A Case of Conscience

X

At first Egtverchi knew nothing, in the peculiarly regular and chilly womb where he floated, except his name. That was inherited, and marked in a twist of desoxyribonucleic acid upon one of his genes; farther up on the same chromosome, the x-chromosome, another gene carried his father's name: Chtexa. And that was all. At the moment he had begun his independent life, as a zygote or fertilized egg, that had been written down in letters of chromatin: his name was Egtverchi, his race Lithian, his sex male, his inheritance continuous back through Lithian centuries to the moment when the world of Lithia began. He did not need to understand this; it was implicit.

But it was dark, chilly, and too regular in the pouch. Tiny as a speck of pollen, Egtverchi drifted in the fluid which sustained him, from wall to smoothly curved and unnaturally glazed wall, not conscious yet, but constantly, chemically reminded that he was not in his mother's pouch. No gene that he carried bore his mother's name, but he knew — not in his brain, for he had none yet, but by feel, with purely chemical revulsion — whose child he was, of what race he was, and where he should be: not here. And so he grew — and drifted, seeking to attach himself at every circuit to the chilly glass-lined pouch which rejected him always. By the time of gastrulation, the attachment reflex had run its course and he forgot it. Now he merely floated, knowing once more only what he had known at the beginning: his race Lithian, his sex male, his name Egtverchi, his father Chtexa, his life due to begin; and his birth world as bitter and black as the inside of a jug.

Then his notochord formed, and his nerve cells congregated in a tiny knot at one end of it. Now he had a front end and a hind end, as well as an address. He also had a brain — and now he was a fish — a spawn, not even a fingerling yet, circling and circling in the cold enclave of sea. That sea was tideless and lightless, but there was some motion in it, the slow roll of convection currents. Sometimes, too, something went through it which was not a current, forcing him far down toward the bottom, or against the walls. He did not know the name of this force — as a fish he knew nothing, only circled with the endlessness of his hunger — but he fought it, as he would have fought cold or heat. There was a sense in his head, aft of his gills, which told him which way was up. It told him, too, that a fish in its natural medium has mass and inertia, but no weight. The sporadic waves of gravity — or acceleration — which whelmed through the lightless water were no part of his instinctual world, and when they were over he was often swimming desperately on his back.

There came a time when there was no more food in the little sea; but time and the calculations of his father were kind to him. Precisely at that time the weight force returned more powerfully than had even been suggested as possible before, and he was driven to sluggish immobility for a long period, fanning the water at the bottom of the jug past his gills with slow exhausted motions.

It was over at last, and then the little sea was moving jerkily from side to side, up and down, and forward. Egtverchi was now about the size of a larval fresh-water eel. Beneath his pectoral bones twin sacs were forming, which connected with no other system of his body, but were becoming more and more richly supplied with capillaries. There was nothing inside the sacs but a little gaseous nitrogen, just enough to equalize the pressure. In due course, they would be rudimentary lungs.

Then there was light.

To begin with, the top of the world was taken off. Egtverchi's eyes would not have focussed at this stage in any case and, like any evolved creature, he was subject to the neo-Lamarckian laws which provide that even a completely inherited ability will develop badly if it is formed in the absence of any opportunity to function. As a Lithian, with a Lithian's special sensitivity to the modifying pressures of environment, the long darkness had done him less potential damage than it surely would have done another creature — say, an Earth creature; nevertheless, he would pay for it in due course. Now, he could sense no more than that in the up direction (now quite stable and unchanging) there was light. He rose toward it, his pectoral fins strumming the warm harps of the water.

Father Ramon Ruiz-Sanchez, late of Peru , late of Lithia, and always Fellow in the Society of Jesus, watched the surfacing, darting little creature with surfacing strange emotions. He could not help feeling for the sinuous eel the pity that he felt for every living thing, and an aesthetic delight in the flashing unpredictable certainty of its motions. But this little animal was Lithian.

He had had more time than he had wanted to explore the black ruin that underlay his position. Ruiz-Sanchez had never underestimated the powers which evil could still exercise, powers retained — even by general agreement within the Church — after its fall from beside the throne of the Most High. As a Jesuit he had examined and debated far too many cases of conscience to believe that evil is unsubtle or impotent. But that among these powers the Adversary numbered the puissance to create — no, that had never entered his head, not until Lithia. That power, at least, had to be of God, and of God only. To think that there could be more than one demiurge was outright heresy, and a very ancient heresy at that.

So be it, it was so, heretical or not. The whole of Lithia, and in particular the whole of the dominant, rational, infinitely admirable race of Lithians, had been created by Evil, out of Its need to confront men with a new, a specifically intellectual seduction, springing like Minerva from the brow of Jove. Out of that unnatural birth, as out of the fabled one, there was to come a symbolic clapping of palms to foreheads for everyone who could admit for an instant that any power but God could create; a ringing, splitting ache in the skull of theology; a moral migraine; even a cosmological shell-shock, for Minerva was the mistress of Mars, on Earth as — undoubtedly, Ruiz-Sanchez remembered with anguish — as it is in heaven.

After all, he had been there, and he knew.

But all that could wait a little while, at least. For the moment it was sufficient that the little creature, so harmlessly like a three-inch eel, was still alive and apparently healthy.

Ruiz-Sanchez picked up a beaker of water, cloudy with thousands of cultured Cladocera and Cyclops, and poured nearly half of it into the subtly glowing amphora. The infant Lithian flashed instantly away into the darkness, in chase after the nearly microscopic crustaceans. Appetite, the priest reflected, is a universal barometer of health.

“Look at him go,” a soft voice said beside his shoulder. He looked up, smiling. The speaker was Liu Meid, the UN laboratory chief whose principal charge the Lithian child would be for many months. A small, black-haired girl with an expression of almost childlike calm, she peered into the vase expectantly, waiting for the image to reappear.

“They won't make him sick, do you think?” she said.

“I hope not,” Ruiz-Sanchez said. “They're Earthly, it's true, but Lithian metabolism is remarkably like ours. Even the blood pigment is an analogue of hemoglobin, though the metal base isn't iron, of course. Their plankton includes forms very like Cyclops and the water flea. No; if he's survived the trip, I dare say our subsequent care won't kill him, not even with kindness.”

“The trip?” Liu said slowly. “How could that have hurt him?”

“Well, I really can't say exactly. It was simply the chance that we took, Chtexa — that was his father — presented him to us inside this vase, already sealed in. We had no way of knowing what provisions Chtexa had made for his child against the various strains of space flight. And we didn't dare look inside to see; if there was one thing of which I was certain, it was that Chtexa wouldn't have sealed the vase without a reason; after all, he does know the physiology of his own race better than any of us, even Dr. Michelis or myself.”

“That's what I was getting at,” Liu said.

“I know; but you see, Liu, Chtexa doesn't know space flight. Oh, ordinary flight stresses are no secret to him — the Lithians fly jets; it was the Haertel overdrive that I was worried about. You'll remember the fantastic time effects that Garrard went through on that first successful Centaurus Sight. I couldn't explain the Haertel equations to Chtexa even if I'd had the time. They're classified against him; besides, he couldn't have understood them, because Lithian math doesn't include transfinites. And time is of the utmost importance in Lithian gestation.”

“Why?” Liu said. She peered down into the amphora again, with an instinctive smile.

The question touched a nerve which had lain exposed in Ruiz-Sanchez for a long time. He said carefully: “Because they have physical recapitulation outside the body, Liu. That's why that creature in there is a fish; as an adult, it will be a reptile, though with a pteropsid circulatory system and a number of other unreptilian features. The Lithian females lay their eggs in the sea—”

“But it's fresh water in the jug.”

“No, it's sea water; the Lithian seas are not so salt as ours. The egg hatches into a fishlike creature, such as you see in there; then the fish develops lungs and is beached by the tides. I used to hear them barking in Xoredeshch Sfath — they barked all night long, blowing the water out of their lungs and developing their diaphragm musculature.”

Unexpectedly, he shuddered. The recollection of the sound was far more disturbing than the sound itself had been. Then, he had not known what it was — or, no, he had known that, but he had not known what it meant.

“Eventually the lungfish develop legs and lose their tails, like a tadpole, and go off into the Lithian forests as true amphibians. After a while, their respiratory system loses its dependence upon the skin as an auxiliary source, so they no longer need to stay near water. Eventually, they become true adults, a very advanced type of reptile, marsupial, bipedal, homeostatic — and highly intelligent. The new adults come out of the jungle and are ready for education in the cities.”

Liu took a deep breath. “How marvelous,” she whispered.

“It is just that,” he said somberly. “Our own children go through nearly the same changes in the womb, but they're protected throughout; the Lithian children have to tun the gauntlet of every ecology their planet possesses. That's why I was afraid of the Haertel overdrive. We insulated the vase against the drive fields as best we could, but in a maturation process so keyed to the appearances of evolution, a time slowdown could have been crucial. In Garrard's case, he was slowed down to an hour a second, then whipped up to a second an hour, then back again, and so on along a sine wave. If there'd been the slightest break in the insulation, something like that might have happened to Chtexa's child, with unknowable results. Evidently, there was no leak, but I was worried.”

The girl thought about it. In order to keep himself from thinking about it, for he had already pondered himself in dwindling spirals to a complete, central impasse, Ruiz-Sanchez watched her think. She was always restful to watch, and Ruiz-Sanchez needed rest. It now seemed to him that he had had no rest at all since the moment when he had fainted on the threshold of the house in Xoredeshch Sfath, directly into the astonished Agronski's arms.

Liu had been born and raised in the state of Greater New York. It was Ruiz-Sanchez' most heartfelt compliment that nobody would have guessed it; as a Peruvian he hated the nineteen-million-man megalopolis with an intensity he would have been the first to characterize as unchristian. There was nothing in the least hectic or harried about Liu. She was calm, slow, serene, gentle, her reserve unshakable without being in the least cold or compulsive, her responses to everything that impinged upon her as direct and uncomplicated as a kitten's; her attitude toward her fellow men virtually unsuspicious, not out of naivete, but out of her confidence that the essential Liu was so inviolable as to prevent anyone even from wanting to violate it. These were the abstract terms which first came to Ruiz-Sanchez' mind, but immediately he came to grief over a transitional thought. As nobody would take Liu for a New Yorker — even her speech betrayed not a one of the eight dialects, all becoming more and more mutually unintelligible, which were spoken in the city, and in particular one would never have guessed that her parents spoke nothing but Bronix — so nobody could have taken her for a female laboratory technician.

This was not a line of thought that Ruiz-Sanchez felt comfortable in following, but it was too obvious to ignore. Liu was as small-boned and intensely nubile as a geisha. She dressed with exquisite modesty, but it was not the modesty of concealment, but of quietness, of the desire to put around a firmly feminine body clothes that would be ashamed of nothing, but would also advertise nothing. Inside her soft colors, she was a Venus Callipygous with a slow, sleepy smile, inexplicably unaware that she — let alone anybody else — was expected by nature and legend to worship continually the firm dimpled slopes of her own back. There now, that was quite enough; more than enough. The little eel chasing fresh-water crustaceae in the ceramic womb presented problems enough, some of which were about to become Liu's. It would hardly be suitable to complicate Liu's task by so much as an unworthy speculation, though it be communicated by no more than a curious glance. Ruiz-Sanchez was confident enough of his own ability to keep himself in the path ordained for him, but it would not do to burden this grave sweet girl with a suspicion her training had never equipped her to meet.

He turned away hastily and walked to the vast glass west wall of the laboratory, which looked out over the city thirty-four storeys from the street — not a great height, but more than sufficient for Ruiz-Sanchez. The thundering, heat-hazed, nineteen-million-man megalopolis repelled him, as usual — or perhaps even more than usual, after his long stay in the quiet streets of Xoredeshch Sfath. But at least he had the consolation of knowing that he did not have to live here the rest of his life. In a way, the state of Manhattan was only a relic anyhow, not only politically, but physically. What could be seen of it from here was an enormous multi-headed ghost. The crumbling pinnacles were ninety per cent empty, and remained so right around the clock. At any given moment most of the population of the state (and of any other of the thousand-odd city-states around the globe) was underground. The underground area was self-sufficient. It had its own thermonuclear power sources; its own tank farms, and its thousands of miles — of illuminated plastic pipe througn which algae suspensions flowed richly, grew unceasingly; decades worth of food and medical supplies in cold storage; water-processing equipment which was a completely closed circuit, so that it could recover moisture even from the air and from the city's own sewage; and air intakes equipped to remove gas, virus, fall-out particles or all three at once. The city-states were equally independent of any central government; each was under the hegemony of a Target Area Authority modeled on the old, self-policing port authorities of the previous century — out of which, indeed, they had evolved inevitably.

This fragmentation of the Earth had come about as the end product of the international shelter race of 1960-85. The fission-bomb race, which had begun in 1945, was effectively over five years later; the fusion-bomb race and the race for the intercontinental ballistic missile had each taken five years more. The Shelter race had taken longer, not because any new physical knowledge or techniques had been needed to bring it to fruition — quite the contrary — but because of the vastness of the building program it involved.

Defensive though the shelter race seemed on the surface, it had taken on all the characteristics of a classical arms race — for the nation that lagged behind invited instant attack. Nevertheless, there had been a difference. The shelter race had been undertaken under the dawning realization that the threat of nuclear war was not only imminent but transcendent; it could happen at any instant, but its failure to break out at any given time meant that it had to be lived with for at least a century, and perhaps five centuries. Thus the race was not only hectic, but long-range. And, like all arms races, it defeated itself in the end, this time because those who planned it had planned for too long a span of time. The shelter economy was world-wide now, but the race had hardly ended when signs began to appear that people simply would not live willingly under such an economy for long; certainly not for five hundred years, and probably not for a century. The Corridor Riots of 1993 were the first major sign; since then, there had been many more.

The riots had provided the United Nations with the excuse it needed to set up, at long last, a. real supranational government and world state with teeth in it. The riots had provided the excuse — and the shelter economy, with its neo-Hellenic fragmentation of political power, had given the UN the means. Theoretically, that should have solved everything. Nuclear war was no longer likely between the member states; the threat was gone… but how do you unbuild a shelter economy? An economy which cost twenty-five billion dollars a year, every year for twenty-five years, to build? An economy now embedded in the face of the Earth in uncountable billions of tons of concrete and steel, to a depth of more than a mile? It could not be undone; the planet would be a mausoleum for the living from now until the Earth itself perished: gravestones, gravestones, gravestones…

The word tolled in Ruiz-Sanchez' ears, distantly. The infra-bass of the buried city's thunder shook the glass in front of him. Mingled with it there was an ominous grinding sound of unrest, more marked than he had ever heard it before, like the noise of a cannon ball rolling furiously around and around in “a rickety, splintering wooden track…”

“Dreadful, isn't it?” Michelis' voice said at his shoulder. Ruiz-Sanchez shot a surprised glance at the big chemist — not surprised that he had not heard Michelis enter, but that Mike was speaking to him again.

“It is,” he said. “I'm glad you noticed it too. I thought it just might be hypersensitivity on my part — from having been away so long.”

“It might well be that,” Michelis agreed gravely. “I was away myself.”

Ruiz-Sanchez shook his head.

“No, I think it's real,” be said, “These are intolerable conditions to ask people to live under. And it's more than a matter of making them live ninety days out of every hundred at the bottom of a hole. After all, they think of living every day of their lives on the verge of destruction. We trained their parents to think that way, otherwise there'd never have been enough taxes to pay for the shelters. And of course the children have been brought up to think that too. It's inhuman.”

“Is it?” Michelis said. “People lived all their lives on the verge for centuries — all the way up until Pasteur. How long ago was that?”

“Only about 1860,” Ruiz-Sanchez said. “But no, it's quite different now. The pestilence was capricious; one's children might survive it; but fusion bombs are catholic.” He winced involuntarily. “And there it is. A moment ago, I caught myself thinking that the shadow of destruction we labor under now is not only imminent but transcendent; I was burlesquing a tragedy; death in premedical days was always both imminent and immanent, impending and indwelling — but it was never transcendent. In those days, only God was impending, indwelling and transcendent all at once, and that was their hope. Today, we've given them Death instead.”

“Sorry,” Michelis said, his bony face suddenly turning flinty.

“You know I can't argue with you on those grounds, Ramon. I've already been burned once. Once is enough.” The chemist turned away. Liu, who had been making a serial dilution at the long bench, was holding the ranked test tubes up to the daylight, and peeping up at Michelis from under her half-shut eyelids. She looked promptly away again as Ruiz-Sanchez' gaze fell on her face. He did not know whether she knew that he had caught her; but the tubes rattled a little in the rack as she put them down again.

“Excuse me,” he said. “Liu, this is Dr. Michelis, one of my confreres on the commission to Lithia. Mike, this is Dr. Liu Meid, who'll be taking care of Chtexa's child for an indefinite period, more or less under my supervision. She's one of the world's best xenozoologists.”

“How do you do,” Mike said gravely. “Then you and the Father stand in loco parentis to our Lithian guest. It's a heavy responsibility for a young woman, I should think.” The Jesuit felt a thoroughly unchristian impulse to kick the tall chemist in the shins; but there seemed to be no conscious malice in Michelis' voice.

The girl merely looked down at the ground and sucked in her breath between slightly parted lips. “Ah-so-deska,” she said, almost inaudibly.

Michelis' eyebrows went up, but in a moment it became obvious that Liu was not going to say anything more, to him, right now. With a slight huff of embarrassment, Michelis addressed himself to the priest, catching him erasing the traces of a smile.

“So I'm all feet,” Michelis said, grinning ruefully. “But I won't have time to practice my manners for a while yet. There are lots of loose ends to tie up. Ramon, how soon do you think you can leave Chtexa's child in Dr. Meid's hands? We've been asked to do a non-classified version of the Lithia report—”

“We?”

“Yes. Well, you and I.”

“What about Cleaver and Agronski?”

“Cleaver's not available,” Michelis said. “I don't offhand know where he is. And for some reason they don't want Agronski; maybe he doesn't have enough letters after his name. It's The Journal of Interstellar Research, and you know how stuffy they are — they're nouveau-riche in terms of prestige, and that makes them more academic than the academicians. But I think it would be worth doing, just to get some of our data out into the open. Can you find the time?”

“I think so,” Ruiz-Sanchez said thoughtfully. “Providing it can be sandwiched in between getting Chtexa's child born, and my pilgrimage.”

Michelis raised his eyebrows again. “That's right, this is a Holy Year, isn't it?”

“Yes,” Ruiz-Sanchez said.

“Well, I think we can work it in,” Michelis said. “But, excuse me for prying, Ramon, but you don't strike me as a man in urgent need of the great pardon. Does this mean that you've changed your mind about Lithia?”

“No, I haven't changed my mind,” Ruiz-Sanchez said quietly.

“We are all in need of the great pardon, Mike. But I'm not going to Rome for that.”

“Then—”

“I expect to be tried there for heresy.”

XI

There was light on the mud flat where Egtverchi lay, somewhere eastward of Eden , but day and night had not been created yet, nor was there yet wind or tide to whelm him as he barked the wafer from his itchy lungs and wbooped in the fiery air. Hopefully he squirmed with his new forelimbs, and there was motion; but there was no place to go, and no one and nothing from which to escape. The unvarying, glareless light was comfortingly like that of a perpetually overcast sky, but Somebody had failed to provide for that regular period of darkness and negation during which an animal consolidates its failures and seeks in the depths of its undreaming self for sufficient joy to greet still another morning.

“Animals have no souls,” said Descartes, throwing a cat out the window to prove, if not his point, at least his faith in it. The timid genius of mechanism, who threw cats well but Popes badly, had never met a true automaton, and so never saw that what the animal lacks is not a soul, but a mind. A computer which can fill the parameters of the Haertel equations for all possible values and deliver them in two and a half seconds is an intellectual genius but, compared even to a cat, it is an emotional moron.

As an animal which does not think, but instead responds to each minute experience with the fullness of immediately apprehended — and immediately forgotten — emotions which involve its whole body, needs the temporary death of nightfall to protract its life, so the newly emerged animal body requires the battles appointed to the day in order to become, at long last, the somnolent self-confident adult which has been written aforetime in its genes; and here, too, Somebody had failed Egtverchi. There was soap in his mud, a calculated percentage which allowed him to thrash on the floor of his cage without permitting him to make enough progress to bump his head against its walls. This was conservative of his head, but it wasted the muscles of his limbs. When his croaking days were over, and he was transformed into a totally air-breathing, leaping thing, he did not leap well. This too had been arranged, in a sense. There was nothing in this childhood of his from which he needed to leap away in terror, nor was there any place in it to which a small leap could have carried him. Even the smallest jump ended with an invisible bang and a slithering fall for the end of which, harmless though it invariably proved to be, no instinct prepared him, and for which no learning-reflex helped him to cultivate a graceful recovery. Besides, an animal with a perpetually sprained tail cannot be graceful regardless of its instincts.

