Fear That Man

I

When he woke from a featureless dream of silver, there was nothing but endless blackness on three sides, a blackness so intense that it almost coughed out a breath and nearly moved. And when he woke, he did not know who he was.

The control console — splashed with sixteen luminous dials, scopes, a dozen toggle switches and half a hundred varicolored buttons — told him that this thing under and behind him was a spaceship. That, at least, explained the darkness through the viewplate that wrapped around the other three sides of the guidance nipple. And his misty reflection on the thick plastiglass told him that he was a man, for he had the eyes of a man (blue), the face of a man (severe, but handsome, topped by a tangle of coal dusted hair). But these things were generals. When he tried to concentrate on specifics, there were no answers.

Who was he?

The dials only wavered in answer.

What had been his past?

Only the scopes, pulsating…

And where was he bound?

He sat very still, running through all the things that he did know. This was the year 3456. He knew the names of the cities; he understood the function and order of the empire; the past history of the galaxy was at his tongue tip, quivering. Generals, all.

Who was he? What had been his past? And where was he bound?

He unbuckled and pushed himself from his contour-molded seat, walked behind it, away from the viewplate and toward the rear of the chamber.

Grayness. The room was tomblike, a single-hued conformity of leaden plating, machines, and service stands. Only the glow from the control console added a note of liveliness. Circling the room, he found there was no written log. There was a service stand for that purpose, but it was empty. The logtapes brought only great thunders, crashing and scraping until he was no longer so very certain that there should be a log. After all, if he could not remember his own name, how could he be so damnably sure of these lesser things?

Bong-bong-bong!

He whirled, his heart racing wildly in response to the alarm. Waves of yellow light crashed across the room, splashed off the dark walls. He swallowed the lump in his throat, walked back to his chair. He seemed to know how to operate a ship, for his fingers flew across the switches and dials, touched the scopes and traced patterns on them as his mind automatically sifted through the readings they gave, interpreting them. “Report!” he said to the vessel.

There was a moment of silence, then: OBJECT APPROACHING. SPEED NEGLIGIBLE. UNNATURAL.

“Size?”

The ship grumbled as if clearing its throat. He knew, somehow, that it was only seeking an answer tape. THREE FEET BY TWO FEET BY FIVE FEET.

“Time to contact?”

FOURTEEN MINUTES.

“Call me then.” He flipped off the computer comline and went to the rear of the cabin. Rather than sit and wait for the speck, he would investigate the rest of the ship. It might hold a clue to his identity. He tugged at the circular wall hatch, swung it inward. Beyond lay a corridor, narrow and low-ceilinged. At the end of it, he knew, lay a room of shielding before the drive chamber. Along the sides were two rooms that he could enter without being burned to death by hard radiation.

In the room to the right, there was a complete laboratory. Long rows of glittering machines lined the walls, humming, chanting to themselves. In the very center of the chamber, there was a table with a flexoplast top. He touched the mattress and watched while the shimmering stuff squeezed his hands, pushed between his fingers, gripped him. It was a surgeon’s table. Above it, suspended from the ceiling like bloated spiders, were the robosurgeons — spherical, many-armed, silver-fingered. He shivered. On the third try, he freed his hand from the table, walked into the hall. He did not entirely trust machines like the robosurgeons — machines that were so much like men but without the mercies, faults, or thoughts of men.

The room across the corridor was an armory. Crates of construction explosives sat on the floor, enough to level a city. There were racks of guns on the walls. Vaguely, he knew there were no guns in the world any more. Men of this age did not kill anything but game animals. Guns were mainly for collecting. But these were too new for collecting, and deep within he knew he possessed the ability to use each of them — and to a deadly intent. Against the far wall and next to the cargo portal sat a ground car, broadcasting nubs studding it. With its invincible shield turned on, it was, in effect, another weapon.

There was something bothering him, something more than the mere presence of weapons. Then, as he gazed at the ground car, he knew what it was. Nothing here carried a trade name! The car was void of brand, model, and make. So were the rifles and the throwing knives — and the explosives. All of these things had been produced to provide anonymity for their maker. But who had made them? And for what purpose?

Bong-bong-bong!

At first, he ignored the ship’s alarm, trying to think. But the ship grew more insistent. He put back the rifle he had been examining and left for the control room.

UNIDENTIFIED OBJECT APPROACHING. CLARIFICATION IN THIRTY SECONDS. The computer’s squawk-box grated the words out like sandpaper drawn across sandpaper. CLARIFICATION. IT IS A MAN.

“A man? Out here without a ship?”

THERE IS A HEARTBEAT.

II

Like a grotesquely misshapen fruit, the body in the red jumpsuit floated in the blackness, directionless, moving with a slight spin that brought all sides of it into view.

UNCONSCIOUS.

He brought the ship in as close as possible, studied the crimson figure. What was a man doing this far from a ship, alone, in a suit that could not support him for more than twelve hours? “I’m going to have him brought in,” he said to the ship.

DO YOU THINK YOU SHOULD?

“He’ll die out there!”

The ship was silent.

Like small animals, his fingers moved. A moment later, the cylindrical body of the Scavenger appeared in the viewplate. It was another almost-alive machine. He tensed with the sight of it. The single eye of the Scavenger focused on the body. On the console screen, there was a close-up of the stranger. The lens caught the face inside the helmet, and he was no longer sure it was a man.

There was a face with two eyes, but no eyebrows. Where the brows should have been, there were two bony ridges, hard and dark and glistening. A mane of brown hair streaked with white lay as a cushion about the head. The mouth was wide and generous, but definitely not the mouth of a man. The lips were a bit too red, and the teeth that stuck over them at two places were sharp, pointed, and very white. Still, it was more of a man than an animal. There was a look about the face that suggested soul-tortured agony, and that was very human indeed. He directed the Scavenger to begin retrieval.

