dark silence, the faint sound of music from the radio behind the bar. The bartender stood, switched the radio off and opened the trap behind the bar to bring up another case of beer. From nearby the sound of the music continued like a remembered echo. Charlie realized that it was coming from the cigar box on the table before them.

"Do you have a radio in that?" he asked, happy to change the subject.

"Yes — well, really no, though there is an RF stage."

"If you think you're making sense — you're not. I told you, I'm majoring in economics."

Sam smiled and opened the box, pointing to the precisely wired circuits inside. "My nephew made this, — he has a little I-fix-it shop, but he learned a lot about electronics in the Air Force. I brought him the equations, and we worked out the circuit together."

Charlie thought about a man with electronic training who was forced to run a handyman's shop, but he had the sense not to mention it. "Just what is it supposed to do?"

"It's not really supposed to do anything. I just built it to see if my equations would work out in practice. I suppose you don't know much about Einstein's unified field theory. .?" Charlie smiled ruefully and raised his hands in surrender. "It's difficult to talk about. Putting it the simplest way, there is supposed to be a relation between all phenomena, all forms of energy and matter. You are acquainted with the simpler interchanges, heat energy to mechanical energy as in an engine, electrical energy to light—"

"The light bulb!"

"Correct. To go further, the postulation has been made that time is related to light energy, as is gravity to light, as has been proven, and gravity to electrical energy. That is the field I have been exploring. I have made certain suppositions that there is an interchange of energy within a gravitic field, a measurable interchange, such as the lines of force that are revealed about a magnetic field by iron particles — no, that's not a good simile — perhaps the ability of a wire to carry a current endlessly under the chilled condition of superconductivity—"

"Professor, you have lost me — I'm not ashamed to admit it. Could you maybe give me an example — like what is happening in this little radio here?"

Sam made a careful adjustment, and the music gained the tiniest amount of volume.

"It's not the radio part that is interesting — that stage really just demonstrates that I have detected the leakage. No, we should call it the differential between the earth's gravitic field and that of the lump of lead there in the corner of the box."

"Where is the battery?"

Sam smiled proudly. "That is the point — there is no battery. The input current is derived—"

"Do you mean you are running the radio off gravity? Getting electricity for nothing?"

"Yes. . really, I should say no. It is not like that. ."

"It sure looks like that!" Charlie was excited now, crouching half across the table so he could look into the cigar box. "I may not know anything about electronics, but in economics we learn a lot about power sources. Couldn't this gadget of yours be developed to generate electricity at little or no cost?"

"No, not at once. This is just a first attempt…"

"But it could eventually and that means—"

Sam thought that the young man had suddenly become sick. His face, just inches away, became shades lighter as the blood drained from it. His eyes were staring in horror as he slowly dropped back and down into his seat. Before Sam could ask him what was the matter a grating voice bellowed through the room.

"Anyone here seen a boy by name of Charlie Wright? C'mon now, speak up. Ain't no one gonna get hurt for tellin' me the truth."

"Holy Jesus…" Charlie whispered, sinking deeper in the seat. Brinkley stamped into the bar, hand resting on his gun butt, squinting around in the darkness. No one answered him.

"Anybody try to hide him gonna be in trouble!" he shouted angrily. "I'm gonna find that black granny dodger!"

He started towards the rear of the room, and Charlie, with his airline bag in one hand, vaulted the back of the booth and crashed against the rear door.

"Come back here, you son of a bitch!"

The table rocked when Charlie's flying heel caught it, and the cigar box slid to the floor. Heavy boots thundered. The door squealed open and Charlie pushed out through it. Sam bent over to retrieve the box.

"I'll kill yuh, so help me!"

The circuit hadn't been damaged. Sam sighed in relief and stood, the tinny music between his fingers.

He may have heard the first shot, but he could not have heard the second because the.38 slug caught him in the back of the head and killed him instantly. He crumpled to the floor.

Patrolman Marger ran in from the patrol car outside, his gun ready, and saw Brinkley come back into the room through the door in the rear.

"He got away, damn it, got clear away."

"What happened here?" Marger asked, slipping his gun back into the holster and looking down at the slight, crumpled body at his feet.

"I dunno. He must have jumped up in the way when I let fly at the other one what was running away. Must be another one of them Commonists anyway; he was sittin' at the same table."

"There's gonna be trouble about this…"

"Why trouble?" Brinkley asked indignantly. "It's just anutha ol' dead nigger…"

One of his boots was on the cigar box, and it crumpled and fractured when he turned away.

An Artist's Life

A busman's holiday. A real busman's holiday. I stay on the moon for a year, I paint pictures there for three hundred and sixty-five days— then the first thing I do back on Earth is go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to look at more paintings. Brent smiled to himself. It had better be worthwhile.

He looked up the immense stretch of granite steps. They shimmered slightly in the intense August sun. He took a deep breath and shifted the cane to his right hand. Slowly he dragged himself up the steps. . they seemed to stretch away into the ovenlike infinity.

He was almost there… a few more steps would do it. The cane caught between two of the steps, shifting his balancejand he was suddenly falling.

The woman standing in the shade at the top of the steps screamed. She had watched since he first climbed out of the cab. Brent Dalgreen, the famous painter, everyone recognized the tanned young face under bristly hair burned silver white by the raw radiation of space. The papers had told how his stay on the moon had weakened his muscles from low gravity. He had climbed painfully up the steps and now he was rolling hopelessly down them. She screamed again and again.

They carried him into the first-aid room. "Gravity weakness.” he told the nurse. "I'll be all right."

She tested him for broken bones and frowned when her hand touched his skin. She took his temperature, her eyes widened and she glanced at him with a frightened look.

"I know," he said. "It's much higher than normal. Don't let it worry you though, the fever isn't due to the fall; in fact, it's probably the other way around."

"I'll have to enter it in my report, just in case there's any trouble."

"I wish you wouldn't. I don't want the fact to leak out that I'm not as well as I should be. If you'll call Dr. Grayber in the Medical Arts Building you'll find that this condition is not new. The museum will have no worry about their responsibility as to my health."

It would make wonderful copy for the scandal sheets: MOON PAINTER DYING. . GIVES LIFE FOR ART. It wasn't at all like that. He had known there was danger from radiation sickness; in the beginning he had been very careful to be out in his spacesuit only the prescribed length of time. That was before he ran into the trouble.

There had been a feeling about the moon that he just couldn't capture. He had almost succeeded in one painting — then lost it again forever. It was the feeling of the haunted empty places, the stark extremes of the plains and boulders. It was an alien sensation that had killed him before he could imprison it in oil.

The critics had thought his paintings were unique, wonderful, just what they had always thought the moon would be like. That was exactly his trouble. The airless satellite wasn't at all like that. It was different — so different that he could never capture the difference. Now he was going to die, a failure in the only thing he had really wanted to do.

The radiation fever was in him, eating away at his blood and bones. In a few months it would destroy him. He had been too reckless those last months, fighting against time. He had tried and failed… it was as simple as that.

The nurse put the phone down, frowning.

"I've checked and what you say is true, Mr. Dalgreen. I won't put it in my report if that's what you want." She helped him up.

The moon was out of his thoughts later as one canvas after another swam into his vision. He bathed his senses in the collected art of the ages. This was his life, and he was enjoying it to the utmost, trying to make up for his year's absence from the world. The Greek marbles soothed his mind and the Rembrandt portraits wakened his interest once again. He marveled at the fact that after all the years he could still wander through these halls and have his interest recaptured. But he also wanted to see what the moderns were doing. The elevator took him to the Contemporary Wing.

Almost at once, his quiet enjoyment was broken by the painting. It was an autumn landscape, a representative example of the Classic-modern school that had been so popular for the last few years. However, it had something else: an undefinable strangeness about it.

His legs were beginning to tremble again, — he knew that he had better rest for a few minutes.

Brent sat on the wide lounge on the main staircase, cracking his knuckles, his mind whirling in circles as he rapidly introspected himself into a headache. There was no one thing in that painting that he could put his mental finger on, but it had upset him. It was disturbing him emotionally; something about the picture didn't quite ring true. He knew there was a logical evaluation of a painting, just as there Was a logical evaluation of any material object, but that wasn't the trouble, he was sure.

Equally, there was an emotional evaluation — more of a sensation or feeling; and this was where the trouble lay. Everyone has felt pleasure or interest at one time or another when looking at any form of visual ajrt. A magazine photo, drawing or even a well-designed building could generate an emotional pattern. Brent was attempting to analyze such a sensation now, a next-to-impossible job. The only coherent thought he could muster on the subject was: "There is something subtly wrong with that picture.”

Suddenly he had the answer. It came in a second, as if revealed by some hidden source of insight. Perhaps his recent stay on the moon helped the idea to form; it had a relationship to things he had experienced there. It brought to mind the cinder plains that had never felt the foot of man. The sensation could be expressed by one word— "alienness."

In the eternal lifelessness of the silent lunar wastes this^ensation had a place. But how did it get into the polite autumn landscape? What twist in the mind of the painter enabled him to capture this strange feeling on canvas? Brent cursed himself softly. This wasn't a painting of an alien landscape. It was an autumn-in-the-woods landscape painted by a man who didn't understand his topic. A man with an odd way of looking at things. A painter who could look at the bustling life of a fall day and capture the eternal death of a lifeless satellite.

Brent leaned forward on his cane, his heart beating in tempo with his swirling thoughts. He had to find this artist. He would talk to him, reason with him — beat him if necessary… he must find out the man's secret. The thought of his coming death sat like a cold black weight in his body. To die without knowing how to capture that sensation on canvas!

He had killed himself searching for it — to no avail. Yet all the time here on Earth was the man who had the knowledge he sought. The bitter irony of it swirled his head with madness.

The insane thoughts seeped away slowly. He sat on the couch until he was rested enough to trust himself on his feet. He had to find the man.

Down in the right-hand corner of the picture in the shadow of a rock was the signature, " Arthur Di Costa.” printed with wide, sweeping strokes. Brent had never heard the name before but this fact was not unusual in itself. Real artists were a retiring crew. They labored in backrooms and old garages, filling canvas after canvas for their own satisfaction. Their work might never be shown until long after they were dead — dead.

That word kept intruding in his thoughts. He turned angrily and walked towards the guard who leaned casually on a sworl of abstractionist sculpture.

"Shore, mister," the guard answered. "You'll find the curator in his office — the door there behind them old hangings."

"Thanks," Brent muttered, and followed the course indicated by a meaty finger. He found an alcove partially concealed by the luxurious draperies. It contained a photoelectric water fountain and a neomarble door bearing the legend G. ANDREW KINNENT — CURATOR, CONTEMPORARY WING. He pushed open the door and stepped into the receptionist's office. She looked up from her typewriter.

"My name is Brent Dalgreen; I would like to see Mr. Kinnent."

"Not the Mr. Dalgreen! Why I—" The girl broke off, flustered. She leaned hard on the intercom button.

"Go right in, Mr. Dalgreen. Mr. Kinnent will be very happy to see you."' But the lovely smile that accompanied the statement was wasted on him, — his thoughts were elsewhere, today.

After thirty minutes of shop talk Brent drew the conversation around to the present exhibit — and one painter in particular.

"Mr. Di Costa is one of our most brilliant young painters, yes, indeed," the curator said smugly as if he had personally taught Di Costa every painting trick he knew. "He has only lived in New York a short while, but the boy has made quite a name for himself already. Here, let me give you his address, I'm sure you would enjoy meeting him. Common interests, you know."

Brent was easily talked into accepting the information he had come for in the first place. He kept his real thoughts secret from the vociferous Kinnent. They would seem more than foolish — unsupported as they were by a single shred of real evidence. He couldn't let this deter him. The sands of his life were trickling out, but there was something he had to do first.

The building was one of a hundred identical greenstone structures that had lined the streets in the fashionable Thirties. The site of the former garment center was now one of the most favored residential districts in the city. Brent stood across the street from number 31, ostensibly studying the headlines on the newsvend machine. The windowless exterior gave the obvious fact that the owner was fairly well off financially. Any information he sought would be inside — not outside. He crossed the street and stepped into the chrome entrance-way.

The inductance of his body actuated the automatic butler and the soft mechanical voice spoke from over the door.

"The Di Costa residence. May I serve you?"

"Mr. Brent Dalgreen to see Mr. Di Costa."

"I'm sorry, but I have no information regarding you, sir, if you care to leave a mess—" The robot tones stopped with a sharp click, to be replaced by a man's voice.

"I am very happy to greet you, Mr. Dalgreen. Won't you please step in?"

The door swung quietly open to reveal a small wood-paneled vestibule. It wasn't until the door closed again that Brent recognized it as an elevator. There was a feeling of motion and the end wall slid back to reveal a book-lined sitting room. The occupant turned from his desk and stepped forward.

Brent took the proffered hand — at the same time trying to penetrate the man's smile. Di Costa was taller than Brent with a thinness that seemed to contradict his graceful movements. They shook hands, and his hand had the same qualities: thin, long and strong. At this point Brent realized he was staring; he hastened to respond to his host's hospitality.

"I hope you will excuse my just dropping in like this, Mr. Di Costa. I have seen some work of yours at the Metropolitan, and found it, well, very interesting."

Brent stopped, aware of how weak his reasons seemedwhen brought out in conversation. He was more than pleased when Di Costa interrupted him.

"I understand perfectly, Mr. Dalgreen. I have had the same experience many times when looking at your paintings and those of some of our fellow artists." He smiled. "Not all of them, I assure you. I have looked at these works and said to myself, I would like to meet the man who did that. This very rarely happens, a fact which I deplore. That you feel the same way towards my work is both flattering and most enjoyable."

Di Costa's friendliness broke the ice; they were soon on the best of terms. Brent sat in the comfortable leather chair while Di Costa mixed drinks at the built-in bar. This gave him a chance to look around the room. A brown study, it fitted the word. The decorations were all subdued to the room as a whole, the sort of things a man would buy for himself. The only clashing note was the rotary book rack in the corner.

He suddenly realized that it was revolving slowly, had been doing so since he first entered the room. Something else. . yes, there on the desk, the bronze ashtray was also revolving with the same steady motion. They created an unusual effect, yet an oddly pleasing one. It fitted the room and the owner's personality.

"And here are the drinks. A toast first — always a good idea. Long life and good painting, to both of us."

Brent frowned to himself as he sipped the drink.

There is a fascination about shop talk that carpenters and bank executives indulge in with equal pleasure. Brent found himself easily drawn into conversation on the merits of alizarin crimson and the influence of Byzantine art on Renaissance Italy. Yet all the time he talked a small portion of his mind was weighing the other's words, testing and observing. But his host was everything he seemed to be — a gentleman of private means with an active interest in painting.

A half hour had passed, entertaining but unenlightening, when a light rap sounded on the study door. It opened to reveal an attractive woman, tastefully dressed in a gray-and-silver robe of classic Greek design, the latest fashion.

She hesitated in the doorway. "I don't mean to disturb you, Arthur, but there is — oh, excuse me, I had no idea you had a guest."

Di Costa took her gently by the arm. "I'm very glad you did, my dear. Let me introduce the famous Brent Dalgreen." He passed his arm around her waist. "My wife, Marie."

Brent took her hand and smiled into her large brown eyes. She returned his greeting warmly — with exactly the right amount of pressure on his hand. A loving wife, a pleasant home — Arthur Di Costa was a model of the modern gentleman. The painting in the museum seemed unimportant in the face of all this normality.

For a fraction of an instant as he held her hand, his eyes were drawn to a portrait that hung next to the door.

It was only by the strongest effort of will that he prevented himself from crushing her hand. Marie was there in the portrait, her portrait. .

The same subtle transformation as the painting in the museum. Something about a twist of the mouth — the haunting look in her eyes as she stared out of the picture. He tore his gaze from the painting but not before Di Costa had noticed his attention.

"It must be a strange sensation," Di Costa laughed, "to meet both my beautiful Marie and her portrait at the same instant. But here, let me show you." He touched the frame and a soft light bathed the painting. Brent mumbled something polite and stepped nearer, as if mere proximity would answer his questions.

Di Costa seemed flattered by his famous guest's interest. They discussed the many problems of a painting and their happy or unhappy solution. Blushing slightly, Marie was coaxed into standing under her portrait. She pretended not to notice the dissecting artistic analysis that could be so embarrassing to the outsider: "That blue hollow in the neck helps the form". . "the effect of the gold hair on the cheekbones." She turned her head "just so," and "a little more" while they talked.

Yet all during the discussion a small part of Brent's mind was weighing and analyzing. The how of the paintings was becoming clearer although the why still escaped him. It wasn't that there was an alienness in the figure itself, it was more as if the person were looking at something totally strange to worldly eyes.

He felt the small throb of an incipient headache as his frustrated thoughts danced dizzily inward on themselves in ever tightening circles. The mellow sound of a chime from the wall cabinet provided a welcome interruption. Di Costa excused himself and stepped out of the room — leaving Brent alone with Marie. They had just seated themselves when Di Costa returned, looking as if he had received painful news.

"I must ask you to excuse me, but my lawyer wishes to see me at once — a small but important matter about my estate. I am most unhappy to leave now. We must continue our talk another time. Please do not leave on my account, Mr. Dalgreen — my house is at your service."

When her husband left, Brent and Marie Di Costa talked idly on irrelevant topics; they had to, since he had no idea of what might be relevant. You couldn't walk up to a girl whom you'd met for the first time and ask, "Madam, does your husband paint monsters? Or perhaps you dabble in witchcraft! Is that the secret?"

A quick glance at his watch convinced him it was time to go, before he wore out his welcome.

Turning to light a cigarette his eyes fell on the mantle clock. He registered surprise.

"Why, it's three-thirty already! I'm afraid I'll have to be leaving."

She rose, smiling. "You have been a most delightful guest.” she laughed. "I know I speak for Arthur as well as myself when I say I hope to see you again."

"I may take you up on that," Brent said.

Their forward progress was suddenly impeded as the elevator swung open to discharge a small bundle of screaming humanity. Dazed, Brent realized it was a young girl as she swept past. The child collapsed on Marie Di Costa's shoulder, her golden hair shaking with muffled sobs. A plastic doll with a shattered head gave mute evidence of the source of the disturbance.

Brent stood by self-consciously until the crying was soothed. Marie flashed him an understanding smile while she convinced the child at least to say hello to the visitor. He was rewarded with the sight of the red, tear-stained face.

"Dotty, I want you to meet Mr. Dalgreen."

"How do you do, Mr. Dalgreen. . but Mommy the boy stepped on the doll and he laughed when it broke and…"

The thought was once again too much to bear — the tears began to course again through the well-used waterways.

"Cheer up, Dotty. You wouldn't want your father to see you like this.” Brent suggested.

These seemingly innocent words, while having no effect on the little girl, had a marked effect on her mother. Her face whitened.

"Arthur is not Dotty's father, Mr. Dalgreen. You see, this is my second marriage. He… I mean we cannot have children." She spoke the words as if they were a pain, heavy within her.

Brent was slightly embarrassed — yet elated at the same time. This was the first crack in the facade of normality that concealed the occupants of the house. Her sudden change of expression could only mean that there was something troubling her — something he would give his last tube of oil paint to find out. Perhaps it wasn't the secret hidden in the painting, but there must be a relationship somewhere. He was determined to search it out.

Apartment lights were out all over the city, the daytime world was asleep. Brent stirred in the large chair and reached out for the glass of sparkling Burgundy that was slowly dying on the end table. A little flat — but still very good. It was one of the luxuries he allowed himself. A luxury that might really be called a necessity to one who lived by selling his emotional responses, translated into color.

The wine was going flat, but the view of the city never would. New York, the eternal wonder city. The soft lights of his studio threw no reflections on the window, and his sight traveled easily over the architectural fairyland. Sparkling search-beams swept across the sky, throwing an occasional glint as they slid across a jetcar or a strato-plane. A thousand lights of a thousand hues twinkled in the city below. Even here on the one-hundred-eightieth floor he could hear the throbbing roar of its ceaseless activity. This was the foremost of the cities of man, yet somewhere in that city was a man was not quite human.

Brent had the partial answer, he was sure of that. He had found the missing factor in one of his own paintings. It was the only one he was even slightly pleased with. He had turned it out in nine solid hours of work, one of the "dangerous exposures" the doctors talked about. He had it propped on the video console, a stark vista of Mare Imbrium in the afternoon — moon time. It was a canvas touched with the raw grandeur of eternal space. It had a burning quality that reacted on human sight. An alien landscape seen through a human eye. Just as the Di Costa canvases were human scenes seen through a different eye. Perhaps not totally foreign to Earth — they weren't that obvious. Now that he understood, though, the influence was unmistakable.

He also had substantiating evidence. The Law was the Law and genes would always be genes. Man and ape are warm-blooded mammals, close relatives among the anthropoids. Yet even with this close heritage, there could be no interbreeding. Offspring were out of the question; they were a genetic impossibility,

It followed that alienness meant just that. A man who wasn't Man — Homo sapiens — could never have children with a human wife. Marie Di Costa was human, and had a real tear-soaked human daughter to prove it. Arthur Di Costa had no children.

Brent pressed the window release and it sank into the casement with a soft sigh. The city noises washed in along with the fresh smell of growing things. The light breeze carried the fragrance in from the Jersey woodlands. It seemed a little out of place here above the gleaming city.

Leaning out slightly, he could see the moon riding through the thin clouds and — the morning star, Venus, just clearing the eastern horizon. He had been there on the moon. He had watched them assembling the Venus rocket. Man, the erect biped, was the only sentient life form he had ever seen. If there were others, they were stillVput there among the stars. All, that is, except one — or could there possibly be others here on Earth?

This was useless thinking though. Don't invent more monsters until you've caught your first. A night's sleep first. After that, he could start setting his traps out tomorrow.

For the tenth time, Brent threw a half-eaten candy bar into the receptacle and started down the street. Being a private eye was so easy in the teleshows — but how different the reality was! He had been shadowing Arthur Di Costa for three days now, and it was ruining his digestion. Whenever his quarry stopped, he stopped — often on the crowded city streets. Loitering was too obvious, so he found himself constantly involved with the vending machines that lined the streets. The news sheets were easily thrown away, but he felt obliged at least to sample the candy bars.

Di Costa was just stepping onto the Fifth Avenue walkway. Brent got on a few hundred feet behind him. They rolled slowly uptown at the standard fifteen miles per hour. As the walkway crossed Fifty-seventh Street, a small man in a black-and-gold business suit stepped briskly onto it. Brent noticed him only when he stopped next to Di Costa and tapped him on the shoulder. Di Costa turned with a smile which changed slowly into a puzzled expression.

The little man handed what appeared to be a folded piece of paper to the surprised painter. Before Di Costa could say anything, the man stepped off the walkway onto a safety platform. With a quick movement, surprising in a man of his chunky build, he vaulted the guard barrier and stepped onto the downtown walkway.

Brent could only stare open-mouthed as the black figure swept by him and was lost in the crowds. Surprised by the entire action, he turned back to find Di Costa staring directly into his eyes!

Whatever course of action he might have considered was lost. Di Costa took the initiative. He smiled and waved. Brent could hear his voice faintly through the street noises.

"Mr. Dalgreen, over here!"

Brent waved back and did the only thing possible. As he walked slowly forward he saw that Di Costa's curiosity had gotten the better of him. Brent watched him open the note, read it — and change suddenly. The man's arm dropped to his side, his body stiffened. Staring straight ahead, he stood on the walkway, eyes fixed and as full as a Roman portrait bust.

Dalgreen hurried toward the man. Events were going too fast. He had more than a suspicion that the note and the short man were somehow connected with the secret of the paintings. He stepped forward.

The man stared ahead, unseeing and unhearing. Brent felt justified in removing the mysterious note from between his fingers. One side was blank, but the other contained a single illegible character — a queer sign made up of flowing curves crossed by choppy green lines. It resembled nothing Brent had ever seen in his entire life.

They rode uptown side by side. Brent leaned on the railing while Di Costa remained fixed in his strange trance. The note in Brent's hand was tangible evidence that his suspicions had some basis in fact. As he examined it again, he was aware of an undefinable tingling in his hand. The note seemed to be vibrating shaking free from his hand in some unknown way. Under his startled gaze it glowed suddenly— and disappeared! One instant he had held it, the next his hand was empty.

He leaped back in surprise — passing through the space formerly occupied by Di Costa. Gone — while he had been studying the note! Leaning over the rail he had a quick glimpse of the stiff figure entering the Central Park Skyport. Cursing himself for his stupidity, Brent changed lanes and raced back to the Skyport entrance.

His luck still held. Di Costa was on the outgoing aircab line. It would take him at least ten minutes to get a cab this time of day. With a little speed and a few greased palms Brent could rent a Fly-Your-Own before the other man was airborne.

Shortly after, the orange-and-black cab flashed up from the takeoff circle followed closely by Brent's blue helio. The two aircraft flew north and vanished in the distance over the Hudson.

