CANTATA-141

12

Within one week the initial collection of bibs passed through the Jiffi-scuttler and into another world entirely, to virtually everyone's satisfaction. On TV the country watched it and in person

Leon Turpin, President Schwarz, the Republican-Liberal candidate James Briskin, and Darius

Pethel - who owned the 'scuttler - and other pertinent notables looked on with a galaxy of emotions, most of them concealed.

The darn fools, Dar Pethel thought as he watched the steady line of men and women trudge past the entrance hoop. It made him sick to his stomach, and he turned and walked to the far end of

TD's lab, to light a cigarette. Don't they know what's going to happen to them on the other side ?

Don't they care ? Doesn't anyone care ?

I ought to close it down, Pethel said to himself. It's my 'scuttler. And I've decided I don't want it used for this, not now, not after my trip over there, that 'hopper ride back across the Atlantic with

Bill Smith.

He wondered where Bill Smith, the Peking man, was now. Perhaps at Yale Psychiatric Institute or some such august place, being put through aptitude and profile tests, one after another. And of course being subjected to relentless questioning regarding the ingredients of his culture.

Some of Bill Smith's testimony had leaked to the homeopapes. The Pekes had not, for instance, discovered glass. Rubber, too, was unknown to them, as were electricity, gunpowder, and, of course, atomic energy. But, more mysteriously, both clocks and the steam engine had never been stumbled onto or developed by the Pekes, and Dar Pethel could make no sense out of that. In fact, their entire society was an enigma to him.

However, one thing was certain: there had been no Thomas Edison on alter-Earth. Phonographs, light bulbs, and, for that matter, the telephone and even the ancient telegraph, were absent. What inventions they did have - for example the technique of laying crushed rock roads - had been developed over enormously long periods, microscopically elaborated by each generation mosaicstyle.

Except for the odd, complex compressor and turbine system, nothing seemed to have come to the Pekes in a single creative leap.

The device by which the QB satellite had been knocked off remained a mystery; Bill Smith knew nothing about it, according to the homeopapes, and knew nothing even of the satellite. The linguistics machine appeared to be unable to clarify the situation.

Jim Briskin, as he also watched, found himself dwelling on the gloomier aspects of the situation.

Where we made our mistake, he decided, was in not coming to some kind of rapprochement with the Pithecanthropi. It should have been done before a single emigrant crossed over ... now, of course, it's too late. But of course President Schwarz had to proceed swiftly if this was to become a way of stealing Jim Briskin's thunder. Both men knew this. In his situation, Jim mulled, I

probably would have done the same.

But that doesn't make it any less lethal.

Standing beside him, Sal Heim murmured, 'When do you think they'll be streaming back ? Or will they be able to get back ?'

'Cally Vale stood it. Alone. Possibly they can adapt; it's certainly more viable an environment than Mars.' In fact, there was no comparison. Mars was utterly impossible and everyone knew it.

'It all depends on the reaction of the Peking people.' And, he reflected, since the Schwarz administration couldn't wait to find that out, we'll have to learn it the hard way. In terms of the loss of human life.

'What I'm trying to figure out,' Sal murmured, 'is whether the public still identifies you with this or whether Schwarz has succeeded in....'

'Even if you knew that,' Jim said, 'you wouldn't know anything. Because we don't know yet what the upshot of this mass migration is going to be, and I have a feeling that when we find out it won't matter who gets the credit for it; well all be in the pot together.'

Sal said, 'I heard an interesting rumor on my way here. You're aware that George Walt have been missing since they shut down the Golden Door. According to this rumor ...' Sal chuckled. 'They emigrated.'

Feeling a pervasive, shocked chill, Jim said, "They what ? To alter-Earth, you mean ?'

'Right through this 'scuttler, here, that we're looking at.'

'But that ought to be easy to check on. If George Walt had passed through, TD's engineers would certainly remember; they could hardly mistake George Walt for anybody else.' He was now deeply disturbed. 'I'll see what Leon Turpin has to say about it.'

'Don't be so sure George Walt would be noticed,' Sal said. 'He, the actual living brother, may have carried his synthetic twin over in dissembled form, identified as maintenance and colonizing equipment; everyone who goes across carries something, some of them a couple tons.'

'Why would George Walt emigrate ?' In fact, why had they shut the satellite down ? Nobody had been able to explain that to his satisfaction, although a number of theories had been floating around, the central one being that George Walt anticipated Jim's election and realized that their day had virtually arrived.