When the machine had done this and was locked in place on the mother ship, he opened the floor hatch, drew up the body, and carefully unsuited it. The helmet bore the stenciled name HURKOS…

… He was in a great cathedral. The red tongues of candles flickered in their silver holders.

Belina was dead. No one died any longer, but Belina was dead. A rare case. The monster in her womb had slashed her apart. Nothing the doctors could do. When you can’t turn to blame other men, there is only one entity to blame: God. It was difficult finding a temple, for there were not many faithful these days. But he had found one now, complete with its holy water tainted with the sacrificial blood and its handful of ancient Christians — ancient because they refused the man-made immortality of the Eternity Combine: they grew old.

In the great cathedral…

In the great cathedral, clambering across the altar railing and clutching the feet of the great crucifix. On the kneecap, slipping, falling to the feet three times until the bruises blackened his arms beneath the thickly matted hair. Then, grasping at the loincloth, fingers hooked into the wooden folds, pulling himself up, weeping… A foot in the navel, shoving up… screaming into the ear… But the ear, after all, was wooden. The ear merely cast back his condemnations.

Candles flickered below.

He began swaying, using his weight to topple God. The head did not respond at first. He locked his arms more tightly about it. It began to sway. The head fell, crashing from the shoulders, down…

Then toppled the body.

He pushed away from it as it — and he — fell.

There were sirens and hospital attendants.

The last thing he remembered seeing was an old man, a Christian, cradled between the broken halves of God’s face, mumbling and content with his sanctuary…

He pulled himself away from Hurkos, shook his head. That had been the stranger’s dream. How had he experienced it?

Hurkos opened his eyes. They were chunks of polished coal, dark jewels threatening many secrets. His mouth was very dry, and when he tried to speak the corners of his lips cracked and spilled blood. The nameless man brought water. Finally: “It didn’t work, then.” Hurkos had a deep, commanding voice.

“What didn’t work? What were you doing out there?”

Hurkos smiled. “Trying to kill myself.”

“Suicide?”

“They call it that.” He sipped more water.

“Because Belina died?”

Hurkos bristled. “How did you…?” After a moment: “I guess I told you.”

“Yes. How could I hear your dreams like that?”

Hurkos looked puzzled for a moment. “I’m a telepath, of course. Sometimes I project, some rarer times I read thoughts. A very unstable talent. I project mostly when I’m asleep — or under pressure.”

“But how did you get out there without a ship?”

“After I was released from the hospital — after Belina’s death and the crucifix incident — I signed on the Space Razzle as a cargo handler. When we were relatively far out in untraveled space, I went into the hold, disconnected the alarms from the pressure chamber, and left. I won’t be missed until pay day.”

“But why not step out without a suit? That would be quicker.”

Hurkos smiled an unsmile. “I guess a little of the healing did take hold. I guess we can recover from anything.” But he did not look recovered. “Right now, my talent is fading. I can’t see a name in your mind.”

He hesitated. “You can’t see a name… because I have none.” Briefly, he recounted the story of the waking, the amnesia, the strangeness of the ship.

Hurkos was excited. Here was something in which he could submerge his grief, his melancholia. “We are going to make a real search of this tub, you and me. But first, you ought to have a name.”

“What?”

“How about — Sam?” He paused. “After a friend of mine.”

“I like it. Who was the friend?”

“A dog I bought on Callileo.”

“Thanks!”

“He was noble.”

With the preliminaries out of the way, Sam could no longer contain his curiosity. “We both have names now. We know I am a man — but what are you?”

Hurkos looked startled. “You don’t know what a Mue is?”

“No. I guess maybe I have been gone too long. Maybe I left before there were Mues around.”

“Then you left a thousand years ago — and you went damn far away!”

III

Hurkos came padding down the narrow corridor and into the main chamber. “Nothing at all!” he said, incredulous.

They had been searching for six hours, looking through and behind everything. Still, no clues. During the time they had pried about together, however, Sam had filled in a few gaps in his education; Hurkos had recounted the history of the Mues. Once, well over a thousand years before, man had tried to make other men with the aid of artificial wombs, large tanks of semi-hydroponic nature that took sperm and egg of their own making and worked at forming babies. But after hundreds and hundreds of attempts, nothing exceedingly worthwhile had come of it. They had been attempting to produce men with psionic abilities valuable as weapons of war. Sometimes they came close, but never did they truly succeed. Then, when the project was finally junked, they had five hundred mutated children on their hands. This was a time when mankind was laying down its weapons for tools of friendship. Most looked upon the wombs as a hideous arm of the war effort that should never have been started in the first place — and they looked upon the Mue children with pity and shame. There was a great public outcry when the government hinted that the Mues might be put quietly and painlessly to sleep. Though some people did not consider them human, the vast majority of the population could not tolerate so horrid a slaughter with the Permanent Peace only months behind them. The Mues lived. In fifteen years, they had equality by law. In another hundred, they had it in reality. And they mated and had more of their kind, although the children were often perfectly normal. Today, there were fourteen million Mues — only an eighth of one percent of the galactic population, but alive and breathing and happy just the same. And Hurkos was one of them.

Fourteen million.

And he could not remember having ever heard of them before.

“Food’s about ready,” he said. Just then the light above the wall slot popped off and the tray slid out.

“Smells good.”