Finally, he forgot how to leap entirely, and simply sat huddled until the next transformation overcame him, looking back dully at the many bobbing heads that were beginning to ring him round during his every waking hour. By the time he realized that all these watchers were alive like himself, and much larger than he was, his instincts were so far submerged as to produce in him nothing more than a vague alarm which resulted in no action. The new transformation turned him into a weak and spindly walker with no head for distance, oversized though it was. It was here that Somebody saw to it that he was transferred to the terrarium.

Here at last the hormones of his true adolescence awakened and began to flow in his blood. The proper responses for a world something like this tiny jungle had been written imperatively upon every chromosome in his body; here, all at once, he was almost at home. He roved through the verdure of the terrarium on his shaky shanks with a counterfeit of gladness, looking for something to flee, something to fight, something to eat, something to learn. Yet in the long run he hardly found even a place to sleep, for in the terrarium night was as unknown as ever. Here he also became aware for the first time that there were differences among the creatures who looked in at him and sometimes molested him. There were two who were almost always to be seen, either alone or together. They were always the molesters, as well — except-except that it was not always exactly molestation, for sometimes these beings with their sharp stings and their rough hands would give him something to eat which he had never tasted before, or do something else to him which pleased as much as it annoyed. He did not understand this relationship at all, and he did not like it.

After a while, he hid from all the watchers except these two — and even from them most of the time, for he was always sleepy. When he wanted them, he would call: “Szan-tchez!” (For he could not say “Liu” at all; his mesentery-tied tongue and almost cleft palate would never master so demanding a combination of liquid sounds — that had to wait for his adulthood.)

But eventually he stopped calling, and took to squatting apathetically beside the pond in the center of the miniature jungle. When on the last night of his lizard existence he laid his bulging brain case again in that hollow of mosses where there was the most dimness, he knew in his blood that on the morrow, when he awoke into his doom as a thinking creature, he would be old with that age which curses those who have never even for an instant been young. Tomorrow he would be a thinking creature, but the weariness was on him tonight…

And so he awoke; and so the world was changed. The multiple doors from sense to soul had closed; suddenly, the world was an abstract; he had made that crossing from animal to automaton which had caused all the trouble eastward of Eden in 4004 B. C. He was not a man, but he would pay the toll on that bridge all the same. From this point on, nobody would ever be able to guess what he felt in his animal soul, least of all Egtverchi himself. “But what is he thinking about?” Liu said wonderingly, staring up at the huge, grave Lithian head which bent down upon them from the other side of the transparent pyroceram door.

Egtverchi — he had told them his name very early — could hear her, of course, despite the division of the laboratory into two;, but he said nothing. Thus far, he was anything but talkative, though he was a voracious reader.

Ruiz did not respond for a while, though the nine-foot, young Lithian awed and puzzled him quite as much as he did Liu — and for better reasons. He looked sidewise at Michelis. The chemist was ignoring them both. Ruiz could understand that well enough, as far as he himself was concerned; the attempt to write a joint but impartial report on the Lithia expedition for the J.I.R. had proven disastrous for the already tense relationship between the two scientists. But that same tension, he could see, was distressing Liu without her being quite aware of it, and that he could not let pass; she was innocent. He mustered a last-ditch attempt to draw Mike out.

“This is their learning period,” he said. “Necessarily, they spend most of it listening. They're like the old legend of the wolf boy, who is raised by animals and comes into human cities without even knowing human speech — except that the Lithians don't learn speech in infancy and so have no block against learning it in young adulthood. To do that, they must listen very hard — most wolf boys never learn to talk at all — and that's what he's doing.”

“But why won't he at least answer questions?” Liu said troubledly, without quite looking at Michelis. “How is he going to learn if he won't practice?”

“He hasn't anything to tell us yet, by his lights,” Ruiz said. “And for him, we lack the authority to put questions. Any adult Lithian could question him, but obviously we don't qualify — and what Mike calls the foster-parent relationship couldn't mean anything to a creature adapted to a solitary childhood.”

Michelis did not respond.

“He used to call us,” Liu said sadly. “At least, he used to call you.”

“That's different. That's the pleasure response; it has nothing to do with authority, or affection either. If you were to put an electrode into the septal or caudate nucleus areas in the brain of a cat, or a rat, so that they could stimulate themselves electrically by pushing a pedal, you could train them to do almost anything that's within their powers, for no other reward but that jolt in the head. In the same way, a cat or a rat or a dog will learn to respond to its name, or to initiate some action, in order to gain pleasure. But you don't expect the animal to talk to you or answer questions just because it can do that.”

“I never heard of the brain experiments,” Liu said. “I think that's horrible.”

“I think so too,” Ruiz said. “It's an old line of research that got sidetracked somehow. I've never understood why some of our megalomaniacs didn't follow it up in human beings. A dictatorship founded on that device might really last a thousand years. But it has nothing to do with what you're asking of Egtverchi. When he's ready to talk, he'll talk. In the meantime, we don't have the stature to compel him to answer questions. For that, we would have to be twelve-foot Lithian adults.”

Egtverchi's eyes filmed, and he brought his hands together suddenly.

“You are already too tall,” his harsh voice said over the annunciator system.

Liu clapped her hands together in delighted imitation.

“See, see, Ramon, you're wrong! Egtverchi, what do you mean? Tell us!”

Egtverchi said experimentally: “Liu. Liu. Liu.”

“Yes, yes. That's right, Egtverchi. Go on, go on — what did you mean — tell us!”

“Liu.” Egtverchi seemed satisfied. The colors in his wattles died down. He was again almost a statue.

After a moment, there was an explosive snort from Michelis. Liu turned to him with a start, and, without really meaning to, so did Ruiz. But it was too late. The big New Englander had already turned his back on them, as though disgusted at himself for having broken his own silence. Slowly, Liu too turned her back, if only to hide her face from everyone, even Egtverchi. Ruiz was left standing alone at the vertex of the tetrahedron of disaffection.

“This is going to be a fine performance for a prospective citizen of the United Nations to turn in,” Michelis said suddenly, bitterly, from somewhere behind his shoulder. “I suppose you expected nothing else when you asked me here. What moved you to tell me what vast progress he was making? As I got the story, he ought to have been propounding theorems by this time.”

“Time,” Egtverchi said, “is a function of change, and change is the expression of the relative validity of two propositions, one of which contains a time t and the other a time f-prime, which differ from each other in no respect except that one contains the coordinate t and the other the coordinate f-prime.”

“That's all very well,” Michelis said coldly, turning to look up at the great head. “But I know where you got it from. If you're only a parrot, you're not going to be a Citizen of this culture; you can take that from me.”

“Who are you?” Egtverchi said.

“I'm your sponsor, God help me,” Michelis said. “I know my own name, and I know what kind of record goes with it. If you expect to be a citizen, Egtverchi, you'll have to do better than pass yourself off as Bertrand Russell, or Shakespeare for that matter.”

“I don't think he has any such notion,” Ruiz said. “We explained the citizenship proposal to him, but he didn't give us any sign that he understood it. He just finished reading the Principia last week, so there's nothing unlikely about his feeding it back. He does that now and then.”

“In first-order feedback,” Egtverchi said somnolently, “if the connections are reversed, any small disturbance will be self-aggravating. In second-order feedback, going outside normal limits will force random changes in the network which will stop only when the system is stable again.”

“God damn it!” Mike said savagely. “Now where did he get that? Stop it, you! You don't fool me for a minute!”

Egtverchi closed his eyes and fell silent.

Suddenly Michelis shouted: “Speak up, damn it!”

Without opening his eyes, Egtverchi said: “Hence the system can develop vicarious function if some of its parts are destroyed.” Then he was silent again; he was asleep. He was often asleep, even these days.

“Fugue,” Ruiz said softly. “He thought you were threatening him.”

“Mike,” Liu said, turning to him with a kind of desperate earnestness, “what do you think you're doing? He won't answer you, he can't answer you, especially when you speak to him like that! He's only a child, whatever you think when you have to look up at him! Obviously he learns many of these things by rote. Sometimes he says them when they seem to be apposite, but when we question him, he never carries it any farther. Why don't you give him a chance? He didn't ask you to bring any citizenship committee here!”

“Why don't you give me a chance?” Michelis said raggedly.

Then he turned white-on-white. After a moment, so did Liu. Ruiz looked up again at the slumbering Lithian and, as assured as he could be that Egtverchi was truly asleep, pressed the button which brought the rumbling metal curtain down in front of the transparent door. To the last, Egtverchi did not seem to move. Now they were isolated and away from him; Ruiz did not know whether this would make any difference, but he had his doubts about the innocence of Egtverchi's responses. To be sure, he had not overtly done anything but make an enigmatic statement, ask a simple question, quote from his reading — yet somehow everything he said had helped matters to go more badly than before.

“Why did you do that?” Liu said.

“I wanted to clear the air,” Ruiz said quietly. “He's asleep, anyhow. Besides, we don't have any argument with Egtverchi yet. He may not be equipped to argue with us. But we've got to talk to each other — you too, Mike.”

“Haven't you had enough of that already, Ramon?” Michelis said, in a voice a little more like his own.

“Preaching is my vocation,” Ruiz said. “If I make a vice of it, I expect to atone for that somewhere else than here. But in the meantime — Liu, part of our trouble is the quarrel that I mentioned to you. Mike and I sharply disagreed on what Lithia means to the human race, indeed we disagreed on whether Lithia poses us any philosophical question at all. I think the planet is a time bomb; Mike thinks that's nonsense. And he thought that a general article for a scientific audience was no place to raise such questions, especially since this particular question has been posed officially and hasn't been adjudicated yet. And that's one reason why we're all snarling at each other right now, without any surface reason for it.”

“What a cold thing to be heated about!” Liu said. “Men are so exasperating. How could a problem like that matter now?”

“I can't tell you,” Ruiz said helplessly. “I can't be specific — the whole issue is under security seal. Mike thinks even the general issues I wanted to raise are graveyarded for the time being.”

“But what we're waiting for is to find out what's going to happen to Egtverchi,” Liu said. “The UN examining group must be already on its way. What business do you have to be hatching philosophical mandrake's-eggs when the life of a — of a human being, there's no other way to put it — is hanging on the next half hour?”

“Liu,” Ruiz said gently, “forgive me, but are you so convinced that Egtverchi is what you mean by a human being — a hnau, a rational soul? Does he talk like one? You were complaining yourself that he won't answer questions, and that very often when he speaks he doesn't make much sense. I've talked to adult Lithians, I knew Egtverchi's father well, and Egtverchi isn't much like them, let alone much like a human being. Hasn't anything that's happened in the past hour changed your mind?”

“Oh, no,” Liu said warmly, reaching out her hands for the Jesuit's.

“Ramon, you've heard him talk yourself, as much as I have — you've tended him with me — you know he's not just an animal! He can be brilliant when he wants to be!”

“You're right, the mandrake's eggs have nothing to do with the case,” Michelis said, turning and looking at Liu with dark, astonishingly pain-haunted eyes. “But I can't make Ramon listen to me. He's becoming more and more bound in some rarefied theological torture of his own. I'm sorry Egtverchi isn't as far along as I'd thought, but I foresaw almost from the beginning, I think, that he was going to be a serious embarrassment to us all, the closer he approaches his full intelligence.

“And I didn't get all my information from Ramon. I've seen the protocol on the progressive intelligence tests. Either they're reports on something phenomenal, or else we have no really trustworthy way of measuring Egtverchi's intelligence at all — and that may add up to the same thing in the end. If the tests are right, what's going to happen when Egtverchi finally does grow up? He's the son of a highly intelligent inhuman culture, and he's turning out to be a genius to boot — and his present status is that of an animal in a zoo! Or far worse than that, he's an experimental animal; that's how most of the public tends to think of him. The Lithians aren't going to like that, and furthermore the public won't like it when it learns the facts.

“That's why I brought up this whole citizenship question in the beginning. I see no other way out; we've got to turn him loose.” He was silent a moment, and then added, with almost his wonted gentleness:

“Maybe I'm naive. I'm not a biologist, let alone a psychometrist. But I'd thought he'd be ready by now, and he isn't, so I guess Ramon wins by default. The interviewers will take him as he is, and the results obviously can't be good.” This was precisely Ruiz-Sanchez' opinion, though he would hardly have put it that way.

“I'll be sorry to see him go, if he leaves,” Liu said abstractedly. It was evident, however, that she was hardly thinking about Egtverchi at all any more. “But Mike, I know you're right, there's no other solution in the long run — he has to go free. He is brilliant, there's no doubt about that. Now that I come to think of it, even this silence isn't the natural reaction of an animal with no inner resources. Father, is there nothing we can do to help?”

Ruiz shrugged; there was nothing that he could say. Michelis' reaction to the apparent parroting and unresponsiveness of Egtverchi had of course been far too extreme for the actual situation, springing mostly from Michelis' own disappointment at the equivocal outcome of the Lithia expedition; he liked issues to be clear-cut, and evidently he had thought he had found in the citizenship maneuver a very sharp-edged tool indeed. But there was much more to it than that: some of it, of course, tied into the yet unadmitted bond which was forming between the chemist and the girl; in that single word “Father” she had shucked the priest off as a foster parent of Egtverchi, and put him in a position to give her away instead.

And what remained left over to be said would have no audience here. Michelis had already dismissed it as “some rarefied theological torture” which was personal to Ruiz and of no importance outside the priest's own skin. What Michelis dismissed would shortly fail to exist at all for Liu, if indeed it had not already been obliterated.

No, there was nothing further that could be done about Egtverchi; the Adversary was protecting his begotten son with all the old, divisive, puissant weapons; it was already too late. Michelis did not know how skilled UN naturalization commissions were at detecting intelligence and desirability in a candidate, even through the thickest smoke screen of language and cultural alienation, and at almost any age after the disease called “talking” had set in. And he did not realize how primed the commission would be to settle the Lithia question by a fait accompli. The visitors would see through Egtverchi within an hour at most, and then —

And then, Ruiz would be left with no allies at all. It seemed now to be the will of God that he be stripped of everything, and brought before the Holy Door with no baggage, not even such comforters as Job had, no, not even burdened by belief. For Egtverchi would surely pass. He was as good as free — and closer to being a citizen in good standing than Ruiz himself.

XII

Egtverchi's coming-out party was held at the underground mansion of Lucien le Comte des Bois-d'Averoigne, a fact which greatly complicated the already hysterical life of Aristide, the countess' caterer. Ordinarily, such a party would have presented Aristide with no problems reaching far beyond the technical ones with which he was already familiar, and used to drive the staff to that frantic peak which he regarded as the utmost in efficiency; but planning for the additional presence of a ten-foot monster was an affront to his conscience as well as to his artistry.

Aristide — born Michel di Giovanni in the timeless brutal peasantry of un-Sheltered Sicily — was a dramatist who knew well the intricate stage upon which he had to work. The count's New York mansion was many levels deep. The part of it in which the party was being held protruded one storey above the surface of Manhattan, as though the buried part of the city were coming out of hibernation — or not quite finished digging in for it. The structure had been a carbarn, Aristide had discovered, a dismal block-square red brick building which had been put up in 1887 when cable street cars had been the newest and most hopeful addition to the city's circulatory system. The trolley tracks, with their middle division for the cable grips, were still there in the asphalt floor, with only a superficial coating of rust — steel does not rust appreciably in less than two centuries. In the center of the top storey was a huge old steam elevator with a basketwork shaft, which had once been used to tower the trolley cars below ground for storage. There were more tracks in the basement and sub-basement, whose elaborate switches led toward the segments of rail in the huge elevator cab. Aristide had been stunned when he first encountered this underlying blueprint, but he had promptly put it to good use.

The countess' parties, thanks to his genius, were now confined in their most formal phase to the uppermost of these three levels, but Aristide had installed a serpentine of fourteen two-chair cars which wound its way sedately along the trolley tracks, picking up as passengers those who were already bored with nothing but chatter and drinking, and rumbled onto the elevator to be taken down — with a great hissing and a cloud of rising steam, for the countess was a stickler for surface authenticity in antiques — to the next level, where presumably more interesting things were happening. As a dramatist, Aristide also knew his audience: it was his job to provide that whatever was seen on the next levels was more interesting than what had been going on above. And he knew his dramatis personae, too: he knew more about the countess' regular guests than they knew about themselves, and much of his knowledge would have been decidedly destructive had he been the talkative type. Aristide, however, was an artist; he did not bribe; the notion was as unthinkable to him as plagiarism (except, of course, self-plagiarism; that was how you kept going during slumps.) Finally, as an artist, Aristide knew his patroness: he knew her to the point where he could judge just how many parties had to pass by before he could chance repeating an Effect, a Scene or a Sensation.

But what could you do with a ten-foot reptilian kangaroo? From where he stood in a discrete pillared alcove on the above-ground entrance floor, Aristide watched the early guests filtering in from the reception room to the formal cocktail party, one of his favorite anachronisms, and one which the countess seemed prepared to allow him to repeat year after year. It required very little apparatus, but the most absurd and sub-lethal concoctions, and even more absurd costumes on the part of both staff and guests. The nice rigidity of the costumes provided a pleasant contrast to the of the psyche which the drinks quickly induced.

Thus far, there were only the early comers: here, Senator Sharon, waggling her oversize eyebrows in wholesome cheeriness at the remaining guests, ostentatiously refusing drinks, secure in the knowledge that her good friend Aristide had provided for her below five strong young men no one of whom she had ever seen before; there, Prince William of East Orange, a young man whose curse was that he had no vices, and who came again and again to ride the serpentine in hopes of discovering one that he liked; and, nearby, Dr. Samuel P. Shovel, M. D., a jovial, red-cheeked, white-haired man who was the high priest of psichonetology, “the New Science of the Id,” and a favorite of Aristide's, since he was easy to provide for — he was fundamentally nothing more complicated than a bottom-pincher.

Faulkner, the head butler, was approaching Aristide stiffly from the left. Ordinarily, Faulkner ran the countess' household like an oriental despot, but he was no longer in control while Aristide was on the premises.

“Shall I order in the embryos in wine?” Faulkner said.

“Don't be such a blind, stupid fool,” Aristide said. He had learned his first English from sentimental 3-C 'casts, which gave his ordinary conversation decidedly odd overtones; he was well aware of it, and these days it was one of his principal weapons for driving his underlings, who could not tell when he said these things dispassionately from when he was really angry. “Go below, Faulkner. I'll call you when I need you — if I do.”

Faulkner bowed slightly and vanished. Fuming mildly at the interruption, Aristide resumed his survey of the early comers. In addition to the regulars, there was, of course, the countess, who had posed him no special problems yet. Her gilded make-up was still unmussed and the mobiles in the little caves Stefano had contrived in her hair spun placidly or blinked their diamond eyes. Then there were the sponsors of the Lithian monster into Shelter society, Dr. Michelis and Dr. Meid; these two might present special problems, for he had been unable to find out enough about them to decide what personal tastes they might need to have catered to down below, despite the fact that they were key guests, second only to the impossible creature itself. There was an explosive potential here, Aristide knew with the certainty of fate, for that impossible creature was already more than an hour late, and the countess had let it be known to all the guests and to Aristide that the creature was to be the guest of honor; fully half of the party would be coming to see him.

There was no one else in the room at the moment but a UN man wearing a funny hat — a sort of crash helmet liberally provided with communications apparatus and other, unnamable devices, including bubble goggles which occasionally filmed over to become a miniature 3-V screen — and a Dr. Martin Agronski, whom Aristide could not place at all, and whom he regarded with the consequent intense suspicion he reserved for people whose weaknesses he could not even guess at. Agronski's face was as petulant as that of the Prince of East Orange, but he was a much older man, and it seemed unlikely that he was there for the same reasons. He had something to do with the guest of honor, which made Aristide all the more uneasy. Dr. Agronski seemed to know Dr. Michelis, but for an unaccountable reason shied away from him at every opportunity; he was spending most of his time at one of the most potent of Aristide's punches, with the glum determination of a non-drinker who believes that he can perfect his poise by poisoning his timidity. Perhaps a woman … ?