The aircab stayed at the ten-thousand-foot level. Brent cruised at eight thousand, lagging slightly behind, keeping in the blind spot of the other ship. The entire affair was moving too fast for his peace of mind. He had the feeling that he was no longer a free agent, that he was being pushed into things before he decided for himself.

He suddenly felt elated. The strange symbol on the note, the note that disappeared in such an inexplicable fashion, proved the existence of alien hidden forces. Every mile that rushed under his plane brought him closer to the answer. He didn't fear death — it was no longer a stranger to him. The moments of time left to him might be made more satisfactory if he ferreted out this secret. He smiled to himself.

Fifteen minutes later the two ships grounded at the Municipal Sky-port in Poughkeepsie. Brent parked the ship and followed his quarry down to the street level. Except for a certain stiffness in his movements, Di Costa seemed normal. He walked quickly and turned into an office building before Brent could catch up with him.

Throwing discretion aside; Brent broke into a run. He turned into the lobby just as the elevator door closed. He pressed the call button but the car continued to rise. The indicator stopped at 4, then slowly sank down again.

He was too close to the end to even consider stopping now. He stepped into the self-service elevator and pressed 4. The door closed and the car began to… descend!

With the realization that he was trapped came the knowledge that there was very little he could do about it. Just wait and see who — or what — might be outside the car when the door opened!

The elevator dropped down to a level that must have been far beneath the basement floor. The door slid slowly back.

The room was not what he had expected. Not that he had any idea of what there would be_; it was just — just that this room was so ordinary!

Ordinary — except for the side wall. That was an impossibility. It was a glass wall looking into a vast tank of swirling water — only there was no glass! It was the surface of the ocean standing on its side. He felt himself drawn into it, falling into it.

The sensation vanished as the wall suddenly turned jet black. He became aware for the first time that he wasn't alone in the room. There was a girl behind a chrome desk. A lovely girl with straight bronze hair and green eyes.

"An untrained person shouldn't watch that machine, Mr. Dalgreen; it has a negative effect on the mind. Won't you please step in?"

His jaw dropped. "How do you know my name? Who are you? What is this pi—"

"If you'll be seated, I'll be with you in a moment."

Brent saw that the elevator would stay here until he got out. He stepped into the room, and the door sliding shut behind him didn't help his morale any. He was into it up to his neck, and the other team had taken complete charge. He sat.

The redhead pulled the sheet of paper out of her typewriter and pushed it into the strange wall. It once more had the undersea look. Brent kept his eyes averted until she turned to him with a slight frown furrowing her forehead.

''You have been very interested in Arthur Di Costa's activities, Mr. Dalgreen. Perhaps there are some questions you would like to ask me?"

"That, lady, is the world's best understatement! Just what happened to him today?. . And what is this place?"

She leaned forward and pointed. "You're responsible for Mr. Di Costa's visit here today. You were observed following him, so we brought him in, in the hope that you would come also. The message he received was a code word designed to trigger an automatic response planted in his mind. He came directly here, controlled by the posthypnotic suggestion."

"But the note!" he exclaimed.

"A simple matter! It was written on a material made entirely of separate molecules. A small charge of energy held them together for a brief period of time. The charge leaked out and the material merely separated into its constituent molecules."

The utter impossibility of the situation was striking home. The evidences of a superior culture were unmistakable. These people were his. .

"Aliens, Mr. Dalgreen — I suppose you could call us that. Yes, I can read your mind quite clearly. That is why you are here today. A thought receiver in Arthur Di Costa's study informed us of your suspicions when you first walked in. We have been following you ever since, arranging your visit here.

"I'll tell you what I can, Mr. Dalgreen. We are not of Earth; in fact, we come from beyond your solar system. This office is, to be very frank, the outpatient ward of a sanitarium."

"Sanitarium!" Brent shouted. "This is the office only. . then where is the sanitarium?"

The girl twirled her pencil slowly, her piercing stare seeming to penetrate his eyes — into his brain.

"The entire Earth is our sanitarium. Mixed in with your population are a great number of our mentally ill."

The floor seemed to tilt under Brent's feet. He clutched the edge of the desk. "Then Di Costa must be one of your outpatients. Is he insane?"

The girl spoke quietly. "Not insane in the strictest sense of the word, he is congenitally feeble-minded; his case is incurable."

Brent thought of the brilliant Di Costa as a moron, and the inference shook his mind. "That means that the average IQ of your race must be—"

"Beyond your powers of comprehension.” she said. "To your people Di Costa is normal, really far above average.

"On his home planet he was not bright enough to take his place in that highly integrated society. He became a ward of the state. His body was altered to be an exact duplicate of Homo sapiens. We gave him a new body and a new personality — but we could not change his basic intelligence. That is why he is here on Earth, a square peg in a square hole.

"Di Costa spent his childhood on his home planet, living in an 'alien' environment. These first impressions drive deep into the subconscious, you know. His new personality has no awareness of them — but they are there, nonetheless. When he is painting, these same impressions bypass his conscious mind and operate directly on his thalamus. It takes a keen eye to detect their effect on the final work. May I congratulate you, Mr. Dalgreen?"

Brent smiled ruefully. "I'm a little sorry now that I did. What are you plans for me? I imagine they don't include a return to my earthly 'asylum'?"

The girl folded her hands in her lap. She looked down at them as if not wanting to look Brent in the eye when she made her next statement. However, he wasn't waiting for it. If he could overpower the girl, he might find the elevator control. Any chance was worth taking. He tensed his muscles and jumped.

A wave of pain swept through his body. Another mind — strong beyond comparison — was controlling his body!

Every muscle jerked with spasmodic activity, halting his plunge in midair. Crashing to the desk he lay unmoving; every muscle ached with the fierce alien control. The redhead looked up — eyes blazing with the strength she had so suddenly revealed.

"Never underestimate your opponent, Brent Dalgreen. I adopted the earthly form of a woman for just this reason. I find your people much easier to handle. They never suspect that I am. . more than what they see. I will release your mind from my control, but please don't force me to resume it."

Brent sank to the floor, his heart pumping wildly, his body vibrating from the unnatural spasm.

"I am the director of this. . sanitarium, so you see I have no desire to have our work exposed to the prying eyes of your government. I shall have to have you disposed of."

Brent controlled his breathing enough to allow him to speak. "You. . intend to… kill me then?"

"Not at all Mr. Dalgreen; our philosophy forbids killing except for the most humane reasons. Your physical body will be changed to conform to the environment of another of our sanitarium planets. We will of course remove all the radiation damage. You can look forward to a long and interesting life. If you agree to cooperate you will be allowed to keep your present personality."

"What kind of a planet is it?" Brent asked hurriedly. He realized from the girl's tones that the interview was almost at an end.

"Quite different from this one. It is a very dense planet with a chlorine atmosphere." She pressed a stud on her desk and turned back to her typewriter.

Brent had a last, ragged thought as unconsciousness overcame him. He was going to live. . and work. . and there must be some fine greens to paint on a chlorine planet. .

The Ever-Branching Tree

The children had spread up and down the beach, and some of them had even ventured into the surf where the tall green waves crashed down upon them. Glaring from a deep blue sky, the sun burned on the yellow sand. A wave broke into foam, surging far up the shore with a soundless rush. The sharp clap-clap of Teacher's hands could easily be heard in the sunlit silence.

"Playtime is over — put your clothes back on, Grosbit-9, all of them — and the class is about to begin.”

They straggled towards Teacher, as slowly as they could. The bathers emerged dry from the ocean, while not a grain of sand adhered to skin or garment of the others. They gathered about Teacher, their chatter gradually dying away, and he pointed dramatically at a tiny creature writhing across the sand.

"Uhggh a worm!" Mandi-2 said and shivered deliciously, shaking her red curls.

"A worm, correct. A first worm, an early worm, a protoworm. An important worm. Although it is not on the direct evolutionary track that we are studying we must pause to give it notice. A little more attention, Ched-3, your eyes are closing. For here, for the first time, we see segmentation, as important a step in the development of life as was the development of multicellular forms. See, look carefully, at those series of rings about the creature's body. It looks as though it were made of little rings of tissue fused together — and it is."

They bent close, a circle of lowered heads above the brown worm that writhed a track across the sand. It moved slowly towards Grosbit-9 who raised his foot and stamped down hard on the creature. The other students tittered. The worm crawled out through the side of his shoe and kept on.

"Grosbit-9, you have the wrong attitude," Teacher said sternly. "Much energy is being expended to send this class back through time, to view the wonders of evolution at work. We cannot feel or touch or hear or change the past, but we can move through it and see it about us. So we stand in awe of the power that permits us to do this, to visit our Earth as it was millions of years ago, to view the ocean from which all life sprung, to see one of the first life forms on the ever-branching tree of evolution. And what is your response to this awe-inspiring experience? You stamp on the annelid! For shame, Grosbit-9 for shame."

Far from feeling shameful, Grosbit-9 chewed a hangnail on his thumb and looked about out of the corners of his eyes, the trace of a smirk upon his lips. Teacher wondered, not for the first time, how a 9 had gotten into this class. A father with important contacts, no doubt, high placed friends.

"Perhaps I had better recap for those of you who are paying less than full attention.” He stared hard at Grosbit-9 as he said this, with no apparent effect. "Evolution is how we reached the high estate we now inhabit. Evolution is the forward march of life, from the one-celled creatures to multicelled, thinking man. What will come after us we do not know, what came before us we are now seeing. Yesterday we watched the lightning strike the primordial chemical soup of the seas and saw the more complex chemicals being made that developed into the first life forms. We saw this single-celled life triumph over time and eternity by first developing the ability to divide into two cells, then to develop into composite, many-celled life forms. What do you remember about yesterday?"

"The melted lava poured into the ocean!"

"The land rose from the sea!"

"The lightning hit the water!"

"The squirmy things were so ugghhy!"

Teacher nodded and smiled and ignored the last comment. He had no idea why Mandi-2 was registered in this science course and had a strong feeling she would not stay long.

"Very good. So now we reach the annelids, like our worm here. Segmented, with each segment almost living a life of its own. Here are the first blood vessels to carry food to all the tissues most efficiently. Here is the first hemoglobin to carry oxygen to all the cells. Here is the first heart, a little pump to force the blood through those tubes. But one thing is missing yet. Do you know what it is?"

Their faces were empty of answers, their eyes wide with expectation.

"Think about it. What would have happened if Grosbit-9 had really stepped on this worm?"

"It would have squashed," Agon-1 answered with eight-year-old practicf lity. Mandi-2 shivered.

"Correct. It would have been killed. It is soft, without a shell or a skeleton. Which brings us to the next branch on the evolutionary tree."

Teacher pressed the activating button on the control unit at his waist, and the programmed computer seized them and hurled them through time to their next appointment. There was a swift, all-encompassing grayness, with no feeling of motion at all, which vanished suddenly to be replaced by a green dimness. Twenty feet above their heads the sun sparkled on the surface of the ocean while all about them silent fish moved in swift patterns. A great monster, all plates and shining teeth, hurried at and through them and Mandi-2 gave a little squeal of surprise.

"Your attention down here, if you please. The fish will come later. First we must study these, the first echinoderms. Phill-4, will you point out an echinoderm and tell us what the term means?"

" 'Echinoderm.’ " the boy said, keying his memory. The training techniques that all the children learned in their first years of schooling brought the words to his lips. Like the others he had a perfect memory. "Is Greek for spiny skin. That must be one there, the big hairy starfish."

"Correct. An important evolutionary step. Before this, animals were either unprotected, like our annelid worm, or had skeletons outside, like snails or lobsters or insects. This is very limiting and inefficient. But an internal skeleton can give flexible support and is light in weight. An important evolutionary step has been made. We are almost there, children, almost there! This simple internal skeleton evolved into a more practical notochord, a single bone the length of the body protecting a main nerve fiber. And the chordates, the creatures with this notochord were only a single evolutionary step away from this — all this!"

Teacher threw his arms wide just as the sea about them burst into darting life. A school of silvery, yard-long fishes flashed around and through the students, while sharp-toothed sharklike predators struck through their midst. Teacher's speech had been nicely timed to end at this precise and dramatic moment. Some of the smaller children shied away from the flurry of life and death while Grosbit-9 swung his fist at one of the giants as it glided by.

"We have arrived," Teacher said, vibrantly, carried away by his own enthusiasm. "The chordate give way to the vertebrate, life as we know it. A strong, flexible internal skeleton that shields the soft inner organs and supports at the same time. Soft cartilage in these sharks— the same sort of tissue that stiffens your ears — changes to hard bone in these fishes. Mankind, so to speak, is just around the corner! What is it, Ched-3?" He was aware of a tugging on his toga.

"I have to go to the—"

"Well press the return button on your belt and don't be too long about it."

Ched-3 pressed the button and vanished, whisked back to their classroom with its superior functional plumbing. Teacher smacked his lips annoyedly while the teeming life whirled and dived about them. Children could be difficult at times.

"How did these animals know to get a notochord and bones?" Agon-1 asked. "How did they know the right way to go to end up with the vertebrate — and us?"

Teacher almost patted him on the head, but smiled instead.

"A good question, a very good question. Someone has been listening and thinking. The answer is they didn't know, it wasn't planned. The ever-branching tree of evolution has no goals. Its changes are random, mutations caused by alterations in the germ plasm caused by natural radiation. The successful changes live, the unsuccessful ones die. The notochord creatures could move about easier, were more successful than the other creatures. They lived to evolve further. Which brings us to a new word I want you to remember. The word is 'ecology' and we are talking about ecological niches. Ecology is the whole world, everything in it, how all the plants and animals live together and how they relate one to the other. An ecological niche is where a creature lives in this world, the special place where it can thrive and survive and reproduce. All creatures that find an ecological niche that they can survive in are successful."

"The survival of the fittest?" Agon-1 asked.

"You have been reading some of the old books. That is what evolution was once called, but it was called wrong. All living organisms are fit, because they are alive. One can be no more fit than the other. Can we say that we, mankind, are more fit than an oyster?"

"Yes," Phill-4 said, with absolute surety. His attention on Ched-3 who had just returned, apparently emerging from the side of one of the sharks.

"Really? Come over here, Ched-3, and try to pay attention. We live and the oysters live. But what would happen if the world were to suddenly be covered by shallow water?"

"How could that happen?"

"The how is not important," Teacher snapped, then took a deep breath. "Let us just say it happened. What would happen to all the people?"

"They would all drown!" Mandi-2 said, unhappily.

"Correct. Our ecological niche would be gone. The oysters would thrivaand cover the world. If we survive we are all equally fit in the eyes or nature. Now let us see how our animals with skeletons are faring in a new niche. Dry land."

A press, a motionless movement, and they were on a muddy shore by a brackish swamp. Teacher pointed to the trace of a feathery fin cutting through the floating algae.

"The subclass Crossoptergii, which means fringed fins. Sturdy little fish who have managed to survive in this stagnant water by adopting thsir swim bladders to breathe air directly and to get their oxygen in this Jnanner. Many fish have these bladders that enable them to hover at any given depth, but now they have been adapted to a different use. Watch!"

The water became shallower until the fish's back was above the water, then its bulging eyes. Staring about, round and wide, as though terrified by this new environment. The sturdy fins, reinforced by bone, thrashed at the mud, driving it forward, further and further from its home, the sea. Then it was out of the water, struggling across the drying mud. A dragonfly hovered low, landed — and was engulfed by the fish's open mouth.

"The land is being conquered," Teacher said, pointing to the humped back of the fish now vanishing among the reeds. "First by plants, then insects — and now the animals. In a few million years, still over 255 million years before our own time, we have this…"

Through time again, rushing away on the cue word, to another swampy scene, a feathery marsh of ferns as big as trees and a hot sun burning through low-lying clouds.

And life. Roaring, thrashing, eating, killing life. The time researchers must have searched diligently for this place, this instant in the history of the world. No words were needed to describe or explain.

The age of reptiles. Small ones scampered by quickly to avoid the carnage falling on them. Scolosaurus, armored and knobbed like a tiny tank pushed through the reeds, his spiked tail dragging a rut in the mud. Great Brontosaurus stood high against the sky, his tiny, foolish head, with its teacup of brains, waving at the end of his lengthy neck, turned back to see what was bothering him as some message crept through his indifferent nervous system. His back humped-up, a mountain of gristle and bone and flesh and hooked to it was the demon form of Tyrannosaurus. His tiny forepaws scratched feebly against the other's leathery skin while his yards-long razor-toothed jaws tore at the heaving wall of flesh. Brontosaurus, still not sure what was happening, dredged up a quarter ton of mud and water and plants and chewed it, wondering. While high above, heaving and flapping its leathery wings, Pteranodon wheeled by, long jaws agape.

"That one's hurting the other one," Mandi-2 said. "Can't you make them stop?"

"We are only observers, child. What you see happened so very long ago and is unalterable in any way."

"Kill!" Grosbit-9 muttered, his attention captured for the very first time. They all watched, mouths dropping open at the silent fury.

"These are reptiles, the first successful animals to conquer the land. Before them were the amphibia, like our modem frogs, tied un-breakably to the water where their eggs are laid and the young grow up. But the reptiles lay eggs that can hatch on land. The link with the sea has been cut. Land has been conquered at last. They lack but a single characteristic that will permit them to survive in all the parts of the globe. You have all been preparing for this trip. Can anyone tell me what is still missing?"

The answer was only silence. Brontosaurus fell and large pieces of flesh were torn from his body. Pteranodon flapped away. A rain squall blotted out the sun.

"I am talking about temperature. These reptiles get a good deal of their body heat from the sun. They must live in a warm environment because as their surroundings get cooler their bodies get cooler…"

"Warm blooded!" Agon-1 said with shrill excitement.

"Correct! Someone, at least, has been doing the required studying. I see you sticking your tongue out, Ched-3. How would you like it if you couldn't draw it back and it stayed that way? Controlled body temperature, the last major branch on the ever-branching tree. The first class of what might be called centrally heated animals is the mammalia. The mammals. If we all go a little bit deeper into this forest you will see what I mean. Don't straggle, keep up there. In this clearing, everyone. On this side. Watch those shrubs there. Any moment now…"

Expectantly they waited. The leaves stirred and they leaned forward. A piglike snout pushed out, sniffing the air, and two suspicious, slightly crossed eyes looked about the clearing. Satisfied that there was no danger for the moment, the creature came into sight.

"Coot! Is that ever ugly," Phill-4 said.

"Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, young man. I'll ask you to hold your tongue. This is a perfect example of the subclass Proto-theria, the first beasts, Tritylodon itself. For many years a source of controversy as to whether it was mammal or reptile. The smooth skin and shiny plates of a reptile — but notice the tufts of hair between the plates. Reptiles do not have hair. And it lays eggs, as reptiles do. But it, she, this fine creature here also suckles her young as do the mammals. Look with awe at this bridge between the old class of reptiles and emerging class of mammals."

"Oh, how cute!" Mandi-2 squealed as four tiny pink duplicates of the mother staggered out of the shrubbery after her. Tritylodon dropped heavily onto her side and the young began to nurse.

"That is another thing that the mammals brought into the world," Teacher said as the students looked on with rapt fascination. "Mother love. Reptile offspring, either born live or when they emerge from the egg, are left to fend for themselves. But warm blooded mammals must be warmed, protected, fed while they develop. They need mothering and, as you see, they receive it in sufficiency."

Some sound must have troubled the Tritylodon because she looked around,) then sprang to her feet and trundled off into the underbrush, her young falling and stumbling after her. No sooner was the clearing empty than the hulking form of Triceratops pushed by, the great horns and bony frill held high. Thirty feet of lumbering flesh, its tail tip twitching as it dragged behind.

"The great lizards are still here, but doomed soon to final destruction. The mammals will survive and multiply and cover the earth. We will later discuss the many paths traveled by the mammals, but today we are going to leap ahead millions of years to the order Primates which may look familiar to you."

A taller, deeper, more tangled jungle replaced the one they had been visiting, a fruit-filled, flower-filled, life-filled maze. Multicolored birds shot by, insects hung in clouds and brown forms moved along the branches.

"Monkeys," Grosbit-9 said and looked around for something to throw at them.

"Primates. A relatively primitive group that took to these trees some fifty million years in our past. See how they are adapting to the arboreal life? They must see clearly in front of them and gauge distances correctly, so their eyes are now on the front of their heads, and they have developed binocular vision. To hold securely to the branches their nails have shortened and become flat, their thumbs opposed to strengthen their grip. These primates will continue to develop until the wonderful, important day when they descend from the trees and venture from the shelter of the all-protecting forest.

"Africa," Teacher said as the time machine once more moved them across the centuries. "It could be today, so little have things changed in the relatively short time since these higher primates ventured forth."

"I don't see anything," Ched-3 said, looking about at the sun-scorched grass of the veldt, at the verdant jungle pressing up next to it.

"Patience. The scene begins. Watch the herd of deer that are coming towards us. The landscape has changed, become drier, the seas of grass are pushing back the jungle. There is still food to be had in the jungle, fruit and nuts there for the taking, but the competition is becoming somewhat fierce. Many different primates now fill that ecological niche and it is running over. Is there a niche vacant? Certainly not out here on the veldt! Here are the fleet-footed grass eaters, look how they run, their survival depends upon their speed. For they have their enemies, the carnivores, the meat eaters who live on their flesh."

Dust rose and the deer bounded towards them, through them, around them. Wide eyes, hammering hooves, sun glinting from their horns and then they were gone. And the lions followed. They had a buck, cut off from the rest of the herd by the lionesses, surrounded, clawed at and wounded. Then a talon tipped paw hamstrung the beast and it fell, quickly dead as its throat was chewed out and the hot red blood sank into the dust. The pride of lions ate. The children watched, struck silent, and Mandi-2 sniffled and rubbed at her nose.

"The lions eat a bit, but they are already gorged from another kill. The sun is reaching the zenith and they are hot, sleepy. They will find shade and go to sleep and the corpse will remain for the scavengers to dispose of, the carrion eaters.”

Even as Teacher spoke the first vulture was dropping down out of the sky, folding its dusty wings and waddling towards the kill. Two more descended, tearing at the flesh and squabbling and screaming soundlessly at one another.

Then from the jungle's edge there emerged first one, then two more apes. They blinked in the sunlight, looking around fearfully, then ran towards the newly killed deer, using their knuckles on the ground to help them as they ran. The blood-drenched vultures looked at them apprehensively, then flapped into the air as one of the apes hurled a stone at them. Then it was the apes' turn. They too tore at the flesh.

"Look and admire, children. The tailless ape emerges from the forest. These are your remote ancestors."

"Not mine!"

"They're awfull"

"I think I am going to be sick."

"Children — stop, think! With your minds not your viscera just for once. These ape-men or man-apes have occupied a new cultural niche. They are already adapting to it. They are almost hairless so that they can sweat and not overheat when other animals must seek shelter. They are tool using. They hurl rocks to chase away the vultures. And see, that one there — he has a sharp bit of splintered rock that he is using to cut off the meat. They stand erect on their legs to free their hands for the tasks of feeding and survival. Man is emerging and you are privileged to behold his first tremulous steps away from the jungle. Fix this scene in your memory, it is a glorious one. And you will remember it better, Mandi-2, if you watcrlwith your eyes open."

The older classes were usually much more enthusiastic. Only Agon-1 seemed to be watching with any degree of interest — other than Grosbit-9 who was watching with too much interest indeed. Well, they said one good student in a class made it worthwhile, made one feel as though something were being accomplished.

"That is the end of today's lesson, but I'll tell you something about tomorrow's class." Africa vanished and some cold and rainswept northern land appeared. High mountains loomed through the mist in the background and a thin trickle of smoke rose from a low sod house half-buried in the ground. "We will see how man emerged from his primate background, grew sure and grew strong. How these early people moved from the family group to the simple Neolithic community. How they used tools and bent nature to their will. We are going to find out who lives in that house and what he does there. It is a lesson that I know you are all looking forward to."

There seemed very little actual evidence to back this assumption, and Teacher stabbed the button and the class was over. Their familiar classroom appeared around them and the dismissal bell was jingling its sweet music. Shouting loudly, without a backward look, they ran from the room and Teacher, suddenly tired, undipped the controls from his waist and locked them into his desk. It had been a very long day. He turned out the lights and left.

At the street entrance he was just behind a young matron, most attractive and pink in miniaturized mini, hair a flaming red. Mandi-2's mother, he realized, he should have known by the hair, as she reached down to take an even tinier, pinker hand. They went out before him.

"And what did you learn in school today, darling?" the mother asked. And, although he did not approve of eavesdropping, Teacher could not help but hear the question. Yes, what did you learn? It would be nice to know.

Mandi-2 skipped down the steps, bouncing with happiness to be free again.

"Oh, nothing much," she said, and they vanished around the corner.

Without knowing he did it, Teacher sighed a great weary sigh and turned in the other direction and went home.