They pulled the tray apart where it was perforated and sat on the floor to eat. “It’s damn eerie,” Hurkos said, spitting the words around a mouthful of synthe-beef. “There should be some trademark, some scrap of writing, at least one brand name!” He paused, swallowed, then snapped, “The food!”

Sam waved him back to his seat before the Mue could spill his dinner in a futile effort to rise quickly. “I already looked. The volume of food basics below the synthesizer is in unmarked containers.”

Hurkos frowned, sat down. “Well, let’s see what we do know. First, there is no log. Second, there is no trade name, serial number, brand anywhere on the ship. Third, you have no memory of your own past beyond this morning. Fourth, though you do not remember a thing that happened to you in your lifetime, you do remember the basics of empire history, human history. Except, that is, for a few especially glaring holes. Such as the artificial wombs and we Mues.”

“Agreed thus far,” Sam said, putting down his food, wiping his mouth.

“What’s the matter? You hardly ate.”

Sam grimaced, waved a hand vaguely and let it fall into his lap. “I don’t know exactly. I’m afraid to eat.”

Hurkos looked down at his own tray, paused half-finished with a mouthful. “Afraid?”

“There’s this… hazy sort of fear… because…”

“Go on!”

“Because it’s been made by machines. The food isn’t natural.”

Hurkos swallowed. “There is the fifth piece of data. You’re afraid of machines. I thought so earlier — judging by your reaction to the sight of the robosurgeons.”

“But I’ll starve!”

“I doubt that. You ate enough to keep you going. You just won’t get fat is all.”

Sam started to say something, but in the moment it took for his words to come from his larnyx to his tongue, he felt his head being ripped apart by thunders that shook every ounce of his flesh and soul. He opened his mouth, tried to scream, closed it abruptly. There was a chaos of noise in his head, a fermenting, fizzing, erupting madness. He was just barely aware that Hurkos was still talking to him, but he heard nothing. The world of the ship was distant and unreal. The noises, then, were speaking to him in a language of cacophony. Then he lost all awareness, was wrapped into the boomings, the dissonance. He pushed from the floor, found his seat, strapped in.

Hurkos was beside him, obviously shouting. But he heard nothing.

Nothing but the dissonance.

He saw the Mue running, crawling into the flexoplast mattress they had taken off the surgeon’s table. They had decided, since there was no second chair, that the flexoplast — wrapped completely around the Mue as a protective shell — would be a perfect substitute for a chair.

Sam slammed down on the toggles, blasted… then hyperspaced with a gut-wrenching jerk.

Hurkos was shouting from inside his mattress.

The ship moaned.

He reclined in his seat. The ship reached top hyperspace in incredibly short time. And collided with something…

IV

The thunders, as soon as Sam had thrown the ship out of hyperspace and into Real Space, had faded into silence. He again had control of his body.

Hurkos was rolling all over the floor, bounding off the walls as the ship shuddered, wallowed with the impact.

Sam remembered, suddenly, that they had struck something, and he looked up at the viewplate and the blank expanse of normal space. So near that he could almost touch it, another ship was drifting in front and slightly to the left of him. Perhaps only a mile away. Close for a shield-collision. He punched for open radio and tried to contact the other vessel, but he received no response.

“What the hell were you doing!” Hurkos shouted, freeing himself of the flexoplast and staggering to his feet.

Sam loosened his seatbelt and also stood. He felt as if he was about to throw up, but he fought the urge. “I don’t know! I just lost control of my mind, my body, everything! Someone told me to set a course for the capital.”

“Hope?”

“Yes. It told me to set a course for Hope and to hyperspace. Argument was impossible.”

Hurkos rubbed a sore spot on his arm, bruised because he had not gotten it into the flexoplast in time. “Did you recognize the voice?”

“It wasn’t exactly a voice. It was more like… well…”

There was a sudden pounding noise.

They whirled in the direction of the sound and saw a suited figure against the viewplate, rapping his fist against the glass. He had his suit phone turned up to maximum volume and was shouting something. They moved to the window. The man outside was huge — six feet six if an inch, two hundred and sixty pounds if an ounce. “Open up and let me in!” he was shouting. “Let me in before I tear this tub apart plate for plate!”

He looked as if he just might be able to carry out that threat.

“He must be from the other ship,” Hurkos said, moving to open the outer doors into the Scavenger that served as a pressure chamber.

The figure moved away from the viewplate toward the port. They waited nervously until the chamber closed, equalized with cabin pressure, and the door in the floor was opened.

If the stranger from the other ship had been imposing seen through the viewplate, he was overwhelming seen at first hand, inside the cabin, his head towering dangerously close to the ceiling. He pulled back his helmet, spewing a stream of curses, his eyes two fiery droplets within the flushed fury of his face. His blond hair was a wild disarray, uncombed and completely uncombable. “What the hell are you, some kinda moron? Morons have been wiped out of the culture! Haven’t you been told? You’re a one-of-a-kind, and I have to meet up with you in all this emptiness where — by all rights — we should never even be able to imagine each other’s existence!”

“I guess you’re angry about the collision,” Sam began, “and—”

The big man allowed his mouth to drop to his ankles and bounce back to a more respectable level just below the chin. “You guess I’m angry about the collision! You guess I” He turned to Hurkos. “He guesses I’m angry about the collision,” he repeated as if the stupidity of the remark was the most glaring understatement ever pronounced and had to be shared and discussed to be believed.

“I—” Sam began once more.

“Of course I’m angry about the collision! Damn furious is what I am! You hyperspaced without checking to see if there was another ship in hyperspace within the danger limit. Your field locked in mine and jolted us out into Real Space. What would have happened if our ships had struck instead of just our fields?”