'Maybe the Pekes will take care of them,' Sal offered. 'They would be rather a disheartening apparition, appearing in their midst; the Pekes might take it as a bad omen and cast the two of them back here in pieces.'

'Who would be able to find this out ?' Jim said.

'You mean what George Walt are up to on the other side - assuming they're there ? Perhaps Tito

Cravelli.'

'How would Tito know ? He doesn't have any contacts among the Peking people.'

Sal said, 'Tito keeps tabs on everything.'

'Not on this,' Jim disagreed. 'George Walt, if they've crossed over, have gone where we can't scrutinize them; that's the cold, hard truth and we might as well face it.' Broodingly he said, 'If I

was positive they'd crossed over, I think I'd seriously plead with TD to shut the 'scuttler down.

To keep them bottled up over there, for the rest of eternity.'

'Are you that much afraid of George Walt ?'

'Sometimes I am. Especially very late at night. I am right now, hearing about this.' He moved a little away from Sal Heim, feeling depressed. 'I thought we were through with George Walt," he said.

Through with them ? Without killing them ?' Sal laughed.

I guess in the final analysis I'm not very bright, Jim Briskin said to himself glumly. We should have finished it, up there at the satellite, when we almost had them. Instead we chose to shuffle naively back to Terra, for what seemed a good idea at the time: a cup of hot syntho-coffee.

Now, it did not seem very brilliant. The passage of even a little time was a great edifier.

Sal said sardonically, 'Hell, Jim, maybe you won their respect by being so charitable.' He obviously did not think so. Far from it.

'You're a great second-guesser,' Jim said, with bitterness. 'Where were you with your advice then ?'

Sal said quietly, 'Nobody expected them to do something so radical as close the Golden Door.

What happened up there on the satellite that day must really have shaken them.'

Coming up beside him, ancient Leon Turpin leered happily and cackled, 'Well, Briskin, or whatever you call yourself, that's the first batch of bibs. Historic, isn't it ? Makes you feel young again, doesn't it ? Say something. At least, smile.' To Sal he said, 'Is he always this solemn ?'

'Jim runs deep, Mr. Turpin,' Sal said. 'You have to get accustomed to it.'

'Just wait until we get that rent enlarged,' Turpin wheezed. 'My boys have been on it all week and tonight they're going to hook up an entirely different power source; it's all plotted out, rechecked dozens of times. By tomorrow morning, we should have a hole two to three times bigger. And then we can really hustle them through. Zip.' He made a quick gesture.

'Have you made thorough provision,' Jim said, 'to receive them back in the event something goes wrong on the other side ?'

'Well,' Leon Turpin conceded, 'the 'scuttler will be turned off most of the night as the boys work it over. Nobody can pass through then, of course. But we weren't expecting any trouble. At least not so soon.'

Sal and Jim glanced at each other.

'President Schwarz said it would be agreeable,' Turpin added. 'After all, our contract is with the

Dept of SPW. We're acting well within the law. There's nothing that compels us to keep the

'scuttler running at all times.'

God pity those colonists, Jim Briskin said to himself, if anything does go wrong tonight.

"They know about the Pekes,' Turpin protested. 'It's been in the papes constantly; nothing's been concealed from them; as soon as they were revived the situation was explained to them in detail.

Nobody forced them to go.'

Jim said, 'They were given the choice of going across or being put back to sleep.' He knew that for a fact; Tito had informed him.

'As far as I'm concerned,' Leon Turpin said sulkily, 'those people are over there voluntarily. And any risk they're taking - '

You skunk, Jim Briskin thought.

It was going to be a long night. At least for him.

At eleven p.m. Tito Cravelli received from one of his almost infinite number of paid contacts a piece of news which did not resemble anything he had ever picked up before. Frankly, he did not know whether to laugh or rush to the tocsin; it was simply too goddam peculiar. He mixed himself a whiskey sour in the kitchen of his conap and pondered. The datum had reached him by a circuitous route; initially it had been piped from a TD exploration team on the other side of the

'scuttler nexus, prior to the shutting-down of the 'scuttler, and from there to Bohegian, whereupon Earl had of course relayed it to him. Was it possibly a gag ? If he could regard it that way, it would be a distinct relief. But he could not afford to; it might be bona fide. And in that case...

Back in the living room, he dialed Jim Briskin's number. 'Listen to this,' Cravelli said, when he had Jim on the vidscreen. He did not bother to apologize for waking Jim up; that hardly mattered. 'See what you can make out of this. George Walt is with the Pekes, at their population center in northern Europe. TD's field corps believes they made contact with the Pekes somewhere in North America, and the Pekes then transported them across the Atlantic.'