By the Falls

It was the rich damp grass, slippery as soap, covering the path, that caused Carter to keep slipping and falling, not the steepness of the hill. The front of his raincoat was wet and his knees were muddy long before he reached the summit. And with each step forward and upward the continuous roar of sound grew louder. He was hot and tired by the time he reached the top of the ridge — yet he instantly forgot his discomfort as he looked out across the wide bay.

Like everyone else he had heard about The Falls since childhood and had seen countless photographs and films of them on television. All this preparation had not readied him for the impact of reality.

He saw a falling ocean, a vertical river — how many millions of gallons a second did people say came down? The Falls stretched out across the bay, their farthest reaches obscured by the clouds of floating spray. The bay seethed and boiled with the impact of that falling weight, raising foam-capped waves that crashed against the rocks below. Carter could feel the impact of the water on the solid stone as a vibration in the ground, but all sound was swallowed up in the greater roar of The Falls. This was a reverberation so outrageous and overpowering that his ears could not become accustomed to it. They soon felt numbed from the ceaseless impact, but the very bones of the skull carried the sound to his brain, shivering and battering it. When he put his hands over his ears he was horrified to discover that The Falls were still as loud, as ever. As he stood swaying and wide-eyed one of the constantly changing air currents that formed about the base of The Falls shifted suddenly and swept a wall of spray down upon him. The inundation lasted scant seconds but was heavier than any rainfall he had ever experienced, had ever believed possible. When it passed he was gasping for air, so dense had been the falling water.

Quiuering with sensations he had never before experienced, Carter turned and looked along the ridge toward the gray and water-blackened granite of the cliff and the house that huddled at its base like a stony blister. It was built of the same granite as the cliff and appeared no less solid. Running and slipping, his hands still over his ears, Carter hurried toward the house.

For a short time the spray was blown across the bay and out to sea, so that golden afternoon sunlight poured down on the house, starting streamers of vapor from its sharply sloping roof. It was a no-nonsense building, as solid as the rock against which it pressed. Only two windows penetrated the blankness of the front that faced The Falls — tiny and deep, they were like little suspicious eyes. No door existed here but Carter saw that a path of stone flags led around the corner.

He followed it and found — cut into the wall on the far side, away from The Falls — a small and deep-set entry. It had no arch but was shielded by a great stone lintel a good two feet in diameter. Carter stepped into the opening that framed the door and looked in vain for a knocker on the heavy, iron-bolted timbers. The unceasing, world-filling, thunder of The Falls made thinking almost impossible and it was only after he had pressed uselessly against the sealed portal that he realized that no knocker, even one as loud as a cannon, could be heard within these walls above that sound. He lowered his hands and tried to force his mind to coherence.

There had to be some way of announcing his presence. When he stepped back out of the alcove he noticed that a rusty iron knob was set into the wall a few feet away. He seized and twisted it but it would not turn. However, when he pulled on it, although it resisted, he was able to draw it slowly away from the wall to disclose a length of chain. The chain was heavily greased and in good condition — a fair omen. He continued to pull until a yard of chain emerged from the opening and then, no matter how hard he pulled, no more would come. He released the handle and it bounced against the rough stone of the wall. For some instants it hung there. Then with a jerky mechanical motion, the chain was drawn back into the wall until the knob once more rested in place. Whatever device this odd mechanism activated seemed to perform its desired function. In less than a minute the heavy door swung open and a man appeared in the opening. He examined his visitor wordlessly.

The man who was much like the building and the cliffs behind it— solid, no-nonsense, worn, lined and graying. But he had resisted the years even as he showed their marks upon him. His back was as straight as any young man's and his knob-knuckled hands had a look of determined strength. Blue were his eyes and very much the color of the water falling endlessly, thunderously, on the far side of the building. He wore knee-high fisherman's boots, plain corduroy pants and a boiled gray sweater. His face did not change expression as he waved Carter into the building.

When the thick door had been swung shut and the many sealing bars shoved back into place the silence in the house took on a quality of its own. Carter had known absence of sound elsewhere — here was a positive statement of no-sound, a bubble of peace pushed right up against the very base of the all-sound of The Falls. He was momentarily deafened and he knew it. But he was not so deaf that he did not know that the hammering thunder of The Falls had been shut outside. The other man must have sensed how his visitor felt. He nodded in a reassuring manner as he took Carter's coat, then pointed to a comfortable chair set by the deal table near the fire. Carter sank gratefully into the cushions. His host turned away and vanished, to return a moment later with a tray, bearing a decanter and two glasses. He poured a measure of wine into each glass and set one down before Carter, who nodded and seized it in both hands to steady their shaking. After a first large gulp he sipped at it while the tremors died and his hearing slowly returned. His host moved about the room on various tasks and presently Carter found himself much recovered. He looked up.

"I must thank you for your hospitality. When I came in I was — shaken."

"How are you now? Has the wine helped?" the man said loudly, almost shouting, and Carter realized that his own words had not been heard. Of course, the man must be hard of hearing. It was a wonder he was not stone deaf.

"Very good, thank you," Carter shouted back. "Very kind of you indeed. My name is Carter. I'm a reporter, which is why I have come to see you."

The man nodded, smiling slightly.

"My name is Bodum. You must know that if you have come here to talk to me. You write for the newspapers?"

"I was sent here." Carter coughed — the shouting was irritating his throat. "And I of course know you, Mr. Bodum — that is, I know you by reputation. You're the Man by The Falls."

"Forty- three years now," Bodum said with solid pride, "I've lived here and have never been away for a single night. Not that it has been easy. When the wind is wrong the spray is blown over the house for days and it is hard to breathe — even the fire goes out. I built the chimney myself — there is a bend partway up with baffles and doors. The smoke goes up — but if water comes down the baffles stop it and its weight opens the doors and it drains away through a pipe to the outside. I can show you where it drains — black with soot the wall is…

While Bodum talked Carter looked around the room at the dim furniture shapes barely seen in the wavering light from the fire and at the two windows set into the wall.

"Those windows," he said, "you put them in yourself? May I look out?"

"Took a year apiece, each one. Stand on that bench. It will bring you to the right level. They're armored glass, specially made, solid as the wall around them now that I have them anchored well. Don't be afraid. Go right up to it. The window's safe. Look how the glass is anchored."

Carter was not looking at the glass but at The Falls outside. He had not realized how close the building was to the falling water. It was perched on the very edge of the cliff and nothing was to be seen from this vantage point except the wall of blackened wet granite to his right and the foaming maelstrom of the bay far below. And before him, above him, filling space The Falls. All the thickness of wall and glass could not cut out their sound completely and when he touched the heavy pane with his fingertips he could feel the vibration of the waters' impact.

The window did not lessen the effect The Falls had upon him but it enabled him to stand and watch and think, as he had been unable to do on the outside. It was very much like a peephole into a holocaust of water — a window into a cold hell. He could watch without being destroyed — but the fear of what was on the other side did not lessen. Something black flickered in the falling water and was gone.

"There — did you see that?" he called out. "Something came down The Falls. What could it possibly be?"

Bodum nodded wisely. "Over forty years I have been here and I can show you what comes down The Falls." He thrust a splint into the fire and lit a lamp from it. Then, picking up the lamp, he waved Carter after him. They crossed the room and he held the light to a large glass bell jar.

"Must be twenty years ago it washed up on the shore. Every bone in its body broke too. Stuffed and mounted it myself."

Carter pressed close, looking at the staring shoe-button eyes and the gaping jaw and pointed teeth. The limbs were stiff and unnatural, the body under the fur bulging in the wrong places. Bodum was by no means a skilful taxidermist. Yet, perhaps by accident, he had captured a look of terror in the animal's expression and stance.

"It's a dog," Carter said. "Very much like other dogs."

Bodum was offended, his voice as cold as shout can be. "Like them, perhaps, but not of them. Every bone broken I told you. How else could a dog have appeared here in this bay?"

"I'm sorry, I did not mean to suggest for an instant — down The Falls, of course. I just meant it is so much like the dogs we have that perhaps there is a whole new world up there. Dogs and everything, just like ours."

"I never speculate," Bodum said mollified. "I'll make some coffee."

He took the lamp to the stove and Carter, left alone in the partial darkness went back to the window. It drew him. "I must ask you some questions for my article," he said but did not speak loudly enough for Bodum to hear. Everything he had meant to do here seemed irrelevant as he looked out at The Falls. The wind shifted. The spray was briefly blown clear and The Falls were once more a mighty river coming down from the sky. When he canted his head he saw it exactly as if he were looking across a river.

And there, upstream, a ship appeared, a large liner with rows of portholes. It sailed the surface of the river faster than ship had ever sailed before and he had to jerk his head to follow its motion. When it passed, no more than a few hundred yards away, for one instant he could see it clearly. The people aboard it were hanging to the rails, some with their mouths open as though shouting in fear. Then it was gone and there was only the water, rushing endlessly by.

"Did you see it?" Carter shouted, spinning about.

"The coffee will be ready soon."

"There, out there," Carter cried, taking Bodum by the arm. "In The Falls. It was a ship, I swear it was, falling from up above. With people on it. There must be a whole world up there that we know nothing about."

Bodum reached up to the shelf for a cup, breaking Carter's grip with the powerful movement of his arm.

"My dog came down The Falls. I found it and stuffed it myself."

"Your dog, of course, I'll not deny that. But there were people on that ship and I'll swear — I'm not mad — that their skins were a different color from ours."

"Skin is skin, just skin color."

"I know. That is what we have. But it must be possible for skins to be other colors, even if we don't know about it."

"Sugar?"

"Yes, please. Two." Carter sipped at the coffee — it was strong and warm. In spite of himself he was drawn back to the window. He looked out and sipped at the coffee — and started when something black and formless came down. And other things. He could not tell what they were because the spray was blowing toward the house again. He tasted grounds at the bottom of his cup and left the last sips. He put the cup carefully aside.

Again the eddying wind currents shifted the screen of spray to one side just in time for him to see another of the objects go by.

"That was a house! I saw it as clearly as I see this one. But wood perhaps, not stone, and smaller. And black as though it had been partially burned. Come look there may be more."

Bodum banged the pot as he rinsed it out in the sink. "What do you newspapers want to know about me? Over forty years here— there are a lot of things I can tell you about."

"What is up there above The Falls — on top of the cliff? Do people live up there? Can there be a whole world up there of which we live in total ignorance I"

Bodum hesitated, frowned in thought, before he answered.

"I believe they have dogs up there."

"Yes.” Carter answered, hammering his fist on the window ledge, not knowing whether to smile or cry. The water fell by; the floor and walls shook with the power of it.

"There — more and more things going by." He spoke quietly, to himself. "I can't tell what they are. That — that could have been a tree and that a bit of fence. The smaller ones may be bodies — animals, logs, anything. There is a different world above The Falls and in that world something terrible is happening. And we don't even know about it. We don't even know that world is there."

He struck again and again on the stone until his fist hurt.

The sun shone on the water and he saw the change, just here and there at first, an altering and shifting.

"Why — the water seems to be changing color. Pink it is — no, red. More and more of it. There, for an instant, it was all red. The color of blood."

He spun about to face the dim room and tried to smile but his lips were drawn back hard from his teeth when he did.

"Blood? Impossible. There can't be that much blood in the whole world. What is happening up there? What is happening?"

His scream did not disturb Bodum, who only nodded his head in agreement.

"I'll show you something," he said. "But only if you promise not to write about it. People might laugh at me. I've been here over forty years and that is nothing to laugh about."

"My word of honor, not a word, just show me. Perhaps it has something to do with what is happening."

Bodum took down a heavy Bible and opened it on the table next to the lamp. It was set in very black type, serious and impressive. He turned pages until he came to a piece of very ordinary paper.

"I found this on the shore. During the winter. No one had been here for months. It may have come over The Falls. Now I'm not saying it did — but it is possible. You will agree it is possible?"

"Oh, yes — quite possible. How else could it have come here?" Carter reached out and touched it. "I agree, ordinary paper. Torn on one edge, wrinkled where it was wet and then dried." He turned it over. "There is lettering on the other side."

"Yes. But it is meaningless. It is no word I know."

"Nor I, and I speak four languages. Could it have a meaning?"

"Impossible. A word like that."

"No human language." He shaped his lips and spoke the letters aloud. "Aich — Eee — Ell — Pea."

"What could 'HELP' mean?" Bodum shouted louder than ever. "A child scribbled it. Meaningless." He seized the paper and crumpled it and threw it into the fire.

"You'll want to write a story about me," he said proudly. "I have been here over forty years, and if there is one man in the entire world who is an authority on The Falls it is me.

"I know everything that there is to know about them."

American Dead

Francesco Bruno crossed himself, muttered the quick words of a prayer, then turned his attention to the metal plate on the splintered table before him. Hunger possessed him, he had not eaten in over twelve hours, or he would not have been able to face the little beans with the black markings, or the limp, greasy greens again. He ate quickly, aware of the dark figures silently watching him. There was only water to wash the food down with.

"Show him the paper," one of the men said and, for possibly the hundredth time in the last three days, Bruno took the creased and stained sheet from his wallet. A black hand reached out and took it from him. The newcomer carried it to the paneless window and held it to the light to read it. There was a muttered discussion. Bruno looked around, at the gnarled, white-haired woman bent over the stove, at the board walls — with gaps between the boards big enough to get a finger through — the poverty and the barrenness. Even the slums of Palermo, where he had grown up, were not this bad.

The newcomer brought the paper back. "What you got with you?" he asked. Bruno opened the stained canvas pack, with the weathered initials US on it, and began to spread its contents on the rickety table. They had given him this in place of the suitcase he had left the city with. The palm-sized TV camera, the recorder for it, the fuel-cell power pack, the extra reels of tape, a change of underclothing and his toilet kit. The man poked through everything, then pointed to the camera.

"This a gun?" he asked.

Bruno did not bother to explain that he had been through this routine an uncountable number of times since the journey had begun. Patiently, he set the camera, explained how it operated, then shot a brief take. When he reran the tape the men pushed close to look at the tiny monitor screen.

"Hey, Granny, you on the tee-vee. You gonna be a big-time star, you hear!"

He had to replay it again for the old woman, who chuckled in appreciation before returning to the stove. The demonstration had cleared some of the tension from the air, for the first time, the newcomer relaxed and dropped into a chair. He was big and dark, dressed in patched and muddy army fatigues. He had a submachine gun slung over his shoulder and clips of cartridges hanging across his chest.

"You kin call me Chopper. Where you from?"

Bruno spread his hands wide. "From Europe, a consortium of the press…" He saw the quick frown and glower: damn his Oxford English. He tried again.

"I'm from Italy, way down in the south. I work for a newspaper. I write newspaper stories. We have a lot of papers over there, television stations too. We were informed that it might be able to send one man over here. Everyone got together to pick one man. I am the one they picked…"

"You sure nuff talk funny."

"I told you, I am from Italy."

"You say somfin now in that Italy talk."

"Buon giorno, signore. Voglio andare al—"

"He sure talk it, all right," one of the interested bystanders said.

Chopper nodded approval, as though this demonstration of alien ability had made an important point.

"You ready go now? We got some walkin' tuh do."

"Whenever you say." Bruno hurriedly stuffed everything back into the pack, after first wrapping it securely in a sheet of plastic. Walking would be no novelty. He had walked, rode muleback, traveled in a wagon, a truck, cars. Blindfolded most of the time.

They went out into the tiny yard, soaked and muddy chickens squawking out of their way. The early-afternoon sky was dark as evening and a perpetual fine rain was falling, drenching everything. But it was warm, even hot once they started walking, the air almost too humid to breathe.

Chopper led the way, but went only a few yards down the rutted, puddle-filled lane before turning off between the pine trees. Bruno concentrated only on keeping up with his apparently tireless guide, so he was just vaguely aware of the falling mist, the squish of damp pine needles under their feet, the black columns of the trees vanishing grayly into the fog on all sides. They walked for two hours without a break, before coming suddenly to an open field of stubble that disappeared into the mist before them. A bird sounded ahead and Chopper clutched Bruno and dragged him to the ground. Then he cupped his hand and repeated the same bird call. They lay there, until two men materialized out of the rain, their M-16 rifles pointing warily ahead.

"Let's go," Chopper said. "We here."

The two guards walked behind them as they worked their way around the edge of the field to a split-rail fence, heavily overgrown with vines and creepers. A man was lying there, peering through a gap between the rails. He wore heavy field boots and a rain-darkened rubber poncho. He had on an army steel helmet and, when he rolled over and sat up, seven gold stars in a circle were visible on it.

The supreme commander of all the American Armed Forces only had six.

"I understand that you have my letter.” the man said.

"Right here," Bruno answered, groping inside his jacket. "Then you must be the man who wrote it? Mau Mau…"

As Mau Mau examined the letter, Bruno examined him. A wide face, dark eyes, cappuccino-colored skin, an unexpressive mouth under a drooping black moustache. He took one glance at the letter, then tore it in half and stuffed the pieces into his pants pocket.

"You've come a long way — and it has taken a long time," he said.

Bruno nodded. "It was not easy. The immigration people are very difficult these days, and there was the paperwork. Then a legitimate reason had to be found for me to get far enough south to meet the contact."

Mau Mau looked him up and down carefully. "For a white man you're pretty dark.” he said.

"For a black man you're pretty light.” Bruno answered, then went on hurriedly when he saw that the other was not amused. "The Mediterranean, in the south where I come from, people are darker. Perhaps, who knows, that is why I was chosen…"

Mau Mau smiled and the lines of severity, the grimness vanished for a moment. "Sicily I bet. That's pretty near to Africa. Maybe you have a touch of the tarbrush…"

He broke off as a young Negro, barefooted and wearing ragged overalls and shirt, ran up, bent low behind the cover of the fence. He carried a new and efficient-looking army field telephone that trailed a glistening length of black wire. Mau Mau grabbed off the handset and listened.

"A truck coming," he announced. "With a jeep, maybe a hundred yards behind it."

They all ran, with Bruno hurrying after.

"Hey!" he shouted. "Can I take pictures?"

Mau Mau stopped so abruptly that Bruno almost collided with him. They stood close, Mau Mau almost a head taller, looking down at the reporter. "Yes, as long as I can see them afterwards."

"Absolutely, every foot of tape," he called after the man's departing back, then began to dig furiously in his pack. The camera and power pack were reasonably waterproof, and everything else was still dry inside the plastic. He followed the others after slipping a hood over the lens.

They were gathered in a small clump of silver birch trees that stood at the edge of a narrow stream. The water burbled past and ran through a culvert under a road. It was a paved road, narrow but well kept up, with a county marker at its edge. Bruno squinted but could not make out the number or even the state. There were more men here, all waiting tensely, looking down the road to the left where it vanished into the mist and falling rain. A growing whine of tires could be heard.

Everything happened quickly. The truck loomed up out of the mist, a big army truck with many wheels and a canvas top. It was going very fast. When it reached the culvert the ground and the road rose up in a roar of sound and a great flash of orange light. The front of the truck lifted off the road for an instant before it dropped back heavily, the front wheels falling into the gap where the culvert had been. A gun must have been fired — Bruno could not hear it for the roaring in his ears — because sudden holes punched their way across the white star on the metal door of the cab.

The jeep appeared out of the fog, skidding and twisting sideways as the driver braked on the wet road. It stopped, nuzzling up to the tilted rear of the truck, and a gun muzzle jabbed out from behind the front curtains, hammering out a spasm of rapid firing. There was answering fire from all sides — Bruno could hear better now — and the gun dropped to the pavement and a soldier's body slid after it.

"If you are alive — come out!" Mau Mau shouted. "You have five seconds or we blow you out. Hands empty when you come."

There was a silence, then the truck springs creaked and a rifle came over the tailgate and clattered onto the road. A soldier, a corporal, emerged and slowly climbed down. Something stirred in the back of the jeep, a pair of shiny boots protruded out from under the curtain, and an officer slid out onto the road. He had his left hand clutched about his right forearm. Blood ran down his fingers and dripped to the ground.

A sudden burst of rapid firing made Bruno jump and he swung the camera toward the rear of the truck. Chopper had jumped out and sprayed a clip into the canvas. Another man kicked the corporal in the back of the knees so he dropped to the ground. With quick efficienty he pulled the soldier's wrists behind his back and secured them with rapid twists of insulated wire. He did the same with his ankles then stuffed a rag into his mouth and sealed it there with more wire. The soldier, like a hog-tied animal, could only roll his eyes upward in fear.

"Get the aid kit from the jeep and fix up Whitey's arm," Mau Mau ordered, "and bring me a can of sandman." He put his hand behind him without looking, and the can was slapped into it. The soldier rolled on the wet pavement as the blast of spray from the pressurized canister hit his face; then he slumped limply. Mau Mau turned to the officer.

"Ready for your turn, Lieutenant?" he asked.

Raindrops beaded the officer's close-cropped blond hair as he bent his head to watch the field bandage being tied around his arm. He looked up slowly, but did not answer. Yet the answer was obvious in the look of cold hatred directed at Mau Mau. The tall Negro laughed aloud and held out the can and blasted the fine spray full into the contemptuous face. The eyelids fluttered, closed, the features sagged and the man's knees wobbled. Mau Mau put his hand in the middle of the officer's chest and pushed. The man went over backward into the weeds beside the road, his legs and arms sprawling wide. There were appreciative chuckles from the bystanders and Bruno swept the camera across their smiling faces.

"Enough funning.” Mau Mau said. "Put that camera away." As soon as Bruno had lowered it he turned and cupped his hands and shouted, "Come an' git it!"

On the far side of the road the ground grew sodden where the stream widened out and vanished into a swamp. Ghostly trunks of trees readied up from the dark water, their branches hung with festoons of parasitic plants. Figures emerged from among the trees, one, two, then a score, until there was a large crowd of Negroes coming out of the swamp. Old men, women, young children, they moved with a sense of purpose.

One of the gunmen pulled open the truck's tailgate and climbed inside. The first thing he dropped out was the blood-drenched body of a soldier, which was grabbed by the heels and dragged aside. Then came some guns and ammunition, followed by boxes and crates. As he pushed each item to the edge someone stepped forward to take it from him, — sometimes two people if the box was very big. The children carried, proudly, the bandoleers of ammunition and the rifles. The burdened carriers vanished, one by one, down the path leading back into the swamp.

"What did we get?" Mau Mau called out.

"Little of everyfin," the voice called from inside the truck. "K-rations, typin' paper, blankets, grenades—"

"Now you're talking."

"— pro kits, toilet paper. You name it, it's here."

"What the army can use, we can use," Mau Mau said, smiling happily, wiping his hands together. "We're fighting the same war."

While waiting their turn at the truck, some of the people went over to look at the two unconscious soldiers. There was a sudden murmur of voices and a woman called out shrilly.

"Mau Mau, you come here. Dis little boy was at Ellenville an' he say he saw Whitey dere!"

Everyone stopped and there was absolute silence — broken only by the thud of boots as Mau Mau ran across the road. He had his hand on the thin little boy's shoulder and bent to talk to him. Voices whispered now, with an undertone of anger like the hum of a disturbed beehive.

"Hurry it up, we haven't all day!" Mau Mau shouted, and his voice was harsh. Things moved faster. The last case vanished into the mist and the truck was empty. Two armed men followed the burdened people. At the swamp edge they turned and raised their right arms, fist clenched. In silence, the others returned the salute.

"Run the jeep onto the path into the swamp," Mau Mau ordered. "And burn it. Make sure it blows up. That will cover any tracks. Throw the soldier into the back of the truck. Get moving into the field and leave plenty of footprints, hear?" Then his voice lowered, the words almost hissing out. "Chopper and Ali pick up the lieutenant. We're taking him with us."

Bruno watched while two men manhandled the jeep off the road to the edge of the swamp and left it astraddle the trail. One of them dropped grenades inside the jeep — then shot a hole in the gas tank. The other man twisted a silver device, about the size of a pencil, which he dropped into the growing pool of gasoline on the ground. They came hurrying back.

"Mistuh, better make tracks," one shouted. "Dat thing blow in one minute."

Bruno turned and realized that the others had gone, vanished already in the rain. He hurried after the remaining two men. They were halfway across the field, following the obvious tracks, when there was a muffled explosion from the direction of the road.

They caught up quickly with the others, who were walking slowly rather than marching. A rough litter had been made with two rifles and a blanket and the officer was being carried in it, his uninjured arm dangling limply over the side. Mau Mau led the way, scowling into the mist ahead. Bruno walked beside him for a few minutes, in silence, before he spoke.

"May I ask you questions?"

Mau Mau glanced at him, then brushed the raindrops from his moustache with his knuckles. "By all means, that's why you are here."

Bruno opened one strap and dug into the pack, pulling out the microphone. "I would like to record this," he said, holding it up.

"You just do that."

"Oggi e il quatro giorno di luglio…"

"Tall English!"