“That’s rather unlikely,” Hurkos said. “After all, the fields are five miles in diameter, but the ships are far, far smaller than that. The odds against our ships striking in so vast a galaxy—”

“A moron spewing logic!” the big stranger shouted. “A real, honest moron shouting scientific gobbleygook at me like it really meant something to him! This is amazing.” He slapped one hammy hand against his forehead in a snow of amazement.

“If you’ll just listen a moment…” Sam sighed, seeing the big man’s lips open for comment even before he had said three words.

“Listen? I’m all ears. I’m just all ears for your excuse! Some excuse that could possibly explain your imbecilic reactions, and—”

“Wait a minute!” Hurkos shouted gleefully. “I know you!”

The stranger stopped talking abruptly.

“Mikos. You’re Mikos, the poet. Gnossos Mikos!”

The rage was swept away in the wash of a wide grin, and the grin became a flush of embarrassment. The huge fist dropped away from the forehead and became a hand again — a hand that was abruptly stuck out to Hurkos as a sign of friendliness. “And I haven’t had the pleasure,” the giant said politely.

Hurkos took the hand, shook it vigorously.

For one short moment, Sam felt as if he were going to collapse. Fear of the colossus had been the only thing holding him up, a fear whose vibrant force coursed through his quivering legs and straightened him with its current. Now, the fear gone, he wanted nothing so much as to fold up his legs, tuck them under his belly, and fall onto his face. Somehow, he held himself erect.

“My name is Hurkos. First and last. I’m a nobody, but I read your poetry. I love it. Especially “The Savagery of Old.”

“That was a damn grizzly one though,” Gnossos said, beaming.

“Spill the blood across the savage face;

Raise the ax, the bow, the gun, the mace—”

Gnossos finished the quatrain:

“Scream the scream that breaks apart the chest.

Killing is the thing you know best.”

The grin on the poet’s face was even wider.

“All the world’s a stage for plundering…” Hurkos began the next stanza.

“Hmmph!” Sam manged to cough without being too conspicuous.

“Oh! Mr. Mikos, this is—”

“Gnossos,” the poet interrupted. “Call me Gnossos.”

Hurkos was more than pleased with the offer of a first name basis. “Gnossos, this is a recently-made friend of mine. Sam, meet Gnossos Mikos, the empire’s most famous and most literate poet.”

The giant hand came forth, engulfed Sam’s own in a warm, dry embrace that almost crushed every bone up to his wrist. “Glad to meet you, Sam!” He seemed to mean it. “Now what malfunction of your vessel caused this recent unpleasantry?”

“I—”

“Perhaps I can help you repair it.”

Later, after the poet had heard the story of the missing trade names, the amnesia, the memory blank, the strange voices in Sam’s head, he rubbed his hands together and said, “You’ll not get rid of me until we discover the roots of this thing. What a helluva mystery! It’s almost worth an epic poem already!”

“Then you aren’t angry?” Sam asked.

“Angry? But whatever for? If you’re referring to the unfortunate collision of our hyperspace fields, please let us forget it. It was very obviously not your fault, and there are far more important things to discuss.”

Sam sighed again, heavily.

“Well,” Hurkos said, “what do you make of it?” He was hunched forward, as they all were, sitting on the floor like a small boy at his father’s knee.

Gnossos rolled his tongue over his wide, perfect teeth, thought a moment. His eyes were crystal blue and, when he stared, it seemed as if he were looking directly through — not at — whatever his gaze fell upon. “It sounds,” he said at length, “as if someone is trying to overturn the galaxy — or the order of the galazy, at least.”

Hurkos looked at him blankly. Sam shifted, waited for more, shifted again. “What do you mean?”

“Consider the weapons. Weapons have been illegal — except for sport, Beast hunting and collecting — for a thousand years. You say these weapons are obviously not for sporting because of their terrific power, and yet no one collects explosives or new and gleaming guns. Someone, it seems painfully clear to me, means to use them on humans.”

Sam shuddered. Hurkos blanched. The thought had been hanging in the rear of their minds, but neither had allowed it to gain perspective out in the light of the conscious. Now it was looming there — to be feared.

“The trade names,” Gnossos continued, “are missing because this ship and its contents were designed to provide secrecy for their owner and manufacturer. Sam here is being used by someone. He seems to be a tool to overthrow the current order of things.”

“Then he could get orders at any time to kill both of us!”

Sam was perspiring.

“I don’t think so,” the poet said.

“But the order to hyperspace—” Hurkos protested.

“Was a posthypnotic suggestion.” Gnossos waited for a reaction. When their facial expressions registered a modicum of relief, he continued. “Sam here was kidnapped, taken somewhere to have his memory removed. Then they — whoever They may be — implanted a series of hypnotic commands, a sequence of orders. When that was done, they shipped him off to do whatever they had ordered. The first order was designed to be triggered by… oh, let’s say that meal you ate earlier.”

“The food didn’t affect me,” Hurkos said.

“But you had no hypnotic suggestions implanted in your mind. Sam did. The food triggered the first, let’s say. Now, perhaps the remaining orders will come at measured intervals. Every sixth hour or something like that. Or perhaps they will be irregularly spaced but with planned intervals.”

“So whoever gave him the orders would not be aware of our presence.”

“Correct.”

Sam interrupted the dialogue. “That’s a relief. I like you both too much to kill.”

“One thing I’ve been wondering about,” Gnossos said. “Why didn’t you acknowledge my radio message just after the collision?”

“We didn’t receive any,” Sam said, perplexed. “We tried to get through to you, but you didn’t answer.”

“A broken radio?” Hurkos offered.