Aristide crooked a finger. His assistant scuttled around the back of the hanging floral decorations with a practiced stoop, covering even the sound of his movements by a brief delay which allowed the serpentine to come into its station, and cocked his ear to Aristide's mouth under the squeal of the train's brakes.

“Watch that one,” Aristide said through motionless lips, pointing with the apex of one pelvic bone. “He will be drunk within the next half hour. Take him out before he falls down, but don't take him off the premises. She may ask for him later. Better put him in the recovery room and taper him off as soon as he begins to wobble.”

The assistant nodded and pedaled away, bent double. Aristide was still talking to him in blunt, businesslike English; that was a good sign, as far as it went.

Aristide returned to watching the guests; their number was growing a little, but he was still most interested in assessing the countess' reaction to the absence of the guest of honor. For the moment Aristide himself was in no danger, though he could see that the countess' hints had begun to acquire a certain hardness. Thus far, however, she was directing them at the monster's sponsors, Dr. Michelis and Dr. Meid, and it was plain that they had no answer for these gambits. Dr. Michelis could only say over and over again, with a politeness which was becoming more and more formal as his patience visibly evaporated:

“Madame, I don't know when he's coming. I don't even know where he lives now. He promised to come. I'm not surprised that he's late, but I think he'll show up eventually.” The countess turned away petulantly, swinging her hips. Here was the first danger point for Aristide. There was no other pressure that the countess could bring to bear upon the monster's sponsors, regardless of how ignorant they were of the actual situation in the countess' household. By some trick of heredity, Lucien le Comte des Bois-d'Averoigne, Procurator of Canarsie, had been shrewd enough to spend his money wisely: he gave ninety-eight per cent of it to his wife, and used the other two per cent to disappear with for most of the year. There were even rumors that he did scientific research, though nobody could say in what field; certainly it could not be psichonetology or ufonics, or the countess would have known about it, since both were currently fashionable. And without the count, the countess was socially a nullity supported only by money; if the Lithian creature failed to show up at all, there was nothing that the countess could do to his sponsors but fail to invite them to the next party — which she would probably fail to do anyhow. On the other hand, there was a great deal that she might do to Aristide. She could not fire him, of course — he had kept careful dossiers against that possibility — but she could make his professional life with her very difficult indeed.

He signaled his second-in-command.

“Give Senator Sharon the canape with the jolt in it as soon as there are ten more people on the floor,” he directed crisply. “I don't like the way this is going. As soon as we have a minimum crowd, we'll have to get them rolling on the trains — Sharon 's not the best Judas goat for the purpose, but she'll have to do. Take my advice, Cyril, or you will rue the day.”

“Very good, Maestro,” the assistant, whose name was not Cyril at all, said respectfully.

Michelis had hardly noticed the serpentine at the beginning, except as a novelty, but somehow or other it became noisier as the party grew older. It seemed to wind along the floor about every five minutes, but he soon realized that there were actually three such trains: the first one collected passengers up here; the second returned parties from the second level, to discharge wildly exhilarated recruiters among the cautiously formal newcomers on the first level; and the third train, usually almost empty this early in the party's course, brought glassy-eyed party-poopers from the sub-basement, who were removed efficiently by the countess' livery in a covered station stop well apart from the main entrance and well out of sight of new boarders for the nether levels. Then the whole cycle repeated itself.

Michelis had had every intention of staying off the serpentine entirely. He did not like the diplomatic service, especially now that it had nothing left to be diplomatic about, and anyhow he was far too dedicated to loneliness to be comfortable even at small parties, let alone anything like this. After a while, however, he became bored with repeating that same apology for Egtverchi, and aware that the top level of the party was now so empty that his and Liu's presence there was keeping their hostess against her will.

When Liu finally noticed that the serpentine not only toured this level but went below, he lost his last excuse to stay off it; and the elevator took all the rest of the newcomers down, leaving behind only the servants and a few bewildered scientific attachés who probably were at the wrong party to begin with. He looked about for Agronski, whose presence had astonished him early, but the hollow-eyed geologist had disappeared.

Everyone on the train shouted with glee and mock terror as the steam elevator took it down to the second level in utter blackness and rusty-smelling humidity. Then the great doors rolled up sharply in their eyes, and the train surged out, making an abrupt turn along its banked rails. Its plowlike nose butted immediately through a set of swinging double doors, plunged its passengers into even deeper darkness, and stopped completely with a grinding shudder.

From out of the darkness came a barrage of shrieking, hysterical feminine laughter and the shouting of men's voices.

“Oh, I can't stand!”

“Henry, is that you?”

“Leggo of me, you bitch.”

“I'm so dizzy!”

“Look out, the damn thing's speeding up again!”

“Get off my foot, you bastard.”

“Hey, you're not my husband.”

“Ugh. Lady, I couldn't care less.”

“Woman's gone too far this—”

Then they were drowned out by a siren so prolonged and deafening that Michelis' ears rang frighteningly even after the sound had risen past the upper limits of audibility. Then there was the groan of machinery, a dim violet glow —

The serpentine was turning over and over in midspace, supported by nothing. Many-colored stars, none of them very bright, whirled past, rising on one side and sweeping over and then under the train with a period of only ten seconds from one “horizon” to the other. The shouts and the laughter were heard again, accompanied by a frantic scrabbling sound — and there came the siren again, first as a pressure, then as a thin singing which seemed to be inside the skull, and then as a prolonged sickening slide toward the infrabass.

Liu clutched frantically at Michelis' arm, but he could do nothing but cling to his seat. Every cell in Ms brain was flaring with alarm, but he was paralyzed and sick with giddiness —

Lights.

The world stabilized instantly. The serpentine sat smugly on its tracks, which were supported by cantilever braces; it had never moved. At the bottom of a gigantic barrel, disheveled guests looked up at the nearly blinded passengers of the train and howled with savage mockery. The “stars” had been spots of fluorescent paint, brought to life by hidden ultraviolet lamps. The illusion of spinning in midspace had been made more real by the siren, which had disturbed their vestibular apparatus, the inner ear which maintains the sense of balance.

“All out!” a rough male voice shouted. Michelis looked down cautiously; he was still a little dizzy. The shouter was a man in rumpled black evening clothes and fire-red hair; his huge shoulders had burst one seam of his jacket. “You get the next train. That's the rules.” Michelis thought of refusing, and changed his mind. Being tumbled in the barrel was probably less likely to produce serious wounds than would fighting with two people who had already “earned"' their passage out in his and Liu's seats. There were rules of conduct for everything. A gang ladder protruded up at them; when their turn came, he helped Liu down it.

“Try not to fight it,” he told her in a low voice. “When it starts to revolve, slide if you can, roll if you can't. Got a pyrostyle? All right, here's mine — jab if anybody stays too close, but don't worry about the drum — it looks thoroughly waxed.”

It was; but Liu was frightened and Michelis in a murderously ugly mood by the time the next train came through and took them out; he was glad that he had not decided to argue with his predecessors in the barrel. Anybody who had tried the same thing with him might well have been killed. The fact that he was drenched with perfume as the serpentine passed through the next cell did not exactly improve his temper, but at least the cell did not require anyone's participation. It was a sizable and beautiful garden made of blown glass in every possible color, in which live Javanese models were posed in dioramas of discovered lust; the situations depicted were melodramatic in the extreme but, except for their almost imperceptible breathing, the models did not move a muscle; they were almost as motionless as the glass foliage. To Michelis' surprise — for outside the sciences he had almost no aesthetic sense — Liu regarded these lascivious, immobile scenes with a kind of withdrawn, grave approval.

“It's an art, to suggest a dance without moving,” she murmured suddenly, as though she had sensed his uneasiness. “Difficult with the brush, far more difficult with the body. I think I know the man who designed this; there couldn't be but one.”

He stared at her as though he had never seen her before, and by the pure current of jealousy that shot through him he knew for the first time that he loved her. “Who?” he said hoarsely.

“Oh, Tsien Hi, of course. The last classicist. I thought he was dead, but this isn't a copy—”

The serpentine slowed before the exit doors long enough for two models, looking obscenely alive in very modest movement, to hand them each a fan covered with brushed drawings in ink. A single glance was enough to make Michelis thrust his fan in his pocket, unwilling to acknowledge ownership of it by so definite a gesture as throwing it away; but Liu pointed mutely to an ideogram and folded hers with reverence. “Yes,” she said. “It is he; these are the original sketches. I never thought I'd own one—”

The train lurched forward suddenly. The garden vanished, and they were plunged into a vague, colored chaos of meaningless emotions. There was nothing to see or hear or feel, yet Michelis was shaken to his soul, and then shaken again, and again. He cried out, and dimly heard others crying. He fought for control of himself, but it eluded him, and… no, he had it now, or almost had it… If he could only think for an instant —

For an instant, he managed it, and saw what was happening. The new cell was a long corridor, divided by invisible currents of moving air into fifteen sub-cells. Inside each sub-cell was a colored smoke, and in each smoke was some gas which went instantly home to the hypothalamus. Michelis recognized some of them: they were crude hallucinogenic compounds which had been developed during the heyday of tranquilizer research in the mid-twentieth century. Under the waves of fright, religious exaltation, berserker bravery, lust for power, and less namable emotions which each induced, he felt a mounting intellectual anger at such irresponsible wholesale tampering with the pharmacology of the mind for the sake of a momentary “experience"; but he knew that this kind of jolt — breathing was anything but uncommon in the Shelter state. The smokes had the reputation of being non-addicting, which for the most part they were — but they were certainly habit-forming, which is quite a different thing, and not necessarily less dangerous.

A hazy, formless curtain of pink at the far end of the corridor proved to be a pure free-serotonin antagonist in high concentration, a true ataraxic which washed his mind free of every emotion but contentment with everything in all the wide universe. What must be, must be… it is all for the best… there is peace in everything —

In this state of uncritical yea-saying, the passengers on the serpentine were run through an assembly line of elaborate and bestial practical jokes. It ended with a 3-V tape recreation of Belsen , in which the scenarist had cunningly made it appear that the people on the serpentine would be next into the ovens. As the furnace door closed behind them there was a blast of mind-cleansing oxygen; staggering with horror at what they had been about to accept with joy, the passengers were helped off the train to join a guffawing audience of previous victims. Michelis' only impulse was to escape — above all he did not want to stay to laugh at the next load of passengers in shock — but he was too exhausted to get beyond the nearest bench in the amphitheater, and Liu could hardly walk even that far. They were forced to sit there in the press until they had made a better recovery.

It was fortunate that they did. While they were nursing their drinks Michelis, had been deeply suspicious of the warm amber cups, but their contents had proved to be nothing but honest and welcome brandy — the next train was greeted with a roar of delight and a unanimous surge of the crowd to its feet.

Egtverchi had arrived.

There was a real mob now in the cocktail lounge above ground, but Aristide was far from happy; he had already cut off quite a few heads down below on the catering staff. He had somewhere inside him a very delicate sense which told him when a party was going sour, and that sense had put up the red alarms long before this. The arrival of the guest of honor in particular had been an enormous fiasco. The countess had not been on hand, the creature's sponsors had not been there, none of the really important guests who had been invited specifically to see the guest of honor had been there, and the guest himself had betrayed Aristide into showing, before all the staff, that he was frightened out of his wits. He was bitterly ashamed of his fright, but the fact was now beyond undoing. He had been told to anticipate a monster, but not such a monster as this — a creature well more than ten feet high, a reptile which walked more like a man than like a kangaroo, with vast grinning jaws, wattles which changed color every few moments, small clawlike hands which looked as though they could pluck one like a chicken, a balancing tail which kept sweeping trays off tables, and above all a braying laugh and an enormous tenor voice which spoke English with a perfection so cold and carefully calculated as to make Aristide feel like a thumb-fingered leather-skinned Sicilian who had just landed.

And at the monster's entrance, nobody but Aristide had been there to welcome him…

A train rumbled into the atrium of the recovery room, but before it stopped, Senator Sharon tumbled out with a vast display of piano legs and black eyebrows. “Look at him!” she squealed, full of the five-fold revival Aristide had conscientiously arranged for her. “Isn't he male!”

Another failure for Aristide: it was one of the countess' standing orders that the Senator had to be put through her cell and fired out into the Shelter night long before the party proper could be said to have begun; otherwise the Senator would spend the rest of the evening, after her five-fold awakening, climbing from one pair of shoulders to another to a political, literary, scientific or any other eminence she could manage to attain at the expense of everyone else who could be bought with half an hour on a table top — and never mind that she would spend the rest of the next week falling down from that eminence into the swamps of nymphomania again. If Senator Sharon were not properly ejected this early, and with due assurances, in the warm glow of her aftermath, she was given to lawsuits.

The empty train pulled out invitingly into the lounge. The Lithian monster saw it and his grin got wider.

“I always wanted to be an engine driver,” he said in a brassy English which nevertheless was more precise than anything to which Aristide would be able to pretend to the end of his life.

“And there's the major-domo. Good sir, I've brought two, three, several guests of my own. Where is our hostess?”

Aristide pointed helplessly, and the tall reptile boarded the train at the front car, with a satisfied crow. He was scarcely settled in before the rest of his party was pouring across the lounge floor and piling in behind him. The train started with a jerk, and rumbled to the elevator. It sank down amid tali wisps of steam.

And that was that. Aristide had muffed the grand entrance. Had he had any doubts about it, they would have been laid to rest most directly: less than ten minutes later, he was snooted egregiously by Faulkner. So much for being a dedicated artist with a loyal patroness, he thought dismally. Tomorrow, he would be a short-order cook in some Shelter commissariat, dossiers or no dossiers. And why? Because he had been unable to anticipate the time of arrival, let alone the desires or the friends, of some creature which had never been born on Earth at all. He marched deliberately and morosely away from his post toward the recovery room, kicking assistants who were green enough to stay within range. He could think of nothing further to do but to supervise personally the tapering-off of Dr. Martin Agronski, the unknown guest who had something to do with the Lithian.

But he had no illusions. Tomorrow, Aristide, caterer to the Countess des Bois-d'Averoigne, would be lucky to be Michel di Giovanni, late of the malarial plains of Sicily .

Michelis was sorry he had allowed himself and Liu aboard the serpentine the moment he understood the construction of the second level, for he saw at once that they would have virtually no chance of seeing Egtverchi's arrival. Fundamentally, the second level was divided by soundproof walls into a number of smaller parties, some of them only slightly drunker and more unorthodox than the cocktail party had been, but the rest running a broad spectrum of frenetic exoticism. He and Liu were carried completely around the course before he was able to figure out how to get the girl and himself safely off the serpentine; and each time he was moved to attempt it, the train began to go faster in unpredictable spurts, producing a sensation rather like that of riding a roller coaster in the middle of the night.

Nevertheless, they saw the only entrance that counted. Egtverchi emerged from the last gas bath standing in the head car of the serpentine, and stepped out of the car under his own power. In the next five cars behind him, also standing, were ten nearly identical young men in uniforms of black and lizard-green with silver piping, their arms folded, their expressions stern, their eyes straight ahead.

“Greetings,” Egtverchi said, with a deep bow which his disproportionately small dinosaurian arms and hands made both comical and mocking. “Madame the Countess, I am delighted. You are protected by many bad smells, but I have braved them all.” The crowd applauded. The countess' reply was lost in the noise, but evidently she had chided him with being naturally immune to smokes which would affect Earthmen, for he said promptly, with a trace of hurt in his voice:

“I thought you might say that, but I'm grieved to be caught in the right. To the pure all things are pure, however, did you ever see such upstanding, unshaken young men?” He gestured at the ten. “But of course I cheated. I stopped their nostrils with filters, as Ulysses stopped his men's ears with wax to pass the sirens. My entourage will stand for anything; they think I am a genius.”

With the air of a conjurer, the Lithian produced a silver whistle which seemed small in his hand, and blew into the thick air a white, warbling note which was utterly inadequate to the gesture which had preceded it. The ten soldierly young men promptly melted. The forefront of the crowd gleefully toed the limp bodies, which took the abuse with lax indifference.

“Drunk,” Egtverchi said with fatherly disapproval. “Of course. Actually I didn't stop their noses at all. I prevented their reticular formations from reporting the countess' smokes to their brains until I gave the cue. Now they have gotten all the messages at once; isn't it disgraceful? Madame, please have them removed, such dissoluteness embarrasses me. I shall have to institute discipline.”

The countess clapped her hands. “Aristide! Aristide?” She touched the transceiver concealed in her hair, but there was no response that Michelis could detect. Her expression changed abruptly from childish delight to infant fury. “Where is that lousy rustic—”

Michelis, boiling, shouldered his way into Egtverchi's line of sight with difficulty.

“Just what the hell do you think you're doing?” he said in a hoarse voice.

“Good evening, Mike. I am attending a party, just as you are. Good evening, dear Liu. Countess, do you know my foster parents? But I am sure you do.”

“Of course,” the countess said, turning her bare shoulders and back unmistakably on Michelis and Liu, and looking up at Egtverchi's perpetually grinning head from under gilded eyelids.

“Let's go next door — there's more room, and it will be quieter. We've all seen enough of these train riders. After you, their arrivals will seem all alike.”

“I cultivate the unique,” Egtverchi said. “But I must have Mike and Liu by my side. Countess. I am the only reptile in the universe with mammalian parents, and I cherish them. I have a notion that it may be a sin; isn't that interesting?”

The gilded eyelids lowered. It had been years since the countess' caterers had come up with a new sin interesting enough to be withheld from the next evening's guests for private testing; that was common knowledge. She looked as if she scented one now, Michelis thought; and since she was, in fact, a woman of small imagination, Michelis was not in much doubt as to what it was. For all his saurian shape and texture, there was something about Egtverchi that was intensely, overwhelmingly masculine.

And intensely childlike, too. That the combination was perfectly capable of overriding any repugnance people might feel toward his additionally overwhelming reptilian-ness had already been demonstrated, in the response to his first interview on 3-V. His wry and awry comments on Earthly events and customs had been startling enough, and perhaps it could have been predicted even then that the intelligentsia of the world would pick him up as a new fad before the week was out. But nobody had anticipated the flood of letters from children, from parents, from lonely women. Egtverchi was a sponsored news commentator now, the first such ever to have an audience composed half-and-half of disaffected intellectuals and delighted children. There was no precedent for it in the present century, at least; learned men in communications compared him simultaneously with two historical figures named Adlai E. Stevenson and Oliver J. Dragon.

Egtverchi also had a lunatic following, though its composition had not yet been analyzed publicly by his 3-V network. Ten of these followers were being lugged limply out by the countess' livery right now, and Michelis' eyes followed them speculatively while he trailed with the crowd after Egtverchi and the countess, out of the amphitheater and into the huge lounge next door. The uniforms were suggestive — but of what? They might have been no more than costumes, designed for the party alone; had the ten young men who fell to the bleat of Egtverchi's silver whistle been physically different from each other, the effect would have been smaller, as Egtverchi would have known. And yet the whole notion of uniforms was foreign to Lithian psychology, while it was profoundly meaningful in Earth terms — and Egtverchi knew more about Earth than most Earthmen did, already.

Lunatics in uniforms, who thought Egtverchi to be a genius who could do no wrong; what could that mean?

Were Egtverchi a man, one would know instantly what it meant. But he was not a man, but a musician playing upon man as on an organ. The structure of the composition would not be evident for a long time to come — if it had a structure; Egtverchi might only be improvising, at least this early. That was a frightening thought in itself.

And all this had happened within a month of the awarding of citizenship to Egtverchi. That had been a pleasant surprise. Michelis was none too sure how he felt about the surprises that had followed; about those certain to come he was decidedly wary.

“I have been exploring this notion of parenthood,” Egtverchi was saying. “I know who my father is, of course — it is a knowledge we are born with — but the concept that goes with the word is quite unlike anything you have here on Earth. Your concept is a tremendous network of inconsistencies.”

“In what way?” the countess said, not very much interested.

“Why, it seems to be based on a reverence for the young, and an extremely patient and protective attitude toward their physical and mental welfare. Yet you make them live in these huge caves, utterly out of contact with the natural world, and you teach them to be afraid of death — which of course makes them a little insane, because there is nothing anybody can do about death. It is like teaching them to be afraid of the second law of thermodynamics, just because living matter sets that law aside for a very brief period. How they hate you!”

“I doubt that they know I exist,” the countess said drily. She had no children.

“Oh, they hate their own parents first of all,” Egtverchi said, “but there is enough hatred left over for every other adult on your planet. They write me about it. They have never had anybody to say this to before, but they see in me someone who has had no hand in their torment, who is critical of it, and who obviously is a comical, harmless fellow who won't betray them.”