'So quickly ?' Jim said. 'I thought they had nothing better than slow surface ships.'

'Here's the substance of it. The Pekes have installed George Walt at their capital and are worshipping them as a god.'

There was silence.

Finally Jim said, 'How - did the TD field corps find this out ?'

'From parleys with North American Pekes. They've been palavering continually; you know that.

Those linguistics machines have been droning on night and day. The Pekes are - dazzled. Well, weren't we a little in awe of George Walt ourselves ? It's not so odd when you think of it. I'd make book that George Walt went there anticipating some such reaction as that; they probably did some groundwork In advance.'

Jim said cryptically, 'Another one of Sal's predictions bites the dust.' He looked weary. 'Cravelli, you know we're over our head. Schwarz is over his head. If someone suggested shutting - '

'And strand those people over there ?'

"They can be brought back tomorrow morning. And then it could be shut down.'

'There's too much momentum behind it now,' Cravelli pointed out. 'You can't turn off a mass movement like that. In Dept of SPW warehouses all over the United States, they're rousing the sleepers right and left. Assembling equipment, arranging transportation to Washington, D.C. -'

'I'll call Schwarz,' Jim said.

'He won't listen to you. He'll think you're just trying to regain a primary relationship to the project, a relationship which he inherited by moving so quickly. Schwarz has the initiative now,

Jim, not you. His whole political life depends on pushing those bibs across as fast as possible.

Fix yourself a great big stiff type drink. That's what I did. And then go back to bed. I'll talk to you again in the morning. Maybe in the light of day we can hatch something out.' But he didn't think so.

Jim said, 'I'll talk to Leon Turpin, then.'

'Ha! Turpin and Schwarz are interlaced through that lush contract let to TD through Rosenfeld; it's a masterpiece. You can't offer TD that kind of money - I hear it involves billions of dollars, and all TD has to do is keep the 'scuttler going, just stand there and pump power to it.' Cravelli added, 'And enlarge the aperture, I understand. But that ought to be easy enough; they've been studying it for the last week.' In fact they had probably already accomplished it. 'I'm going back to my drink, now. And then I'm going to fix another and then ...'

"There's one man who can stop this. The owner of the 'scuttler. I met him on that trip across the

Atlantic. Darius Pethel, in Kansas City.'

'Yes, he claims it as part of his inventory. But dammit, Jim, are you really sure you want to shut down the 'scuttler and stop emigration ? It would be the end of you politically. Sal must have told you that already.'

Woodenly, Jim nodded. 'Yes. Sal told me.'

'Don't do anything tonight'

'We're in the grip of fate,' Jim said. 'We can't do anything; we've started something bigger than all of us put together. We may be seeing the end of the human race.'

'Humanum est errare,' Cravelli said, assuming he was joking. But was he ? 'You don't mean that,'

Cravelli said, stricken. 'I hate that kind of talk; it's morbid and defeatist and ten other things, all of them bad. That acceptance speech you gave at the nominating convention; it was cut out of the same lousy cloth. Sal ought to give you a good swift kick.'

'I believe what I believe,' Jim said.

At four a.m. the augmented power supply had been coupled to the Jiffi-scuttler; supervising the work, Don Stanley gave the go-ahead signal to start the 'scuttler back up. It had been off now for six and a half hours. His fingers crossed, Stanley tensely smoked his cigarette and waited as the entrance hoop gradually flared into unusual, pale-yellow brilliance, at least four times as bright as before.

Beside him, Bascolm Howard, who had strolled in to watch, said, 'It certainly caught right away.

No hesitation there.'

'It really shines,' Stanley murmured. God, suppose we're overloading it he thought. Suppose it heats up too much and burns out. But the engineers who had done the work had assured him that the load was within the safe tolerance. And he had to go by what they said.

'Tired ?' Howard asked him.

'Darn right.' Stanley felt irritable. 'I ought to be home in bed.' We all should be, he said to himself. I'll be glad when they've run the final tests on this and it's ready to go back into operation.

A senior engineer hopped into the tube of the 'scuttler and disappeared from sight. Stanley dropped his cigarette to the lab floor and savagely ground it out. Now we learn the truth, he realized. We get the poop, whether we've failed or been successful.

Minutes passed.

Reappearing, the engineer called to him. 'Mr. Stanley, would you come here, please ?'