Sam forced himself to his feet, walked to the console. “Report on the condition of the radio/receiver.”

WORKING PROPERLY.

“That shoots that theory.”

“But how could my secret master control the radio if he doesn’t even know what’s going on here?” Sam traced his fingers over the seams of the console chair.

Gnossos shrugged, got to his feet. “Maybe we’re wrong. Maybe they do know that Hurkos and I are here and they’re just waiting for the best moment to knock us off. But that’s a question we’ll leave till later. Right now, let’s check out your laboratory. I have an idea.”

The three of them stood looking up at the robosurgeons. Sam shivered at the sight of them: men-talented but not men. He hated every machine he came in contact with, though he was not sure why.

“Someone could have machined the cases for these,” the poet said. “But there are only a few companies that have the facilities to produce the delicate interiors. No one could make his own robosurgeon from scrap without billions in equipment and hundreds of trained minds. Whoever put this together would have had to purchase the factory-made workings.”

Sam flicked the control knob that lowered the machines out of the ceiling. Ponderously, they came. When the underslung arms had spread to the sides and the machines were almost to the top of the table, he stopped them. Then he caused the main component to revolve so that the access plate faced them.

Gnossos rubbed his palms together: sand on stone. “Now we’ll find a few clues.” He threw back the latches that held the plate on, dropped the cover to the floor. “Every company carries a list of purchases and customers. With one little serial number, we can find the buyer and, consequently, the constructor of this tub.” He bent over and peered into the dark interior of the globe. He looked puzzled.

“Awful dark in there,” Hurkos said.

Gnossos put a hand inside, reached in… and in, in, in up to his elbow.

“There’s nothing in it!” Sam said.

“Oh yes there is!” Gnossos shouted painfully. “And it has hold of my hand!”

V

Gnossos tore his hand out of the machine, rubbed it against his chest. It was red and raw and bleeding in a few spots.

“What the hell is in there?” Hurkos asked, leaning away from the open machine.

Sam stifled some low-keyed scream he felt twisting up toward his lips.

As if in answer to Hurkos’ question, a jelly-mass began dripping onto the table from the open access plate. It collected there, amber spotted with areas of bright orange. It trembled there, quivered. Piercing, low-scale hummings bathed its convulsing form. There was something like a skin forming over it, the amber and orange changing to a pinkish-tan hue that made it look amazingly like human skin — too much like human skin. The skin expanded, contracted, and there were pseudopods pulling the mass across the table toward the warmth of their bodies.

They had backed nearly to the door. “There were no mechanical insides!” Gnossos said, rubbing his hand.

“But it moved,” Sam argued. “It operated like a machine. How could it do that without moving parts?”

The jelly-mass burst in places as bubbles of something reached its surface, flopped open and left pocks. But the pocks were healed rapidly, and the skin was returned to normal.

“That — that thing was its insides, its working parts,” Gnossos said. “The jelly-mass operated the shell like a machine.”

The last of the mess dropped from the bowl of the main component. There was more than could have been contained in the main sphere; apparently all the sections had been filled and were now drained empty. The jelly-mass, shapeless, plunged over the end of the table, struck the floor with a sickening sloshing noise, and moved toward them, arms of simulated flesh lashing out for purchase on the cold floor.

“The armory!” Sam shouted, turning into the hall and flinging the door to the other room wide. Perhaps it had been the hypnotic training with the weapons that had made him think of guns so quickly. He knew how to kill; he could stop the amoeba, the super-cell. He stepped back into the hall with a rifle in his hands, brought it up, sighted. “Move away!”

Gnossos and Hurkos stepped behind him, moving toward the control cabin. Aiming for the center of the mass, Sam pulled the trigger. Blue lightning flashed outward, sparkling, and illuminated the passageway like a small sun going nova. Despite the light, there was no heat. In fact, the flame seemed to radiate coolness. It struck the jelly, sank into it. There was something like a scream from the writhing slop, though the sounds were most certainly not a voice. It was as if the very molecules of the mass had closed gaps and were rubbing one another. The jelly stopped.

Sam, trembling, released the trigger, started to let air out of his lungs.

And the jelly leaped!

He fired, caught it in mid-jump, sent it crashing backward, blue fire coursing through it like contained lightning flashing in a crystal paperweight. He aimed again, depressed the firing stud.

Nothing.

Nothing!

No blue, shimmering flame. No cool but deadly flame. Not even a lousy click! He raised the weapon to look at it, to see if some latch or bolt had not been thrown properly by the automatic mechanism. Then he saw the amber goo beginning to pulse out of the tip of the barrel. Suddenly his hand was burning furiously and there was amoeba slopping out of the powerpack casing inside the handle. He threw the gun down, wiped his hand on the wall, scraping his skin loose in the mad attempt to rid himself of every drop of the jelly.

“Explosives!” Gnossos shouted.

Sam turned, dashed into the armory once more. When he came out, he had three grenades. He ran to Gnossos and Hurkos, panting heavily, his eyes wide, his heart furious as a drum.

The jelly-mass was recovering and had slopped into the hall where it joined up with the smaller clump of stuff that had been the insides of the gun. The two touched each other, glowed purple where their surfaces met, then easily flowed together and became one.

“I think I see why the radio didn’t work,” Gnossos said. “It didn’t want to work!”

“The entire ship is alive,” Sam agreed.

Hurkos rapped a hand on the wall, listened to the solid sound of it. “It’s steel. I’ll be damned if it is anything but steel!”

“Inside,” Sam said, keeping an eye on the pulsating jelly-mass at the end of the passageway. “Deep inside the plating, there’s more goo.”