“You're exaggerating,” Michelis said uneasily.

“Oh no, Mike. I have prevented several murders already. There was one five-year-old who had a most ingenious plan, something involving garbage disposal. He was ready to include his mother, his father, and his fourteen-year-old brother, and the whole affair would have been blamed on a computational error in his city's sanitation department. Amazing that a child that age could have planned anything so elaborate, but I believe it would have worked — these Shelter cities of yours are so complex, they become lethal engines if even the most minute errors creep into them. Do you doubt me, Mike? I shall show you the letter.”

“No,” Michelis said slowly. “I don't think I do.”

Egtverchi's eyes filmed briefly. “Some day I will let one of these affairs proceed to completion,” he said. “As a demonstration, perhaps. Something of the sort seems to be in order.”

Somehow Michelis did not doubt that he would, nor that the results would be as predicted. People did not remember their childhoods clearly enough to take seriously the rages and frustrations that shook children — and the smaller the child, the less superego it had to keep the emotions tamed. It seemed more than likely that a figure like Egtverchi would be able to tap this vast, seething underworld of impotent fury and there was where you had to tap it, if you were hoping to do any good. Tapping it by hindsight, through analysis of adults, was successful with neurotics, but it had never proved effective against the psychoses; those had to be attacked pharmacologically, by regulating serotonin metabolism with ataraxics — the carefully tailored chemical grandchildren of the countess' crude smokes.

That worked, but it was not a cure, but a maintenance operation — like giving insulin or sulfonylureas to a diabetic. The organic damage had already been done. In the great raveled knot of the brain, the basic reverberating circuits, once set in motion, could be interrupted but never discontinued — except by destructive surgery, a barbarity now a century out of use.

And it all fitted some of the disturbing things he had been discovering about the Shelter economy since his return from his long sojourn on Lithia. Having been born into it, Michelis had always taken that economy pretty much for granted; or at least his adult memory of his childhood told him that. Maybe it had really been different, and perhaps a little less grim, back in those days, or maybe that was just an illusion cherished by the silent censor in his brain. But it seemed to him that in those days people had let themselves become reconciled to these endless caverns and corridors for the sake of their children, in the hope that the next generation would be out from under the fear and could know something a little better, a glimpse of sunlight, a little rain, the fall of a leaf.

Since then, the restrictions on surface living had been relaxed greatly, nobody now believed in the possibility of nuclear war, since the Shelter race had produced an obvious impasse — but somehow the psychic atmosphere was far worse instead of better.

The number of juvenile gangs roaming the corridors had increased four hundred per cent while Michelis was out of the solar system; the UN was now spending about a hundred million dollars a year on elaborate recreation and rehabilitation programs for adolescents, but the rec centers stayed largely deserted, and the gangs continued to multiply. The latest measure taken against them was frankly punitive: a tremendous increase in the cost of compulsory insurance on power scooters, seemingly harmless, slow-moving vehicles which the gangs had adapted first to simple crimes like purse-snatching, and then to such more complicated and destructive games as mass raids on food warehouses, industrial distilleries, even utilities — it had been drag-racing in the air ducts that had finally triggered the confiscatory insurance rates.

In the light of what Egtverchi had said, the gangs made perfect and horrible sense. Nobody now believed in the possibility of nuclear war, but nobody could believe in the possibility of a full return to surface life, either. The billions of tons of concrete and steel were far too plainly there to stay. The adults no longer had hopes even for their children, let alone for themselves. While Michelis had been away in the Eden of Lithia, on Earth the number of individual crimes without motive — crimes committed just to distract the committer from the grinding monotony of corridor life — had passed the total of all other crimes put together. Only last week some fool on the UN's Public Polity Commission had proposed putting tranquilizers in the water supplies; the World Health Organization had had him ousted within twenty-four hours — actually putting the suggestion into effect would have “doubled crimes of this kind, by cutting the population further free of its already feeble grip on responsibility — but it was too late to counteract the effect on morale of the suggestion alone.

The WHO had had good reason to be both swift and arbitrary about it. Its last demographic survey showed, under the grim heading of “Actual Insanity,” a total of thirty-five million unhospitalized early paranoid schizophrenics who had been clearly diagnosed, every one of whom should have been committed for treatment at once — except that, were the WHO to commit them, the Shelter economy would suffer a manpower loss more devastating than any a war had inflicted on mankind in all of its history. Every one of those thirty-five million persons was a major hazard to his neighbors and to his job, but the Shelter economy was too complicated to do without them, let alone do without the unrecognized, subclinical cases, which probably totaled twice as many. The Shelter economy could not continue operating much longer without a major collapse; it was on the verge of a psychotic break at this instant. With Egtverchi for a therapist?

Preposterous. But who else — ?

“You're very gloomy tonight,” the countess was complaining.

“Won't you amuse anyone but children?”

“No one,” Egtverchi said promptly. “Except, of course, myself. And of course I am also a child. There now: not only do I have mammals for parents, but I am myself my own uncle, these 3-V amusers of children are always everyone's uncle. You do not appreciate me properly, Countess; I become more interesting every minute, but you do not notice. In the next instant I may turn into your mother, and you will do nothing but yawn.”

“You've already turned into my mother,” the countess said, with a challenging, slumbrous look. “You even have her jowls, and all those impossibly even teeth. And the talk. My God. Turn into something else — and don't make it Lucien.”

“I would turn into the count if I could,” Egtverchi said, with what Michelis was almost sure was genuine regret. “But I have no affinity for affines; I don't even understand Haertel yet. Tomorrow, perhaps?”

“My God,” the countess said again. “Why in the world did I think I should invite you? You're too dull to be borne. I don't know why I count on anything any more. I should know better by now.” Astonishingly, Egtverchi began to sing, in a high, pure, costrato tenor: “Swef, swef, Susa …” For a moment Michelis thought the voice was coming from someone else, but the countess swung on Egtverchi instantly, her face twisted into a Greek mask of pure rage.

“Stop that,” she said, her voice as raw as a wound. Her expression, under the gilded gaiety of her party paint, was savagely incongruous.

“Certainly,” Egtverchi said soothingly. “You see I am not your mother after all. It pays to be careful with these accusations.”

“You lousy snake-scaled demon!”

“Please, Countess; I have scales, you have breasts; this is proper and fitting. You ask me to amuse you; I thought you might enjoy my jongleur's lullaby.”

“Where did you hear that song?”

“Nowhere,” Egtverchi said. “I reconstructed it. I could see from the cast of your eyes that you were a born Norman .”

“How did you do it?” Michelis said, interested in spite of himself. It was the first sign he had encountered that Egtverchi had any musical ability.

“Why, by the genes, Mike,” Egtverchi said; his literal Lithian mind had gone to the substance of Michelis' question rather than to its sense. “This is the way I know my name, and the name of my father. E-G-T-V-E-R-C-H-I is the pattern of genes on one of my chromosomes; the G, V and I alleles are of course from my mother; my cerebral cortex has direct sensual access to my genetic composition. We see ancestry everywhere we look, just as you see colors — it is one of the spectra of the real world. Our ancestors bred that sense into us; you could do worse than imitate them. It is helpful to know what a man is before he even opens his mouth.”

Michelis felt a faint but decided chill. He wondered if Chtexa had ever mentioned this to Ruiz. Probably not; a discovery so fascinating to a biologist would have driven the Jesuit to talking about it. In any event, it was too late to ask him, for he was on the way to Rome ; Qeaver was even farther away by now; and Agronski wouldn't know.

“Dull, dull, dull,” the countess said. She had got back most of her self-possession.

“To be sure, to the dull,” Egtverchi said, with his eternal grin, which somehow managed to disarm almost anything that he said.

“But I offered to amuse you; you did not enjoy my entertainment. It is your doom to amuse me, too, you know; I am the guest here. What do you have in the sub-basement, for instance? Let us go see. Where are my summer soldiers? Somebody wake them; we have a trip to take.”

The packed guests had been listening intently, obviously enjoying the countess' floundering upon Egtverchi's long and multiple-barbed gaff. When she bowed her high-piled, gilded head and led the way back toward the trolley tracks, a blurred and almost animal cheer shook the lounge. Liu shrank back against Michelis; he put his arm tightly around her waist.

“Mike, let's not go,” she whispered. “Let's go home. I've had enough.”

XIII

ENTRY IN EGTVERCHI'S JOURNAL:

June 13th, 13th week of citizenship; This week I stayed home. Elevators on Earth never stop at this floor. Must check why. They have reasons for everything they do.

It was during the week Egtverchi's program was off the air that Agronski stumbled across the discovery that he no longer knew who he was. Though he had not recognized it for what it was at the time, the first forebodings of this devastation had come creeping over him as far back as that four-cornered debate in Xoredeshch Sfath, when he had begun to realize that he did not know what Mike, the Father and Cleaver were talking about. After a while, it had begun to seem to him that they didn't know, either; the long looping festoons of logic and emotion with which they so determinedly bedecked the humid Lithian air seemed to hang from nothing, and touch no ground on which he or any other human being he knew had ever stood.

Then, after he had come home, he had hardly even been angered — only vaguely irritated — when the J. L. R. had failed to include him in its invitation to prepare the preliminary article on Lithia. The Lithian experience had already begun to seem remote and dreamlike to him, and he already knew that he and the senior authors could have nothing more to say to each other on that subject which would make mutual sense.

So far, so good; but so far there was no explanation for the sensation of bottomless despair, loneliness and disgust which had swept over him here at the discovery, seemingly of no consequence in itself, that his favorite 3-V program would not be on tonight. Superficially, everything else was as it should be. He had been invited to a year of residency at Fordham's seismological laboratories on the basis of his previous publications on gravity waves — tidal and seismic tremors — and his arrival had been greeted with just the proper mixture of respect and enthusiasm by the Jesuits who ran the great university's science department. His apartment in the bachelor scientists' quarters was not at all monastic, indeed it was almost luxurious for a single man; he had as much apparatus as any geologist in his field could have dreamed of having under such an arrangement, he was virtually free of lecture duties, he had made several new friends among the graduate students assigned to him — and yet, tonight, looking blankly at the replacement program which had appeared instead of Egtverchi on his 3-V screen —

In retrospect, each of the steps toward this abyss seemed irrevocable, and yet they had all been so small! He had been looking forward to his return to Earth with an unfocussed but intense excitement, not directed toward any one aspect of Earthly life, but simply eager for the pat wink of all things familiar. But when he had returned, he found no reassurance in the familiar; indeed, it all seemed rather flat. He put it down to having been a relatively free-wheeling, nearly unique individual on a virtually unpopulated world; there was bound to be a certain jolt in readapting oneself to the life of one mole among billions.

And yet a jolt was precisely what it had not been. Instead, it had been a most peculiar kind of lack of all sensation, as though the familiar were powerless to move him or even to touch him. As the days wore by, this intellectual, emotional, sensual numbness became more and more pronounced, until it became a kind of sensation in itself, a sort of giddiness — as though he were about to fall, and yet could not see anything to grab hold of to steady himself, or indeed what kind of ground he was standing on at the moment.

Somewhere along in there he had taken up listening to Egtverchi's news broadcasts, out of simple curiosity insofar as he could remember any feeling so far removed in time. There had been something there that was useful to him, though he could not know what it was. At the very least, Egtverchi occasionally amused him. Sometimes the creature reminded him obscurely that on Lithia, no matter how divorced he had been from the thinking and the purposes of the other members of the commission, he had been almost unique; that was comforting, though it was a watery comfort. And sometimes, during Egtverchi's most savage sallies against Agronski's familiar Earth, he felt a slight surge of genuine pleasure, as though Egtverchi were his agent in acting out a long and complicated revenge against enemies hidden and unknown. More usually, however, Egtverchi failed to penetrate the slightly nauseating numbness which had closed around him; the broadcasts simply became a habit.

In the meantime, increasingly it came over him that he did not understand what his fellow men were doing or, in the minority of instances where he did understand it, it seemed to him to be something utterly trivial; why did people bind themselves to these regimes? Where were they going that was so important? The air of determined dull preoccupation with which the average troglodyte went to his job, got through it, and came away again to his cubby in his target area would have seemed tragic to him if the actors had not all been such utter ciphers; the eagerness, dedication, chicanery, short-cutting, brilliance, hard labor and total immersion of people who thought themselves or their jobs important would have seemed absurd had he been able to think of anything in the world more worth all this attention, but the savor was leaking rapidly out of everything now. Even the steaks he had dreamed of on Lithia were now only something else to be got through, an exercise in cutting, forking, swallowing, and disturbed cat naps.

In brief flashes of a few minutes at a time, he was able to envy the Jesuit scientists. They still believed geology to be important, an illusion which now seemed far in the past — a matter of weeks — to Agronski. Their religion, too, seemed to be a constant source of great intellectual excitement, especially during this Holy Year; Agronski had gathered from conversations with Ramon two years ago that the Jesuit order is the cerebral cortex of the Church, concerned with its knottiest moral, theological and organizational problems. In particular, Agronski remembered, the Jesuits were charged with weighing questions of polity and making recommendations to Rome , and it was here that the area of greatest excitement at Fordham was centered. Although he never did arouse himself sufficiently to find out the core of the issue, Agronski knew that this year was to mark the settlement by papal proclamation of one of the great dogmatic questions of Catholicism, comparable to the dogma of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin which had been proclaimed a century ago; from the hot discussions he overheard in the refectory, and elsewhere after working hours, he gathered that. the Society of Jesus had already made its recommendation, and all that remained to be debated was the most probable decision which Pope Hadrian would arrive at. That there should still be any question about the matter surprised him a little, until a scrap of conversation overheard in the commissariat told him that there was nothing in the least binding about the Order's decisions. The doctrine of the Assumption had been heavily recommended against by the Jesuits of the time, despite the fact that it had been an obvious personal preference of the then incumbent Pope, but it had been adopted all the same — the decision of St. Peter's was beyond all appeal.

Nothing in the world, Agronski was learning with this feeling of general giddiness and nausea, was that certain. In the end his colleagues here at Fordham came to seem as remote to him as Ruiz-Sanchez had on Lithia. The Catholic Church in 2050 was still fourth in rank in terms of number of adherents, with Islam, the Buddhists and the Hindi sects commanding the greater number of worshipers, in that order; after Catholicism, there was the confusing number of Protestant groups, which might well outnumber the Catholics if one included all those in the world who had no faith worth mentioning — and it was probable that the agnostics, atheists and don't — cares taken as a separate group were at least as numerous as the Jews, perhaps more so. As for Agronski, he knew grayly that he belonged no more with one of these groups than with any other; he had been cut adrift; he was slowly beginning to doubt the existence of the phenomenal universe itself, and he could not bring himself to care enough about the probably unreal to feel that it mattered what intellectual organization you imposed on it, whether it was High Episcopalian or Logical Positivist. If one no longer likes steak, what does it matter how well it has been aged, butchered, cooked or served?

The invitation to Egtverchi's coming-out party had almost succeeded in piercing the iron fog which had descended between Agronski and the rest of creation. He had nad the notion that the sight of a live Lithian might do something for him, though what he could hardly have said; and besides, he had wanted to see Mike and the Father again, moved by memories of having been fond of them once. But the Father was not there, Mike had been removed light-years away from him by having taken up in the meantime with a woman — and of all the meaningless obsessions of mankind, Agronski was most determined now to avoid the tyranny of sex — and in person Egtverchi had turned out to be a grotesque and alarming Earthly caricature of the Lithians that Agronski remembered. Disgusted with himself, he kept sedulously away from all of them, and in the process, quite inadvertently, got drunk. He remembered no more of the party except scraps of a fight that he had had with some swarthy flunkey in a huge dark room bounded by metal webwork, like being inside the shaft of the Eiffel Tower at midnight — a memory which seemed to include inexplicable rising clouds of steam and a jerky intensification of his catholic, nauseating vertigo, as though he and his anonymous adversary were being lowered into hell on the end of a thousand-mile-long hydraulic piston.

He had awakened after noon the next day in his rooms with a thousand-fold increase in the giddiness, an awful sense of mission before a holocaust, and the worst hangover he had had since the drunk he had staged on cooking sherry in the first week of his freshman year hi college. It took him two days to get rid of the hangover, but the rest remained, shutting him off utterly even from the things that he could see and touch in his own apartment. He could not taste his food; words on paper had no meaning; he could not make his way from his chair to the toilet without wondering if at the next step the room would turn upside down or vanish entirely. Nothing had any volume, texture, or mass, let alone any color; the secondary properties of things, which had been leaking steadily out of his world ever since Lithia, were gone entirely now, and the primary qualities were beginning to follow.

The end was clear and predictable. There was to be nothing left but the little plexus of habit patterns at the center of which lived the dwindling unknowable thing that was his I. By the time one of those habits brought him before the 3-V set and snapped open the switch, it was already too late to save anything else. There was nobody left in the universe but himself — nobody and nothing —

Except that, when the screen lighted and Egtverchi failed to appear, he discovered that even the I no longer had a name. Inside the thin shell of unwilling self-consciousness, it was as empty as an upended jug.

XIV

Ruiz-Sanchez put the much-folded, sleazy airletter down into his lap and looked blindly out the compartment window of the rapido. The train was already an hour out from Naples, slightly less than halfway to Rome, and as yet he had seen almost nothing of the country he had been hoping to reach all of his adult life; and now he had a headache. Michelis' sprawling cursive handwriting was under the best of circumstances about as legible as Beethoven's, and obviously he had written this letter under the worst circumstances imaginable. And after emotion had done its considerable worst to Michelis' scrawl, the facsimile reducer had squeezed it all down onto a single piece of tissue for missile mail, so that only a man who knew the handwriting as well as Assyriologists know cuneiform could have deciphered the remaining ant tracks at all.

After a moment, he picked up where he had left off; the. letter went on:

Which is why I missed the subsequent debacle. There is still some doubt in my mind as to whether or not Egtverchi was entirely responsible — it occurs to me that maybe the countess' smokes did affect him in some way after all, since his metabolism can't be totally different from ours — but you'd know much more about that than I would. It's perfectly possible that I'm just whistling past the graveyard.

In any event, I don't know any more about the sub-130 basement shambles than the papers have reported. In case you haven't seen them, what happened was that Egtverchi and his bravoes somehow became impatient with the progress the serpentine was making, or with the caliber of the entertainment they could see from it, and went on an expedition of their own, breaking down the barriers between cells when they couldn't find any other way in. Egtverchi is still pretty weak for a Lithian, but he's big, and the dividing walls apparently didn't pose him any problems.

What happened thereafter is confused — it depends on which reporter you believe. Insofar as I've been able to piece all these conflicting accounts together, Egtverchi himself didn't hurt anybody, and if his condottieri did, they got as good as they gave; one of them died. The major damage is to the countess, who is ruined. Some of the cells he broke into weren't on the serpentine's route at all, and contained public figures in private hells especially designed by the countess' caterers: The people who haven't themselves already succumbed to the sensation-mongers — though in some instances the publicity is no more vicious than they had coming — are out to revenge themselves on the whole house of Averoigne.

Of course the count can't be touched directly, since he wasn't even aware of what was going on. (Did you see that last paper from “H. O. Petard,” by the way? Beautiful stuff: he has a fundamental twist on the Haertel equations which make it look possible to see around normal space-time, as well as travel around it. Theoretically you might photograph a star and get a contemporary image, not one light-years old. Another blow to the chops for poor old Einstein.) But he is already no longer Procurator of Canarsie and, unless he takes his money promptly out of the countess' hands, he will wind up as just another moderately comfortable troglodyte. And at the moment nobody knows where he is, so unless he has been reading the papers it is already too late for him to make a drastic enough move. In any event, whether he does or he doesn't, the countess will be persona non grata in her own circles to the day she dies.

And even now I haven't any idea whether Egtverchi intended exactly this, or whether it was all an accident springing out of a wild impulse. He says he will reply to the newspaper criticism of him on his 3-V program next week — this week nobody can reach him, for reasons he refuses to explain — but I don't see what he could possibly say that would salvage more than a fraction of the good will he'd accumulated before the party. He's already half-convinced that Earth's laws are only organized whims at best — and his present audience is more than half children! I wish you were the kind of man who might say “I told you so"; at least I could get a melancholy pleasure out of nodding. But it's too late for that now. If you can spare any time for further advice, please send it post haste. We are in well over our heads.

— Mike

P.S.: Liu and I were married yesterday. It was earlier than we had planned, but we both feel a sense of urgency that we can't explain — almost a desperation. It's as though something crucial were about to happen. I believe something is; but what? Please write. -M.