"Today is the Fourth of July, somewhere in the South of the United States. I am with a man whose name I may not mention—"

"Mention it."

"A man named Mau Mau, who is not only a local resistance leader, but is also reputed to be on the Black Power Council of Ten. Would you care to comment on that?"

Mau Mau shook his head in a sharp no.

"I have just witnessed a brief action, a minor engagement in the grim battle that is now gripping this country. I am going to ask him about this, and about the bigger picture as he sees it."

"Turn that thing off now."

Bruno flipped the switch and they walked in silence for a moment. The path had emerged into a rough and partly overgrown logging road that wound erratically through the trees. Mau Mau took the microphone and buried it inside his fist.

"How long will it be before this is printed or broadcast?" he asked.

Bruno shrugged. "I would say, at a minimum, two weeks after it gets to Washington. I would like to ask you for help with that."

"We can get it there for you. But I'm going to sit on it for a month. By that time none of this will matter because we will be someplace else. How are you going to get the tapes out of the country? They are searching things pretty closely ever since the Hungarians printed the stolen New Orleans ghetto massacre pictures."

"I am afraid I cannot tell you exactly. But I will give you an address to deliver the tapes to. After that, well, the diplomatic pouch of a friendly government."

"That isn't quite as friendly as they act. Good enough." He handed back the microphone. The rain had stopped, but the mist still clung to the ground. Mau Mau squinted up at the sky. "They tell me that you are a big praying man. You better pray that this fog and rain hang around. There are still three hours until sunset."

"Might I ask — the significance of that?"

"Planes and choppers. You must understand that we are irregulars and we are fighting the military. Our only advantage is in being irregular. Their disadvantage is that they are too organized. They have to be. They have chains of command and orders come down from the top. They can't have people thinking for themselves or there would be chaos. Now, chaos just helps us fine. These big military minds have finally, and reluctantly, accepted the idea that we control the roads at night. They have to do all their rushing about in the daytime. They have this day thing so stuck in their heads that they sometimes don't notice that there are days that are just as good as nights as far as we are concerned."

“Like today?"

"You're catching on fine. We hit and we leave. The goods we confiscated go in one direction, we go in another. The military finds our tracks and sort of concentrates in this direction. They don't really believe them, they don't believe much of anything anymore, but they don't have much choice. We lead them on a bit, keep them busy until dark, and that is that. By morning we're gone, the supplies are gone, and the world is back to normal." He smiled wryly when he spoke the last word.

"Then we are — so to speak — bait?"

"You could say that. But remember bait is usually placed in a trap."

"Would you explain that?"

"Wait and see."

"Whitey wakin' up," a voice said from behind them.

They stopped and waited until the litter bearers came up to them. The officer's eyes were open, watching them.

"Get up," Mau Mau ordered. "You can walk now, you been in dat baby buggy too long." He put his hand out to help. The officer ignored it and got his legs to the ground and stood, swaying.

"What's your name?"

"Adkins, Lieutenant—10034268."

"Well, Adkins, Lieutenant, are you beginning to wonder why we didn't leave you back there by the road, you being wounded and all that? Isn't often we take prisoners, is it?"

The officer did not answer, and started to turn away. Mau Mau reached out and took him by the chin, dragging his head back until they were face-to-face again.

"Better talk to me, Adkins. I can make big trouble for you."

"Do you torture prisoners, then?" He had a firm, controlled voice that was used to command.

"Not very often. But stranger things have happened in this war, haven't they?"

"To what do you refer? And I prefer to call this a criminal, Communist insurrection."

Bruno had to admire the man. He wondered how he would have acl«&d in the same situation.

"You call it just what you want, Whitey, just what you want," Mau Mau said in a low voice. He went on, still speaking softly. "I think this is more of a war, with you on one side and me on the other. Bad things happen during a war. Did you hear what happened at Ellenville?"

There was the smallest break in the lieutenant's composure. A small start, a slight narrowing of the eyes. If Bruno had not been watching him closely he would never have noticed. Yet the man's voice was calm as ever.

"A lot of things have happened at Ellenville. To what are you referring?"

"Let's move.” Mau Mau said, turning away. "Choppers will be coming soon and we need a few more miles behind us."

They moved in silence after that. The two former stretcher bearers walking close behind the prisoner, guns ready. After about five minutes Mau Man halted them and put his hand to his ear. "Is that a copter out there? Ali, rig that listener and see if you can hear anything."

Ali slung his rifle and took the submicrominiaturized listening device from his pocket. The plastic case was olive drab in color and obviously army issue. He put the earphone into place and sprang open the collapsed acoustic shell. They all watched closely while he turned in a slow circle, listening intently, hesitated, then turned back. He nodded.

"Kin hear one real clear. An' mebbe 'nother one way out."

"Search pattern. Let's double time," Mau Mau ordered.

They ran. Bruno was staggering, exhausted and soaked with sweat, before they reached the clearing that was their destination. There was a banked mound of raw dirt around a yard-wide hole in the center of it.

"Chopper, dive down and get the bolo," Mau Mau said. "Then the rest of you get in there with Whitey and keep a close eye on him." He turned to Bruno. "Stick around, I think that you'll enjoy this."

The big Negro vanished over the mound of dirt and reappeared a minute later with a device like a bulge-barreled telescope that was mounted on a tripod.

"The modern technology of war," Mau Mau said. "The military just love gadgetry, they do indeed. All the hardware makes them feel important and is great for explaining their inflated budgets. Over eighty percent of the federal budget is spent by the military, one way or another, and has been for the past forty, fifty years. You record this. Now the military was glad to have black boys for cannon fodder, in Vietnam and the like, and those boys learned real good how to use all the fancy devices. Of course the army is kind of lily-white these days, but an awful lot of blacks learned how to press the buttons before they were booted out for the good of the service." He stopped and listened. The distant rumble of a helicopter could be clearly heard now. Mau Mau smiled.

"Here come the ofay air cavalry now. They know that a lot of people walked off with a lot of their goods and they have to find them right quick. Because by morning those goods will be buried real deep and safe, and the people will be back at their farms and at their jobs and who's to know? So they go flapping around up there with sophisticated electronic sniffers and body-heat detectors and all kind of expensive junk. They'll smell us out soon. And when they do bolo there will sniff them right back. Got a sound detector in its nose. Works simple and is hard to jam."

Louder and louder the copter sounded, obviously coming toward them now. Bruno resisted the temptation to cringe away from its advance. He knew just what the gunship could do with its rapid-firing cannon, rockets, bombs. .

The nose of the bolo missile was turning. Chopper stood off to one side, the control box in his hand with the cable leading to the tripod. "Range!" he called out, and at the same moment the rocket spat out a jet of flame and hurled itself up into the fog. One, two, three seconds passed — and a great explosion sounded from the sky, which lit for an instant with a ruddy flame. Pieces of debris crashed down through the trees and thudded to the ground, and silence followed.

"Scratch a couple million bucks," Mau Mau said, and pointed to the hole. "Now get down because there will be incoming very soon."

By the time Bruno had stowed his camera and clambered up the mound the other two were out of sight below. Thick lengths of branch were set into the shaftlike rungs of a ladder, and he climbed carefully down them. It was completely dark and musty in the deep hole, claustrophobic. He touched bottom and, by feel, found that a low tunnel went off horizontally. He went into it, on his hands and knees and, after turning two right-angle corners, came out into an underground chamber. Battery lamps illuminated it. It was low, he could stand only if he crouched over, and just big enough for all of them to sit against the walls, knees almost touching. It was roofed with heavy logs, which were notched and supported by even thicker sections along the walls. It was dark, the officer's face the only relieving spot of white in the chamber.

"We have three, four minutes at the most," Mau Mau said. "As soon as the chopper was missed from the radio net they send something flying over to look for it. They'll find the wreck. Then they'll call for air support. Then they'll drop a lot of bombs hoping that there are a lot of nice black people just sitting down here waiting for incoming mail."

There was a muffled explosion and dirt shook down from above. Mau Mau smiled. "Three minutes. They're getting very efficient."

Bruno did not know how long the barrage lasted. There were separate explosions at first, but these quickly joined into a continuous hammering roar. The ground shook under them, bigger clouds of earth fill from above and the roaring became so loud they had to cover their ears. The sound eased a bit when an explosion sealed the entrance tunnel. To Bruno's fear of being killed was added the greater fear of being buried alive. He spoke prayers aloud, but could not hear them. The men looked upward, then at each other, turning quickly away when they caught another's eye. The sound went on and on.

Then, an unmeasurable time later, there was an end to it. The explosions became distinct, one from the other, waned, grew again, and finally ceased altogether. The roof had held and they were alive.

"Let's go," Mau Mau said, his voice sounding dim and muffled to their battered ears. "If we start digging now we should be out by dark, and we have a lot of ground to cover tonight."

The guerrillas took turns with the shovels, carrying the dirt back in buckets to dump at the far end of the chamber.

They all helped with this, except for the prisoner and one guard. The atmosphere was stifling and hot before they holed through to the outside again. They emerged, breathing deeply, savoring the indescribable sweetness of the evening air.

Bruno looked about in the twilight and gasped. The rain had stopped and the fog had thinned a good deal. The clearing was gone, as were the trees, in every direction, as far as he could see. In their place was a sea of churned craters and splintered pieces of wood. Pieces of steel casing were scattered over the ground. He bent and picked up a shining steel ball: there were many of these.

"Antipersonnel bombs," Mau Mau said. "Each bomb has a couple hundred of these balls, and they drop them by the thousands. Cut a person in two they will. Military denied dropping them in Vietnam, they deny using them now. They lied both times."

"Mau Mau — we on de radio!" Chopper called out. He had a small transistor portable held to his ear. "That raid we done on de truck. Dey say de army had three casualties and dat we had thirty-seven killed."

"Turn that damn thing off and get Whitey over here. I want some words with him."

They stood, face-to-face, black and white faces, each mirroring the other's expression of cold hatred.

"Record this, Bruno," Mau Mau said. The camera mechanism whirred as it opened the lens wide in the failing light. "Lieutenant Adkins is now going to tell us what he was doing in Ellenville. Speak up, Lieutenant."

"I have nothing to say."

"Nothing? There was a little boy back at the truck who recognized you. He was hidden in the loft of that country store, and nobody ever looked up there because the ladder had got knocked down. He said that you were in charge of the men that afternoon, that day, that's what he said."

"He's lying!"

"Now why should a little boy lie? He did say that most ofays looked alike to him, white like something dead, but he is never going to forget your face."

The lieutenant turned away contemptuously and said nothing. Mau Mau drew back his fist — then struck him in the side of the head so hard that he was hurled to the ground. He lay there, blood running down his cheek, and cursed.

"See, did you see that, you with the camera, whoever you are? He struck a prisoner, a wounded prisoner. Do you see the kind of creature he is? I'll tell you what happened in Ellenville. There was a girl riding in a car, a sweet girl, a girl I knew, who I even had the privilege of dancing with once. One minute she was alive, and the next minute she was butchered and dead. Maybe killed by this black ape here for all I know!"

"Oh, Whitey, you got a mighty big mouth," Mau Mau said, shaking his head. "Why don't you tell him that this sweet girl was an army nurse and she happened to be in a car with a colonel that had been causing a lot of trouble in these parts. And that that car was taken out by a mortar shell from over a hill and no one knew she was in the car until they heard it on the radio. Now I'm just as sorry about that sweet girl as you are. But how come you didn't tell him about the other sweet girl, the black girl, who had the bad luck to be in a store the next day when a patrol came looking for evidence and shot the man that ran the store, then gang-shagged the girl and killed her too? Go ahead now, tell the press all about that."

"You're a liar!" He spat out the words.

"Me? I'm just telling you what the little boy told me. He says you kind of knocked the old man around before he got killed. He also said that you didn't climb on that little black girl with the others, but you seemed to enjoy yourself just watching. And he said that you were the one that killed her afterwards, put your gun in her mouth and blew her brains out through the back of her head."

l^feu Mau bent over the man on the ground, lower and lower, and every muscle in his body drew taut with the intensity of his emotion. When he spoke again he almost spat the words in the other's face.

"So now I am going to give it to you, you white son of a bitch, just the way you gave it to her."

It was ugly, Bruno felt sickened, yet he got it all on tape. The man fought back, hard, in spite of his wounded arm, but they put him down and brought the lanterns so they glared on his face while Mau Mau stood over him and lowered a rifle an inch above his face. "Got some last words, Whitey? Want to try and make your peace with God?"

"Don't dirty the name of God with your thick filthy lips.” the lieutenant shouted, twisting against the hands that held him. "You black Jew Communist nigger come down here from the North and look for trouble — you'll find it, all of you — because before this is over you are going to be dead or shipped back to Africa with the rest of the apes…"

The gun muzzle pushed against his mouth cutting off the flow of words. Mau Mau nodded.

"Now that's just what I wanted to hear you say. I wouldn't have wanted to kill an innocent man."

Though Bruno closed his eyes when the shot was fired he kept the camera going.

"That. . that was horrible," he said, turning away, fighting to control his stomach while his gorge rose bitter in his mouth.

"Everything about war is horrible," Mau Mau said. "Now let's march before they catch us here." He started away, then turned back to the Italian newsman.

"Look, do you think I like doing this? Maybe I do now, but I didn't start out this way. War brutalizes everyone involved until there is no more innocence on either side. But you must remember that this is a revolt — and that people do not revolt and get killed unless there is a reason for them to do it. And, oh man, man, do we have a couple of hundred years of good reasons! So why shouldn't we fight, and kill, for what we know is right? Whitey does it all the time. Remember Vietnam? Whitey thought he was right there so he dropped napalm on schools and hospitals. Whitey taught us just how it is done. So when we run across filth like this" — he kicked at the sprawled leg of the body on the ground—"we know how to deal with it. People like this you can't talk to — except with a gun."

Bruno was shocked, his hand making little chopping motions in the air before he could choke out the words.

"Do you hear yourself? Do you know what you are saying? This is what Mussolini, the fascists said, when they took over Italy. This is what the hysterical Birchites, the Minutemen, say in your own country. You are parroting their words!"

Mau Mau smiled, but there was nothing, nothing at all humorous in the twist of his mouth.

"Am I? I guess that you are right. They always said that we needed education to change, and I guess they were right, too. They taught us. We got the message. We learned."

He turned away and led them off into the darkness.

Dawn of the Endless Night

I wrote the West of Eden trilogy about our planet Earth where the giant meteorite did not strike 65 million years ago. In these books intelligent dinosaurs develop to share the world with mankind. In history as we know it there were no intelligent dinosaurs. Or were there. .

Akotolp was deeply asleep, immersed in the dreamless and immobile sleep of the Yilane. Then the dawn came and she was instantly awake, instantly aware at the same time that something was very wrong. The light was far too bright for dawn, far brighter even than midday, burning through the gaps between the leaves that walled her sleeping chamber. Her nictitating membranes closed as she pushed aside the vines and stepped out beneath the branches of the city tree.

"It is wrong, all wrong," she said to herself, making the twisting tail movement of intensity magnified. For this dawn that was not dawn was in the west. This could not be, but it certainly was. As a scientist she was forced to accept the evidence of her senses, no matter how unbelievable they were.

The light was fading, slowly becoming dimmer, obscured even more by the figure that stood before her. A fargi; Akotolp waved her aside but she did not move. She spoke instead.

"The Eistaa. . summons of great urgency."

"Yes, of course — now move out of the way."

Akotolp watched until the last glimmer had faded from sight. The stars reappeared, as well as the almost full moon that spread silver light across the city. The fargi led the way, stumbling and shuffling through the shadows towards the open, central area of the ambesed where the Eistaa waited.

"You saw the light," she said when Akotolp stopped before her.

"I did."

" Explanation-expatiation desired."

"Desire to obey — however, insufficiency of knowledge-information."

The Eistaa signed surprise and disillusion. "In a lifetime of acquaintance-friendship I have never heard you admit to any lack of knowledge."

"There is a first time for everything. I am considering this matter slowly and rationally. The cause of this great light is unknown. It is not fire, for I have seen fire."

"What does that term fire mean?"

"Explanation time-consuming, unneeded."

"The fargi panic, my scientist knows nothing. It is all very disturbing."

"A strange phenomenon — but it is over."

Akotolp instantly regretted saying this, for no sooner had she spoken than the earth beneath her feet shuddered and a great sound assaulted them. The attendant fargi wailed in fear and clapped their hands over their ear-openings; some even fell to the ground and lay writhing there. The Eistaa was made of sterner stuff and stood stoutly upright, back arched with legs spread wide, toe-claws sunk into the soil to hold her erect. When the noise had sunk to a rumble she signed great disapproval.

"You did say it was over, scientist of great knowledge?"

"Apology for misconception, humble submission."

Akotolp stretched her neck back, exposing her throat in added emphasis. The Eistaa signed acceptance and rejection of death offer.

"Tell me your thoughts for, feeble as they are, this night you are still the only one who might possibly explain what has happened."

"I cannot explain. Only analyze."

"Then proceed."

"An event of geological magnitude—"

"Definition needed unknown term geological."

Akotolp fought not to disclose her agitation at the interruption. She concealed her movements of distaste by turning and kicking aside some fallen leaves, then settling back comfortably on her tail. She used the simplified motions of night-talk, clearly visible in the clear moonlight.

"Geological refers to the earth on which we stand. There are beneath this solid ground great forces at work. I have seen, beyond the jungles of Entoban to the east, a range of high mountains that have burst open and give forth melted rock. I saw fire there as well. An event that can tear open solid mountains and melt solid rock is of geological magnitude."

"Was this tonight a geological event?"

Akotolp sat rigid and unmoving, wrapped in thought. It was some time before she stirred and spoke.

"No, I am certain it was not. It was too sudden. All of the events I watched began slowly, grew and proceeded. This came too quickly-And it was very large, though distant."

"Distant? Explanation needed." The Eistaa, while efficient at ruling and ordering her city, neither knew nor cared about the facts of science. Akotolp forced herself to proceed patiently.

"Distant because of the strong light that awakened us. A Yilane of science in the city of Yebeisk to the south conducted a series of experiments to discover at what speed light passes through the air. She told me that refine the experiments as she might the speed always seemed to be close to instantaneous. But the speed of sound is very slow. This is easily demonstrated. Therefore, since the sound of the event came a good time after we saw the light, the conclusion is that what happened was far distant in the ocean. And very large."

The Eistaa made motions of impatience-confusion. "As always I find your explanations impossible to follow. Now you will clarify-simplify."

"Something very large happened far out in the ocean."

"The light flared. Later there was the sound and the ground moved. Why?"

"The ground must have been moved by the movement of the sea—"

Akotolp gasped, her mouth opening wide with shock. She jumped to her feet and turned to look at the smooth water of the bay.

"It will happen!" She signed urgency and fear so strongly that the Eistaa recoiled.

"What is it? What is happening?"

"What will happen. You must order your fargi to go among the sleepers at once. Awaken every Yilane. Order them inland as quickly as possible, to the hills beyond the fields where the onetsensast graze. Order it, Eistaa."

"Why?"

"Don't you see? A force so distant that could shake the ground here must be very strong indeed. It will make waves such as we have never seen in the worst storm. Those waves are coming even as we speak."

The Eistaa reached an instant decision. "I will so order—"

It was already too late, far too late.

The water of the bay were draining away, pouring through the harbor enr^nce into the sea. And distantly, growing instantly louder, was the crashing rumble of water falling on water, churning and roaring. Drowning out all other sounds.

Striking and drowning the shore, filling the bay in an instant. Rising in a flood that engulfed the city tree, broke off the limbs, stripped away the smaller growth, hurtled inland.

Akotolp closed mouth, eyes, nostrils, struck out in panic at the saltwater that engulfed her. Felt the pressure of the water above her.

Swam upwards in the darkness. Was struck a terrible blow in her side that numbed her. Clutched her wounded arm with her other hand, thrust violently with legs and tail.

Burst into foam-filled darkness, gasped in air.

Was struck again in the darkness. Almost unconscious, weakened by pain, she swam on, knowing that this was her only chance of survival. If she sank below the surface again she would never emerge.

An unmeasurable, pain-filled time passed before she felt solidity beneath her feet. Muddy, debris-laden water streamed about her, dropped lower, to her midriff, then to her knees. She staggered and fell heavily, screamed with pain as a greater darkness closed over her.

Akotolp woke slowly to light and agony. A heavy, warm rain was falling. Black rain, streaming filthily across the skin. She blinked with incomprehension, felt the grit in her eyes. Sat up and her vision blurred red with pain. Arms and legs moved, apparently no bones broken. But the immense soreness in her side must surely be more than mere bruising; some ribs might be broken. It hurt to breathe. Alive and injured — but still alive. Only when she was gratefully aware of this did her scientific curiosity return.

She was standing ankle-deep in a plain of mud. Branches, entire uprooted trees were strewn about her. Two dead Yilane were nearby, broken and unmoving, one of them crushed by the bulk of an armored fish of some kind. Her arms crossed across her ribcage, Akotolp walked slowly and painfully up a rise to the top of a nearby mound, leaned gratefully against the broken trunk of a tree on its summit.

Nothing looked familiar; she was pinned in a nightmare landscape of mud and destruction. Only when she faced inland, blinking through the sheets of rain, did she manage to make out the familiar shapes of the range of hills. They ran down almost to the sea, almost to the outlet of the bay. Using this as a guide, she was horrified to see that the birth beaches were gone, gouged out by the sea and washed away. The far side of the bay was gone as well, the bay and lagoon now joined directly to the ocean.

Then that heap of dark debris must be all that was left of her city tree. She moaned in agony at the sight. If she were weaker she might have died. Yilane, when deprived of their city did die, she had seen it happen. But she would not. Others might. Not her_; she was strong enough to bear the shock. Pushing herself upright, she stumbled toward the remains.

And she was not alone. Others were moving that way as well, fargi who signed respect and gratitude when they identified her. They moved close to draw strength from her presence. One of them, despite the bruises and filth caked to her skin, she recognized.

"You are Inlenu — she who commands the workers at the fish pens."

Inlenu signed gratefulness for attention. "We have happiness-magnified and greet you, Akotolp. Humbly request explanation of happenings."

"Your knowledge is as great as mine. Something disastrous occurred far out in the ocean. With it was a great light, a great sound. This something caused the earth to move, the sea to rise. What you see around you is the result."

"The city, everything is destroyed. What will become of us?"

"We will live. The waters will not have covered all of Entoban. There will be food, in the forests and in the sea."

"But our city—"

"Will be regrown. Until that time we will sleep on the ground under the stars, as countless others have done before us. Do not despair, strong Inlenu, we need your strength."

"As we need yours." She signed respect-admiration, a movement that was echoed by all the fargi watching and listening. They would survive now.

Surely they would — for when they were closer they saw that hidden behind the rubble was the sturdy trunk of the city-tree, some of its thick branches still intact.

And — wonder of wonders! — standing at its base was the solid form of the Eistaa. The fargi hurried forward, bodies and limbs writhing with pleasure and great awe at her presence. They signed gratitude and happiness as well. Pushed close, then moved back when she signed them this order, parted to let Akotolp through to join her.

"You have survived, Eistaa, and therefore the city shall survive as well."

"There has been great damage, many deaths." She signed the fargi away so that they could speak without being heard.

"Two out of three, possibly more, are dead. Others badly injured will die as well." With quieter words and smaller motions she revealed an even more terrible fact.

"The males are gone. Every one. The eggs they carried will never hatch*'

Akotolp swayed with agony, fought for control, spoke calmly and wisely. "It is not the end. We are only one city. There are other Yilane cities inland along the great rivers to the north. One even on the inland sea of Isegnet. When the time comes I will visit them and return with males. Yilane are as one when facing disaster. The city will be grown again."

The Eistaa moved with pleasure when she heard this and took Akotolp's upper arms between her opposed thumbs in the gesture of greatest happiness, highest respect. The fargi murmured with pleasure at this happy sight, pain and despair forgotten for the moment. The city would grow again.

They set to work, under the Eistaa's instruction, clearing away the mud-caked debris. The rain never stopped, pouring darkly from a muddy sky. By nightfall much had been done. They discovered that fish that had been washed in from the sea were still alive in the remaining pools of water. These were gathered and shared out. In the end, tired and wounded, they slept.

The flood of water that had destroyed the coastal plain had also destroyed the civilized, formal way of life of the city. The fish vats were gone, along with the enzyme vats that cured and preserved the flesh of the animals. These creatures were gone too for the most part, the thorn barriers between the fields wiped away, the penned animals drowned or fled. Only a single hunter had survived — though all her weapons had drowned. With teeth and claws alone she could not supply the city with meat. Therefore it was the sea they turned to, the sea they had emerged from, renewing ancient swimming skills, seeking out the schools of fish and herding them into the shallows. Then the ocean churned with silver bodies seeking escape and reddened quickly with blood. It was crude but effective, — they would survive.