“But the hyperdrive—”

“There mustn’t really be a hyperdrive mechanism,” Sam said. “The jelly can build up a hyperspace field somehow. There are no machines aboard, I’d wager. Only jelly-cored shells.”

“Your fear of machines—” Hurkos began.

“Was gained from whoever — or whatever — built this… this ship-thing.”

The lump had begun to move again, pseudopods slapping wetly against the deck. It was six feet high, a good three hundred pounds.

“You two get into the suits,” Gnossos said, taking the grenades. He still had his own suit on, and his helmet lay within easy reach. “We’ll have to go across to my ship. This one won’t let us live long now that we know part of its secret.”

Sam and Hurkos struggled into their suits, fitted their helmets to the shoulder threads, attached their air tanks. Every little act, though performed at top speed, seemed to take hours. When they were dressed, Gnossos pulled the hatch shut, sealing the main cabin from the hallway where the thing was advancing warily. “Let’s see it get through that!” the poet said, putting on his helmet. “Now let’s get out of here.”

“I’m afraid there isn’t much hope of that,” Sam said from his position next to the control console. “I’ve pressed all buttons to depressurize the cabin and open the exit chamber, but I can’t seem to get any response from the ship.”

Hurkos, eyes wide, jumped to the console, flipped the comline to the computer open. “Let us out!”

But the computer was not a computer. There was a deafening roar from the wire and plastic voice plate. There were screams, thunders, explosions. A thousand rats burning alive. A million sparrows madly attacking one another in a battle to the death.

“Shut it off!” Gnossos shouted.

Hurkos slammed the switch shut. The noises continued. At first, it swept out in irregular waves, shredded them and put them back together. Then there was not even a pattern of waves, merely a constant din of overwhelming magnitude. And there was jelly spewing out of the speaker grid…

Jelly spewing out of the jack-holes…

Abruptly, the speaker grid was gone, thrust away by the surging pressure of the thing behind it. Parts of the console began to sag as the supportive jelly that had filled it was drained away, spat out.

Still the noise. “It’s the same sound,” Sam shouted into his suit phone, “that I heard when I was obeying the hypnotic orders — only it isn’t ordering anything.”

“The grenades!” Hurkos called above the roar as the jelly began to collect on the floor, changing from amber to pink-tan, rising in a pulsating mass. The other glob pressed against the hatch from the hallway. There was the screeching sound of metal being strained to its limits. Soon the hatch would give, and they would be trapped between two shapeless monsters. The jelly would cover them and do… whatever it did to flesh and blood and bone.

Gnossos flipped the cap that dissolved the anti-shock packing in the outer shell of the grenade. He tossed it. Nothing.

“The grenades are jelly too!” Hurkos shouted.

Sam snatched one of the remaining bulbs from the poet. “No. They aren’t machines, so there is no reason for the jelly to replace them with part of itself. It’s just a natural chemical that explodes without mechanical prompting. It just needs a jar. Gnossos didn’t throw it hard enough.” He wailed the second grenade against the viewplate.

All the world was a sun. A lightbulb. Then the filament began to die and the light went out completely. The force of the explosion had gone, mostly, outward. What had pressed in their direction had been caught by the second mass of jelly that rose to snatch at the grenade — unsuccessfully. Miraculously, they were tumbling through the shattered front of the ship, moving into the darkness and emptiness of space toward The Ship of the Soul, the poet’s boat that lay silently a short mile away.

Behind them, the jelly came, boiling away in the vacuum, tumbling and sputtering. Steaming, it lashed out with non-arms as it realized its chances for success were diminishing. The thunder of its non-voice was definitely not sound but thought. It bombarded their minds, unable to order them so quickly, unable to control them in their panic.

Hurkos was out ahead, his shoulder jets pushing him swiftly toward the ship’s portal. Then came the poet. Finally, Sam. A hand of false-flesh streaked around the latter, curled in front of him, attempting to cut him off from the others. Cut him off. Cut him off and devour him. He choked, maneuvered under the whip before it could sweep around and capture him in an acidic embrace.

And still it came. It grew smaller, boiled and bubbled itself away. But there seemed always to be a new central mass moving out from the hull, leaping the blackness and replenishing the withering pseudopods before they could snap, separate, and dissolve. Finally, however, there was nothing left except a speck of pinkish-tan. It turned amber-orange, then it too puffed out of existence. With it, went the noise.

Inside The Ship of the Soul, they stripped, collapsed into soft chairs without animate padding. This was a ship of comfort, not one of destruction. This was a ship built for six people, not for one man, one tool of an insane, unnamable entity without a face or a time. For a while, then, they were silent, composing themselves for what must be said. The moment the composing ended and the discussion began was signaled by a quiet suggestion from Gnossos that they get some wine to help loosen their tongues.

The wine was warm and green, a special bottle opened for a special occasion.

“It was the same sound I heard under the hypnotic trance.”

“That means,” Hurkos said, staring into his wine as he talked, “that it was the ship itself that was ordering you around. That jelly was the plotter behind the scheme.”

Gnossos downed one glass of wine, poured a second from the decanter. “I don’t agree. If the ship were responsible for Sam’s actions, there would be no reason for hypnotic controls — and really no reason for Sam. If the ship were intelligent itself, it could do everything Sam could do — and possibly better. And when he shot it, it should have been able to order him to throw down the gun. No, the ship was just a cancerous mass of goo that was to convey Sam to Hope. Nothing more.”

“But what kind of man could make a thing like the jelly-mass?”

“I think,” Gnossos said, “that there is a chance you are the dupe of an extra-galactic intelligence.”