Ruiz groaned involuntarily, drawing incurious glances from his compartment-mates: a Pole in a sheepskin coat who had spent the entire journey wordlessly cutting his way through a monstrous and smelly cheese he had boarded the train with, and a Hollywood Vedantist in sandals, burlap and beard whose smell was not that of cheese and whose business in Rome in a Holy Year was problematical.

He closed his eyes against them. Mike had had no business even thinking about such matters on his wedding morning. No wonder the letter was hard to read.

Cautiously, he opened his eyes again. The sunlight was almost intolerably bright, but for a moment he saw an olive grove sweeping by against burnt-umber hills lined beneath a sky of incredibly clear blue. Then the hills abruptly came piling down upon him and the express shot screaming into a tunnel.

Ruiz lifted the letter once more, but the ant tracks promptly puddled into a dirty blur; a sudden stab of pain lanced vertically through his left eye. Dear God, was he going blind? No, nonsense, that was hypochondria — there was nothing wrong with him but simple eyestrain. The stab through the eyeball was pressure in his left sphereoid sinus, which had been inflamed ever since he left Lima for the wet North, and had begun to become acute in the dripping atmosphere of Lithia.

His trouble was Michelis' letter, that was plain. Never mind the temptation to blame eyes or sinuses, which were only surrogates for hands empty even of the amphora in which Egtverchi had been brought into the world. Nothing was left of his gift but the letter.

And what answer could he give?

Why, only what Michelis obviously was already coming to realize: that the reason for both Egtverchi's popularity and his behavior lay in the fact that he was both mentally and emotionally a seriously displaced person. He had been deprived of the normal Lithian upbringing which would have taught him how fundamental it is to know how to survive in a predominantly predatory society. As for Earth's codes and beliefs, he had only half-absorbed them when Michelis forcibly expelled him from the classroom straight into citizenship. Now he had already had ample opportunity to see the hypocrisy with which some of those codes were served and, to the straight-line logic of the Lithian mind, this could mean only that the codes must therefore be only some kind of game at best. (He had encountered the concept of a game here, too; it was unknown on Lithia.) But he had no Lithian code of conduct to substitute or to fall back on, since he was as ignorant of Lithian civilization as he was innocent of experience of Lithia's seas, savannas and jungles.

In short, a wolf child.

The rapido hurled itself from the mouth of the tunnel as impetuously as it had entered, and the renewed blast of sunlight forced Ruiz to close his eyes once more. When he opened them he was rewarded by the sight of an extensive terraced vineyard. This was obviously wine country and, judging by the mountains, which were especially steep here, they must be nearing Terracina. Soon, if he was lucky, he might see Mt. Circeo ; but he was far more interested in the vineyards.

From what he had been able to observe thus far, the Italian states were far less deeply buried than was most of the rest of the world, and the people were on the surface for much greater proportions of their lifetimes. To some extent this was a product of poverty — Italy as a whole had not had the wealth to get into the Shelter race early, or on anything like the scale which had been possible for the United States or even the other continental countries. Nevertheless, there was a huge Shelter installation at Naples, and the one under Rome was the world's fourth biggest; that one had got itself dug with funds from all over the Western world, and with a great deal of outright voluntary help, when the first deep excavations had begun to turn up an incredible wealth of unsuspected archaeological finds.

In part, however, sheer stubbornness was responsible. A high proportion of Italy 's huge population, which had never known any living but in and by the sun, simply could not be driven underground on any permanent basis. Of all the Shelter nations — a class which excluded only countries still almost wholly undeveloped, or unrecoverably desert — Italy appeared to be the least thoroughly entombed.

If that turned out to hold true for Rome in particular, the Eternal City would also be by far the sanest major capital on the planet. And that, Ruiz realized suddenly, would be an outcome nobody would have dared predict for an enterprise founded in 753 B.C. by a wolf child.

Of course, about the Vatican he had never been in any doubt, but Vatican City is not Rome . The thought reminded him that he had been commanded to an udienza speciale with the Holy Father tomorrow, before the ring-kissing, which meant before 10:00 at the latest — probably as early as 7:00, for the Holy Father was an early riser, and in this year of all years would be holding audiences of all kinds nearly around the clock. Ruiz had had nearly a month to prepare, for the command had reached him very shortly after the order of the College to appear for inquisition, but he felt unreadier than ever. He wondered how long it had been since any Pope had personally examined a Jesuit convert to an admitted heresy, and what the man had found to say; doubtless the transcript was there in the Vatican library, as recorded by some papal master of ceremonies, assiduous as always in bis duty toward history, as masters of ceremonies had been ever since the invaluable Burchard — but Ruiz would not have time to read it.

From here on out, there would be a thousand petty distractions to keep him from settling his mind and heart any further. Just getting his bearings was going to be a chore, and after that there was the matter of accommodations. None of the case religiose would take him in — word had apparently got around — and he had not the purse for a hotel, though if worse came to worst he had a confirmed-reservation slip from one of the most expensive which just might let him into some linen closet there. Finding a pensione, the only other tolerable alternative, was going to be particularly difficult, for the one which had been contracted for him by the tourist agency had become impossible the moment he received the papal summons; it was too far from St. Peter's. The agency had been able to do nothing else for him except suggest that he sleep in the Shelter, which he was resolved not to do. After all, the agent had told him belligerently, it's a Holy Year, almost as though he were saying, “Don't you know there's a war on?”

And of course his tone had been right. There was a war on. The Enemy was presently fifty light-years away, but He was at the gates all the same.

Something prompted him to check the date of Michelis' letter. It was, he discovered with astonishment and disquiet, nearly two weeks old. Yet the postmark read today; the letter had been mailed, in fact, only about six hours ago, just in time to catch the dawn missile to Naples . Michelis had been sitting on it — or perhaps adding to it, but the facsimile process and the ensmallment, together with Ruiz' gathering eyestrain. all conspired to make it impossible to detect differences in the handwriting or the ink.

After a moment, Ruiz realized what importance the discrepancy had for him. It meant that Egtverchi's 3-V answer to his newspaper critics had been broadcast a week ago, and that he was due on the air again tonight!

Egtverchi's program was broadcast at 3:00 Rome time; Ruiz was going to be up earlier than the pontiff himself. In fact, he thought grimly, he was going to get no sleep at all.

The express pulled into the Stations Termini in Rome five minutes ahead of schedule with a feminine shriek. Ruiz found a porter with no difficulty, tipped him the standard 100 lire for his two pieces of luggage, and gave directions.

The priest's Italian was adequate, but hardly standard; it made the facchino grin with delight every time Ruiz opened his mouth. He had learned it by reading, partly in Dante, mostly in opera libretti, and consequently what he lacked in accent he made up for in flowery phrases: he was unable to ask the way to the nearest fruit stall without sounding as though he would throw himself into the Tiber unless he got an answer.

“Be” “a!” the porter kept saying after every third sentence from Ruiz. “Che be' 'a!”

Still, that was easier to get along with than the French attitude had been, on Ruiz' one visit to Paris fifteen years ago. He remembered a taxi driver who had refused to understand his request to be taken to the Continental Hotel until he had written the name down, after which the hackie had said, miming sudden comprehension: “Ah, ah! Le Con-ti-nen-TAL!” This he had found to be an almost universal pretense; the French wanted one to know that without a perfect accent one is not intelligible at all.

The Italians, apparently, were willing to meet one halfway. The porter grinned at Ruiz' purple prose, but he guided the priest deftly to a newsstand where he was able to buy a news magazine containing a high enough proportion of text over pictures to insure an adequate account of what Egtverchi had said last week; and then took him down the left incline from the station across the Piazza Cinquecento to the corner of the Via Viminale and the Via Diocletian, precisely as requested. Ruiz promptly doubled his tip without even a qualm; guidance like that would be invaluable now that time was so short, and he might see the man again.

He had been left in the Casa del Passegero, which had the reputation of being the finest travelers' way station in Italy — which, Ruiz quickly discovered, means the finest in the world, for there are no other institutions precisely like the alberghi diurni anywhere else. Here he was able to check his luggage, read his magazine over a pastry in the caffe, have his hair cut and his shoes shined, have a bath while his clothes were being pressed, and then begin the protracted series of telephone calls which, he hoped, would eventually allow him to spend the coming night in a bed — preferably near by, but at least anywhere in Rome but in a Shelter dormitory.

In the coffee shop, in the barber's chair, and even in the tub, he pored again and again over the account of Egtverchi's broadcast. The Italian reporter did not give a text, for obvious reasons — a thirteen-minute broadcast would have filled an entire page of the journal in which he was limited to a single column of type — but he digested it skillfully, and he had an inside story to go with it. Ruiz was impressed.

Evidently Egtverchi had composed his rebuttal by weaving together the news items of the evening, just as they had come in to him off the wires beyond any possibility of his selecting them, into a brilliant extempore attack upon Earthly moral assumptions and pretensions. The thread which wove them all together was summed up by the magazine's reporter in a phrase from the Inferno: Perche mi scerpi?/non hai tu spirto di pietate alcuno? — the cry of the Suicides, who can speak only when the Harpies rend them and the blood flows: “Wherefore pluckest thou me?” It had been a scathing indictment, at no point defending Egtverchi's own conduct, but by implication making ridiculous the notion that any man could be stainless enough to be casting stones. Egtverchi had obviously absorbed Schopenhauer's vicious Rules for Debate down to the last comma.

“And in fact,” the Italian reporter added, “it is widely known in Manhattan that QBC officials were on the verge of cutting off the outworlder in mid-broadcast as he began to cover the Stockholm brothel war. They were dissuaded by the barrage of telephone calls, telegrams and radiograms which began to pour down upon QBC's main office at precisely that moment. The response of the public has hardly diminished since, and it continues to be overwhelmingly approving. The network, encouraged by Signor Egtverchi's major sponsor, Bridget Bifalco World Kitchens, now is issuing almost hourly releases containing statistics 'proving' the broadcast a spectacular success. Signor Egtverchi is now a hot property, and if past experience is any guide (and it is) this means that henceforth the Lithian will be encouraged to display those aspects of his public character for which formerly he was being widely condemned, for which the network was considering taking him off the air in the middle of a word. Suddenly, in short, he is worth a lot of money.”

The report was both literate and overheated — a peculiarly Roman combination — but as long as Ruiz lacked the text of the broadcast itself, he could not take exception to a word of it. Both the reporter's editorializing and the precise passion of his language seemed no more than justified. Indeed, a case could be made for a claim that the man had indulged in understatement. To Ruiz, at least, Egtverchi's voice came through. The accent was familiar and perfect. And this for an audience full of children! Had any independent person called Egtverchi ever really existed? If so, he was possessed — but Ruiz did not believe that for an instant. There had never been any real Egtverchi to possess. He was throughout a creature of the Adversary's imagination, as even Chtexa had been, as the whole of Lithia had been. In the figure of Egtverchi He had already abandoned subtlety; already He dared to show Himself more than half-naked, commanding money, fathering lies, poisoning discourse, compounding grief, corrupting children, killing love, building armies — and all in a Holy Year.

Ruiz-Sanchez froze, one arm halfway into his summer jacket, looking up at the ceiling of the dressing room. He had yet to make more than two telephone calls, neither of them to the general of his Order, but he had already changed his mind. Had he really failed, all this time, to read such obvious signs — or was he as crazed as heretics are supposed to be, smelling the Dies irae, the day of the wrath of God, in the steam of nothing but a public bath? Armageddon — in 3-V? The pit opened to let loose a comedian for the amusement of children?

He did not know. He could only be sure that he needed to hunt for no bed tonight, after all; what he needed was stones. He got out of the Casa del Passegero as quickly as he could, leaving everything he owned behind, and found his way alone back to the Via del Termini; the guidebook showed a church just off there, on the Piazza, della Republica, by the Baths of Diocletian. The book was right. The church was there: Santa Maria d'Angeli. He did not stop in the porch to cool off, though the early evening sunlight was almost as hot as noon. Tomorrow might be much hotter — unredeemably hotter. He went through the portals at once.

Inside, in the chill darkness, he knelt; and in cold terror, he prayed.

It did not seem to do him much good.

XV

All about Michelis the jungle stood frozen in a riot of motionlessness. Filtered through it, the sourceless blue-gray daylight was tinged with deep green, and where the light fell on one or another clear reflection it seemed to penetrate rather than glance off, carrying the jungle on in an inversion of images to the eight corners of the universe. The illusion was made doubly real by the stillness of everything; at any moment it seemed as though a breeze would spring up and ruffle the reflections, but there was no breeze, and nothing but time would ever disturb those images. Egtverchi moved, of course; though his figure was ensmalled as if by distance, he was about the right size for the rest of the jungle, and almost more convincingly colored and in the round. His circumscribed gestures seemed to be beckoning, as though he were attempting to lead Michelis out of this motionless wilderness.

Only his voice was jarring: it was at normal conversational volume, which meant that it was far too loud to be in scale with himself or his (and Michelis') surroundings. It seemed so loud to Michelis, indeed, that in his reverie he almost missed the content of Egtverchi's final speech. Only when Egtverchi had bowed ironically and faded away and his voice died, leaving behind only the omni-present muted insect buzz, did the meaning penetrate. Michelis sat where he was, stunned. A full thirty seconds of commercial for Mammale Bifalco's Delicious Instant Knish Mix went by before he remembered to put his finger over the 3-V's cut-off stud. Then this year's Bridget Bifalco in turn faded in mid-mix, smothered before she reached her famous brogue tag-line ("Give it t' me a minute, dharlin', till I give it a lhashin'.") The scurrying electrons in the phosphor complex migrated back to the atoms from which they had been driven by the miniature de Broglie scanner imbedded in the picture frame. The atoms resumed their chemical identity, the molecules cooled, and the screen became a static reproduction of Paul Klee's “Caprice in February.” The principle, Michelis recalled with gray irrelevancy, had emerged out of d'Averoigne's first “Petard” paper, the count's only venture into applied math, published when he was seventeen.

“What does he mean?” Liu said faintly. “I don't understand him at all any more. He calls it a demonstration — but what can he possibly demonstrate by that? It's childish!”

“Yes,” Michelis said. For the moment he could think of nothing else to say. He needed to get his temper back; he was losing it more and more easily these days. That had been one of the reasons for his urgency hi marrying Liu: he needed her calmness, for his own was vanishing with frightening rapidity.

No calmness seemed to be passing from her to him now. Even the apartment, originally such a source of satisfaction and repose for them both, felt like a trap. It was far above ground, in one of the mostly unused project buildings on the upper East Side of Manhattan . Originally Liu had had a far smaller set of rooms in the same building, and Michelis, after he had got used to the idea, had had them both installed in the present apartment with only a minimum of wirepulling. It was not customary, it was certainly not fashionable, and they were officially warned that it was considered dangerous — the gangs raided surface structures now and then; but apparently it was no longer outright illegal, if one had the money to live that high up in the slums.

Given the additional space, the artist buried inside Liu's demure technician's exterior had run quietly wild. In the green glow of concealed light which washed the apartment, Michelis was surrounded by what seemed to be a miniature jungle. On small tables stood Japanese gardens with real Ming trees or dwarf cedars in them. An oriental lamp was fashioned out of a piece of fantastically sculptured driftwood. Long, deep, woven flower boxes ran completely around the room at eye level; they were thickly planted with ivy, wandering Jew, rubber plants, philodendron, and other non-flowering species, and benind each box a mirror ran up to the ceiling, unbroken anywhere except by the placidly witty Klee reproduction which was the 3-V set; the painting, made almost wholly of detached angles and glyphs like the symbols of mathematics, was a welcome oasis of dryness for which Liu had paid a premium — QBC's stock “covers” were mostly Sargents and van Goghs. Since the light tubes were hidden behind the planting boxes, the room gave an effect of extraterrestrial exuberance kept under control only with the greatest difficulty.

“I know what he means,” Michelis said at last. “I just don't know quite how to put it. Let me think a minute — why don't you get dinner while I do it? We'd better eat early. We're going to have visitors, that's a cinch.”

“Visitors? But — All right, Mike.”

Michelis walked to the glass wall and looked out onto the sun porch. All of Liu's flowering plants were out there, a real garden, which had to be kept sealed off from the rest of the apartment; for in addition to being an ardent amateur gardener, Liu bred bees. There was a colony of them there, making singular and exotic honeys from the congeries of blossoms Liu had laid out so carefully. The honey was fabulous and ever-changing, sometimes too bitter to eat except in tiny fork-touches like Chinese mustard, sometimes containing a heady touch of opium from the sticky hybrid poppies that nodded in a soldierly squad along the sun porch railing, sometimes sickly-sweet and insipid until, with a surprisingly small amount of glassware, Liu converted it into a liqueur that mounted to the head like a breeze from the Garden of Allah. The bees that made it were tetraploid monsters the size of hummingbirds, with tempers as bad as Michelis' own was getting to be; only a few of them could kill even a big man. Luckily, they flew badly in the gusts common at this altitude, and would starve anywhere but in Liu's garden, otherwise Liu would never have been licensed to keep them on an open sun porch in the middle of the city. Michelis had been more than a little wary of them at first, but lately they had begun to fascinate him: their apparent intelligence was almost as phenomenal as their size and viciousness.

“Damn.” Liu said behind him.

“What's the matter?”

“Omelettes again. That's the second wrong number I've dialed this week.”

Both the oath — mild though it was — and the error were uncharacteristic. Mike felt a twinge, a mixture of compassion and guilt. Liu was changing; she had never been so distractible before. Was he responsible?

“It's all right. I don't mind. Let's eat.”

“All right.”

They ate silently, but Michelis was conscious of the pressure of inquiry behind Liu's still expression. The chemist thought furiously, angry with himself, and yet unable to phrase what he wanted to say. He should never have got her into this at all. No, that couldn't have been prevented; she had been the logical scientist to handle Egtverchi in his infancy — probably nobody else could have brought him through it even this well. But surely it should have been possible to keep her from becoming emotionally involved —

No, that had not been possible either; that was the woman of it. And the man of it, now that he was forced to think about his own role. It was no use; he simply did not know what he should think; Egtverchi's broadcast had rattled him beyond the point of logical thought. He was going to wind up with his usual bad compromise with Liu, which was to say nothing at all. But that would not do either.

And yet it had been a simple enough piece of foolery that the Lithian had perpetrated — childish, as Liu had said. Egtverchi had been urged to be off beat, rebellious, irresponsible, and he had come through in spades. Not only had he voiced his disrespect for all established institutions and customs, but he had also challenged his audience to show the same disrespect. In the closing mornents of his broadcast, he had even told them how: they were to mail anonymous, insulting messages to Egtverchi's own sponsors.

“A postcard will do,” he had said, gently enough, through his grinning chops. “Just make the message pungent. If you hate that powdered concrete they call a knish mix, write and tell them so. If you can eat the knishes but our commercials make you sick, write them about that, and don't pull any punches. If you loathe me, tell the Bifalcos that, too, and make sure you're spitting mad about it. I'll read the five messages I think in the worst possible taste on my broad—”

'To nobody,” Michelis said angrily.

“Quite so. And yet I repeat that I didn't select it deliberately for shock value, Dr. Michelis. It's a bagatelle — very mild, compared to some of the stuff we've been getting. This Snake obviously has an audience of borderline madmen, and he means to use it. That's why I came to see you. We think you might have some idea as to what he intends to use it for.”

“For nothing, if you people have any control over what you yourselves do,” Michelis said. “Why don't you cut him off the air? If he's poisoning it, then you don't have any other choice.”

“One man's poison is another man's knish mix,” the UN man said smoothly. “The Bifalcos don't see this — the way we do. They have their own analysts, and they know as well as we do that they're going to get more than seven and a half million dirty postcards in the next week. But they like the idea. In fact, they're positively wriggling with delight. They think it will sell products. They will probably give the Snake a whole half hour, solely sponsored by them, if the response comes through as predicted — and it will.”

“Why can't you cut Egtverchi off anyhow?” Liu said.

“The charter prevents us from interfering with the right of free speech. As long as the Bifalcos put up the money, we are obligated to keep the program on the air. It's a good principle at bottom; we've had experiences with it before that threatened to turn out nastily, but in every case we sweated them out and the public got bored with them eventually. But that was a different public — the broad public, which used to be mostly sane. The Snake obviously has a selected audience, and that's not sane at all. This time — for the first time — we are thinking of interfering. That's why we came to you.”

“I can't help you,” Michelis said.