Stanley, on rubber legs, made his way to the tube. 'How is it inside there ?'

The rent's big, now. Three and a half, maybe four times greater.'

Feeling limp as tension throughout his body lessened, Stanley said, 'Fine. Now we can go home where we belong.'

'I want you to look through the rent,' the engineer said.

'Why ?' He did not see the point.

The engineer said, 'Just look, okay ? For chrissake, will you please look, Mr. Stanley ?'

He looked.

Through the rent in the tube wall he saw, not a grassy meadow and ultramarine sky, no white flowers with buzzing, lazy bees tackling them. And he saw no sign of people. None of the tons of equipment which had been passed through the rent. No tents. No temporary septic tanks. No improvised food kitchens or overhead lighting. Instead he saw - and could not at first accept that he saw - a marshlike expanse, gray with mist and the hollow croakings of some distant birds. He saw reeds poking through the gummy, yellow water which lay in pools. A snake moved suddenly, twisting its path through the stagnant debris. And over to the right, some small living creature with a naked tail dropped to safety in the dense shadows beneath a cracked, hairy mass of roots.

The air smelled of decay and silent, utter death.

Pulling back into the 'scuttler tube, Stanley said hoarsely, 'It's not the same place.'

His chief engineer nodded mutely.

'It's a swamp,' Stanley said. 'My god, what kind of catastrophe is this ? Can you make any sense out of it ? We better get the original power supply right back on; you evidently can't increase the load and get the same results only more so, instead you get this, whatever it is.' He took one more look. All his determination was required merely to see it, let alone venture through the rent and actually into it. 'I think I understand,' he said, muttering to himself. 'There's not just one alter-

Earth, parallel universe or whatever you call it; there's several, and why we didn't deal that factor into our planning I'll never know. We'll never make that mistake again.'

'I agree,' his engineer said, beside him, also looking.

'You think we can restore the original power supply and make contact again with where we dumped those people ?'

'We can try.'

'We've got to,' Stanley said. 'You know who'll get the rap; it'll be us. Start work immediately; we'll work the rest of the night.' God, he thought. What'll I tell old man Turpin ? Nothing. If we can get this patched up again we'll see it's forgotten forever. Like it never happened.

I'm not thinking about us getting the blame,' the senior engineer said to him. 'I'm thinking about those people, especially those women, stranded there.'

'They'll be okay! They've got supplies; they went there to colonize, so let them colonize. It was their idea to go across, they knew they were taking a risk. It was their responsibility. So tough tubes.' He drew himself back into the 'scuttler, shaking. 'Wow, what a hell of a sight. I can't see colonizing there. You think you'd like to live there, Hal ?'

'No, Mr. Stanley,' the engineer said. He rose to his feet stiffly, waved to the team standing before the entrance hoop. 'Shut it off!'

The power died. Stanley walked back out of the tubs and over to Howard. 'Now we have to take apart the whole damn thing again and fix it back up the way it was,' he said bitterly. 'What lousy luck. And it's going to take twenty years to get those millions of bibs through; President

Schwarz'll never buy that. That's the end of that contract. That voids it automatically.' And to think we worked six and a half hours for this, he said to himself.

Something appeared at the mouth of the tube.

Stanley saw it, but, even as he saw it, the shadow-like substance vanished.

'Who has a laser pistol ?' he said.

'Get a laser pistol,' Howard said. Evidently he had seen it, too. 'It must have followed you. Come over from the other side. Before the power was turned off.'

'It's just an insect,' Stanley said. 'Some miserable thing that flew up out of that swamp.' I know that's all it is, he said to himself. It's got to be. 'For chrissakes, somebody kill it!' he said, looking around. Where had it gone ? Not back into the tube, but out into the room.

From within the tube, the senior engineer said loudly, 'Mr. Stanley, the rent never shut down.'

'That's absolutely impossible,' Stanley said. 'The power's off.' He ran back into the tube, found the engineer crouched down by the rent. Once more Stanley saw across, into the world of the swamp, the decaying landscape of doomed, collapsing ruin. His senior engineer was right; it was still there.

'I can think of only one explanation,' the engineer said to Stanley. 'It must be that it's maintained by a power source on the other side, because you know no power's coming to it from here; that's for sure.'

Stanley said, 'Did you see something that slipped through just now ? Something alive ?'

'Only for a second. But I thought it went back.'