“That’s absurd! We’ve never found another intelligent race in the last thousand years. That’s—”

“That’s frighteningly possible,” Hurkos reflected. “There are thousands and millions of galaxies out there. How do you know a bunch of jelly-masses didn’t kidnap you, take you away, and decide to train you to overthrow the galaxy?”

Sam finished his wine in a gulp. Heat flooded through his flesh, outward from his stomach. Still, it could not ward off the sharp chill in him. “Because,” he answered in even tones, “that would be one helluva backward way of invading the empire. If these extra-galactics have all this skill, can use something like the jelly for hyperspace travel and making food and operating robosurgeons, they could overturn the galaxy in a month. A week! Hell, that blob even talked to me in a computer voice. Probably forms some crude set of vocal cords when it needs them. And it operated a radar set; it—”

“It’s a living machine,” Gnossos said, almost to himself.

“That’s another thing,” Hurkos added. “Your fear of machines. You got it, obviously, because whoever — or whatever — hypnotized you fears machines also. Because he, it, or they do not use machines. They have blobs instead. We have nothing like this. It almost proves they’re extra-galactic!”

“One couldn’t live in the empire without the aid of machines,” Gnossos agreed. “One would have to be from… Outside.”

“No.” Sam set his glass on the floor. “If there were aliens with this sort of thing, they wouldn’t need me. This is something smaller than an entire extra-galactic race. This is someone who needs help, who needs an automaton to do his dirty work.”

“Agreed also,” the poet said. “Looks like there is a stalemate in this conversation and this line of thought.” He heaved his bulk to a more comfortable position. “Well, I for one, am sticking with you until this mystery is solved. I couldn’t bear to quit with the whole thing raveled up. This could be the most important, most dangerous event of the last thousand years. And one thing that there is just too little of these days is danger. Warring man might have been crude, but he sure as the devil had his fill of danger in a lifetime. Today we travel on, living hundreds of years, and everything is so safe and perfect that we hardly ever experience danger. I’m long overdue for some excitement!”

“Me too, I guess,” Hurkos said. Sam had the feeling the Mue was not terribly comfortable since the jelly-mass had attacked them. But he would not — could not — back down in front of the poet.

“So what next?”

Gnossos rubbed a huge paw across his chin, wrinkled his nose for a moment. “We set this tub on a course for Hope. When we get there, we wait for your next command. We’re going to find out the answers to this.”

“But,” Sam said uneasily, “suppose I am out to overturn the galaxy?”

“Hurkos and I will be right behind you to stop you before you have a chance.”

“I hope so,” he said.

Later, after more wine and much conjecture, as The Ship of the Soul plunged through the thick river of the void, they retired, leaning back in their chairs, belting themselves in, and shutting their mouths so that they could neither consume nor converse. And eventually they fell into sleep…

There was deep and awful darkness, save for the scattered pinpoints of the stars dotting the roof of the night. Then, as the breeze shifted, dawn came crawling over the horizon, tinting the blackness with yellow… then orange… And there was still a hill with a cross upon it. There was a man on the cross. His hands were dripping blood.

And his feet were dripping blood…

The wounds were festered and black demon mouths.

The man on the cross raised his head, looked to the dawn. He seemed very weary, as if he were ready to give up more than the body, the spirit also. There were dumps of matting at the corners of his eyes that interfered with his vision. His teeth were yellow from long neglect.

“Dammit, let me down!” he shrieked.

The words rebounded from the low sky.

“Please,” he said, groveling.

The sun was a flaming eye. When it was at its zenith, there came angels, beings of light and awesome majesty. They floated about the man, administering to his needs. Some carried water which they poured between his cracked and crusted lips. And some brought oil with which they anointed him. And still others sponged away the oil and fed him. Then they were vanished into air.

The sun was setting. It seemed only minutes since it had risen.

“Please,” the man wept. The angels had missed some of the oil in his beard. It glistened there — and tickled.

With darkness came the demons. Crawling from under brown stones, slithering out of crevices in the earth, they came. There were dwarfs, slavering, eyeless yet seeing. There were wolves with sabers for teeth. There were things with tails and horns, things with heads that were nothing more than huge mouths. They screamed and cawed, muttered, shrieked, and moaned. They came at the cross, crawling over one another. But they could not reach the man. They clawed the wood of his prison but could not claw him. One by one, they began to die…

They withered and became smoke ghosts that the cool wind bore away. They collapsed into dust. They dribbled into blood pools.

Then there were stars for a short time.

And again came the dawn…

And the angels…

And the night and the demons and the stars and the dawn and the awesome, awesome angels and the night… It continued at a maddening pace. Days became weeks; weeks turned to months. For years, he hung there. For centuries, he remained. Finally, all time was lost as the sun spun madly across the sky and night with its devils was barely a blink of an eye.

“Please!” he screamed. “Please!”

The last screams brought them out of sleep, breathing hard. Sam pushed himself up, looked about the ship to reassure himself. Then he turned to Hurkos. “What sort of dream was that?”

Gnossos looked curious.

“He’s a telepath,” Sam explained. “Irregular talent. But what the hell kind of dreams were those?”

“That’s what I’d like to know, Sam,” Hurkos said. “I was getting them from you!”

VI

“Me?”

“Well, not really from your mind. Through your mind. The generator of those thoughts is very distant. No one in this room. And the mind of that generator is horribly large. Immeasurable. This was only a fraction of the thoughts in it, a small corner of them. In this case, I picked up this trace of thoughts and for some reason my subconscious talent began boosting their vividness and re-broadcasting them.”

“But I wouldn’t have dreamed them without your help.”