“You can, and you will, Dr. Michelis. I'm talking from under both my hats now. QBC wants him off the air, and the UN is beginning to smell something which might prove to be much worse than the 1993 Corridor Riots. You sponsored this Snake, and your wife raised him from an egg, or damn near an egg. You know him better than anyone else on Earth. You will have to give us the weapon that we need against him. That's what I came to tell you. Think about it. You are responsible under the naturalization law. It's not often that we have to invoke that clause, but we're invoking it now. You'll have to think fast, because we have to have him closed out before his next broadcast.”

“And suppose we have nothing to offer?” Michelis said stonily.

“Then we will probably declare the Snake a minor, and you his guardians,” the UN man said. “Which will hardly be a solution from our point of view, but you would probably find it painful — you'd be well advised to come up with something better. I'm sorry to bring such bad news, but the news is bad tonight; that sometimes happens. Good-night, and thank you.”

He went out. He did not have to resume any of his three hats; he had never taken any of them off, visible or metaphorical. Michelis and Liu stared at each other, appalled.

“We-we couldn't possibly have him as a ward now,” Liu whispered.

“Well,” Michelis said harshly, “we were talking about wanting a son—”

“Mike, don't!”

“I'm sorry,” he said inadequately. “That officious son of a bitch. He was the man that passed on the application — and now he's throwing it right back in our laps. They must be really desperate. What are we going to do? I haven't an idea in my head.”

Liu said, after a moment's hesitation: “Mike — we don't know enough to come up with anything useful in a week. At least I don't, and I don't think you do either. We've got to get through to the Father somehow.”

“If we can,” Michelis said slowly. “But even so, what good will that do? The UN won't listen to him — they've bypassed him.”

“How? What do you mean?”

“They've made a de facto decision in favor of Cleaver,” Michelis said. “It won't he announced until after Ramon's church has finished disavowing him, but it's already in effect. I knew about it before he left for Rome , but I didn't have the heart to tell him. Lithia has been closed; the UN is going to use it as a laboratory for the study of fusion power storage — not exactly what Cleaver had in mind originally, but close enough.”

Liu was silent for a long time. She arose and went to the window, against which the huge bees were still butting like live battering-rams.

“Does Cleaver know?” she said, her back still turned.

“Oh yes, he knows,” Michelis said. “He's in charge. He was scheduled to land back at Xoredeshch Sfath yesterday. I tried to tip Ramon off indirectly as soon as I heard about it — that's why I promoted that collaboration for the J.I.R. — but Ramon just didn't seem to hear any of my hints. And I just couldn't tell him outright that his cause was already lost, before he'd even had a hearing.”

“It's ugly,” Liu said slowly. “Why won't they announce it until after Ramon is officially excommunicated? Why does that make any difference?”

“Because the decision is tainted, that's all,” Michelis said fiercely. “Whether you agree with Ramon's theological arguments or not, to decide for Cleaver is a dirty act — impossible to defend except in terms of raw power. They know that well enough, damn them, and sooner or later they're going to have to let the public see what the arguments were on the other side. When that day comes, they want Ramon's arguments discredited in advance by his own church.”

“What precisely is Cleaver doing?”

“I can't say, precisely. But they're building a big Nernst generator plant inland on the south continent, near Glesh-chtehk Sfath, to turn out the power, so that much of his dream is already realized. Later they'll try to trap the power raw, as it comes off, instead of stepping it down and throwing away ninety-five per cent of it as heat. I don't know how Cleaver proposes to do that, but I should guess he'd begin with a modification of the Nernst effect itself — the 'magnetic bottle' dodge. He'd better be damned careful.” He paused. “I suppose I'd have told Ramon if he'd asked me. But he didn't, so I didn't say anything. Now I feel like a coward.”

Liu turned swiftly at that, and came back to sit on the arm of his chair. “That was right to do, Mike,” she said. “It's not cowardice to refuse to rob a man of hope, I think.”

“Maybe not,” Michelis said, taking her hand gratefully.

“But what it all comes out to is that Ramon can't help us now. Thanks to me, he doesn't even know yet that Cleaver is back on Lithia.”

XVI

Shortly past dawn, Ruiz-Sanchez walked stiffly into the vast circle of the Piazza San Pietro toward the towering dome of St. Peter's itself. The piazza was swarming with pilgrims even this early, and the dome, more than twice as high as the Statue of Liberty, seemed frowning and ominous in the early light, rising from the forest of pillars like the forehead of God.

He passed under the right arch of the colonnade, past the Swiss Guards in their gorgeous, outré uniforms, and through the bronze door. Here he paused to murmur, with unexpected intensity, the prayers for the Pope's intentions obligatory for this year. The Apostolic Palace soared in front of him; he was astonished that any edifice so crowded with stone could at the same time contrive to be so spacious, but he had no time for further devotions now. Near the first door on the right a man sat at a table. Ruiz-Sanchez told him: “I am commanded to a special audience with the Holy Father.”

“God has blessed you. The major-domo's office is on the first floor, to the left. No, one moment — a special audience? May I see your letter, please?”

Ruiz-Sanchez showed it.

“Very good. But you will need to see the major-domo anyhow. The special audiences are in the throne room; he will show you where to go.” The throne room! Ruiz-Sanchez was more unsettled than ever. That was where the Holy Father received heads of state, and members of the college of cardinals. Certainly it was no place to receive a heretical Jesuit of very low rank —

“The throne room,” the major-domo said. “That's the first room in the reception suite. I trust your business goes well, Father. Pray for me.”

Hadrian VIII was a big man, a Norwegian by birth, whose curling beard had been only slightly peppered with gray at his election. It was white now, of course, but otherwise age seemed to have marked him little; indeed, he looked somewhat younger than his photographs and 3-V 'casts suggested, for they had a tendency to accentuate the crags and furrows of his huge, heavy face.

Ruiz-Sanchez found his person so overwhelming that he barely noticed the magnificence of his robes of state. Needless to say, there was nothing in the least Latin in the Holy Father's mien or temperament. In his rise to the gestatorial chair he had made a reputation as a Catholic with an almost Lutheran passion for the grimmer reaches of moral theology; there was something of Kierkegaard in him, and something of the Grand Inquisitor as well. After his election, he had surprised everyone by developing an interest — one might almost call it a businessman's interest — in temporal politics, though the characteristic coldness of Northern theological speculation continued to color everything he said and did. His choice of the name of a Roman emperor was perfectly appropriate, Ruiz-Sanchez realized: here was a face that might well have been stamped on imperial coin, for all the beneficence which tempered its harshness.

The Pope remained standing throughout the interview, staring down at Ruiz-Sanchez with what seemed at first to be nine-tenths frank curiosity.

“Of all the thousands of pilgrims here, you may stand in the greatest need of our indulgence,” he observed in English. Near by, a tape recorder raced silently; Hadrian was an ardent archivist, and a stickler for the letter of the text. “Yet we have small hope of your winning it. It is incredible to us that a Jesuit, of all our shepherds, could have fallen into Manichaeanism. The errors of that heresy are taught most particularly in that college.”

“Holiness, the evidence—”

Hadrian raised his hand. “Let us not waste time. We have already informed ourself of your views and your reasoning. You are subtle, Father, but you have committed a grievous oversight all the same — but we wish to defer that subject for the moment. Tell us first of this creature Egtverchi — not as a sending of the Devil, but as you would see him were he a man.”

Ruiz-Sanchez frowned. There was something about the word “sending” that touched some weakness inside him, like an obligation forgotten until too late to fulfill it. The feeling was like that which had informed a ridiculous recurrent nightmare of his student days, in which he was not to graduate because he had forgotten to attend all his Latin classes. Yet he could not put his finger on what it was.

“There are many ways to describe him, Holiness,” he said. “He is the kind of personality that the twentieth-century critic Colin Wilson called an Outsider, and that is the kind of Earth man he appeals to — he is a preacher without a creed, an intellect without a culture, a seeker without a goal. I think he has a conscience as we would define the term; he's very different from the rest of his race in that and many other respects. He seems to take a deep interest in moral problems, but he's utterly contemptuous of all traditional moral frames of reference — including the kind of rationalized moral automation that prevails on Lithia.”

“And this strikes some chord in his audience?”

“There can be no doubt of that, surely, Holiness. It remains to be seen how wide his appeal is. He ran off a very shrewdly designed experiment last night, obviously intended to test that very question; we should soon know just how great the response will be. But it already seems clear that he appeals to all those people who feel cut off, emotionally and intellectually, from our society and its dominant cultural traditions.”

“Well put,” Hadrian said, surprisingly. “We stand at the brink of unguessable events, that is certain; we have had forebodings that this might be the year. We have commanded the Inquisition to put away its bell, book and candle for the time being; we think such a move would be most unwise.”

Ruiz-Sanchez was stunned. No trial — and no excommunication? The drumming of events around his head had begun to remind him of the numbing, incessant rains of Xoredeshch Sfath.

“Why, Holiness?” he said faintly.

“We believe you may be the man appointed by our Lord to bear St. Michael's arms,” the Pope said, weighing every word.

“I, Holiness? A heretic?”

“Noah was not perfect, you will recall,” Hadrian said, with what might have been a half-smile. “He was merely a man who was given another chance. Goethe, himself more than a little heretical, reshaped the legend of Faustus to the same lesson: redemption is always the crux of the great drama, and there must be a peripataea first. Besides, Father, consider for a moment the unique nature of this case of heresy. Is not the appearance of a solitary Manichaean in the twenty-first century either a wildly meaningless anachronism — or a grave sign?”

He paused and fingered his beads.

“Of course,” he added, “it will be necessary for you to purge yourself, if you can. That is why we have called you. We believe as you do that the Adversary is the moving spirit behind this whole Lithian crisis; but we do not believe that any repudiation of dogma is required. It all hinges upon this question of creativity. Tell us, Father: when you first became convinced that the whole of Lithia was a sending, what did you do about it?”

“Do about it?” Ruiz-Sanchez said numbly. “Why, Holiness, I did only what was recorded. I could think of nothing else to do.”

“Then did it never occur to you that sendings can be banished — and that God has given that power into your hands?”

Ruiz-Sanchez had no emotions left.

“Banished… Holiness, perhaps I have been stupid. I feel stupid. But as far as I know, exorcism was abandoned by the Church more than two centuries ago. My college taught me that meteorology replaced the 'spirits and powers of the air,' and neurophysiology replaced 'possession.' It would never have occurred to me.”

“Exorcism was not abandoned, merely discouraged,” Hadrian said. “It had become limited, as you have just pointed out, and the Church wished to prevent its abuse by ignorant country priests — they were bringing the Church into disrepute trying to drive demons out of sick cows and perfectly healthy goats and cats. But I am not talking about animal health, the weather or mental illness now, Father.”

“Then… is Your Holiness truly proposing that… that I should have attempted to… to exorcise a whole planet?”

“Why not?” Hadrian said. “Of course, the fact that you were standing on the planet at the time might have helped to prevent you, unconsciously, from thinking of it. We are convinced that God would have provided for you — in Heaven certainly, and possibly you might have received temporal help as well. But it was the only solution to your dilemma. Had the exorcism failed, then there might have been some excuse for falling into heresy. But surely it should be easier to believe in a planet-wide hallucination — which in principle we know the Adversary has the power to do — than in the heresy of satanic creativity!”

The Jesuit bowed his head. He felt overwhelmed by his own ignorance. He had spent almost all his leisure hours on Lithia minutely studying a book which to all intents and purposes might have been dictated by the Adversary himself, and he had seen nothing that mattered, not in all those 628 pages of compulsive demoniac chatter.

“It is not too late to try,” Hadrian said, almost gently. “That is the only road left for you to travel.” Suddenly his face became stern, flinty. “As we have pointed out to the Inquisition, your excommunication is automatic. It began the instant that you admitted this abomination into your soul. It does not need to be formalized to be a fact — and there are political reasons, as well as spiritual ones, for not formalizing it now. In the meantime, you must leave Rome . We withhold our blessing and our indulgence from you, Dr. Ruiz-Sanchez. This Holy Year is for you a year of battle, with the world as prize. When you have won that battle you may return to us — not before. Farewell.”

Dr. Ramon Ruiz-Sanchez, a layman, damned, left Rome for New York that night by air. The deluge of happenstance was rising more rapidly around him; the time for the building of arks was almost at hand. And yet, as the waters rose, and the words, Into your hand are they delivered, passed incessantly across the tired surfaces of his brain, it was not of the swarming billions of the Shelter state that he was thinking. It was of Chtexa; and the notion that an exorcism might succeed in dissolving utterly that grave being and all his race and civilization, return them to the impotent mind of the Great Nothing as though they had never been, was an agony to him.

Into your hand… Into your hand…

XVII

The figures were in. The people who had taken Egtverchi as both symbol and spokesman for their passionate discontents were now tallied, although they could not be known. Their nature was no surprise — the crime and mental disease statistics had long provided a clear picture of that — but their number was stunning. Apparently nearly a third of twenty-first-century society loathed that society from the bottom of its collective heart. Ruiz-Sanchez wondered suddenly whether, had a similar tally been possible in every age, the proportion would have turned out to be stable.

“Do you think it would do any good to talk to Egtverchi?” he asked Michelis. Over his protests, he was staying in the Michelis' apartment for the time being.

“Well, it hasn't done any good for me to talk with him,” Michelis said. “With you it might be a different story — though frankly, Ramon, I'm inclined to doubt even that. He's doubly hard to reason with because he himself seems to be getting no satisfaction out of the whole affair.”

“He knows his audience better than we do,” Liu added. “And the more the numbers pile up, the more embittered he seems to become. I think they remind him continually that he can never be fully accepted on Earth, fully at home on it. He thinks he's of interest only to people who themselves don't feel at home on their own planet. That's not true, of course, but that's how he feels.”

“There's enough truth in it so that he'd be unlikely to be dissuaded of it,” Ruiz-Sanchez agreed gloomily.

He shifted his chair so as not to be able to see Liu's bees, which were hard at work in the shafts of sunlight on the porch. At another time he could not have torn himself away from them, but he could not afford to be distracted now.

“And of course he's also well aware that he'll never know what it means to be a Lithian — regardless of his shape and inheritance,” he added. “Chtexa might get a shadow of that through to him, if only they could meet — but no, they don't even speak the same language.”

“Egtverchi's been studying Lithian,” Michelis said. “But it's true that he can't speak it, not even as well as I can. He has nothing to read but your grammar — the documents are still all classified against him — and nobody to talk to. He sounds as rusty as an iron hinge. But, Ramon, you could interpret.”

“Yes, I could. But Mike, it's physically impossible. There just isn't time to get Chtexa here, even if we had the resources and the — authority to do it.”

“I wasn't thinking of that. I was thinking of CirCon, d'Averoigne's new circum-continuum radio. I don't know what shape it's in, but the Message Tree puts out a powerful signal — possibly d'Averoigne could pick it up. If so, you might be able to talk to Chtexa. I'll see what I can find out, anyhow.”

“I'm willing to try,” Ruiz-Sanchez said. “But it doesn't sound very promising.”

He stopped to think, not of more answers — he had already hit his head against that wall more than often enough — but of what questions he still needed to ask, Michelis' appearance gave him the cue. It had shocked him at first, and he could still not quite get used to it. The big chemist had aged markedly: his face was drawn, and he had deeply cut, liverish circles under his eyes. Liu looked no better; while she had not seemed to age any, she looked miserable. There was a tension in the air between them, too, as though they had failed to find in each other sufficient release from the tensions of the world around them.

“It's possible that Agronski might know something that would be helpful,” he said, only half-aloud.

“Maybe,” Michelis said. “I've seen him only once — at a party, the one where Egtverchi caused such a stink. He was behaving very oddly. I'm sure he recognized us, but he wouldn't meet our eyes, let alone come and talk to us. As a matter of fact, I can't remember seeing him talking to anybody. He just sat in a corner and drank. It wasn't at all like him.”

“Why did he come, do you suppose?”

“Oh, that's not hard to guess. He's a fan of Egtverchi's.”

“Martin? How do you know?”

“Egtverchi bragged about it. He said he hoped to have the whole Lithia commission on his side eventually.” Michelis grimaced.

“The way Agronski was acting, he'll be of no use to Egtverchi or anybody else.”

“And so we have still another soul on the way to damnation,” Ruiz-Sanchez said grimly. “I should have suspected it. There's so little meaning in Agronski's life as it is, it won't take Egtverchi long to cut him off from any contact with reality at all. That is what evil does — it empties you.”

“I'm none too sure Egtverchi's to blame,” Michelis said, his voice steeped in gloom. “Except as a symptom. The Earth is riddled with schizophrenics already. If Agronski had any tendency that way, and obviously he did, then all he needed was to be planted here again for the tendency to flower.”

“That wasn't my impression of him,” Liu said. “From what little I saw of him, and from what you've told me, he seemed dreadfully normal — even simple-minded. I don't see how he could get deep enough into any question to be driven insane — or how he could be tempted to fall into your theological vacuum, Ramon.”

“In this universe of discourse, Liu, we are all very much alike,” Ruiz-Sanchez said dispiritedly. “And from what Mike tells me, I think we may be already too late to do much for Martin. And he's only-only a sample of what's happening everywhere within the sound of Egtverchi's voice.”

“It's a mistake to think of schizophrenia as a disease of the wits, anyhow,” Michelis said. “Back in the days when it was first being described, the English used to call it 'lorry-driver's disease.' When intellectuals get it, the results are spectacular only because they can articulate what they feel: Nijinski, van Gogh, T. E. Lawrence, Nietzsche, Wilson … it's a long list, but it's nothing compared to the ordinary people who've had it. And they get it fifty-to-one over intellectuals. Agronski is just the usual kind of victim, no more, no less.”

“What has happened to that threat you mentioned?” Ruiz-Sanchez said. “Egtverchi got on the air again last night without his being made a ward of yours. Was your friend in the complicated hat just flailing the air?”

“I think that's partly the answer,” Michelis said hopefully. “They haven't said another word to us, so I'm just guessing, but it may be that your arrival disconcerted them. They expected you to be publicly unfrocked — and the fact that you weren't has thrown their schedule for announcing the Lithia decision seriously out of joint. They're probably waiting to see what you will do now.”

“So,” Ruiz-Sanchez said grimly, “am I. I might just do nothing, which would probably be the most confusing thing I could do. I think their hands are tied, Mike. He's never mentioned the Bifalcos' products but that once, but obviously he must be selling them by the warehouse-load, so his sponsors won't cut him off. Nor can I see on what grounds the UN Communications Commission can do it.” He laughed shortly. “They've been trying for decades to encourage more independent comment on 3-V anyhow — and Egtverchi is certainly a giant step in that direction.”

“I should think he'd be open to charges of inciting to riot,” Michelis said.

“He hasn't incited any riots that I've heard about,” Ruiz-Sanchez said. “The Frisco affair happened spontaneously as far as anyone could see — and I noticed that the pictures didn't show a single one of those uniformed followers of his in the crowds.”

“But he praised the rioters' spirit, and made fun of the police,” Liu pointed out. “He as good as endorsed it.”

“That's not incitement,” Michelis said. “I see what Ramon means. He's smart enough to do nothing for which he could be brought to trial — and a false arrest would be suicide, the UN would be inciting a riot itself.”

“Besides, what would they do with him if they got a conviction?” Ruiz asked. “He's a citizen, but his needs aren't like ours; they'd be chancing killing him with a thirty-day sentence. I suppose they could deport him, but they can't declare him an undesirable, alien without declaring Lithia a foreign country — and until that report is released, Lithia is a protectorate, with a right to admission to the UN as a member state!”

“Small chance of that,” Michelis said. “That would mean ditching Cleaver's project.”

Ruiz-Sanchez felt the same sinking of the heart that had overcome him when Michelis first gave him that news. “How far advanced is it now?” he asked.

“I'm not sure. All I know is that they've been shipping equipment to him in huge amounts. There's another load scheduled to leave in two weeks. The scuttlebutt says that Cleaver has some kind of crucial experiment ready to go as soon as that shipment gets there. That puts it pretty close — the new ships make the trip in less than a month.”

“Betrayed again,” Ruiz-Sanchez said bitterly.

“Then is there nothing you can do, Ramon?” Liu asked.

“I'll interpret for Egtverchi and Chtexa, if anything comes of that project.”

“Yes, but…”

“I know what you mean,” he said. “Yes, there is something decisive that I can do. And possibly it would work. In fact, it is something that I must do.”

He stared blindly at them. The buzzing of the bees, so reminiscent of the singing of the jungles of Lithia, probed insistently at him.