'It didn't go back,' Stanley said. 'It's out somewhere in the lab, in the TD building, on our side, and now more are going to come across because we can't shut down this damn rent. Maybe we can block it somehow. Can you put a barrier right up ? I don't care what it's made out of, just as long as it's good and solid.'

'We'll get on it right away,' the engineer said and scrambled to his feet.

What kind of power source could exist there on the other side ? Stanley asked himself. There in that brackish, desolate swamp ... it's as if it were waiting. But how could it know we'd show up ?

How could it possibly have been expecting us ?

When he made his way out of the tube once more, Howard said to him, 'It's still somewhere in the room. I can feel it, but I'll be darned if I can see it. It's like it just merged with everything on this side, just sort of - you know, whatever it saw here.'

Don Stanley tried to remember when he had felt such fear. Not for a long time. Had he ever reacted this way to anything in his life before ?

Once, he recalled. Years ago. He had felt the same fright when as he had felt now, seeing this dark, pervasive substance scuttle into his world from the other side. I was eighteen, he said to himself. Just a kid. It was my first visit to the Golden Door satellite.

It had been when he had first seen George Walt.

Since it was impossible to close the rent, Don Stanley decided, they were going to have to make the attempt to subject the dimly-lit swamp world to some kind of ordered scrutiny. Taking full responsibility, he ordered a QB observation satellite brought to the lab with launching equipment. Before the barrier had been erected by TD's engineers he had sent the satellite across and had watched as it shot up into the murky, ominous sky.

Reports from the orbiting satellite began to arrive almost at once, and he seated himself with

Howard and started methodically to go over them. The time was five-thirty a.m. Much too early to awaken Leon Turpin, he realized. We'll just have to go on as we are, for at least another two hours.

The planet - and he felt no surprise in learning this - was Earth. But the stellar chart which the satellite recorded on the dark side contained data which was totally unexpected. For a long time he and Howard sat together conferring, to be certain there had been no error. There had not. By six-thirty in the morning, Stanley was sure of the situation, sure enough to have Leon Turpin woken up at his home on Long Island.

The QB satellite, this time, was orbiting an Earth in what was, for their world, a century in the future.

'You realize what this implies, don't you ?' he said to Howard.

'This could still be the same alter-Earth. The one we sent our colonists onto. Only we're seeing it a hundred years later.' Abruptly Howard shivered. 'Then what became of their colonizing efforts ? No trace at all ? After all, the satellite is picking up lights on the dark side in exactly the same locations as before.'

'I'll be glad when Turpin gets here,' Stanley said. The responsibility had become too much for him; he wanted out. Obviously, the colonization attempt had failed. But he simply refused to face it. It can't be the same Earth, he repeated again and again to himself. It's just got to be a totally different one.

Something terrible must have taken place between our colonists and the Pekes.

At seven fifteen a.m., Leon Turpin arrived, perfectly shaved, washed, dressed, and in absolute control of himself.

'Have you sent dredging equipment across ?' he asked Stanley as the two of them stood by the partly-completed concrete barrier, looking out across the swamp.

'What for ?' Stanley said.

Turpin's face twitched. 'To look for remains of our campsite. This is the same spot, isn't it ?

There's been no movement in space; this is where our colonists set up their base a century ago.

There ought to be all kinds of junk, if we dig down far enough, down to the hundred-year level.

Tell them to get started right away.'

It took only two hours for the dredges to locate and bring up an aluminum canteen and then a rusted, corroded, slime-drenched U.S. Army laser rifle. And, after that...

Skeletons. First one which they identified as a human male and then a smaller one, possibly that of a female.

Turpin signaled for the dredging to cease.

'Beyond any reasonable doubt, this was our campsite,' Turpin said, presently. 'We've proved that, to my satisfaction at least.' The others nodded; no one spoke, however, and they did not look directly at one another. 'Perhaps it's possible to view this as a tremendous break,' Turpin said.

'We know now not to send any more colonists across; we know what's going to happen to them.

They're going to perish right here at the campsite without having even...'

'They were slaughtered,' Stanley interrupted, 'because we didn't send any more across. The first group wasn't large enough to hold off the Pekes; it's obvious that the Pekes are responsible for this massacre. What else could have happened to them ?'

'Disease,' Howard said, after a pause. 'We never took time to make thorough studies of viruses and protozoa over there, as we should have. We were in such a goddam hurry to rush them across.'

'If we had kept sending them across,' Stanley persisted, 'in a steady flow, the Pekes wouldn't have been able to mow them down. My god, those colonists suddenly found themselves cut off from us, stranded there with no way to get back, abandoned by us ...' He broke off. 'We never should have tinkered with the power supply. That's where we made our mistake.'