Many days passed before Akotolp approached the Eistaa where she sat in the newly-cleaned ambesed. All had worked hard. The dead had been cast into the sea, the lightly injured had recovered. The badly injured were dead, for all of Akotolp's healing creatures were gone and she could not aid them.

"Everything is gone," she told the Eistaa. "You must remember that all of the creatures bred by our science are mutations and most cannot survive on their own. Our weapons, the hesotsan, lose mobility with maturity and must be fed. We need more of them — as well as all the other forms of life that enable Yilane civilization to survive. I have now done all that I can within the limitations forced upon me. I have taken fargi inland and returned with sharp-thorned vines that have been planted to once again form our fields. I have examined every fargi; the badly wounded are all dead. There is a sufficient supply of fish."

She acknowledged the Eistaa's motions of common-place and boring food. "I agree, Eistaa. But it enables us to live. To improve our situation I must take fargi with me to Teskhets, the city on the great river beyond the hills. I know all of the things we need, hesotsan and string-knives, nefmakel — the list is very long. I will return with breeding stock and our city and our lives will be regrown. I ask only your permission to leave."

The Eistaa moved tail and thumbs in the sign of doubt magnified. "Your presence is needed here."

"Was needed. I guided and explained, you ordered. My work is done — unless I get those things that make science possible. Fargi are training as hunters, the meat supply grows. The fishers grow more proficient. Under your supervision the Yilane will eat, the city live."

The Eistaa radiated displeasure, looked out at the dark and ceaseless rain. "We live, but barely. More like wild creatures than Yilane."

"But we live, Eistaa, that is what is important. In order to live once again the rich life of Yilane you must permit this expedition."

"I will consider it. The meat supply must be greater before you go. You must find a way to bring that about."

Akotolp did what she could, which was very little, knowing that it was only the Eistaa's sense of unease that prevented her making any decision. It was understandable. At least six fargi, uninjured and strong, had simply curled up and died. This of course happened when a Yilane was forced to leave her city, a terminal punishment only meted out after great provocation. Now it happened spontaneously. That even the Eistaa was disturbed by terrible events of this magnitude was understandable.

Still Akotolp was displeased, even angry. There was really nothing more for her to do. The endless clouds, the almost continuous rain, did nothing to change her mood. A second time the Eistaa refused her request; she was hesitant about a third. It was Velikrei, the hunter, who brought a measure of light into her darkness.

"I seek permission to speak as one to one," the scarred hunter said, moving one of her eyes in the direction of the nearby fargi.

"Granted. We will walk along the shore."

"Respectfully suggest forest instead."

There must be a reason for this, Akotolp realized, and signed agreement. They were silent until they had crossed the hardened mud flats and reached the trees beyond.

Here, out of sight of any watchers, Velikrei stopped and spoke.

"You must tell me what to do. I hunt, that I do well. And I follow orders. I serve the Eistaa. Now order and service clash." She brought her fiJtos together with a loud crack; her body writhed with indecision. Akotolp saw she needed quick reassurance.

"The city needs you, Velikrei, at the present time far more than it needs me. Let me help you, for I respect and admire your skill and your strength. My thoughts-rational powers are at your service now. Tell me what disturbs you."

"One comes from the forest with fargi. She will not enter the city, will not see the Eistaa. Asks if a Yilane of science is here. She knows your nanje. Orders me to bring you, not the Eistaa…"

The hunter could no longer talk, her mouth gaped wide as she shuddered. Akotolp touched all four thumbs to her arms in reassurance.

"You have done the correct thing. The Eistaa must not be disturbed in her labors. I will talk to this one who comes — then I will tell the Eistaa about the matter. The responsibility is now mine."

"You have decided.” Velikrei said, relief draining the tension from her knotted muscles. She was safely back in the chain of command, following orders. "I take you to her."

"Name?"

"Essokel."

"I do indeed know her as she knows me. This is very good — for all of us. Take me to her, quickly."

Akotolp recognized the tall form of the other scientist at once, waiting in the shelter of a large tree. She stepped forward when they approached, made motions of greeting. Velikrei stood hesitantly to one side, signed gratitude when she was dismissed, almost fled from sight. Only when she was gone did Akotolp speak.

"Welcome, Essokel, welcome to what little remains of our city."

"Of many cities," she answered grimly. "I was far inland when this thing happened, returning with fargi to my city. When I saw the destruction along the coast I halted them in the forest, went on alone." There was pain in her eyes now, the wound of memory. "Destroyed, gone, none survived. I came close to dying myself — but I did not. I have willed myself to forget the name of my city, strong-request you do not repeat it."

"You are welcome-magnified here. You are now a part of my city, our city. We were injured, we survive. With your aid we grow anew. You will mend our broken egg. We now have nothing other than the claws and teeth with which we emerged from the ocean."

"Then I can indeed be of service," Essokel said, drawing herself up, pride replacing death in her movements. "Mine was a long expedition to distant cities. My fargi carry everything we needed — that your, our, city needs."

"The fargi are here?"

"Close by and out of sight. I wished to talk with you and you alone."

"Not the Eistaa?"

"Not yet. There are matters of science that are for our knowledge alone. Are you strong, Akotolp?"

"I survived. I will survive. I am needed."

"Good. I must talk with you, share my knowledge and you must query it. For I have fear."

"Of what?"

"Of everything."

There were such overtones of despair and death when she said this that Akotolp cried aloud and recoiled. Then controlled herself and spoke with all the courage she could summon.

"You are no longer alone, my old friend, no longer surrounded by mindless fargi you cannot speak to. Unburden yourself, share your knowledge and thoughts. Fears shared are halved, for we will each carry part of the load now."

"You are a Yilane of great intelligence and strength, Akotolp. I will tell you what I have seen and reasoned. Then you will query me, perhaps even prove me wrong. It is as you say, a burden shared. First I need information for I only saw what happened from afar. You were here?"

"Indeed — and it is only by chance I can talk to you now for only one in five survived. It was night — and then it was day. A light that hurt my eyes before slowly fading away. Later there was an immense sound and the ground moved. Later still, as I thought it would happen, the ocean rose and enveloped us."

"You thought it would — why?"

"A chain of logic. An incident of great force occurred, the light of which we saw. The sound came much later — and the shock. A force at sea great enough to cause this would also move the ocean as well."

Essokel signed reinforced agreement. "I did not see or experience what you did — though I surmised as much from physical evidence. Important query: what do you think caused all this?"

"Profess lack of knowledge, lack of theory."

"Then listen to mine. Have you any interest in astronomy?"

Akotolp signed negative. "Biology fills all my time and needs."

"But you have looked at the night sky — seen various phenomena there. You have seen the lines of light that cross the darkness from time to time?"

"Assuredly. Though I have never heard an attempt at explanation."

"I have. Our atmosphere grows thinner as one goes higher; this has been proven by those who carried air pressure devices up mountains. If this is true, then logic dictates that if the pressure drop is contin-uouAthen at a certain height there is no more air."

"I know of this theory and am in agreement. That air ceases to be and beyond our atmosphere there is a nothingness."

"But matter exists in this nothingness. We see the moon and the stars. Now hold that thought and in parallel entertain another thought. A bird moves faster than a fish because it moves through a less dense medium. If something moves through a medium of no density it could have a speed beyond comprehension. So much so that if there are particles of matter moving through this emptiness, small particles, through the operation of the laws of dynamics they would exchange motion for temperature. And glow with light."

Akotolp closed her eyes, wrapped in intense thought. Opened them and signed agreement. "I cannot argue with facts revealed, extrapolation of idea. Seek relevance."

Essokel was grimly silent for a long heartbeat of time, then spoke quietly. "I suggest to you the possibility that a larger particle from above might strike our atmosphere. A particle the size of a boulder, a tree — perhaps a mountain. What would happen then?"

"Then," Akotolp said, slowly and carefully, "this mountain of speed would cause the air to glow fiercely. It would strike the ocean. If it were large enough, fast enough, heavy enough, it might even strike down through the water to hit the ground below. This immense shock would be felt through the ground, heard through the air for great distances. The mountains of water pushed aside would inundate the shore, this land. I am in awe of your wisdom and intellect."

"There is more to come. The clouds that have never parted once since that day, the clouds that rain down dirt, that are black with filth undoubtedly thrown up by the impact. How many days have they remained up there?"

"A great number. I have kept count."

"As have I. Now, one last fearful consideration. What if they remain there longer and longer? What if the warmth of the sun never bathes us again? What will happen to us then?"

Akotolp the biologist swayed in pain, almost lost consciousness at the terror of this thought. Recovered to find that Essokel was holding her, that she would have fallen without her friend's support.

"Death will be our lot. Without sunlight the green plants will not grow. When they die the creatures who eat them die. When they die— the Yilane die. Is this what is to happen?"

"I do not know, I fear for the worst. I have measured carefully. The air temperature is lower each day. We cannot live without heat, without sun."

"The clouds must part!" Akotolp cried aloud. "They must. Or…"

She did not finish the thought. There was no need. It was Essokel who finally broke the terrible silence.

"We will go to the city now. And tell the Eistaa. .?"

"Nothing. If these things we talk about come to be, then we are helpless, powerless. Instead of bringing them death you will now bring them happiness and pleasure. There will be warmth, shelter, food. If… what we discussed. . comes to pass, it will not need discussion. It will soon be obvious to the stupidest fargi."

Akotolp was correct; Essokel and the burdens her fargi carried brought civilization and great happiness back to the city. Hesotsan for hunting, the pleasure of sweet warm meat for all. There were many cloaks in the bundles, for the expedition had been through the mountain passes where the air was chill. They were needed now: the nights were growing colder, and these flat brainless cloak-creatures if kept well fed had high body temperatures. All the city leaders had cloaks and slept well. The fargi did not and could only huddle together at night, draw warmth from one another and shudder in silence.

But the pleasure could not last. Even the stupidest fargi, fresh from the sea and unable to talk, could see that the nights were growing colder, days as well. The fish were no longer as plentiful as they had been. The clouds did not part, the sun did not shine, the plants were dying. The animals they ate were leaner and tougher as the grazing grew harder. Still they ate very well, for the enzyme vats were kept filled with meat. Which was a very bad sign indeed, for they were not being killed — they were dying. This was the time when the Eistaa summoned the two scientists to join her in the ambesed where she waited with Velikrei.

"Listen to what this hunter tells me," the Eistaa said, darkness in her speech.

"The onetsensast that they butcher now, that goes into the meat vats. It is the last one. All others — dead, the fields empty."

"What is happening — what is going to happen?" the Eistaa asked. "You are Yilane of science, you must know."

"We know," Akotolp said, fighting to keep calmness in her words and motions. "We will tell you, Eistaa." The hunter did not see her quick motion of pointing and dismissal.

"You have brought the information, Velikrei. Return to your forest."

Akotolp waited until the three of them were alone before she spoke. Now she made no attempt to keep the dread and despair from her speech.

"It is the sun that brings us life, Eistaa. If the sun does not shine we die. The clouds kill us."

"I see wiai is happening — yet I do not understand."

"There is a chain of life," Essokel said. "It starts in the cells of the plants, where the sun's rays are turned into food. The fish and the ustuzou eat them and live. We in turn eat their flesh — and we live." She leaned down and pulled a clump of yellowed grass from the ground and held it out. "This dies, they die, we die."

The Eistaa looked at the grass, immobile, her muscles locked hard as the thought echoed again and again in her brain. In the end she turned J;o Akotolp and signed a short query.

"True?"

"Inescapable truth."

"Can we not fill the vats, store food, wait until the clouds open up and the sun shines again?"

"We can — and we will. Seed will be stored as well, to plant and regrow when the sun returns."

"This will be done. I will order it. When will the sun return?"

The response to this question was only silence. The Eistaa waited, her anger growing, until she could control it no longer.

"Speak, Akotolp! I order you to speak! When will the sun return?"

"I — we — do not know, Eistaa. And unless it returns soon the world as we know it is dead. Species once destroyed do not return. We are one of those species. We are important only to ourselves. In the totality of biology we are as important — or unimportant — as that clump of grass. It is of no help to us to know that even if the clouds remain forever life will go on. But it will not be the world we know. There exist life forms that are very persistent and can endure a great range of temperatures and environments. We cannot. We will not survive on this world unless things remain very much as they always were. I fear, Essokel and I have discussed this many times that we have already passed the time of survival…"

"That is not true! Yilane live."

"Yilane die," Essokel said with grim movements. "Fargi die already of cold. We have examined them."

"We have cloaks."

"The cloaks will die as well. It is already too cold for them to breed." There was a great feeling of despair in Akotolp's shuddered movements. "I fear that all will be ended, all Yilane dead, everything we are, everything that we have done, vanished. It will be as if we have never been. When the clouds break, if they ever break, it will be the ustuzou who will live."

"What? These vermin-crawling filthy things underfoot? Your speaking is an insult!"

As though in further insult an ustuzou scuttled through the dead grass close by, paused an instant to glance at them with tiny dark eyes, scratched quick claws through its fur. The Eistaa stamped out with her foot but crushed only dead stems as the creature vanished from sight.

"You say that these vile things will live — why?"

"Because of their nature," Essokel explained patiently. "All complex creatures require regularizing of body temperature, they are all warm-blooded. But there are two ways of staying warm. We Yilane are exothermic, which means we must live in a warm climate and take in heat from outside. This is very efficient. The ustuzou are very inefficient since they are endothermic, which means they must eat all of the time and turn their food into heat…"

"You speak like this only to confuse me — all this talk of hot or cold, inside and out."

"You must excuse my inefficiency-stupidity, Eistaa. I simplify. We will get cold, we will die. That small ustuzou will not get cold. When the air cools it will eat more. It will eat dead plants, dead bodies — it will eat our dead bodies. The corpses of our world will nourish these creatures for a long time. Perhaps until the clouds disperse and the sun returns. If this comes to pass then it will be an ustuzou world and the Yilane will not even be a memory. It will be as though we never were—"

"A thought I will not have!" the Eistaa roared with anger, tearing at the ground with her claws. "Leave me! Be silent in my presence hereafter. I will not hear these words again."

The scientists left, a cold rain fell, night descended. There was the movement of tiny, furry creatures through the grass and into the dead forest beyond. Tiny creatures that ate seeds, stems, bones, marrow, flesh, grass, insects — anything.

Warm-blooded animals that could survive when ninety percent of all other creatures died.

Survive and evolve for sixty million years. Whose descendants read these words.

An Honest Day's Work

"I do my job, that's all. And that's all that anyone can expect." Jerry's jaw set hard with these words, set as firmly as his voice as he bit deep into the scarred stem of the old pipe.

"I know that, Mr. Cruncher," the Lieutenant said. "No one is asking you to do anything more than that, or to do anything wrong." He was dusty and one of the pocket flaps had been torn off his uniform. There was a wild look in his eye and he had a tendency to talk too fast. "We tracked you down through BuRecCent and it wasn't easy, there were good men lost…" His voice started to rise and he drew himself up with an effort. "We would like your cooperation if we could get it."

"Not the sort of thing I like to do. It could lead to trouble."

The trouble was that no one had expected events to happen as they did. Or rather the people who expected it had expected something altogether different. They had made their plans accordingly and fed them to the computer which had drawn up programs covering all possible variations of the original. However the Betelgeuseans had a completely different plan in mind so they therefore succeeded far beyond what was possibly their own wildest dreams. The trade station they had set up in Tycho crater on the moon was just that, a trade station, and had nothing to do at all with the events that followed.

Records of the Disaster are confused, as well they might be under the circumstances, and the number of aliens involved in the first phase of the invasion was certainly only a fraction of the exaggerated figures that were being tossed around by excited newsmen, or worried military personnel who felt that there must be that number of attacking aliens to wreak the damage that was done. The chances are that there were no more than two, three maximum, ships involved; a few hundred Betelgeuseans at the most. A few hundred to subjugate an entire planet — and they came within a hair of succeeding.

"Colonel, this is Mr. Cruncher who has volunteered—"

"A civilian! Will you get him the hell out of here and blindfold him first, you unutterable fool! This headquarters is double-red-zed top security. .!"

"Sir, the security doesn't matter anymore. All of our communications are shut down, we're sealed off from the troops."

"Quiet, you fool!" The Colonel raised his clenched fists, his skin flushing, a wild light in his eyes. He still did not want to believe what had happened, possibly could not believe. The lieutenant was younger, a reserve officer; as much as he disliked it he could face the facts.

"Colonel, you must believe me. The situation is desperate, and desperate times call for desperate solutions…"

"Sergeant! Take this lieutenant and this civilian to the target range and shoot them for violating security during an emergency."

"Colonel, please—"

"Sergeant, that is an order!"

The Sergeant who was only four months short of retirement and had a potbelly to prove it, looked from one officer to the other. He was reluctant to make a decision but he had to. He finally rose and went to the toilet, locking the door behind him. The Colonel, who had been following his movements in eye-bulging silence, gasped, his face a bright scarlet, and groped for his sidearm. Even as he drew it from the holster he gurgled and fell face-first upon the desk, then slid slowly to the floor.

"Medic!" the Lieutenant shouted and ran and opened the Colonel's collar. The medic took one look and shook his head gloomily. "The big one. He's had it. Always had a dicey ticker."

The Sergeant came out of the toilet and helped the Lieutenant to pull a gas cape over the corpse. Jerry Cruncher stood to one side and looked on in silence, sucking on his pipe.

"Please, Mr. Cruncher," the Lieutenant said pleadingly, "you must help us. You're our last hope now."

Now when we look back at Black Sunday when the Disaster began, we can marvel at the simplicity of the Betelgeusean plan and understand why it came within a hair's breadth of succeeding. Our armies and space-borne tanks were poised and waiting, all instruments and attention firmly fixed on the massive bulk of the "so-called" trade station which was, indeed, just a trade station. On Earth a complex spiderweb of communication networks linked together the host of defenders, a multilevel net of radio and laser links, buried coaxial cables and land lines, microwave and heliograph connections.

It was foolproof and unjammable and perfect in every way except for the fact tb^j» all global communications were channeled through the two substations and ComCent in Global City. These three stations, wonderfully efficient, handled all the communications with the armed forces on Earth, below the ground, on the moon and in space.

They were knocked out. Betelgeusean commando squads in field armor dropped one null-G onto each center and the battle could not have lasted more than half an hour. When it was over the three communications centers had been taken and the war was lost before it began. Headquarters were cut off from units, individual units from each other tanks from tank commanders, spaceships from their bases. Radar central on the far side of the moon very quickly discovered the blips of the invasion fleet swooping in from beyond Saturn. But there was no way they could tell anyone about it.

"I have to ask my supervisor about it," Jerry Cruncher said, nodding solemnly at the thought. "This being my day off and all. And taking of unauthorized people into the tunnels. Can't say he's going to like it much."

"Mr. Cruncher," the Lieutenant said through tight-clamped teeth. "In case you have not heard, there is a war on. You have just seen a man die because of this war. You cannot call your supervisor because the military override has rendered the civilian visiphone network inoperable."

"Can't say I like that."

"None of us do. That is why we need your help. The enemy aliens have taken our communication centers and they must be recaptured. We have contacted the nearest combat unit by messenger and they are attempting to retake the centers, but they are virtually impregnable."

"They are? How did those Beetlejuicians get in then?"

"Well, yes, it is Sunday, you know, minimum personnel, at 0800 hours the church coaches were leaving, the gates were open…"

"Caught you with your pants down, hey?" A wet suck on his pipe told the world what Jerry Cruncher felt about that kind of efficiency. "So your lot is out and you want back in. So why bother a working-man at home on a Sunday?"

"Because, Mr. Cruncher, war does not recognize days of the week. And you are the oldest employee of CitSubMaint and probably the only man who can answer this question. Our communication centers have their own standby power sources, but they normally use city power. And the land lines and cables go out underground. Now, think carefully before you answer. Can we get into these centers from underground? Particularly into ComCent?"

"Where is it?" He tamped down the glowing tobacco with a cal-lused thumb, then sucked in the gray smoke happily.

"At the junction of 18th Way and Wiggan Road."

"So that's why there are so many cables in 104-BpL."

"Can we get into it?"

In the hushed silence that followed the burble of Jerry Cruncher's pipe could be clearly heard. The Lieutenant stood, fists clenched tightly, and beside him the Sergeant and the Corpsman, as well as the operators who had left their silent communication equipment. All of them waited and listened in strained silence as Jerry Cruncher narrowed his eyes in thought, took the pipe from his mouth and exhaled a cloud of pungent smoke, then turned to face them.

"Yep.” he said.

They weren't the best troops — but they were troops. Technicians and operators, MPs and cooks, clerks, and motor pool mechanics. But they were armed with the best weapons the armories could provide— and armored as well with a sense of purpose. If they stood a little straighter, or held their guns a little more firmly, it was because they knew that the future of the world was in their hands. They marched with grim precision to the road junction where they had been instructed to wait. They had been there no more than a few minutes when Jerry Cruncher showed up. He wore waterproofs and a hardhat, heavy gumboots that came to his waist, while a worn and ancient toolbox was slung by a strap over one shoulder. His pipe was out, but still clamped in his jaw, as he moved his shrewd eyes over the waiting troops.

"Not dressed right," he said.

"Everyone is in combat uniform," the Lieutenant answered.

"Not right for the tunnels. Gets mighty damp—"

"Mr. Cruncher, these are volunteer soldiers. They may die for their world so they do not mind getting wet for it. May we go now?"

Shaking his head in solemn disapproval, Jerry Cruncher led the way to a manhole in the road, into the socket of which he inserted a shining tool with which, in a practiced movement, he flipped the heavy manhole lid aside.

"Follow me then, single-file. Last two men in slide that lid back on and watch out for your fingers. Here we go."

Automatic lights sprang on as they climbed down the ladder to the cool, green tunnel below. Wires, cables and pipes lined the walls and ceiling in a maze that only a Jerry Cruncher could make head or tail of. He slapped them affectionately as they passed.

"Water main, steam main, 50,000 volt line, 220 local feeder, telephone, teletype, co-ax, ice water, pneumo-delivery, food dispenser supply, oxygen, sewer feeder." He chuckled happily. "Yep, we've got a little bit of everything down here."

"Medic!"

"They've found us!" a Permanent KP wailed and there was a rattle of weapons readied.

"Put those away!" the Lieutenant shouted. "Before you kill each other. Get me a report, Sergeant, snap to it."

They waited, weapons clenched and eyes rolling with anxiety, until the Sergeant returned. Jerry Cruncher hummed to himself tonelessly as he tapped various valves with a small ballpeen hammer, then carefully tightened the gasket retainer on one.

"Nothing much," the Sergeant said. "Burne-Smith got a finger mashed putting the lid back on."

"They never listen," Jerry Cruncher coughed disapprovingly.

"Move it out.” the Lieutenant ordered.

"One thing we haven't mentioned," Jerry Cruncher said, unmoving as a block of stone. "You guaranteed that my supervisor would see that I received my pay for this job."

"Yes, of course, can we talk about it as we go?"

"We go when this is settled. I forgot that this being Sunday I'll be getting double time and triple after four hours."

"Fine, agreed. Let's go."

"In writing."

"Yes, writing, of course." The Lieutenant's scriber flew over a message pad and he ripped off the sheet. "There, I've signed it as well, with my serial number. The army will stand behind this."

"Had better," Jerry Cruncher said, carefully folding the slip and placing it securely in his wallet before they moved out again.

It was a nightmare journey for all except the gray, solid man who led them like a Judas goat through this underground inferno. The main tunnels were easy enough to pass through, through pendant valve wheels and transverse pipes lay constantly in wait for the unwary. Had they not been wearing helmets, half of the little force would have been stunned before they had gone a mile. As it was there was many a clank and muffled cry from the rear.

Then came the inspection hatch and the first crawltube leading to a vertical pit sixty feet deep, down which they had to make their way on a water-slippery ladder. At its foot an even damper tunnel, this one faced with blocks of hand-hewn stone, led them through the darkness — no lights here, they had to use their torches — to an immense cavern filled with roaring sound.

"Storm sewer," Jerry Cruncher said, pointing to the rushing river that swirled by just below their feet, "I've seen it bone dry in the season. Been rain in the suburbs lately, and here it is now. Stay on the walkway, this is the shortest way to go, and don't slip. Once in that water you're a goner. Might find your body fifty miles out in the ocean if the fishes don't get it first."

With this cheering encouragement the men slithered and crawled the awful length of that great tunnel, almost gasping with relief when they were back in the safety of a communications tube again. Shortly after this Jerry Cruncher halted and pointed up at a ladder that rose into the darkness above.

"Ninety-eight BaG dropwell. This is the one you want, to that second center you talked about."

"You're sure?"

Jerry Cruncher eyed the Lieutenant with something very much like disgust and he groped his pipe from his pocket.

"Being you're ignorant, mister, I take no offense. When Jerry says a tunnel is a tunnel, that's the tunnel he says."