“But,” he said, “I don't think that I'm going to do it.”

Michelis moved mountains. He was formidable enough under normal conditions, but when he was desperate and saw a possible way out, no bulldozer could have been more implacable in crushing through an opening.

Lucien le Comte des Bois-d'Averoigne, late Procurator of Canarsie, and always fellow in the brotherhood of science, received them all cordially in his Canadian retreat. Not even the sardonically silent figure of Egtverchi made him blink; he shook hands with the displaced Lithian as though they were old friends meeting again after a lapse of a few weeks. The count himself was a large, rotund man 'in his early sixties, with a protuberant belly, and he was brown all over: his remaining hair was brown, his suit was brown, he was deeply tanned, and he was smoking a long brown cigar.

The room in which he received them — Ruiz-Sanchez, Michelis, Liu, and Egtverchi — was a curious mixture of lodge and laboratory. It had an open fireplace, rough furniture, 257 mounted guns, an elk's head, and an amazing mess of wires and apparatus.

“I am by no means sure that this is going to work,” he told them promptly. “Everything I have is still in the breadboard stage, as you can see. It's been years since I last handled a soldering iron and a voltmeter, too, so we may well have a simple electronic failure somewhere in this mass of wiring — but it wasn't a task I could leave to a technician.”

He waved them to seats while he made final adjustments. Egtverchi remained standing in the rear of the room in the shadows, motionless except for the gentle rise and fall of his great chest as he breathed, and an occasional sudden movement of his eyes.

“There will be no image, of course,” the count said abstractedly.

“This giant J-J coupling you describe obviously doesn't broadcast in that band. But if we are very lucky, we may get some sound.… Ah.”

A loudspeaker almost hidden in the maze crackled and then began to emit distant, patterned bursts of hissing. Except for the pattern, it seemed to Ruiz-Sanchez to be nothing but noise, but the count said at once:

“I'm getting something in that region. I didn't expect to pick it up so soon. I don't make much sense of it, however.”

Neither did Ruiz, and for a few moments he had all he could do to get over his amazement. “Those are signals — the Message Tree is broadcasting now?” he said, with a touch of incredulity.

“I hope so,” the count said drily. “I have been busy all day installing chokes against any other possible signal.”

The Jesuit's respect for the mathematician came close to awe. To think that this disorderly tangle of wiring, little black acorns, small red and brown objects like firecrackers, the shining interlocking blades of variable condensers, massively heavy coils, and flickering meters was even now reaching directly through the subether, around fifty light-years of space-time, to eavesdrop on the pulses of the crystalline cliff buried beneath Xoredeshch Sfath…

“Can you tune it?” he said at last. “I think those must be the stutter pattern — what the Lithians use as a navigational grid for their ships and planes. There ought to be an audio band—”

Except, he recalled suddenly, that that band couldn't possibly be an “audio” band. Nobody ever spoke directly to the Message Tree — only to the single Lithian who stood in the center of the Tree's chamber. How he got the substance of the message transformed into radio waves had never been explained to any of the Earthmen.

And yet suddenly there was a voice.

“ — a powerful tap on the Tree,” the voice said in clear, even, cold Lithian. “Who is receiving? Do you hear me? I do not understand the direction your carrier is coming from. It seems inside the Tree, which is impossible. Does anyone understand me?” Silently, the count thrust a microphone into Ruiz' hand. He discovered that he was trembling.

“We understand you,” he said in Lithian in a shaky voice. “We are on Earth. Can you hear me?”

“I hear you,” the voice said at once. “We understood that what you say is impossible. But what you say is not always accurate, we have found. What do you want?”

“I would like to speak to Chtexa, the metallist,” Ruiz said. “This is Ruiz-Sanchez, who was in Xoredeshch Sfath last year.”

“He can be summoned,” said the cold, distant voice. There was a brief hashing sound from the speaker; then it went away again. “If he wishes to speak to you.”

“Tell him,” Ruiz-Sanchez said, “that his son Egtverchi also wishes to speak to him.”

“Ah,” said the voice after a pause. “Then no doubt he will come. But you cannot speak long on this channel. The direction from which your signal comes is damaging my sanity. Can you receive — a sound-modulated signal if we can arrange to send one?”

Michelis murmured to the count, who nodded energetically and pointed to the loudspeaker.

“That is how we are receiving you — now,” Ruiz said. “How are you transmitting?”

“That I cannot explain to you,” said the cold voice. “I cannot speak to you any longer or I will be damaged. Chtexa has been called.”

The voice stopped and there was a long silence. Ruiz-Sanchez wiped the sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand.

“Telepathy?” Michelis muttered behind him. “No, it fits into the electro-magnetic spectrum somewhere. But where? Boy, there sure is a lot we don't know about that Tree.”

The count nodded ruefully. He was watching his meters like a hawk but, judging from his expression, they were not telling him anything he did not already know.

“Ruiz-Sanchez,” the loudspeaker said. Ruiz started.

It was Chtexa's voice, clear and strong.

Ruiz beckoned at the shadows, and Egtverchi came forward. He was in no hurry. There was something almost insolent in his very walk.

“This is Ruiz-Sanchez, Chtexa,” Ruiz said. “I'm talking to you from Earth — a new experimental communications system one of our scientists has evolved. I need your help.”

“I will be glad to do whatever I can,” Chtexa said. “I was sorry that you did not return with the other Earthman. He was less welcome. He and his friends have razed one of our finest forests near Gleshchtehk Sfath, and built ugly buildings here in the city.”

“I'm sorry, too,” Ruiz-Sanchez said. The words seemed inadequate, but it would be impossible to explain to Chtexa exactly what the situation was — impossible, and illegal. “I still hope to come some day. But I am calling about your son.”

There was a brief pause, during which the speaker emitted a series of muted, anomalous sounds, almost yet not quite recognizable. Evidently the Lithians' audio hookup was catching some background noise from inside the Tree, or even outside it. The clarity of the reception was astonishing; it was impossible to believe that the Tree was fifty light-years away.

“Egtverchi is an adult now,” Chtexa's voice said. “He has seen many wonders on your world. Is he with you?”

“Yes,” Ruiz-Sanchez said, beginning to sweat again. “But he does not know your language, Chtexa. I will interpret as best I can.''

“That is strange,” Chtexa said. “But I will hear his voice. Ask him when he is coming home; he has much to tell us.”

Ruiz put the question.

“I have no home,” Egtverchi said indifferently.

“I can't just tell him that, Egtverchi. Say something intelligible, in heaven's name. You owe your existence to Chtexa, you know that.”

“I may visit Lithia some day,” Egtverchi said, his eyes filming. “But I am in no hurry. There is still a great deal to be done on Earth.”

“I hear him,” Chtexa said. “His voice is high; he is not as tall as his inheritance provided, unless he is ill. What does he answer?”

There simply was not time to provide an interpretive translation; Ruiz-Sanchez told him the answer literally, word by word from English into Lithian.

“Ah,” Chtexa said. “Then he has matters of import to his hand. That is good, and is generous of the Earth. He is right not to hurry. Ask him what he is doing.”

“Breeding dissension,” Egtverchi said, with a slight widening of his grin. Ruiz-Sanchez could not translate that literally; the concept was not in the Lithian language. It took him the better part of three long sentences to transmit even a dubious shadow of the idea to Chtexa.

“Then he is ill,” Chtexa said. “You should have told me, Ruiz-Sanchez. You had best send him to us. You cannot treat him adequately there.”

“He is not ill, and he will not go,” Ruiz-Sanchez said carefully. “He is a citizen of Earth and cannot be compelled. This is why I called you. He is a trouble to us, Chtexa. He is doing us hurts. I had hoped you might reason with him; we can do nothing.”

The anomalous sound, a sort of burring metallic whine, rose in the background and fell away again.

“That is not normal or natural,” Chtexa said. “You do not recognize his illness. No more do I, but I am not a physician. You must send him here. I see I was in error in giving him to you. Tell him he is commanded home by the Law of the Whole.”

“I never heard of the Law of the Whole,” Egtverchi said when this was translated for him. “I doubt that there is any such thing. I make up my own laws as I go along. Tell him he is making Lithia sound like a bore, and that if he keeps it up I'll make a point of never going there at all.”

“Blast it, Egtverchi — “ Michelis burst in.

“Hush, Mike, one pilot is enough. Egtverchi, you were willing to co-operate with us up to now; at least, you came here with us. Did you do it just for the pleasure of defying and insulting your father? Chtexa is far wiser than you are; why don't you stop acting like a child and listen to him?”

“Because I don't choose to,” Egtverchi said. “And you make me no more willing by wheedling, dear foster father. I didn't choose to be born a Lithian, and I didn't choose to be brought to Earth — but now that I'm a free agent I mean to make my own choices, and explain them to nobody if that's what pleases me.”

“Then why did you come here?”

“There's no reason why I should explain that, but I will. I came to hear my father's voice. Now I've heard it. I don't understand what he says, and he makes no better sense in your translation, and that's all there is to it as far as I am concerned. Bid him farewell for me — I shan't speak to him again.”

“What does he say?” Chtexa's voice said.

“That he does not acknowledge the Law of the Whole, and will not come home,” Ruiz-Sanchez told the microphone. The little instrument was slippery with sweat in his palm. “And he says to bid you farewell.”

“Farewell, then,” Ghtexa said. “And farewell to you, too, Ruiz-Sanchez. I am at fault, and this fills me with sorrow; but it is too late. I may not talk to you again, even by means of your marvelous instrument.”

Behind the voice, the strange, half-familiar whine rose to a savage, snarling scream which lasted almost a minute. Ruiz-Sanchez waited until he thought he could be heard over it again.

“Why not, Chtexa?” he said huskily. “The fault is ours as much as it is yours. I am still your friend, and wish you well.”

“And I am your friend, and wish you well,” Chtexa's voice said. “But we may not talk again. Can you not hear the power saws?”

So that was what that sound was!

“Yes. Yes, I hear them.”

“That is the reason,” Chtexa said. “Your friend Xlevher is cutting down the Message Tree.”

The gloom was thick in the Michelis apartment. As the time drew closer for Egtverchi's next broadcast, it became increasingly apparent that their analysis of the UN's essential helplessness had been correct. Egtverchi was not openly triumphant, though he was exposed to that temptation in several newspaper interviews; but he floated some disquieting hints of vast plans which might well be started in motion when he was next on the air. Ruiz-Sanchez had not the least desire to listen to the broadcast, but he had to face the fact that he would be unable to stay away from it. He could not afford to be without any new data that the program might yield. Nothing he had learned had done him any good thus far, but there was always the slim chance that something would turn up.

In the meantime, there was the problem of Cleaver, and his associates. However you looked at it, they were human souls. If Ruiz-Sanchez were to be driven, somehow, to the step that Hadrian VIII had commanded, and it did not fail, more than a set of attractive hallucinations would be lost. It would plunge several hundred human souls into instant death and more than probable damnation; Ruiz-Sanchez did not believe that the hand of God would reach forth to pluck to salvation men who were involved in such a project as Cleaver's, but he was equally convinced that his should not be the hand to condemn any man to death, let alone to an unshriven death. Ruiz was condemned already — but not yet of murder.

It had been Tannhauser who had been told that his salvation was as unlikely as the blossoming of the pilgrim's staff in his hand. And Ruiz-Sanchez' was as unlikely as sanctified murder.

Yet the Holy Father had commanded it; had said it was the only road back for Ruiz-Sanchez, and for the world. The Pope's clear implication had been that he shared with Ruiz-Sanchez the view that the world stood on the brink of Armageddon — and he had said flatly that only Ruiz-Sanchez could avert it. Their only difference was doctrinal, and in these matters the Pope could not err…

But if it was possible that the dogma of the infertility of Satan was wrong, then it was possible that the dogma of Papal infallibility was wrong. After all, it was a recent invention; quite a few Popes in history had got along without it. Heresies, Ruiz-Sanchez thought — not for the first time — come in snarls. It is impossible to pull free one thread; tug at one, and the whole mass begins to roll down upon you.

I believe, O Lord; help me in mine unbelief. But it was useless. It was as though he were praying to God's back.

There was a knock on his door. “Coming, Ramon?” Michelis' tired voice said. “He's due to go on in two minutes.”

“All right, Mike.”

They settled before the Klee, warily, already defeated, awaiting — what? It could only be a proclamation of total war. They were ignorant only of the form it would take.

“Good evening,” Egtverchi said warmly from the frame. “There will be no news tonight. Instead of reporting news, we will make some. The time has come, it is now plain, for the people to whom news happens — those hapless people whose grief-stricken, stunned faces look out at you from the newspapers and the 3-V 'casts such as mine — to throw off their helplessness. Tonight I call upon all of you to show your contempt for the hypocrites who are your bosses, and your total power to be free of them.

“You have a message for them. Tell them this: tell them, 'Your beasts, sirs, are a great people.'

“I will be the first. As of tonight, I renounce my citizenship in the United Nations, and my allegiance to the Shelter state. From now on I will be a citizen—”

Michelis was on his feet, shouting incoherently.

“ — a citizen of no country but that bounded by the limits of my own mind. I do not know what those limits are, and I may never find out, but I shall devote my life to searching for them, in whatever manner seems good to me, and in no other manner whatsoever.

“You must do the same. Tear up your registration cards. If you are asked your serial number, tell them you never had one. Never fill in another form. Stay above ground when the siren sounds. Stake out plots; grow crops; abandon the corridors. Do not commit any violence; simply refuse to obey. Nobody has the. right to compel you, as non-citizens. Passivity is the key. Renounce, resist, deny!

“Begin now. In half an hour they will overwhelm you. When—”

An urgent buzzer sounded over Egtverchi's voice, and for an instant a checkerboard pattern in red and black blotted out bis figure: the UN's crash-priority signal, overriding the bypass recording circuit. Then the face of the UN man looked out at them from under its funny hat, with Egtverchi underlying it dimly, his exhortations only a whisper in the background.

“Dr. Michelis,” the UN man said exultantly. “He's done it. He's overreached himself. As a non-citizen, he's right in our hands. Get down here — we need you right away, before he gets off the air. Dr. Meid too.”

“What for?”

“To sign pleas of nolo contendere. Both of you are under arrest for keeping a wild animal — a technicality only; don't be alarmed. But we have to have you. We mean to put Mr. Egtverchi in a cage for the rest of his life — a soundproof cage.”

“You are making a mistake,” Ruiz-Sanchez said quietly.

The UN man's face, a mask of triumph with blazing eyes, swung toward him briefly.

“I didn't ask what you thought, Mister,” he said. “I have no orders concerning you, but as far as I'm concerned, you've been closed out of this case entirely. If you try to force your way back in, you'll get burned. Dr. Michelis, Dr. Meid? Do we have to come and get you?”

“We'll come,” Michelis said stonily. “Sign off.” He did not wait for the UN man, however, but killed the set himself.

“Do you think we should do it, Ramon?” he said. “If not, we'll stay right here, and the hell with him. Or we'll take you along if you want.”

“No, no,” Ruiz-Sanchez said. “Go ahead. No balking on your part will accomplish a thing but getting you both in deep trouble. Do me one favor, though.”

“Gladly. What is it?”

“Stay off the streets. When you get to the UN offices, make them keep you there. As arrested citizens, you have the right to be jailed.” Michelis and Liu both stared at him. Then comprehension began to break over Michelis' face.

“You think it will be that bad?” he said.

“Yes, I do. Do I have your promise?”

Michelis looked at Liu and nodded grimly. They went out The collapse of the Shelter state had already begun.

XVIII

The beast Chaos roared on unslaked for three days. Ruiz-Sanchez was able to follow much of its progress from the beginning, via the Michelises' 3-V set. There were times when he would also have liked to look out over the sun porch rail, but the roar of the mob, the shots, explosions, police whistles, sirens, and unnamable noises had driven the bees frantic; under such conditions he would not have trusted Liu's protective garments for an instant, even had they been large enough for him. The UN squads had made a well-organized attempt to bear Egtverchi off directly from the broadcasting station, but Egtverchi was not there — in fact, he had never been there at all. The audio, video and tri-di signals had all been piped into the station via coaxial cable from some unspecified place. The necessary connections had been made at the last minute, when it became obvious that Egtverchi was not going to show up, by a technician who had volunteered word of the actual situation; a sacrifice piece in Egtverchi's gambit. The network had sent an alert to the proper UN officers at once, but another sacrifice piece saw to it that the alert was shunted through channels. It took nearly all night to sweat out of the QBC technician the location of Egtverchi's studio (the stooge at the UN obviously did not know) and by that time, of course, he was no longer there either. Also by that time, the news of the attempted arrest and the misfire was being blared and headlined in every Shelter in the world.

Even this much did not get to Ruiz-Sanchez until somewhat later, for the noise in the street began immediately after the first announcement had been made. At first it was disconnected and random, as though the streets were gradually filling with people who were angry or upset but were divided over what, if anything, they ought to do about it. Then there was a sudden change in the quality of the sound, and instantly Ruiz-Sanchez knew that the transformation from a gathering to a mob had been made. The shouting could not very well have become any louder, but abruptly it was a frightening uniform growl, like the enormous voice of a single animal.

He had no way of knowing what had triggered the change, and perhaps the crowd itself never knew either. But now the shots began — not many, but one shot is a fusillade if there have been no shots before. A part of the overall roar detached itself and took on an odd and even more frightening hollow sound; only when the floor shook slightly under him did he realize what that meant.

A pseudopod of the beast had thrust itself into the building.

Ruiz-Sanchez realized that he should have expected nothing else. The fad of living above ground was still essentially a privilege, reserved to those UN employees and officials who knew how to get the necessary and elaborate permissions, and who furthermore had enough income to support such an inconvenient arrangement; it was the twenty-first century's version of commuting from Maine — here was where they lived.

Ruiz-Sanchez checked the door hastily. It had elaborate locks — left over from the last period of the Shelter race, when the great untended buildings had been natural targets for looters — but they had gone unused for years. Ruiz-Sanchez used them all now.

He was just in time. There was an obscene shouting in the corridor just outside as part of the mob burst into it from the fire stairs. They had avoided the elevator by instinct — it was too slow to sustain their thoughtless ferocity, too confined for lawlessness, too mechanical for men who were letting their muscles do their thinking.

Somebody rattled the door knob and then shook it.

“Locked,” a muffled voice said.

“Break the damned thing down. Here, get out of the way—”

The door shuddered, but held easily. There was another, harder thump, as though several men had lunged against it at the same time; Ruiz-Sanchez could hear them grunt with the impact Then there were five hammerlike blows.

“Open up in there! Open up, you lousy government fink, or we'll burn you out!”

The spontaneous threat seemed to surprise them all, even the utterer. There was a confused whispering. Then someone said hoarsely: “All right, but find some paper or something.” Ruiz-Sanchez thought confusedly of finding and filling a bucket, though he could not see how any fire could be introduced around the door — there was no transom, and the sill was snug — but at the same time a blurred shout from farther down the hall seemed to draw everyone outside stampeding away. The subsequent noises made it clear that they had found either an open, empty apartment, or an inadequately secured, occupied one where nobody was at home.

Yes, it was occupied; Ruiz-Sanchez could hear them breaking furniture as well as windows.

Then, with a shock of terror, their voices began to come at him from behind his back. He whirled, but there seemed to be nobody in the apartment; the shouting was coming from the glassed-in sun porch, but of course there was nobody out there either —

“Jesus! Look, the guy's got his porch glassed in. It's a goddam garden.”

“They don't let you have no goddam gardens in the Shelters.”

“And you know who paid for it. Us, that's who.”

He realized that they were on the neighboring balcony. He felt a surge of relief which he knew to be irrational. The next words confirmed its irrationality.

“Get some of that kindling out here, “No, heavier stuff. Something to throw, you meathead.”

“Can we get over there from here?”

“If we could throw a ladder across there—”

“It's a long way down—”

The leg of a chair burst through the glass on the sun porch. A heavy vase followed.

The bees came pouring out. Ruiz-Sanchez had not realized how many of them there were. The porch was black with them. For a moment they hovered uncertainly. They would have found the gaps in the glass almost at once in any event, but the men on the next porch, who could not have understood what it was they were seeing, gave the great insects the perfect cue. Something small and massive, possibly a torn-off piece of plumbing, shattered another pane and whirled through the midst of the cloud. Snarling like an old-fashioned aircraft engine, the bees swarmed.

Ruiz-Sanchez pushed at it, but it was partly locked. He got it open about six inches and wormed through.

The contorted man on the floor, his incredibly puffed, taut skin slowly turning black, his eyes glassy with agony, was Agronski.