Howard said, 'I wonder what we'll find when we get the original power supply hooked back up.'

He jerked his head toward the group of TD engineers laboring to disconnect the larger source. 'In a few more hours they'll have it back the way it was. Presumably we'll find ourselves facing the original rent, the original conditions; we'll be back in contact with our campsite, then, and if necessary we can march them all back here to this side again. Every last one of them.'

'But,' Stanley said almost inaudibly, 'you're leaving a factor out. The nexus to this swamp world hasn't gone away; it's either self-maintaining or some force on the other side is underwriting it... in any case it seems to be there for good. Things are never going to be as they were; we can't reestablish the original situation. We'll never see those colonists again. And we might as well get used to that idea. I say, go ahead and hook up the first, smaller power source again, but don't expect anything.' To Leon Turpin, he said,

'I've been here all night. Can I go home and go to bed for a few hours ? I can't keep my eyes open.'

Turpin said raspingly, 'Don't you want to be here when ...'

'You're just not facing it,' Stanley said. 'When I wake up, six or ten or fifteen hours from now, the situation's going to be exactly as it is right now. We'll be looking across at that swamp world, and it'll be staring right back at us. I'll tell you what we've got to do. Somebody - and I don't mean just another atavistic, simple-minded robot-type dredge - some brilliant human individual has got to go across there into that swamp world and locate the power source that's keeping this nexus alive. And then he's got to blow it to bits or, at the very least, dismantle it.' Stanley added,

'And then - and this may be almost impossible - someone's got to find out what established that power source in the first place. And how they knew we were coming.'

After a pause Leon Turpin said, 'Howard tells me that in the first few moments of operation with the augmented power source, something came through, some living creature. Is that true ?'

Don Stanley sighed wearily. 'I thought so at the time. Now I think I was out of my mind; I was simply just too scared by what I saw. I must have realized right away that we had lost those colonists forever.' He walked unsteadily toward the exit door of the lab. 'I'll see you a few hours from now. After I've had some sleep.'

'But I saw it, too,' Howard was saying, as Stanley shut the lab door after him.

I don't care what came through, Stanley said to himself. I don't care what you saw. I've done all I can. I haven't got anything left to give to this situation.

But you better have, Turpin, he realized. Because it's going to take a lot. What I've done disconnecting the augmented power source, getting the barrier erected, sending over the QB

satellite, starting up the robot dredge - all that's nothing. Just a way of finding out what confronts us.

He thought, I wish I could sleep forever. Never wake up again and have to face this.

But he knew he had to.

And he was not the only one. They would all have to wake up, one by one, to face this, President

Schwarz involved in his deft political maneuverings to outrun Jim Briskin, hitting him with his own idea ... Briskin, too, because no matter what Schwarz had done, no matter how hurriedly and recklessly he had acted, the idea behind the colonization had been Briskin's. The responsibility remained essentially his, and Schwarz, now, would be quick to hand it back to him.

Having ascended to surface-level, Stanley passed through the wide front entrance of the TD

building, down the steps and onto the morning sidewalk, the busy downtown Washington street of people and 'hoppers and jet’ abs. The motion, the familiar, reassuring activity, made him feel better. This world, with its everyday sights, had not been blotted out, by any means; it remained solid, thoroughly substantial. As always.

He looked about for a jet'ab to take to his conapt.

Far off, at the corner of TD's administration building, a figure hurriedly disappeared.

Who was that ? Don Stanley asked himself. He halted, forbore hailing the jet'ab. I know him, and

I don't like him; it's somebody who in a day long past reminds me of things almost too repellent to recall, a part of my life that's dim, cut out, deliberately and for adequate reason forgotten.

Mud, he thought. Yes, oddly enough, he thought. That man makes me think of mud and twisted plants, deranged organisms that burst poisonously and silently under a weak and utterly useless sun. Where is this ? What have I been seeing ?

What just happened now, a few minutes ago, back there on level one in TD's labs ? He felt confused; standing on the sidewalk among the passing people he rubbed his forehead wearily, trying to rouse his mind. The swiftly-moving figure of course had been George Walt, but hadn't he - or rather they - closed down the Golden Door satellite and disappeared ?

He had heard that on TV or read it in the homeopapes. He was positive of it.

George Walt must be back, Stanley decided. From wherever they went.

Once more, a little dazedly, he began searching for a jet'ab to take him home.