"No offense meant!"

"None taken," he muttered around the pipe stem. "This is the one. You can see all the wires and communication cables going up there as well. Can't be anything else."

"What's at the top?"

"Door with a handle and a sign saying 'No Admission Under Par. 897A of the Military Code.' "

"Is the door locked?"

"Nope. Forbidden under paragraph 45-C of the Tunnel Authority Code. Need access, we do."

"Then this is it. Sergeant, take eighteen men and get up that ladder. Synchronize your watch with mine. In two hours we go in. Just get through that door and start shooting — watch out for the equipment through — and keep shooting until every one of those slimy, dirty Betelgeuseans is dead. Do you understand?"

The Sergeant nodded with grim determination and drew himself up and saluted. "We'll do our duty, sir."

"All right, the rest of you, move out."

They had walked for no more than ten minutes down a lateral tunnel lined with frosted pipes before Jerry Cruncher stopped and sat down.

"What's wrong?" the Lieutenant asked.

"Tea break," he said, putting his still-warm pipe into his side pocket and opening his lunch box.

"You can't — I mean, listen, the enemy, the schedule…"

"I always have tea at this time." He poured a great mugful of the potent brew and sniffed it appreciatively. "Tea break allowed for in the schedule."

Most of tinmen brought out rations and sipped from their canteens while the Lieutenant paced back and forth slapping his fist into his hand. Jerry Cruncher sipped his tea placidly and chewed on a large chocolate biscuit.

A shrill scream sliced through the silence and echoed from the pipes. Something black and awful launched itself from a crevice in the wall and was attached to Trooper Barnes' throat. The soldiers were paralyzed. Not so Jerry Cruncher. There was a whistle and a thud as he instantly lashed out with his spanner and the vicious assailant rolled, dead, onto the tunnel floor before their bulging eyes.

"It's. . it's. . hideous!" a soldier gasped. "What is it?"

"Mutant hamster.” Jerry Cruncher said as he picked up the monster of teeth and claws and stuffed it into his lunch box. "Descendants of house pets that escaped centuries ago, mutated here in the darkness until they turned into this. I've seen bigger ones. Boffins at the university give me three credits for every one I bring them. Not bad if I say so myself, and tax-free too, which I hope you won't be repeating." He was almost jovial now at this fiscally remunerative encounter. As soon as the trooper had been sewn up, they pressed on.

A second squad was left at the next communication substation and they hurried on towards ComCent itself.

"Ten minutes to go," Lieutenant gasped, jogging heavily under the weight of all his equipment.

"Not to worry, just two tunnels more."

It was three minutes to deadline when they reached the wide opening in the ceiling above them, sprouting cables from its mouth like an electronic hydra's head.

"Big door at the top," Jerry Cruncher said, shining his torch up the shaft. "Has a dual-interlock compound wheel exchange lever. As you turn the wheel counterclockwise the lever in position ready must be…"

"Come up with us, please," the Lieutenant begged, peering at his watch and chewing his lip nervously. "We'll never get in in time and they'll be warned by the attacks on the other stations."

"Not my job, you know, getting shot at. I let them as has been paid for it do it."

"Please, I beg of you, as a patriotic citizen." Jerry Cruncher's face was as of carved stone as he bit down heavily on the stem of his pipe. "You owe it to yourself, your family, your conscience, your country. And I can guarantee a one-hundred-credit bonus for opening it."

"Done."

They climbed against time and when they reached the platform at the top, the second hand on the Lieutenant's watch was just coming up on the 12.

"Open it!" The wheel spun and gears engaged, the great lever went down and the massive portal swung open.

"For Mother Earth!" the Lieutenant shouted and led the charge. When they had all gone inside and the tunnel was silent again Jerry Cruncher lit his pipe and then, more out of curiosity than anything else, strolled in after them. It was a vista of endless steel corridors lined with banks of instruments, whirring and humming under electronic control.

He stopped to tamp down his pipe just as a door opened and a short hairy creature, no taller than his waist, shaped like a bowling pin and possessing a number of arms, scuttled out and raced towards a large red switch mounted on the opposite wall. Five of its arms were reaching for the switch, spatulate fingers almost touching it, when the spanner whistled once again and sank deep into the creature's head, flooring it instantly. Jerry Cruncher had just retrieved the spanner when the white-faced Lieutenant raced through the same door.

"Praise heaven," he gasped, "you've stopped him in time!"

"Didn't like his looks at all, though I didn't mean to bash his brains in."

"That is their leader, the only survivor, and he was going for the destruct switch that would have blown us all a mile high. He's our prisoner now and he'll talk, believe me. You didn't kill him. The Betelgeuseans have their brains in their midriffs, their stomachs are in their heads. He's just unconscious."

"Like a boot in the guts. Glad of that, didn't mean to kill him."

"Where you been?" Agatha called from the kitchen when she heard Jerry's heavy tread in the hall.

"Special job," he wheezed, pulling off his high boots. "Going to be some extra lolly in the pay packet this week."

"We'll need it to fix the viddy. It's been out of order all day, though it just came back on. Something wrong with it I'm sure. Had phone trouble too, would you believe, all in the same day. Tried to call Mum but our line went dead. Was it a hard job?"

"Not specially," Jerry grunted, digging out his pipe. "Government work — bit of a bonus in it too I imagine. Showed a bunch of chaps through the tunnels. Not a clue they had. One mashed his hand in a lid and the other just sat there while a hampmutey went for his throat."

"Oooh, don't say that, I'll have no appetite at all. Tea's ready."

"Now that is the sort of thing I like to hear."

He smiled for the first time since he had got out of bed that morning and went in to have his tea.

If

"We are there, we are correct. The computations were perfect. That is the place below."

"You are a worm.” 17 said to her companion, 35, who resembled her every way other than in number. "That is that place. But nine years too early. Look at the meter."

"I am a worm. I shall free you of the burden of my useless presence." 35 removed her knife from the scabbard and tested the edge, which proved to be exceedingly sharp. She placed it against the white wattled width of her neck and prepared to cut her throat.

"Not now," 17 hissed. "We are shorthanded already and your corpse would be valueless to this expedition. Get us to the correct time at once. Our power is limited, you may remember."

"It shall be done as you command," 35 said as she slithered to the bank of controls. 44 ignored the talk, keeping her multicell eyes focused on the power control bank, constantly making adjustments with her spatulate fingers in response to the manifold dials.

"That is it," 17 announced, rasping her hands together with pleasure. "The correct time, the correct place. We must descend and make our destiny. Give-praise to the Saur of All, who rules the destinies of all."

"Praise Saur," her two companions muttered, all of their attention on the controls.

Straight down from the blue sky the globular vehicle fell. It was round and featureless, save for the large rectangular port, on the bottom now, and made of some sort of green metal, perhaps anodized aluminum, though it looked harder. It had no visible means of flight or support, yet it fell at a steady and controlled rate. Slower and slower it moved until it dropped from sight behind the ridge at the northern end of Johnson's Lake, just at the edge of the tall pine grove. There were fields nearby, with cows, who did not appear at all disturbed by the visitor. No human being was in sight to view the landing. A path cut in from the lake here, a scuffed dirt trail that went to the highway.

An oriole sat on a bush and warbled sweetly, — a small rabbit hopped from the field to nibble a stem of grass. This bucolic and peaceful scene was interrupted by the scuff of feet down the trail and a high-pitched and singularly monotonous whistling. The bird flew away, a touch of soundless color, while the rabbit disappeared into the hedge. A boy came over the rise from the direction of the lake shore. He wore ordinary boy clothes and carried a schoolbag in one hand, a small and homemade cage of wire screen in the other. In the cage was a small lizard, which clung to the screen, its eyes rolling in what presumably was fear. The boy, whistling shrilly, trudged along the path and into the shade of the pine grove.

"Boy," a high-pitched and tremulous voice called out. "Can you hear me, boy?"

"I certainly can," the boy said, stopping and looking around for the unseen speaker. "Where are you?"

"I am by your side, but I am invisible. I am your fairy godmother…"

The boy made a rude sound by sticking out his tongue and blowing across it while it vibrated. "I don't believe in invisibility or fairy godmothers. Come out of those woods, whoever you are."

"All boys believe in fairy godmothers," the voice said, but a worried tone edged the words now. "I know all kinds of secrets. I know your name is Don and—"

"Everyone knows my name is Don and no one believes anymore in fairies. Boys now believe in rockets, submarines, and atomic energy."

"Would you believe space travel?"

"I would."

Slightly relieved the voice came on stronger and deeper. "I did not wish to frighten you, but I am really from Mars and have just landed—"

Don made the rude noise again. "Mars has no atmosphere and no observable forms of life. Now come out of there and stop playing games."

After a long silence the voice said, "Would you consider time travel?"

"I could. Are you going to tell me that you are from the future?"

With relief: "Yes I am."

"Then come out where I can see you."

"There are some things that the human eye should not look upon…"

"Horseapples. The human eye is okay for looking at anything you want to name. You come out of there so I can see who you are — or I'm leaving."

"It is not advisable." The voice was exasperated. "I can prove I am a temporal traveler by telling you the answers to tomorrow's mathematics test. Wouldn't that be nice? Number one, 1.76. Number two—"

"I don't like to cheat, and even if I did you can't cheat on the new math. Either you know it or you fail it. I'm — going to count to ten, then go."

"No, you cannot! I must ask you a favor. Release that common lizard you have trapped and I will give you three wishes, I mean, answer three questions."

"Why should I let it go?"

"Is that the first of your questions?"

"No. I want to know what's going on before I do anything. This lizard is special. I never saw another one like it around here."

"You are right. It is an Old World acrodont lizard of the order Rhip-toglossa, commonly called a chameleon."

"It is!" Don was really interested now. He squatted in the path and took a red-covered book from his schoolbag and laid it on the ground. He turned the cage until the lizard was on the bottom and placed it carefully on the book. "Will it really turn color?"

"To an observable amount, yes. Now if you release her—"

"How do you know it's a her? The time-traveler bit again?"

"If you must know, yes. The creature was purchased from a pet store by one Jim Benan, and is one of a pair. They were both released two days ago when Benan, deranged by the voluntary drinking of a liquid-containing quantities of ethyl alcohol, sat on the cage. The other, unfortunately, died of his wounds, and this one alone survives. The release—"

"I think this whole thing is a joke and I'm going home now. Unless you come out of there so I can see who you are."

"I warn you…"

"Goodbye." Don picked up the cage. "Hey, she turned sort of brick red!"

"Do not leave. I will come forth."

Don looked on, with a great deal of interest, while the creature walked out from between the trees. It was blue, had large and goggling independently moving eyes, wore a neatly cut brown jumpsuit, and had a pack slung on its back. It was also only about seven inches tall.

"You don't much look like a man from the future," Don said. "In fact you don't look like a man at all. You're too small."

"I might say that you are too big: size is a matter of relevancy. And I am from the future, though I am not a man."

"That's for sure. In fact you look a lot like a lizard." In sudden inspiration, Don looked back and forth at the traveler and at the cage. "In fact you look a good deal like this chameleon here. What's the connection?"

"That is not to be revealed. You will now do as I command or I will injure you gravely." 17 turned and waved toward the woods. "35, this is an order. Appear and destroy that growth over there."

Don looked on with increasing interest as the green basketball of metal drifted into sight from under the trees. A circular disk slipped away on one side and a gleaming nozzle, not unlike the hose nozzle on a toy fire truck, appeared through the opening. It pointed toward a hedge a good thirty feet away. A shrill whining began from the depths of the sphere, rising in pitch until it was almost inaudible. Then, suddenly, a thin line of light spat out towards the shrub, which crackled and instantly burst into flame. Within a second it was a blackened skeleton.

"The device is called a roxidizer, and is deadly," 17 said. "Release the chameleon at once or we will turn it on you."

Don scowled. "All right. Who wants the old lizard anyway." He put the cage on the ground and started to open the cover. Then he stopped and sniffed. Picking up the cage again he started across the grass toward the blackened bush.

"Come back!" 17 screeched. "We will fire if you go another step."

Don ignored the lizardoid, which was now dancing up and down in an agony of frustration, and ran to the bush. He put his hand out and apparently right through the charred stems.

"I thought something was fishy," he said. "All that burning and everything just upwind of me and I couldn't smell a thing." He turned to look at the time traveler, who was slumped in gloomy silence. "It's just a projected image of some kind, isn't it? Some kind of three-dimensional movie." He stopped in sudden thought, then walked over to the still hovering temporal transporter. When he poked at it with his finger he apparently pushed his hand right into it.

"And this thing isn't here either. Are you?"

"There is no need to experiment. I, and our ship, are present only as what might be called temporal echoes. Matter cannot be moved through time, that is an impossibility, but the concept of matter can be temporally projected. I am sure that this is too technical for you. ."

"You're doing great so far. Carry on."

"Our projections are here in a real sense to us, though we can only be an image or a sound wave to any observers in the time we visit. Immense amo*nits of energy are required and almost the total resources of our civilization are involved in this time transfer."

"Why? And the truth for a change. No more fairy godmother and that kind of malarkey."

"I regret the necessity to use subterfuge, but the secret is too important to reveal casually without attempting other means of persuasion."

"Now we get to the real story." Don sat down and crossed his legs comfortably. "Give."

"We need your aid, or our very society is threatened. Very recently on our time scale strange disturbances were detected by our instruments. Ours is a simple saurian existence, some million or so years in the future, and our race is dominant. Yours has long since vanished in a manner too horrible to mention to your young ears. Something is threatening our entire race and research quickly uncovered the fact that we are about to be overwhelmed by a probability wave and wiped out, a great wave of negation sweeping toward us from our remote past."

"You wouldn't mind tipping me off to what a probability wave is, would you?"

"I will take an example from your own literature. If your grandfather had died without marrying, you would not have been born and would not now exist."

"But I do."

"The matter is debatable in the greater xan-probility universe, but we shall not discuss that now. Our power is limited. To put the affair simply, we traced our ancestral lines back through all the various mutations and changes until we found the individual protolizard from which our line sprung.”

"Let me guess." Don pointed at the cage. "This is the one?"

"She is." 17 spoke in solemn tones, as befitted the moment. Justas somewhen, somewhere there is a prototarsier from which your race sprung, so is there this temporal mother of ours. She will bear young soon, and they will breed and grow in this pleasant valley. The rocks near the lake have an appreciable amount of radioactivity, which will cause mutations, the centuries will roll by and, one day, our race will reach its heights of glory.

"But not if you don't open that cage."

Don rested his chin on his fist and thought. "You're not putting me on anymore? This is the truth?"

17 drew herself up and waved both arms — or front legs — over her head. "By the Saur of All, I promise," she intoned. "By the stars eternal, the seasons vernal, the clouds, the sky, the matriarchal I—"

"Just cross your heart and hope to die, that will be good enough for me."

The lizardoid moved its eyes in concentric circles and performed this ritual.

"Okay then, I'm as softhearted as the next guy when it comes to wiping out whole races."

Don unbent the piece of wire that sealed the cage and opened the top. The chameleon rolled one eye up at him and looked at the opening with the other. 17 watched in awed silence and the time vehicle bobbed closer.

"Get going.” Don said, and shook the lizard out into the grass.

This time the chameleon took the hint and scuttled away among the bushes, vanishing from sight.

"That takes care of the future," Don said. "Or the past from your point of view."

17 and the time machine vanished silently and Don was alone again on the path.

"Well you could of at least said thanks before taking off like that. People have more manners than lizards any day I'll tell you that."

He picked up the now-empty cage and his schoolbag and started for home.

He had not heard the quick rustle in the bushes, nor did he see the prowling tomcat with the limp chameleon in its jaws.

Brave Newer World

Livermore liked the view from the little white balcony outside his office, even though the air at this height, at this time of year, had a chill bite to it. He was standing there now, trying to suppress a shiver, looking out at the new spring green on the hillsides and the trees in the old town. Above and below him the white steps of the levels of New Town stretched away in smooth elegance, a great A in space with the base a half-mile wide, rising up almost to a point on top. Every level fringed with a balcony, every balcony with an unobstructed view. Well designed. Livermore shivered again and felt the loud beat of his heart; old valves cheered on by new drugs. His insides were as carefully propped up and as well designed as the New Town building. Though his outsides left a lot to be desired. Brown spots, wrinkles, and white hair, he looked as weathered as the homes in Old Town. It was damned cold, and the sun went behind a cloud. He thumbed a button and when the glass wall slid aside, went back gratefully to the purified and warmed air of the interior.

"Been waiting long?" he asked the old man who sat scowling in the chair on the far side of his desk.

"You asked, Doctor. I was never one to complain but—"

"Then don't start now. Stand up, open your shirt, let me have those records. Grazer, I remember you. Planted a kidney seed, didn't they? How do you feel?"

"Poorly, that's the only word for it. Off my feed, can't sleep, when I do I wake up with the cold sweats. And the bowels! Let me tell you about the bowels. . ahhh!"

Livemore slapped the cold pickup of the stethoscope against the bare skin of Grazer's chest. Patients liked Dr. Livermore but hated his stethoscope, swearing that he must keep it specially chilled for them. They were right. There was a thermoelectric cooling plate in the case. It gave them something to think about, Livermore believed. "Hmmrr…" he said, frowning, the earpieces in his ears, hearing nothing. He had plugged the stethoscope with wax year earlier. The systolic, diastolic murmurs disturbed his concentration; he heard enough of that from his own chest. Everything was in records in any case, since the analysis machines did a far better job than he could ever do. He flipped through the sheets and graphs.

"Button your shirt, sit down, take two of these right now. Just the thing for this condition."

He shook the large red sugar pills from the jar in his desk drawer and pointed to the plastic cup and water carafe. Grazer reached for them eagerly: this was real medicine. Livermore found the most recent X rays and snapped them into the viewer. Lovely. The new kidney was growing, as sweetly formed as a little bean. Tiny now beside its elderly brother, but in a year's time they would be identical. Science conquereth all, or at least almost all; he slammed the file on the table. It had been a difficult morning, and even his afternoon surgery was not as relaxing as it usually was. The old folks, the AKs, his peer group, they appreciated each other. Very early in his career he had taken his M.D., that was all that they knew, and he sometimes wondered if they connected him at all with the Dr. Rex Livermore in charge of the ectogenetic program. If they had ever heard of the program.

"I'm sure glad for the pills, Doc. I don't like those shots no more. But my bowels—"

"Goddamn and blast your bowels. They're as old as my bowels and in just as good shape. You're just bored, that's your trouble."

Grazer nodded approvingly at the insults — a touch of interest in an otherwise sterile existence. "Bored's the very word, Doc. The hours I spend on the pot—"

"What did you do before you retired?"

"That was a real long time ago."

"Not so long that you can't remember, and if you can't, why then you're just too old to waste food and space on, and we'll hook that old brain out and put it in a bottle with a label saying senile brain on it."

Grazer chuckled; he might have cried if someone younger had talked to him this way. "Said it was a long time ago, didn't say I forgot. Painter. House painter, not the artist kind, worked at it eighty years before the union threw me out and made me retire."

"Pretty good at it?"

"The best. They don't have any kind of painter around anymore."

"I can believe that. I'm getting damn tired of the eggshell off-white super plastic eternal finish on the walls of this office. Think you could repaint it fo «^jne?"

"Paint won't stick to that stuff."

"If I find one that will?"

"I'm your man, Doc."

"It'll take time. Sure you won't mind missing all the basket weaving, socials, television?"

Grazer snorted in answer and he almost smiled.

"All right, I'll get in touch with you. Come back in a month in any case jjo I can look at that kidney. As for the rest, you're in perfect shape after your geriatric treatments. You're just bored with television and the damned baskets."

"You can say that again. Don't forget about that paint, hear?"

A distant silver bell chimed, and Livermore pointed to the door, picking up the phone as soon as the old man had gone. Leatha Crabb's tiny and distraught image looked up at him from the screen.

"Oh, Dr. Livermore, another bottle failure."

"I know. I was in the lab this morning. I'll be down there at 1500 and we can talk about it then." He hung up and looked at his watch. Twenty minutes until the meeting — he could see another patient or two. Geriatrics was not his field, and he really had very little interest in it; but he was interested in the people. He sometimes wondered if they knew how little they needed him, since they were on constant monitoring and medical attention. Perhaps they just enjoyed seeing and talking to him as he did to them. No harm done in any case.

The next patient was a thin white-haired woman who began complaining as she came through the door and did not stop as she put her crutches aside and sat carefully in the chair. Livermore nodded and made doodles on the pad before him and admired her flow of comment, criticism, and invective over a complaint she had covered so well and so often before. It was just a foot she was talking about, which might seem a limited area of discussion — toes, tendoifs, and that sort of thing. But she had unusual symptoms, hot flushes and itching in addition to the usual pain, all of which was made even more interesting by the fact that the foot under discussion had been amputated over sixty years earlier. Phantom limbs with phantom symptoms were nothing new — there were even reported cases of completely paralyzed patients with phantom sexual impulses terminating in phantom orgasms — but the longevity of this case was certainly worth noting. He relaxed under the wave of detailed complaint, and when he finally gave her some of the sugar pills and ushered her out, they both felt a good deal better.

Catherine Ruffin and Sturtevant were already waiting in the boardroom when he came in. Sturtevant, impatient as always, was tapping green-stained fingers on the marble tabletop, one of his cancer-free tobacco-substitute cigarettes dangling from his lip. His round and thick glasses and sharp nose made him resemble an owl, but the thin line of his mouth was more like that of a turtle's: it was a veritable bestiary of a face. His ears could be those of a moose, Livermore thought, then aloud: "Those so-called cigarettes of yours smell like burning garbage, Sturtevant, do you know that?"

"You have told him that before," Catherine Ruffin said in her slow, careful English. She had emigrated in her youth from South Africa, to marry the long-dead Mr. Ruffin, and still had the accents of her Boer youth. Full-bosomed and round in a very Dutch-housewife manner, she was nevertheless a senior administrator with a mind like a computer.

"Never mind my cigarettes." Sturtevant grubbed the butt out and instantly groped for a fresh one. "Can't you be on time just once for one of these meetings?"

Catherine Ruffin rapped with her knuckles on the table and switched on the recorder.

"Minutes of the meeting of the Genetic Guidance Council, Syracuse New Town, Tuesday, January 14, 2025. Present Ruffin, Sturtevant, Livermore, Ruffin chairman."

"What's this I hear about more bottle failures?" Sturtevant asked.

Livermore dismissed the matter with a wave of his hand. "A few bottle failures are taken for granted. I'll look into these latest and have a full report for our next meeting. Just a mechanical matter and not to bother us here. What does bother me is our genetic priorities. I have a list."

He searched the pockets in his jacket one after another, and Sturtevant frowned his snapping-turtle frown at him.

"You and your lists, Livermore. We've read enough of them. Priorities are a thing of the past. We now have a prepared program that we need only follow."

"Priorities are not outdated, and by saying that you show a sociologist's typical ignorance of the realities of genetics."

"You're insulting!"

"It's the truth. Too bad if it hurts." He found a crumpled piece of paper in an inside pocket and smoothed it out on the table before him. "You're so used to your damn charts and graphs, demographic curves and projections that you think they are really a description of the real world instead of being rough approximations well after the fact. I'm not going to trouble you with figures they're so huge as to be meaningless but I want you to consider the incredible complexity of our genetic pool. Mankind as we know it has been around about a half-million years, mutating, changing, and interbreeding. Every death in all those generations was a selection of some kind, as was every mating. Good and bad traits, pro- and anti-survival mutations, big brains and hemophilia, everything happened and was stirred up and spread through the human race. Now we say we are going to improve that race by gene selection. We have an endless reservoir of traits to draw from, ova from every woman, sperm from every man. We can analyze these for genetic composition and feed the results to the computer to work out favorable combinations, then combine the sperm and ova and grow the fetus ectogenetically. If all goes well, nine months later we decant the infant of our selection and the human race has been improved by that small increment. But what is an improvement, what is a favorable combination? Dark skin is a survival trait in the tropics, but dark skin in the Northern Hemisphere cuts off too much ultraviolet so the body cannot manufacture vitamin D, and rickets follow. Everything is relative."

"We have been over this ground before.” Catherine Ruffin said.

"But not often enough. If we don't constantly renew and review our goals, we are going to start down a one-way road. Once genetic traits have been discarded they are gone forever. In a way the team in San Diego New City have an easier job. They have a specific goal. They are out to build new breeds of men, specific types for different environments: the spacemen who can live without physical or mental breakdowns during the decade-long trips to the outer planets, — the temperature and low-pressure-resistant types for Mars settlers. They can discard genes ruthlessly and aim for a clear and well-established goal. We simply improve — and what a vague ambition that is! And in making this new race of supermen what will we lose? Will new-man be pink, and if so, what has happened to the Negro—?"