The geologist did not recognize him; he was already beyond that. There was no mind behind the eyes. Ruiz-Sanchez fell to his knees, clumsily in the tight protective clothing. He heard himself begin to mutter the rites, but he was no more hearing the Latin words than Agronski was.

This could be no coincidence. He had come here to give grace, if such a one as he could still give grace; and before him was the most blameless of the Lithian commission, struck down where Ruiz-Sanchez would be sure to find him. It was the God of Job who was abroad in the world now, not the God of the Psalmist or the Christ. The face that was bent upon Ruiz-Sanchez was the face of the avenging, the jealous God — the God who made hell before He made man, because He knew that He would have need of it. That terrible truth Dante had written down; and in the black face with the protruding tongue which rolled beside Ruiz-Sanchez' knee, he saw that Dante had been right, as every Catholic who reads the Divine Comedy knows in his heart of hearts.

There is a demonolater abroad in the world. He shall be deprived of grace, and then called upon to administer extreme unction to a friend. By this sign, let him know himself for what he is.

After a while, Agronski was dead, choked to death by his own tongue. But still it was not over. It was necessary now to make Mike's apartment secure, kill any bees that might have got in, see to it that the escaped swarm died. It was easy enough. Ruiz-Sanchez simply papered over the broken panes on the sun porch. The. bees could not feed anywhere but in Liu's garden; they would come back there within a few hours; denied entrance, they would die of starvation an hour or so later. A bee is not a well-designed flying-machine; it keeps itself in the air by expending energy, in short, by pure brute force. A trapped bumblebee can starve to death in half a day, and Liu's tetraploid monsters would die far sooner of their freedom…

The 3-V muttered away throughout the dreary business. The terror was not local, that was clear. The Corridor Riots of 1993 had been nothing but a premonitory flicker, compared to this.

Four target areas were blacked out completely. Egtverchi's uniformed thugs, suddenly reappearing from nowhere in force, had seized the control centers. At the moment, they were holding roughly twenty-five million people as hostages for Egtverchi's safe-conduct, with the active collusion of perhaps five million of them. The violence elsewhere was not as systematic, though some of the outbursts of wrecking must have been carefully planned to allow for the placing of the explosives alone, there seemed to be no special pattern to it — but in no case could it be described as “passive” or “non-violent.”

Sick, wretched and damned, Ruiz-Sanchez waited in the Michelises' jungle apartment, as though part of Lithia had followed him home and enfolded him there.

After the first three days, the fury had exhausted itself sufficiently to permit Michelis and Liu to risk the trip back to their apartment in a UN armored car. They were wan and ghastly-looking, as Ruiz-Sanchez supposed he was himself; they had had even less sleep than he had. He decided at once to say nothing about Agronski; that horror they could be spared. There was no way, however, that he could avoid explaining what had happened to the bees.

Liu's sad little shrug was somehow even harder to bear than Agronski.

“Did they find him yet?” Ruiz-Sanchez said huskily.

“We were going to ask you the same thing,” Michelis said. The tall New Englander was able to get a glimpse of himself in a mirror above a planting box and winced. “Ugh, what a beard! At the UN everybody's too busy to tell you anything, except in fragments. We thought you might have heard an announcement.”

“No, nothing. The Detroit vigilantes have surrendered, according to QBC.”

“Yes, so have those goons in Smolensk ; they ought to be putting that on the air in an hour or so. I never did think they'd succeed in pulling that operation off. They can't possibly know the corridors as well as the target area authorities themselves do. In Smolensk they got them with the fire door system — drained all the oxygen out of the area they were holding without their realizing what was going on. Two of them never came to.”

Ruiz-Sanchez crossed himself automatically. Up on the wall, the Klee muttered in a low voice; it had not been off since Egtverchi's broadcast.

“I don't know whether I want to listen to that damn thing or not,” Michelis said sourly. Nevertheless, he turned up the volume. There was still essentially no news. The rioting was dying back, though it was as bad as ever in some shelters. The Smolensk announcement was duly made, bare of detail. Egtverchi had not yet been located, but UN officials expected a break in the case “shortly.”

“'Shortly,' hell,” Michelis said. “They've run out of leads entirely. They thought they had him cold the next morning, when they found a trail to the hideaway where he'd arranged to tide himself over and direct things. But he wasn't there — apparently he'd gotten out in a hurry, some time before. And nobody in his organization knows where he would go next — he was supposed to be there, and they're thoroughly demoralized to be told that he's not.”

“Which means that he's on the run,” Ruiz-Sanchez suggested.

“Yes, I suppose that's some consolation,” Michelis said. “But where could he run to, where he wouldn't be recognized? And how would he run? He couldn't just gallop naked through the streets, or take a public conveyance. It takes organization to ship something as outré as that secretly — and Egtverchi's organization is as baffled about it as the UN is.” He turned the 3-V off with a savage gesture.

Liu turned to Ruiz-Sanchez, her expression appalled beneath its weariness.

“Then it's really not over after all?” she said hopelessly.

“Far from it,” Ruiz-Sanchez said. “But maybe the violent phase of it is over. If Egtverchi stays vanished for a few days more, I'll conclude that he is dead. He couldn't stay unsighted that long if he were still moving about. Of course his death won't solve most of the major problems, but at least it would remove one sword from over our heads.”

Even that, he recognized silently, was wishful thinking. Besides, can you kill a hallucination?

“Well, I hope the UN has learned something,” Michelis said.

“There's one thing you have to say for Egtverchi: he got the public to bring up all the unrest that's been smoldering down under the concrete for all these years. And underneath all the apparent conformity, too. We're going to have to do something about that now — maybe take sledgehammers in our hands and pound this damned Shelter system down into rubble and start over. It wouldn't cost any more than rebuilding what's already been destroyed. One thing's certain: the UN won't be able to smother a revolt of this size in slogans. They'll have to do something.”

The Klee chimed.

“I won't answer it,” Michelis said through gritted teeth. “I won't answer it. I've had enough.”

“I think we'd better, Mike,” Liu said. “It might be news.”

“News!” Michelis said, like a swearword. But he allowed himself to be persuaded. Underneath all the weariness, Ruiz-Sanchez thought he could detect something like a return of warmth between the two, as though, during the three days, some depth had been sounded which they had never touched before. The slight sigh of something good astonished him. Was he beginning, like all demonolaters, to take pleasure in the prevalence of evil, or at least in the expectation of it?

The caller was the UN man. His face was very strange underneath his funny hat, and his head was cocked as if to catch the first word. Suddenly, blindingly, Ruiz-Sanchez saw the hat in the light of the attitude, and realized what it was: an elaborately disguised hearing aid. The UN man was deaf and, like most deaf people, ashamed of it. The rest of the apparatus was a decoy.

“Dr. Michelis, Dr. Meid, Dr. Ruiz,” he said. “I don't know how to begin. Yes, I do. My deepest apologies for past rudeness. And past damn foolishness. We were wrong — my God, but we were wrong. It's your turn now. We need you badly, if you feel like doing us a favor. I won't blame you if you don't.”

“No threats?” Michelis said, with unforgiving contempt.

“No, no threats. My apologies, please. No, this is purely a favor, requested by the Security Council.” His face twisted suddenly, and then was composed once more. “I volunteered to present the petition. We need you all, right away, on the Moon.”

“On the Moon! Why?”

“We've found Egtverchi.”

“Impossible,” Ruiz-Sanchez said, more sharply than he had intended. “He could never have gotten passage. Is he dead?”

“No, he's not dead. And he's not on the Moon, I didn't mean to imply that.”

“Then where is he, in God's name?”

“He's on his way back to Lithia.”

The trip to the Moon, by ferry-rocket, was rough, hectic and long. As the sole space voyage now being made in which the Haertel overdrive could not be used — across so short a distance, a Haertel ship would have overshot the target — very little improvement in techniques had been made in the trip since the old von Braun days. It was only after they had been bundled off the rocket into the moonboat, for the slow, paddle-wheel-driven trip across the seas of dust to the Comte d'Averoigne's observatory, that Ruiz-Sanchez managed to piece the whole story together.

Egtverchi had been found aboard the vessel that was shipping the final installment of equipment to Cleaver, when the ship was two days out. He was half-dead. In a final, desperate improvisation, he had had himself crated, addressed to Cleaver, marked “FRAGILE — RADIOACTIVE — THIS END UP,” and shipped via ordinary express into the spaceport. Even a normally raised Lithian would have been shaken up by this kind of treatment, and Egtverchi, in addition to being a spindling specimen of his race, had been on the run for many hours before being shipped.

The vessel, by no very great coincidence, was also carrying the pilot model of the Petard CirCon; the captain got the news back to the count on the first test, and the count passed it along to the UN by ordinary radio. Egtverchi was in irons now, but he was well and cheerful. Since it was impossible for the ship to turn back, the UN was now, in effect, doing his running for him, at a good many times the speed of light.

Ruiz-Sanchez found a trace of pity in his heart for the born exile, harried now like a wild animal, penned behind bars, on his way back to a fatherland for which no experience in his life had fitted him, whose very language he could not speak. But when the UN man began to question them all — what was needed was some knowledgeable estimate of what Egtverchi might do next — his pity did not survive his speculations. It was right and proper to pity children, but Ruiz-Sanchez was beginning to believe that adults generally deserve any misfortune that they get.

The impact of a creature like Egtverchi on the stable society of Lithia would be explosive. On Earth, at least, he had been a freak; on Lithia, he would soon be taken for another Lithian, however odd. And Earth had had centuries of experience with deranged and displaced messiahs like Egtverchi; such a thing had never happened before on Lithia. Egtverchi would infect that garden down to the roots, and remake it in his own image — transforming the planet into that hypothetical dangerous enemy against whose advent Cleaver had wanted to make it an arsenal!

Yet something like that had happened when Earth was a stable garden, too. Perhaps — O felix culpa! — it always happened that way, on every world.

Perhaps the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil was like the Yggdrasil of the legends of Pope Hadrian's birthland, with its roots in the floor of the universe, its branches bearing the planets — and whosoever would eat of its fruit might eat thereof…

No, that must not be. Lithia as a rigged Garden had been dangerous enough; but Lithia transformed into a planet-wide fortress of Dis was a threat to Heaven itself.

The Count d'Averoigne's main observatory had been built by the UN, to his specifications, approximately in the center of the crater Stadius, a once towering cup which early in its history had been swamped and partially melted in the outpouring sea of lava which made the Mare-Imbrium. What remained of its walls served the count's staff as a meteor — rampart during showers, yet they were low enough to be well below the horizon from the center of the crater, giving the count what was effectively a level plain in all directions. He looked no different than he had when they had first met, except that he was wearing brown coveralls instead of a brown suit, but he seemed glad to see them. Ruiz-Sanchez suspected that he was sometimes lonely, or perhaps lonely all the time — not only because of his current isolation on the Moon, but in his continuing remoteness from his family and indeed the whole of ordinary humanity.

“I have a surprise for you,” he told them. “We've just completed the new telescope — six hundred feet in diameter, all of sodium foil, perched on top of Mount Piton a few hundred miles north of here. The relay cables were brought through to Stadius yesterday, and I was up all night testing my circuits. They have been made a little neater since you last saw them.” This was an understatement. The breadboard rigs had vanished entirely; the object the count was indicating now was nothing but a black enamel box about the size of a tape recorder, and with only about that many knobs.

“Of course to do this is simpler than picking up a broadcast from a transmitter that doesn't have CirCon, like the Tree,” the count admitted. “But the results are just as gratifying. Regard.” He snapped a switch dramatically. On a large screen on the opposite wall of the dark observatory chamber, a cloud-wrapped planet swam placidly.

“My God!” Michelis said in a choked voice. “That's — is that Lithia, Count d'Averoigne? I'd swear it is.”

“Please,” the count said. “Here I'm Dr. Petard. But yes, that's Lithia; its sun is visible from the Moon a little over twelve days of the month. It's fifty light-years away, but here we see it at an apparent distance of a quarter of a million miles, give or take ten thousand — about the distance of the Moon from the Earth. It's remarkable how much light you can gather with a six-hundred-foot paraboloid of sodium when there's no atmosphere in the way. Of course with an atmosphere we couldn't maintain the foil, either — the gravity here is almost too much for it.”

“It's stunning,” Liu murmured.

“That's only the beginning, Dr. Meid. We have spanned not only the space, but also the time — both together, as is only appropriate. What we are seeing is Lithia today — right now, in fact — not Lithia fifty years ago.”

“Congratulations,” Michelis said, his voice hushed. “Of course the scholium was the real achievement — but you threw up an installation in record time, too, it seems to me.”

“It seems that way to me, too,” the count said, taking his cigar out of his mouth and regarding it complacently. “Are we going to be able to catch the ship's landing?” the UN man said intensely.

“No, I'm afraid not, unless I have my dates wrong. According to the schedule you gave me, the landing was supposed to have taken place yesterday, and I can't back my device up and down the time spectrum. The equations nail it to simultaneity, and simultaniety is what I get — neither more, nor less.”

His voice changed color suddenly. The change transformed him from a fat man delighted with a new toy into the philosopher-mathematician Henri Petard as no disclaimer of his hereditary title could ever have done.

“I invited you to hold your conference here,” he said, “because I thought you should all be witnesses to an event which I hope profoundly is not going to happen. I will explain:

“Recently I was asked to check the reasoning on which Dr. Cleaver based the experiment he has programmed for today. Briefly, the experiment is an attempt to store the total output of a Nernst generator for a period of about ninety seconds, through a special adaptation of what is called the pinch effect.

“I found the reasoning faulty — not obviously, Dr. Cleaver is too careful a craftsman for that, but seriously, all the same. Since lithium 6 is ubiquitous on that planet, any failure would be totally disastrous. I sent Dr. Cleaver an urgent message on the CirCon, to be tape-recorded on the ship that landed yesterday; I would have used the Tree, but of course that has been cut down, and I doubt that he would have accepted any such message from a Lithian had it not been. The captain of the ship promised me that the tape would be delivered to Dr. Cleaver before any of the remaining apparatus was unloaded. But I know Dr. Cleaver. He is bullheaded. Is that not so?”

“Yes,” Michelis said. “God knows that's so.”

“Well, we are ready,” Dr. Petard said. “As ready as we can be. I have instruments to record the event. Let us pray that I won't need them.”

The count was a lapsed Catholic; his injunction was a habit. But Ruiz-Sanchez could no more pray for any such thing than the count could — and no more could he leave the outcome to chance. St. Michael's sword had been put into his hand now so unmistakably that even a fool could not fail to recognize it. The Holy Father had known it would be so, and had planned for it with the skill of a Disraeli. Ruiz-Sanchez shuddered to think what a less politically minded Pope would have made of such an opportunity, but of course it had been God's will that this should happen in the time of Hadrian and not during any other pontificate. By specifically ruling out any formal excommunication, Hadrian had reserved to Ruiz-Sanchez' use the one gift of grace which was pertinent to the occasion at hand. And perhaps he had seen, too, that the time Ruiz-Sanchez had devoted to the elaborate, capriciously hypercomplex case of conscience in the Joyce novel had been time wasted; there was a much simpler case, one of the classical situations, which applied if Ruiz-Sanchez could only see it. It was the case of the sick child, for whose recovery prayers were offered.

These days, most sick children recovered in a day or so, after a shot of spectrosigmin or some similar drug, even from the brink of the terminal coma. Question: Has prayer failed, and temporal science wrought the recovery?

Answer; No, for prayer is always answered, and no man may choose for God the means He uses to answer it. Surely a miracle like a life-saving antibiotic is not unworthy of the bounty of God.

And this, too, was the answer to the riddle of the Great Nothing. The Adversary is not creative, except in the sense that He always seeks evil, and always does good. He cannot claim any of the credit for temporal science, nor imply truthfully that a success for temporal science is a failure, for prayer. In this as in all other matters, He is compelled to lie.

And there on Lithia was Cleaver, agent of the Great Nothing, foredoomed to failure, the very task to which he was putting his hand in the Adversary's service tottering on the edge of undoing all His work. The staff of Tannhauser had blossomed: These fruits are shaken from the wrath-bearing tree.

Yet even as Ruiz-Sanchez rose, the searing words of Pope Gregory VIII trembling on his lips, he hesitated still again. What if he were wrong after all? Suppose, just suppose, that Lithia were Eden , and that the Earth-bred Lithian who had just returned there were the Serpent foreordained for it? Suppose it always happened that way, world without end?

The voice of the Great Nothing, pouring forth lies to the last.

Ruiz-Sanchez raised his hand. His shaken voice resounded and echoed in the cave of the observatory.

“I, A PRIEST OF CHRIST, DO COMMAND YE, MOST FOUL SPIRITS WHO DO STIR UP THESE CLOUDS—”

“What? For heaven's sake, be quiet,” the UN man said irritably. Everyone else was staring in wonder, and in Liu's glance there appeared to be a little fear. Only the count's glance was knowing and solemn.

“ — THAT YE DEPART FROM THEM, AND DISPERSE YOURSELVES INTO WILD AND UNTILLED PLACES, THAT YE MAY BE NO LONGER ABLE TO HARM MEN OR ANIMALS OR FRUITS OR HERBS, OR WHATSOEVER IS DESIGNED FOR HUMAN USE:

“AND THOU GREAT NOTHING, THOU LUSTFUL AND STUPID ONE, SCROFA STERCORATE, THOU SOOTY SPIRIT FROM TARTARUS, I CAST THEE DOWN, O PORCARIE PEDICOSE, INTO THE INFERNAL KITCHEN:

“BY THE APOCALYPSE OF JESUS CHRIST, WHICH GOD HATH GIVEN TO MAKE KNOWN UNTO HIS SERVANTS THOSE THINGS WHICH ARE SHORTLY TO BE; AND HATH SIGNIFIED, SENDING BY HIS ANGEL; I EXORCISE THEE, ANGEL OF PERVERSITY:

“BY THE SEVEN GOLD CANDLESTICKS, AND BY ONE LIKE UNTO THE SON OF MAN, STANDING IN THE MIDST OF THE CANDLESTICKS; BY HIS VOICE, AS THE VOICE OF MANY WATERS; BY HIS WORDS, 'I AM LIVING, WHO WAS DEAD; AND BEHOLD, I LIVE FOREVER AND EVER; AND I HAVE THE KEYS OF DEATH AND OF HELL;' I SAY UNTO YOU, ANGEL OF PERDITION: DEPART, DEPART, DEPART!”

The echoes rang and dwindled. The lunar silence flowed back, underlined by the breathing of the people in the observatory and the sound of pumps laboring somewhere beneath.

And slowly, and without a sound, the cloudy planet on the screen turned white all over. The clouds and the dim oceans and continents blended into a blue-white glare which shone out from the screen like a searchlight. It seemed to penetrate their bloodless faces down to the bone.

Slowly, slowly, it all melted away: the chirruping forests, Chtexa's porcelain house, the barking lungfish, the stump of the Message Tree, the wild allosaurs, the single silver moon, the great beating heart of Blood Lake, the city of the potters, the flying squid, the Lithian crocodile and his winding track, the tall noble reasoning creatures and the mystery and the beauty around them. Suddenly the whole of Lithia began to swell, like a balloon —

The count tried to turn the screen off, but he was too late. Before he could touch the black box, the whole circuit went out with a puffing of fuses. The intolerable light vanished instantly; the screen went black, and the universe with it. They sat blinded and stunned.

“An error in Equation Sixteen,” the count's voice said harshly in the swimming darkness.

No, Ruiz-Sanchez thought, no. An instance of fulfilled desire. He had wanted to use Lithia to defend the faith, and he had been given that. Cleaver had wanted to turn it into a fusion-bomb plant, and he had got that in full measure, all at once. Michelis had seen in it a prophecy of infallible human love, and had been stretched on that rack ever since. And Agronski — Agronski had wanted nothing to change, and now was unchangeably nothing.

In the darkness, there was a long, ragged sigh. For a moment, Ruiz-Sanchez could not place the voice; he thought it was Liu. But no. It was Mike.

“When we have our eyesight back,” the count's voice said, “I propose that we suit up and go outside. We have a nova to watch for.”

That was only a maneuver, an act of misdirection on the count's part — an act of kindness. He knew well enough that that nova would not be visible to the naked eye until the next Holy Year, fifty years to come; and he knew that they knew.

Nevertheless, when Father Ramon Ruiz-Sanchez, sometime Clerk Regular in the Society of Jesus, could see again, they had left him alone with his God and his grief.