"For God's sake, Livermore, let us not start on that again!" Sturtevant shouted. "We have fixed charts, rules, regulations, laid down for all operations."

"I said you had no real knowledge of genetics and that proves it once again. You can't get it through your head that with each selection the game starts completely over again. As they say in the historical 3Vs, it's a brand-new ball game. The entire world is born anew with every child."

"I think you tend to overdramatize," Catherine Ruffin said stolidly.

"Not in the slightest. Genes are not bricks. We can't build the desired structure to order. We just aim for optimum, then see what we have and try again. No directives can lay down the details of every choice or control every random combination. Every technician is a small god, making real decisions of life and death. And some of these decisions are questionable in the long run."

"Impossible," Sturtevant said, and Catherine Ruffin nodded agreement.

"No, just expensive. We must find a closer examination of every change made and get some predictions of where we are going."

"You are out of order, Dr. Livermore," Catherine Ruffin said. "Your proposal has been made in the past, a budget forecast was estimated, and the entire matter turned down because of cost. This was not our decision you will recall, but came down from genguidecoun-chief. We accomplish nothing by raking over these well-raked coals another time. There is new business we must consider that I wish to place before this council."

Livermore had the beginnings of a headache, and he fumbled a pill from the carrier in his pocket. The other two were talking, and he paid them no attention at all.

When Leatha Crabb hung up the phone after talking with Dr. Livermore, she felt as though she wanted to cry. She had been working long hours for weeks and not getting enough sleep. Her eyes stung, and she was a little ashamed of this unaccustomed weakness: she was the sort of person who simply did not cry, woman or no. But seventeen bottle failures, seventeen deaths. Seventeen tiny lives snuffed out before they had barely begun to live. It hurt, almost as though they had been real children. .

"So small you can't hardly see it," Veazy said. The laboratory assistant held one of the disconnected bottles up to the light and gave it a shake to swish the liquid about inside of it. "You sure it's dead?"

"Stop that!" Leatha snapped, then curbed her temper: she had always prided herself on the way she treated those who worked beneath her. "Yes, they are all dead, I've checked that. Decant, freeze, and label them. I'll want to do examinations later."

Veazy nodded and took the bottle away. She wondered what had possessed her, thinking of them as lives, children. She must be tired. They were groups of growing cells with no more personality than the cells grouped in the wart on the back of her hand. She rubbed at it, reminding herself again that she ought to have it taken care of. A handsome, well-formed girl in her early thirties, with her hair the color of honey and tanned skin to match. But her hair was cropped short, close to her head, and she wore not the slightest trace of makeup, while the richness of her figure was lost in the heavy folds of her white laboratory smock. She was too young for it, but a line of worry was already beginning to form between her eyes. When she bent over her microscope, peering at the stained slide, the furrow deepened.

The bottle failures troubled her, deeply, more than she liked to admit. The program had gone so well the past few years that she was beginning to take it for granted, already looking ahead to the genetic possibilities of the second generation. It took a decided effort to forget all this and turn back to the simple mechanical problems of ectogenesis. . Strong arms wrapped about her from behind; the hands pressed firmly against the roundness of her body below her waist; hard lips kissed the nape of her neck.

"Don't!" she said, surprised, pulling away. She look around. Her husband. Gust dropped his arms at once, stepping back from her.

"You don't have to get angry.” he said. "We're married you know, and no one is watching."

"It's not your pawing me I don't like. But I'm working can't you see that?"

Leatha turned to face him, angry at his physical touch despite her words. He stood dumbly before her, a stolid black-haired and dark-complexioned man with slightly protruding lower lip that made him look, now, as though he were pouting.

"You needn't look so put out. It's worktime, not playtime."

"Damn little playtime anymore." He looked quickly around to see if anyone was within.earshot. "Not the way it was when we first married. You were pretty affectionate then." He reached out a slow finger and pressed it to her midriff.

"Don't do that." She drew away, raising her hands to cover herself. "It's been absolute hell here today. A defective valve in one of the hormone feed lines, discovered too late. We lost seventeen bottles. In an early stage, luckily."

"So what's the loss? There must be a couple of billion sperm and ova in the freezers. They'll pair some more and put you back in business."

"Think of the work and labor in gene-matching, wasted."

"That's what technicians are paid for. It will give them something to do. Look, can we forget for awhile and take off an evening? Go to Old Town. There's a place there I heard about, Sharm's, real cult cooking and entertainment."

"Can't we talk about it later? This really isn't the time…"

"By Christ, it never is. I'll be back here at 1730. See if you can't possibly make your mind up by then."

He pushed angrily out of the door, but the automatic closing mechanism prevented him from slamming it behind him. Something had gone out of life — he wasn't sure just what. He loved Leatha and she loved him — he knew that — but something was missing. They both had their work to do, but it had never caused trouble before. They were used to it, even staying up all night sometimes, working in the same room in quiet companionship. Then coffee, perhaps as dawn was breaking, a drowsy pleasant fatigue, falling into bed, making love. It just wasn't that way anymore and he couldn't think why. At the elevators he entered the nearest and called out, "Fifty." The doors closed, and the car fell smoothly away. They would go out tonight: he was resolved that this evening would be different.

Only after he had emerged from the elevator did he realize that it had stopped at the wrong floor. Fifteen, not fifty; the number analyzer in the elevator computer always seemed to have trouble with those two. Before he could turn, the doors shut behind him, and he noticed the two old men frowning in his direction. He was on one of the eldster floors. Instead of waiting for another car, he turned away from their angry looks and hurried down the hall. There were other old people about, some shuffling along, others riding powered chairs, and he looked straight ahead so he wouldn't catch their eyes. They resented youngsters coming here.

Well, he resented them occupying his brand-new building. That wasn't a nice thought, and he was sorry at once for even thinking a thing like that. This wasn't his building; he was just one of the men on the design team who had stayed on for construction. The eldsters had as much right here as he did — more so, since this was their home. And a pleasant compromise it had been, too. This building, New Town, was designed for the future, but the future was rather slow coming, since you could accelerate almost everything in the world except fetal growth. Nine months from conception to birth, in either bottle or womb. Then the slow years of childhood, the quick years of puberty. It would be wasteful for the city to stay vacant all those years.

That was where the eldsters came in — the leftover debris of an overpopulated world. Geriatrics propped them up and kept them going. They were growing older together, the last survivors of the greedy generations. They were the parents who had fewer children and even fewer grandchildren as the realities of famine, disease, and the general unwholesomeness of life were driven home to them. Not that they had done this voluntarily. Left alone, they would have responded as every other generation of mankind had done: selfishly. If the world is going to be overpopulated, it is going to be overpopulated with my kids. But the breakthrough in geriatric treatment and drugs came along at that moment and provided a far better carrot than had ever been held in front of the human donkey before. The fewer children you had the more treatment you received. The birth rate dived to zero almost overnight. The indifferent overpopulaters had decided to overpopulate with themselves instead of their children. If life was being granted, they preferred to have it granted to them.

The result was that a child of the next generation might have, in addition to his mother and father, a half-dozen surviving relatives who were eldsters. A married couple might have ten or fifteen older relatives, all of them alone in the world, looking to their only younger kin. There could be no question of this aging horde moving in with the present generation who had neither room for them nor money to support them. They were a government burden and would remain so. A decreasing burden that required less money every year as old machinery, despite the wonders of medicine, finally ran down. When the new cities were being designed for the future, scientifically planned generations, the wise decision had been made to move the eldsters into them first. The best of food, care, and medicine could be provided with the minimum effort and expense. Life in the older cities would be happier, relieved of the weight of the solid block of aging citizenry. And since the geriatric drugs didn't seem to work too well past the middle of the second century, a timetable could be established for what was euphemistically called phasing out. Dying was a word no one liked to use. So as the present inhabitants were phased out to the phasing place of their choice, the growing generations would move in. All neat. All tidy. As long as you stayed away from the eldster floors.

Looking straight ahead, Gust went swiftly along the streetlike corridor, ignoring the steam, rooms and bathing rooms, tropical gardens and sandy beaches, that opened off to either side. And the people. The next bank of elevators was a welcome sight, and this time he was very clearly enunciated "Tit-tee" as the door closed.

When he reached the end of the unfinished corridor the work shift was just going off duty. The flooring terminated here, and ahead was just the rough gray of raw cement still showing the mold marks where it had been cast in place; the floodlights stood high on wiry legs.

"Been having trouble with the squatter, Mr. Crabb," the shift boss complained. These men had grown up in a world of smoothly operating machines and were hurt when they occasionally proved fallible.

"I'll take a look at it. Anything in the hopper?"

"Half full. Should I empty it out?"

"No, leave it. I'll try a run before I call maintenance."

As the motors on the machines were turned off one by one, an echoing silence fell on the immense and cavernlike area. The men went away, their footsteps loud, calling to each other, until Gust was alone. He climbed the ladder to the top of the hulking squatter and unlocked the computer controls. When he typed a quick condition query the readout revealed nothing wrong. These semi-intelligent machines could analyze most of their own troubles and deliver warnings, but there were still occasional failures beyond their capacity to handle or even recognize. Gust closed the computer and pressed the power button.

There was a far-off rumble and the great bulk of the machine shuddered as it came to life. Most of the indicator lights blinked on red, turning swiftly to green as the motors came up to speed. When the operation-ready light also turned green he squinted at the right-hand television screen, which showed the floor level buried under the squatter. The newly laid flooring ended abruptly where the machine had stopped. He backed it a few feet so the sensors could come into operation, then started it forward again at the crawling pace of working speed. As soon as the edge was reached the laying began again. The machine guided itself and controlled the mix and pouring. About all the operator had to do was turn the entire apparatus on and off. Gust watched the hypnotically smooth flow of new floor appear and could see nothing wrong. It was pleasant here, doing a simple yet important job like this.

A warning buzzer sounded and a light began flashing red on the controls. He blinked and had a quick glimpse of something black on the screen before it moved swiftly out of sight. He stopped the forward motion and put the squatter into reverse again, backing the huge mass a good ten feet before killing all the power and climbing back down. The newly laid plastic flooring was still hot under his feet and he trod gingerly almost up to the forward edge. There was a cavity in the flooring here, like a bowl or a bubble a foot wide. As though the machine had burped while spewing out its flow. Perhaps it had. The technicians would set it right. He made a note to call them in his pocket pad, killed all except the standby lights, then went back to the elevators. Calling out his floor number very carefully.

Dr. Livermore and Leatha were bent over a worktable in the lab, heads lowered as though at a wake. As perhaps they were. Gust came in quietly, listening, not wanting to interrupt.

"There were some of the most promising new strains here," Leatha said. "The Reilly-Stone in particular. I don't know how much computer time was used in the preliminary selection, but the technicians must have put in a hundred hours on this fertilized ovum alone."

"Isn't that a little unusual?" Livermore asked.

"I imagine so, but it was the first application of the Bershock multiple-division cross-trait selection, and you know how those things go."

"I do indeed. It will be easier the next time. Send the records back noting the failures. Get them started on replacements. Hello, Gust, I didn't hear you come in."

"I didn't want to bother you."

"No bother. We are finished in any case. Had some bottle failures today."

"So I heard. Do you know why?"

"If I knew everything, I would be God, wouldn't I?"

Leatha looked at the old man, shocked. "But Doctor, we do know why the embryos were killed. The valve failed on the input—"

"But why did the valve fail? There are reasons beyond reasons in everything."

"We're going to Old Town, Doctor.” Gust said, uncomfortable with this kind of abstract conversation and eager to change the subject.

"Don't let me stop you. Don't bring back any infections, hear?"

Livermore turned to leave, but the door opened before he reached it. A man stood there, looking at them without speaking. He entered, and the silence and the severe set of his features struck them silent as well. When the door had closed behind him he called their names in a deep voice, looking at each of them in turn as he spoke.

"Dr. Livermore, Leatha Crabb, Gust Crabb. I am here to see you. My name is Blalock."

It was clear that Livermore did not enjoy being addressed in this manner. "Call my secretary for an appointment. I'm busy now." He started to leave, but Blalock raised his hand, at the same time taking a thin wallet from his pocket.

"I would like to see you now, Doctor. This is my identification."

Livermore could not have left without pushing the man aside. He stopped and blinked at the golden badge.

"FBI. What on earth are you after here?"

"A killer." A stunned silence followed. "I can tell you now, though I would appreciate your not telling anyone else, that one of the technicians working here is an agent from the bureau. He makes regular reports to Washington about conditions on the project."

"Meddling and spying!" Livermore was angry.

"Not at all. The government has a large investment here and believes in protecting this and in guarding the taxpayers' money. You have had a number of bottle failures here in the first weeks after implanting."

"Accidents, just accidents," Leatha said, then flushed and was silent when Blalock turned his cold, unsmiling gaze on her.

"Are they? We don't think so. There are four other New Towns in the United States, all of them with projects working along the same lines as yours. They have had bottle failures as well, but not in the numbers you have here."

"A few more in one place or another means nothing," Livermore said. "The law of averages covers minor differences."

"I'm sure it does. Minor differences, Doctor. But the rate of failure here is ten times higher than that of the other laboratories. For every bottle failure they have, you have ten. For their ten, you have a hundred. I am not here by accident. Since you are in charge of this project, I would like a letter from you giving me permission to go anywhere on the premises and to speak with anyone."

"My secretary will have gone by now. In the morning—"

"I have the letter here, typed on your stationery, just needing your signature."

Livermore's anger was more forced than real. "I won't have this. Stealing my office supplies. I won't have it."

"Don't be rude, Doctor. Your stationery is printed by the Government Printing Office. They supplied it to me to make my job easier. Don't you make it harder."

There was a coldness in his words that stopped Livermore and sent him fumbling with his pen to sign the letter. Gust and Leatha looked on, not knowing what to do. Blalock folded the letter and put it back into his pocket.

"I'll want to talk to you all later," he said, and left. Livermore waited until he was gone, then went out as well, without a word.

"What an awful man," Leatha said.

"It doesn't matter how awful he is if what he said was right. Bottle sabotage — how can that be?"

"Easily enough done."

"But why should it be done?" Gust asked. "That's the real question. It's so meaningless, so wanton. There's simply no.reason."

"That's Blalock's worry, what he's getting paid for. Right now I've had a long day, and I'm hungry and more concerned with my dinner. You go ahead to the apartment and defrost something. I won't be a minute finishing up these tests."

He was angry. "The first blush is off our marriage, isn't it?

"You've completely forgotten that I asked you out to dinner in Old Town."

"It's not that…" Leatha said, then stopped, because it really was. Gust wasn't completely right; the work was so distracting and then this Blalock person. She tidied up quickly without finishing the tests and took off her smock. Her dress was dark gray and no less severe. It was thin, too, designed for wear in the constant temperature of New Town.

"If it's cold outside, I should get a coat."

"Of course it's cold out. It's still March. I checked out a car earlier and put your heavy coat in it, mine as well."

They went in silence to the elevator and down to the parking level. The bubble-dome car was at the ready ramp, and the top swung up when he turned tjp? handle. They put on their coats before they climbed in, and Gust turned on the heat as he started the car. The electric engine, powered by batteries, hummed strongly as they headed for the exit, the doors opening automatically for them as the car approached. There was a brief wait in the lock while the inner door closed before the outer one opened; then they emerged on the sloping ramp that led up to Old Town.

It had been a long time since their last visit outside the New Town, and the difference was striking. The streets were patched and had an unkempt appearance, with dead grass and weeds protruding from the cracks. There were pieces of paper caught against the curbs, and when they passed an empty lot a cloud of dust swirled around them. Leatha sank deeper into her seat and shivered even though the heater was going full on. The buildings had a weathered and even a decayed look about them, the wooden buildings most of all, and the limbs of the gray trees were bare as skeletons in the fading daylight. Gust tried to read the street signs and lost his way once, but finally found a garish spotlit sign that read SHARM'S. Either they were early or business wasn't booming, because they could park right in front of the door. Leatha didn't wait but ran the few feet through the chill wind while Gust locked up the car. Inside, Sharm himself was waiting to greet them.

"Welcome, welcome.” he said with bored professional exuberance, a tall, wide Negro, very black, wearing a brilliant kaftan and red fez. "I've got just the table for you, right at the ringside."

"That will be nice," Gust said.

Sharm's hospitality was easily understood; there was only one other couple in the restaurant. There was the heavy smell of cooking in the air, some of it not too fresh, and the tablecloth was a cartography of ancient stains only partially removed.

"Like a drink?" Sharm asked.

"I guess so. Any suggestions?"

"Bet your life. Bloody Mary with tequila, the house special. I'll fetch a jug."

They must have been premixed because he was back a moment later with the tray and two menus tucked under his arm. He poured their drinks and then one for himself and pulled up a chair to join them. The atmosphere of Sharm's was nothing if not relaxed.

"Salud," he said, and they drank. Leatha puckered her lips and put her glass down quickly, but Gust liked the sharp bite of the drink.

"Great. Never tasted one before. How about the menu — any house specials there?"

"All specials. My wife is great at any kind of cult food. Black-eyed peas and corn dodgers, kosher hot dogs and Boston baked beans, we got them all. Just take your pick. Music's starting now, and Aikane will be in to dance in about a half an hour. Drink up, folks, these are on the house."

"Very kind," Gust said, sipping his.

"Not at all. I want to pump your brain, Mr. Crabb, and I pay in advance. I saw you on 3V last week talking about New Town. Pretty fancy if I say so myself. What's the chances of opening a restaurant in your place?" He drained his glass and poured himself another one, topping up their glasses at the same time.

"That's not easy to say."

"What's easy? Living on the dole and maybe blowing your brains out from boredom, that's easy. Me, I got bigger plans. Everyone likes cult food. Eldsters, reminds them of the old days; kids think it's real pit-blasting. But people here in Old Town don't eat out much, not that much loose pesos around. Got to go to where the change is. New Town. What're the odds?"

"I can find out. But you have to realize, Mr. Sharm—"

"Just plain Sharm. A first name."

"You have to realize that the eldsters have special diet — special sanitary regulations on their food."

"This beanery isn't bug-finky. We got plenty of sanitary examinations."

"That's not what I meant, I'm sorry don't misunderstand me. It's special diets really, to go with the medication. Really special if you understand, practically worked out and cooked in the labs."

A loud drumming interrupted him as a sad-looking American Indian did a quick Indian war beat on the bass drum. He switched on the taper with his toe, then worked rhythm on the traps as a recording played an Israeli folk song. It was all very unimpressive but loud.

"What about the younger people then?" Sharm shouted to be heard. "Like you folks. You come this far to eat cult food, why not have it closer to home?"

"There's not enough of us, not yet. Just technicians and construction teams. No more than ten percent of the children who will occupy the city have even been born yet, so I don't know if you even have a big enough group to draw from. Later, perhaps."

"Yeah, later. Big deal. Wait twenty years." Sharm sank down, wrapped in gloom, moving only to empty the jug into his glass. He rose reluctantly when another customer entered, ending the embarrassing interlude.

They both ordered mixed plates of all the specialties and a bottle of wine, since Leatha was not that enthusiastic about the Bloody Marys. While they ate, a slightly dark-skinned girl, of possibly Hawaiian descent, ern/?ged from the rear and did an indifferent hula. Gust looked on with some pleasure, since she wore only a low-slung grass skirt with many tufts missing and was enough overweight to produce a great deal of jiggling that added a certain something to the dance.

"Vulgar," Leatha said, wiping her eyes with her napkin after taking too much horseradish on her gefilte fish.

"I don't think so." He put his hand on her leg under the table, and she pushed it away without changing expression.

"Don't do that in public.”

"Or in private either! Damn it, Lea, what's happening to our marriage? We both work, A-OK, that's fine, but what about our life together? What about our raising a newborn?"

"We've talked about this before…"

"You've said no before, that's what has happened. Look, Lea honey, I'm not trying to push you back to the Middle Ages with one in the hand, one on the hip, and one in the belly. Women have been relieved at last of all the trouble and danger of childbirth, but by God they are still women. Not men with different builds. A lot of couples don't want kids, fine, and I agree that creche-raised babies have all the advantages. But other couples are raising babies, and women can even nurse them after the right injections."

"You don't think I'd do that?"

"I'm not asking you to do that, as you so sweetly put it — though it's nowhere near as shocking as your tone of voice indicates. I would just like you to consider raising a child, a son. He would be with us evenings and weekends. It would be fun."

"Not exactly my idea of fun."

The answer that was on his lips was sharp, bitter, and nasty and would have surely started an even worse fight, but before he could speak she grabbed him by the arm.

"Gust, there in the corner at that back table — isn't that the horrible person who was at the lab?"

"Blalock? Yes, it looks like him. Though it's hard to tell in this overromantic light. What difference does it make?"

"Don't you realize that if he is here, he followed us and is watching us? He thinks we may have been responsible for the bottle failures."

"You're imagining too much. Maybe he just likes cult food. He looks the type who might even live on it."

Yet why was he at the restaurant? If he was there to worry them, he succeeded. Leatha pushed her plate away and Gust had little appetite as well. He called for the check and, depressed in spirits, they shrugged into their coats and went out into the cold night, past the silent and accusing eyes of Sharm, who knew he was not going to live the new life in New Town no matter how much he wanted to.

Many years before, Catherine Ruffin had developed a simple plan to enable her to get her work done, a plan that was not part of her work routine. She had discovered, early in her career, that she had an orderly mind and a highly retentive memory that were a great asset in her work. But she had to study facts slowly and deliberately without interruptions, something that was impossible during the routine of a busy office day. Staying after work was not the answer; the phone still rang, and she was often too fatigued to make the most of the opportunity. Nor was it always possible to bring work back to her apartment. Since she had always been an early riser, she found that her colleagues were all slugabeds and would rather do anything than come to work five minutes early. She went to her office now at seven every morning and had the solid core of her work done before anyone else appeared. It was a practical and satisfactory solution to the problem and one that appealed to her. However, she was so used to being alone at these early hours that she looked upon anyone else's presence as an interruption and an annoyance.

She found the note on her desk when she came in, — it certainly had not been there when she left the previous evening. It was typed and quite clear:

Please see me now in bottle lab. Urgent. R. Livermore.

She was annoyed at the tone and the interruption and perhaps the idea that someone had actually come to work before her. Been here all night, more likely; the scientific staff tended to do that unless specifically forbidden. Still, it looked urgent, so she had better comply. There would be time for recriminations later if Livermore had overstepped himself. She put her massive purse in the bottom drawer of her desk and went to the elevator.

There was no one in sight on the laboratory floor, nor in the office when she went in. A motion caught her eye, and she turned to look at the door that led into the bottle rooms; it was closed now, yet she had the feeling that it had moved a moment before. Perhaps Liver-more had gone through and was waiting for her. As she started forward there was the sharp sound of breaking glass from behind the door, again and again. At the same instant an alarm bell began ringing loudly in the distance. She gasped and stood frozen an instant at the suddenness of it. Someone was in there, breaking the apparatus. The bottles! Running heavily, she threw the door open and rushed inside. Glass littered the £^or_; fluids still dripped from the shattered bottles. There was no one there. She looked about her, stunned by the destruction and the suddenness, shocked by the abrupt termination of these carefully plotted lives. The almost invisible masses of cells that were to be the next generation were dying, even while she stood there gaping. And there was nothing she could do about it. It was horrifying, and she could not move. Shards of glass were at her feet and in the midst of the glass and the widening pool of liquid was a hammer.

The killer's weapon? She bent down and picked the hammer up and when she stood upright again someone spoke behind her.

"Turn about slowly. Don't do anything you'll regret."

Catherine Ruffin was out of her depth, floundering. Everything was happening too fast, and she could not grasp the reality of it.

"What?" she said. "What?" Turning to look at the stranger in the doorway behind her, who held what appeared to be a revolver.

"Put that hammer down slowly," he said.

"Who are you?" The hammer clattered on the floor.

"I'll ask the same thing of you. I am Blalock, FBI. My identification is here." He held out his badge.

"Catherine Ruffin. I was sent for. Dr. Livermore. What does this mean?"

"Can you prove that?"

"Of course. This note, read it for yourself."

He pinched it between the tips of his fingers and looked at it briefly before dropping it into an envelope and putting it into his pocket. His gun had vanished.

"Anyone could have typed that," he said. "You could have typed it yourself."

"I don't know what you're talking about. It was on my desk when I came to work a short while ago. I read it, came here, heard the sound of glass being broken, entered here and saw this hammer and picked it up. Nothing else."

Blalock looked at her closely for a long instant, then nodded and waved her after him to the outer office. "Perhaps. We will check that out later. For the moment you will sit here quietly while I make some calls."

He had a list of numbers, and the first one he dialed rang a long time before it was answered. Leatha Crabb's sleep-puffed face finally appeared on the screen.

"What do you want?" she asked, her eyes widening when she saw who the caller was.

"Your husband. I wish to talk to him."

"He's — he's asleep." She looked about uneasily, and Blalock did not miss the hesitation in her voice.

"Is he? Then wake him and bring him to the phone."

"Why? Just tell me why?"

"Then I will be there at once. Would that embarrass you, Mrs. Crabb? Will you either wake your husband — or tell me the truth?"

She lowered her eyes and spoke in a small voice.

"He's not here. He hasn't been here all night."

"Do you know where he is?"

"No. And I don't care. We had a difference of opinion, and he stamped out. And that is all I wish to tell you." The screen went dark. Blalock instantly dialed another number. This time there was no answer. He turned to Catherine Ruffin who sat, still dazed by the rapid passage of events.

"I want you to take me to Dr. Livermore's office."

Still not sure what had happened, she did exactly as he asked. The door was unlocked, and Blalock pushed by her and looked in. The pale early sunlight streamed in through the glass walls, and the office was empty. Blalock sniffed at the air, as though searching out a clue, then pointed to the door in the right-hand wall.

"Where does this lead?"

"I'm sure I don't know."

"Stay here."

Catherine Ruffin disliked his tone, but before she could tell him so, he was across the room and standing to one side as he carefully opened the door. Livermore lay asleep on the couch inside, with a thin blanket pulled over him and clutched to his neck by one hand. Blalock went in silently and took him by the wrist, his forefinger inside below the base of the thumb. Livermore opened his eyes at the touch, blinked, and pulled his hand away.

"What the devil are you doing here?"

"Taking your pulse. You don't mind, do you?"

"I certainly do." He sat up and threw the blanket aside. "I'm the doctor here, and I do the pulse taking. I asked you what you meant by breaking in like this?"

"There has been more sabotage in the bottle room. I had alarms rigged. I found this woman there with a hammer."

"Catherine! Why would you do a foolish thing like that?"

"How dare you! You sent a note, I received it, asking me to come there, to trap me. Perhaps you broke those bottles!"

Livermore yawned and rubbed at his eyes, then bent and groped under the couch for his shoes.

"That's what Dick Tracy here thinks." He grunted as he pulled a shoe on. "Finds me sleeping here, doesn't believe that, tries to take my pulse and see if I've been running around with that hammer, faster pulse than a sleeping pulse. Idiot!" He snapped the last word and rose to his feet. "I am in charge of this project, it's my project. Before you accuse me of sabotaging it, you had better find a better reason than baseless suspicion. Find out who typed that fool note, and maybe you will have a lead."

"I fully intend to," Blalock said, and the phone rang.

"For you," Livermore said, and passed it to the FBI man, who listened silently, then issued a sharp command.

"Birmingham here."

Before she left, Catherine Ruffin made a sworn statement, and it was recorded on Livermore's office taper. Then Livermore did the same thing. Yes, he had not been in his apartment. He had worked late in his office, and as he did many times, he had slept on the couch in the adjoining room. He had gone to sleep around 0300 hours and had neither seen nor heard anything since that time, not until Blalock had wakened him. Yes, it was possible to get from the bottle room by way of the rear door, and through the business office to this office, but he had not done that. He was just finishing the statement when a stranger, with the same dour expression and conservative cut of clothes as Blalock, brought Gust Crabb in. Blalock dismissed the man and turned the full power of his attention on Gust.

"You were not in your apartment all night. Where were you?"

"Go to hell.”

"Your attitude is not appreciated. Your whereabouts are unknown — up to a few minutes ago when you arrived at your office. During the time in question someone broke into the bottle room and sabotaged this project with a hammer. I ask you again. Where were you?"

Gust, who was a simple man in all except his work, now enacted a pantomime of worry, guilt, and unhappiness complete with averted eyes and a fine beading of sweat on his forehead. Livermore felt sorry for him and turned away and harrumphed and found his tie and busied himself knotting it.

"Talk," Blalock said loudly, using all the pressure he could to increase the other's discomfort.

"It's not what you think," Gust said in a hollow voice.

"Give me a complete statement or I'll arrest you now for willful sabotage of a government project."

The silence lengthened uncomfortably. It was Livermore who broke it.

"For God's sake, Gust, tell him. You couldn't have done a thing like this. What is it a girl?" He snorted through his nose at the sudden flushing of Gust's face. "It is. Spill it out, it won't go beyond this room. The government doesn't care about your sex life, and I'm well past the age where these things have much importance."

"No one's business.” Gust muttered.

"Crime is the government's business—" Blalock said but was cut off by Livermore.

"But love affairs aren't, so will you shut up? Tell him the truth, Gust, tell him or you'll be in trouble. It was a girl?"

"Yes," Gust said most reluctantly, staring down at the floor.

"Good. You stayed the night with her. A few details would be appreciated, and then you will no longer be a suspect."

Under painful prodding Gust managed to mumble these details. The girl was a secretary with the engineering commission; he had known her a long time. She liked him_; but he stayed away from her until last night, a fight with Leatha, he had stamped out, found himself at Georgette's door — you won't tell anyone? — and she took him in, one thing led to another. There it was.

"There it is.” Livermore said. "Do your work, Blalock, Gust will be here with me if you want him. Find the girl, get her story, then leave us alone. Investigate the mysterious note, take fingerprints from the hammer, and do whatever you do in this kind of thing. But leave us be. Unless you have some evidence and want to arrest me, get out of my office."

When they were alone, Livermore made some coffee in his anteroom and brought a cup to Gust, who was looking out at the hillside now shaded by clouds and curtained with rain.

"You think I'm a fool," Gust said.

"Not at all. I think there's trouble between you and Leatha and that you're making it worse instead of better."

"But what can I do?!"

Livermore ignored the note of pleading in the man's voice and stirred his coffee to cool it. "You know what to do without bothering me. It's your problem. You're an adult. Solve it. With your wife or family counseling or whatever. Right now I have something slightly more important to think about with this sabotage and the FBI and the rest of it."

Gust sat up straighter and almost smiled. "You're right. My problem isn't that world-shaking and I'll take care of it. Do you realize that you and I and Leatha seem to be the FBI's prime suspects? He must have called the apartment as if he knew I wasn't there. And he followed us to the restaurant last night. Why us?"

"Propinquity, I imagine. We and the technicians are the only ones who go in and out of the bottle rooms at will. And one of the technicians is a plant, he told us that, so they are being watched from their own ranks. Which leaves us."

"I don't understand it at all. Why should anyone want to sabotage the bottles?"

Livermore nodded slowly.

"That's the question that Blalock should be asking. Until he finds out the why of this business he's never going to find who is doing it."

Leatha came silently into his office and said nothing as she closed the door behind her. Gust looked up from the papers on his desk, surprised/ she had never been in his office before.

"Why did you do it, why?" she said in a hoarse voice, her face drawn, ugly with the strain of her emotions. He was stunned into silence.

"Don't think I don't know — that Blalock came to see me and told me everything. Where you were last night, about her, so don't try to deny it. He wasn't lying, I could tell."

Gust was tired and not up to playing a role in a bitter exchange. "Why would he tell you these things?" he asked.

"Why? That's fairly obvious. He doesn't care about you or me, just his job. He suspects me, I could tell that, thinks I could sabotage the bottles. He wanted me to lose my temper, and I did, not that it did any good. Now answer me — pig — why did you do it? That's all I want to know, why?"

Gust looked at his fists, clenched on the desk before him. "I wanted to, I suppose."

"You wanted to!" Leatha shrieked the words. "That's the kind of a man you are, you wanted to, so you just went there. I suppose I don't have to bother asking you what happened — my imagination is good enough for that."

"Lea, this isn't the time or place to talk about this."

"Oh, isn't it? It doesn't take any special place for me to tell you what I think of you, you. . traitor!"

His fixed and silent face only angered her more, beyond words. On the table close by was a cutaway model of New Town, prepared when it was still in the design stage. She seized it in both hands, raised it over her head, and hurled it at him. But it was too light, and it spun end over end in the air, striking him harmlessly on the arm and falling to the floor where it broke, shedding small chunks of plastic.

"You shouldn't have done that," Gust said, bending to retrieve the model. "Here you've broken it and it costs money. I'm responsible for it." The only response was a slam, and he looked up to see that Leatha was gone.

Anger filled her, stronger than anything she had ever experienced before in her life. Her chest hurt and she had trouble breathing. How could he have done this to her? She walked fast, until she had to gasp for breath, through the corridors of New Town. Aimlessly, she thought, until she looked at the entrance to the nearby offices and realized that she had had a goal all the time. CENTENGCOM, the sign read, an unattractive acronym for the Central Engineering Commission. Could she enter here, and if she did, what could she say? A man came out and held the door for her_; she couldn't begin to explain why she was standing there, so she went in. There was a floor plan on the facing wall, and she pressed the button labeled SECRETARIAL POOL, then turned in the indicated direction.

It really proved quite easy to do. A number of girls worked in the large room surrounded by the hum of office machines and typers. People were going in and out, and she stood for a minute until a young man carrying a sheaf of papers emerged. He stopped when she spoke to him.

"Could you help me? I'm looking for a… Miss Georgette Booker. I understand she works here."

"Georgy, sure. Over there at that desk against the far wall, wearing the white shirt or whatever you call it. Want me to tell her you're here?" '

"No, that's fine, thank you very much. I'll talk to her myself."

Leatha waited until he had gone, then looked over the bent heads to the desk against the far wall and gasped. Yes, it had to be that girl, white blouse and dark hair, rich chocolate-colored skin. Leatha pushed on into the office and took a roundabout path through the aisles between the desks that would enable her to pass by the girl, slowing as she came close.

She was pretty, no denying that, she was pretty. A nicely sculptured face, thin-bridged nose, but too heavily made up with the purple lipstick that was in now. And tiny silver stars dusted across one cheek and onto her chesW There was enough of that, and most of it showing, too, in the new peekie-look thin fabric almost completely transparent.

Feeling the eyes on her, Georgette looked up and smiled warmly at Leatha, who turned away and walked past her, faster and faster.

By the middle of the afternoon Dr. Livermore was very tired. He had had little sleep the previous night, and the FBI man's visit had disturbed him. Then he had to put the technicians to work clearing up the mess in the bottle room, and while they could be trusted to do a good job, he nevertheless wanted to check it out for himself when they were done. He would do that and then perhaps take a nap. He pushed the elaborate scrawled codes of the gene charts away from him and rose stiffly. He was beginning to feel his years. Perhaps it was time to consider joining his patients in the warm comfort of the geriatric levels. He smiled at the thought and started for the labs.

There was little formality among his staff, and he never thought to knock on the door of Leatha's private office when he found it closed. His thoughts were on the bottles. He pushed the door open and found her bent over the desk her face in her hands, crying.

"What's wrong?" he called out before he realized that it might have been wiser to leave quietly. He had a sudden insight as to what the trouble might be.

She raised a tear-dampened and reddened face, and he closed the door behind him.

"I'm sorry to walk in like this. I should have knocked."

"No, Dr. Livermore, that's all right." She dabbed at her eyes with a tissue. 'Tm sorry you have to see me like this."

''Perfectly normal. I think I understand."

"No, it has nothing to do with bottles."

"I know. It's that girl, isn't it? I had hoped you wouldn't find out."

Leatha was too distraught to ask him how he knew but began sobbing again at this reminder. Livermore wanted to leave but could think of no way to do it gracefully. At the present moment he just could not be interested in this domestic tragedy.

"I saw her," Leatha said. "I went there, God knows why, driven, I suppose. To see just what he preferred to me was so humiliating. A blowsy thing, vulgar, the obvious kind of thing a man might like. And she's colored. How could he have done this. .?"

The sobbing began again and Livermore stopped, his hand on the knob. He had wanted to leave before he became involved himself. Now he was involved.

"I remember your talking to me about it once," he said. "Where you come from. Somewhere in the South, isn't it?"

The complete irrelevancy of the question stopped Leatha, even slowed her tears. "Yes, Mississippi. A little fishing town named, Biloxi."

"I thought so. And you grew up with a good jolt of racial bias. The worst thing you have against this girl is the fact that she is black."

"I never said that. But there are things…"

"No, there are not things, if you mean races or colors or religions or anything like that. I am shocked to hear you, a geneticist, even suggest that race can have any relevancy to your problems. Deeply shocked. Though, unhappily, I'm not surprised."

"I don't care about her. It's him — Gust — what he did to me."

"He did nothing at all. My God, woman, you want equality and equal pay and freedom from childbearing — and you have all these things. So you can't very well complain if you throw a man out of your bed and he goes to someone else."

"What do you mean?" she gasped, shocked.

"I'm sorry. It's not my place to talk like this. I became angry. You're an adult; you'll have to make your own decisions about your marriage."

"No. You can't leave it like that. You said something, and you're going to tell me exactly what you meant."

Livermore was still angry. He dropped into a chair and ordered his thoughts before he spoke again.

"I'm. an old-fashioned M.D., so perhaps I had better talk from a doctor's point of view. You're a young woman in good health in the prime of your life. If you came to me for marriage counseling I would tell you that your marriage appears to be in trouble and you are probably the cause — the original cause, that is. Though it has gone far enough now so that you both have a good deal to be responsible for. It appears that in your involvement in your work, your major interests outside your marriage, you have lost your sexuality. You have no time for it. And I am not talking about sex now but all the things that make a woman feminine. The way you dress, apply makeup, carry yourself, think about yourself. Your work has come to occupy the central portion of your life, and your husband has to take second-best. You must realize that some of the freedom women gained deprived the men of certain things. A married man now has no children or a mother for his children. He has no one who is primarily interested in him and his needs. I don't insist that all marriages must exist on a master-and-slave relationship, but there should be a deal more give-and-take in a marriage than yours appears to offer. Just ask yourself — what does your husband get out of this marriage other than sexual frustration? If it's just a sometime companion, he would be far better off with a male roommate, an engineer he could talk shop with."

The silence lengthened, and Livermore finally coughed and cleared his throat and stood.

"If I have interfered unreasonably, I'm sorry."

He went out and saw Blalock stamping determinedly down the hall. After scowling at the man's receding back for a moment he entered the laboratory to check the bottle installations.

The FBI man let himself into Catherine Ruffin's office without knocking. She looked up at him, her face cold, then back at her work.

"I'm busy now, and I don't wish to talk to you."

"I've come to you for some help."

"Me?" Her laugh had no humor in it. "You accused me of breaking those bottles, so how can you ask for aid?"

"You are the only one who can supply the information I need. If you are as innocent as you insist, you should be pleased to help."

It was an argument that appealed to her ordered mind. She had no good reason — other than the fact that she disliked him — for refusing the man. And he was the agent officially sent here to investigate the sabotage.

"What can I do?" she asked.

"Help me to uncover a motive for the crimes."

"I have no suspicions, no information that you don't have."

"Yes, you do. You have access to all the records and to the computer — and you know how to program it. I want you to get all the data you can on the contents of those bottles. I have been looking at the records of losses, and there seems to be a pattern, but not one that is necessarily obvious. The fact that certain bottles were broken, three out of five, or that all the bottles in a certain rank on a certain day had their contents destroyed. There must be a key to this information in the records."

"This will not be a small job."

"I can get you all the authorization you need."

"Then I will do it. I can make the comparisons and checks and program the computer to look for relevant information. But I cannot promise you that there will be the answer you seek. The destruction could be random, and if it is, this will be of no help."

"I have my own reasons for thinking that it is not random. Do this and call me as soon as you have the results."

It took two days of concentrated effort, and Catherine Ruffin was very satisfied with the job that she had done. Not with the results themselves, — she could see no clues to any form of organization in any of the figures. But the federal agent might. She put in a call to him, then went through the results again until he arrived.

"I can see nothing indicative," she said, passing over the computer readouts.

"That's for me to decide. Can you explain these to me?"

"This is a list of the destroyed or damaged bottles." She handed him the top sheet. "Code number in the first column, then identification by name."

"What does that mean?"

"Surname of the donors, an easy way to remember and identify certain strains. Here, for instance, Wilson-Smith; sperm Wilson, ovum Smith. The remaining columns are details about the selections, which traits were selected and information of that kind. Instead of the index numbers, I have used the names of the strains for identification in the processing. These are the remaining sheets which are the results of various attempts to extract meaningful relationships. I could find none. The names themselves convey more."

He looked up from the figures. "What do you mean?"

"Nothing at all. A foolish habit of my own. I am by birth a Boer, and I grew up on one of the white reservations in South Africa after the revolution. Until we emigrated here, when I was eleven, I spoke only Afrikaans. So I have an emotional tie to the people — the ethnic group, you would call it — in which I was born. It is a small group, and it is very rare to meet a Boer in this country. So I look at lists of names, an old habit, to see if I recognize any Boers among them. I have met a few people that way in my lifetime, for some talk about the old days behind barbed wire. That is what I meant."

"How does that apply to these lists?"

"There are no Boers among them."

Blalock shrugged and turned his attention back to the paper. Catherine Ruffin, born Katerina Refing, held the list of names before her and pursed her lips over it.

"No Afrikaners at all. All of them Anglo-Irish names, if anything."

Blalock looked up sharply. "Please repeat that.” he said.

She was correct. He went through the list of names twice and found only sternly Anglo-Saxon or Irish surnames. It appeared to make no sense nor did the fact, uncovered by Catherine Ruffin with the name relationship as a clue, that there were no Negroes either.

"It makes no sense, no sense at all," Blalock said, shaking the papers angrily. "What possible reason could there be for this kind of deliberate action?"

"Perhaps you ask the wrong question. Instead of asking why certain names appear to be eliminated, perhaps you should ask why others do not appear on the list. Afrikaners, for instance."

"Are there Afrikaans names on any of the bottle lists?"

"Of course. Italian names, German names, that kind of thing."

"Yes, let us ask that question," Blalock said, bending over the lists again.

It was the right question to ask.

The emergency meeting of the Genetic Guidance Council was called for 2300 hours. As always, Livermore was late. An extra chair had been placed at the foot of the big marble table, and Blalock was sitting there, the computer printouts arranged neatly before him. Catherine Ruffin switched on the recorder and called the meeting to order at once while Sturtevant coughed, then grubbed out his vegetable cigarette and immediately lit another one.

"Those burning compost heaps will kill you yet," Livermore said. Catherine Ruffin interrupted the traditional disagreement before it could get under way.

"This meeting has been called at the request of Mr. Blalock, of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, who is here investigating the bottle failures and apparent sabotage. He is now ready to make a report."

"About time," Livermore said. "Find out yet who is the saboteur?"

"Yes," Blalock said tonelessly. "You are, Dr. Livermore."

"Well, well, big talk from a little man. But you'll have to come up with some evidence before you wring a confession out of me."

"I think I can do that. Since the sabotage began, and even before it was recognized as sabotage, one out of every ten bottles was a failure. Tfiis percentage is known as a tithe, which is indicative of a certain attitude or state of mind. It is also ten times the average failure ratio to other laboratories, which is normally about one percent. As further evidence the bottles sabotaged all had Irish or English-surnamed donors."

Livermore sniffed loudly. "Pretty flimsy evidence. And what does it have to do with me?"

"I have here a number of transcripts of meetings of this council where you have gone on record against what you call discrimination in selection. You seem to have set yourself up as a protector of minorities, claiming at different times that Negroes, Jews, Italians, Indians, and other groups have been discriminated against. The records reveal that no bottles bearing names of donors belonging to any of these groups have ever been lost by apparent accident or deliberate sabotage. The connection with you seems obvious, as well as the fact that you are one of the few people with access to the bottles as well as the specific knowledge that would enable you to commit the sabotage."

"Sounds more like circumstantial evidence, not facts, to me. Are you planning to bring these figures out in a public hearing or trial or whatever you call it?"

"I am."

"Then your figures will also show the unconscious and conscious discrimination that is being practiced by the genetic-selection techniques now being used, because it will reveal just how many of these minority groups are not being represented in the selection."

"I know nothing about that."

"Well, I do. With these facts in mind I then admit to all the acts you have accused me of. I did it all."

A shocked silence followed his words. Catherine Ruffin shook her head, trying to understand.

"Why? I don't understand why you did it," she said.

"Still, Catherine? I thought you were more intelligent than that. I did everything within my power to change the errant policies of this board and all the other boards throughout the country. I got exactly nowhere. With natural childbirth almost completely a thing of the past, the future citizens of this country will all come from the gene pool represented by the stored sperm and ova. With the selection techniques existing now, minority after minority will be eliminated, and with their elimination countless genes that we simply cannot lose will be lost forever. Perhaps a world of fair-skinned, blue-eyed, blond, and muscular Anglo-Saxon Protestants is your idea of an ideal society. It is not mine — nor is it very attractive to the tinted-skin people with the funny foreign ways, odd names, and strangely shaped noses. They deserve to survive just as much as we do and to survive right here in their country, which is the United States of America. So don't tell me about Italian and Israeli gene pools in their native lands. The only real Americans here with an original claim to that name are the American Indians, and they are being dropped out of the gene pool as well. A crime is being committed. I was aware of it and could convince no one else of its existence. Until I chose this highly dramatic way of pointing out the situation. During my coming trial these facts will be publicized, and after that the policy will have to be reexamined and changed."

"You foolish old man," Catherine Ruffin said, but the warmth in her voice belied the harshness of her words. "You've ruined yourself. You will be fined, you may go to jail, at the least you will be relieved of your position, forced into retirement. You will never work again."

"Catherine my dear, I did what I had to do. Retirement at my age holds no fears — in fact, I have been considering it and rather looking forward to it. Leave genetics and practice medicine as a hobby with my old fossils. I doubt the courts will be too hard on me. Compulsory retirement, I imagine, no more. Well worth it to get the facts out before the public."

"In that you have failed," Blalock said coldly, putting the papers together and dropping them into his case. "There will be no public trial, simply a dismissal — better for all concerned that way. Since you have admitted guilt, your superiors can make a decision in camera as to what to do."

"That's not fair!" Sturtevant said. "He only did these things to publicize what was happening. You can't take that away from him. It's not fair…"

"Fair has nothing to do with it, Mr. Sturtevant. The genetic program will continue unchanged." Blalock seemed almost ready to smile at the thought. Livermore looked at him with distaste.

"You would like that, wouldn't you? Don't rock the boat. Get rid of disloyal employees and at the same time rid this country of dissident minorities."

"You said it, Doctor, I didn't. And since you have admitted guilt, there is nothing you can do about it."

Livermore rose slowly and started from the room, turning before he reached the door.

"Quite the contrary, Blalock, because I shall insist upon a full public hearing. You have accused me of a crime before my associates, and I wish my name cleared, since I am innocent of all charges."

"It won't wash." Blalock was smiling now. "Your statement of guilt is on tape, recorded in the minutes of this meeting."

"I don't think it is. I did one final bit of sabotage earlier today. On that recorder. The tape is blank."

''That will do you no good. There are witnesses to your words."

"Are there? My two associates on the council are two committed human beings, no matter what our differences. If what I have said is true I think they will want the facts to come out. Am I right, Catherine?"

"I never heard you admit guilt, Dr. Livermore."

"Nor I," Sturtevant said. "I shall insist on a full departmental hearing to clear your name."

"See you in court, Blalock," Livermore said, and went out.

"I thought you would be at work. I didn't expect to see you here," Gust said to Leatha, who was sitting looking out of the window of their living room. "I just came back to pack a bag, take my things out.",

"Don't do that."

"I'm sorry what happened the other night, I just—"

"We'll talk about that some other time."

There was almost an embarrassed silence then, and he noticed her clothes for the first time. She was wearing a dress he had never seen before, a colorful print, sheer and low-cut. And her hair was different somehow, and her lipstick, more than she usually wore, he thought. She looked very nice, and he wondered if he should tell her that.

"Why don't we go out to that restaurant in Old Town," Leatha said. "I think that might be fun."

"It will be fun, I know it will," he answered suddenly, unreasonably, happier than he had ever been before.

Georgette Booker looked up at the clock and saw that it was almost time to quit. Good. Dave was taking her out again tonight, which meant that he would propose again. He was so sweet. She might even marry him but not now. Life was too relaxed, too much fun, and she enjoyed people. Marriage was always there when you wanted it, but right now she just didn't want it. She smiled. She was quite happy.

Sharm smiled and ate another piece of the ring-shaped roll. "Top-pit," he said. "Really good. What is it called?" "A bagel," his wife said. "You're supposed to eat them with smoked salmon and white cheese. I found it in this old cult food book. I think they're nice."

"I think they're a lot better than nice. We're going to bake a whole lot of them, and I'm going to sell them in New Town because they got bread tastes like wet paper there, and people will love them. They have to love them. Because you and I are going to move to New Town. They are going to love these bagels or something else we are going to sell them because you and I, we are going to live in that new place."

"You tell them, Sharm."

"I'm telling them. Old Sharm is going to get his cut of that good life, too."

"Mine said the same thing, so it must be like that in all the languages. Cook us up a bowl of spaghetti, will you, love? Tonight I want some good old Addis Ababa Ethiopian home cooking."