Hurkos smiled sadly. “You would have dreamed them just the same and just as completely. You would not have been aware of dreaming them, is all.”

“But then what was it? It reminded me of the man on the cross you toppled after Belina’s death.”

“It’s the Christ legend,” Gnossos said. They turned to stare at him. “I make legends my business. Poets work in all sorts of mythologies. There have been a large number of them — and a large number of wild ones too. The Christ legend is not so ancient. There are still Christians, as you know, though damn few. Most of the religion, along with all the others, died out about a thousand years ago, shortly after the Permanent Peace and the immortality drugs. According to legend, the god-figure Christ was crucified on a dogwood cross. This dream seems to be a reenactment of that myth, though I do not recall that the man hung there that long or that there were administering angels and tempting demons.”

“This could be another clue,” Hurkos offered.

“How so?” Sam was ready to clutch at the smallest straw.

“Perhaps your mystery hypnotist is a neo-Christian, one of those who refuse the immortality drugs. That would certainly explain why he would want to overthrow the empire. He would want to convert the pagans, bring the savages into the fold. That’s us.”

“Good point,” Gnossos said. “But that doesn’t explain the blob.”

Hurkos lapsed into silence.

Bong-bong-bong!

PREPARE FOR NORMAL SPACE AND MANUAL CONTROL OF THIS VESSEL!

“We’re almost to Hope,” Gnossos said. “Perhaps we will soon be having more clues.”

The flight-control system of the planet-wide city locked them into its pattern and began bringing them down to a point of its own choosing since they had not requested any particular touchdown spot. Ships fluttered above, below, and to all sides of them. Bubble cars spun across the great elevated roadway, zipping between the buildings, sometimes slipping into tunnels in the skyscrapers from which they often emerged going another direction. They settled onto a gray pad where the flames of their descent were soaked up, cooled, dissipated.

Beyond the pad, on all sides, lay Hope. Super-city. The hope, literally, of a new way of life for billions. They stood at the open portal, waited while the attendant marked their checkslip so that they would have the proper ship to return to, tore it in half and gave them their portion.

“Well,” Gnossos said, “where to?”

“No orders yet,” Sam said.

“Let’s just wander around a bit.”—Hurkos.

“Okay, we will.”—Gnossos.

And they did.

He sat before the thick window that was not really a window at all, and he looked at the thing beyond. It raged, lashing, screaming, roaring like a thousand bulls with pins in their brains. How long? How long had it fought against the Shield, trying to get out? Breadloaf peered deeper into the Shield, clutched his chair and leaned farther back in it. The massive desk nearly concealed his slumped form. A thousand years and more. That was how long. His father had constructed the barrier and the chamber beyond, which dipped into the other dimension. No, not another dimension either — a higher dimension. Not another alternate scheme of things, just a different layer of this particular scheme. And when his father had died in a freak accident that the medics could not undo the damage of, he had come into possesssion of the family fortune, the family buildings, the family office structure here in the Center of Hope, the Shield and the tank beyond. The last two things were something one did not advertise. It was a family secret — a big, hoary skeleton in the family closet. The burden was his, and only his.

For six hundred years he had come here every week, sometimes for stretches that lasted days, most often for just a few hours. He came to look at the Shield. And what lay beyond, trapped by it. It was a weight that rested heavily on his shoulders at all times. It was insane to worry. He knew that. The Shield had held for over a thousand years; it would hold forever. It could not fail. It was maintained by machines, and machines had not been known to fail since his grandfather’s time. And these machines were tended, not by unreliable men, but by other machines that gained their power from still more machines. It was foolproof.

Still, Alexander Breadloaf III came once a week, sometimes staying a long time, sometimes just for a few hours. Still he worried. Still — he was afraid.

Crimson exploded across the screen, washed down and turned to ocher at the bottom. Explosions would not shatter the Shield, no matter how violent they might be. Didn’t it understand this by now? A thousand years of explosions, and it still did not understand. That thought left a sorry spot on his soul, but he reminded himself of what his father always said (said so often that it became the family motto): “There is no longer ignorance in men.” Maybe. Evidently. Although he feared that ignorance lurked just below the surface, waiting for a chance…

There was a lovely pattern of blue and silver as it applied certain stress pattern sequences to the Shield. But it had tried that before. It had tried everything before…

Breadloaf pushed himself out of the chair, walked toward the door that led into the hallway. He would get some simple foods, some coffee. And he would return. This was one of those times when a brief glance at it was not going to be enough. It was going to be one of those weeks. One of those long weeks.

VII

In their wandering, they came across many things that amazed Sam despite the fact that he wholly or partially remembered most of them. It was as if he had been told of these things but had never actually seen them. In the seeing lay the wonder. They had gone to the light shows, the toto-experience places. They had seen the parks, the avenues of art. Gnossos knew the city well, that being one of the qualifications of a true poet — to know the beating heart of the metropolis. Or megalopolis? No matter. He explained all things they did not understand, clarified things they thought they knew. It was a marvelous time, save for the constant awareness that another hypnotic trance and order could be on the way, minutes from them, ready to swallow Sam into noisy chaos and use him.

So it was, in the course of their aimless ramblings, they came upon the Christian. Sam noticed that Hurkos bristled at the sight of the man — not because of this individual, but because of the heedless god that supposedly stood behind him.

The Christian was old. He was fifty, ancient in a world where all were eternally thirty or younger. He had evidently been a child of a strong Christian family, for he had not even received anti-beard elements; the heavy shadow on his face gave him an eerie, seldom-seen metallic look. His teeth were yellow and chipped. His skin was wrinkled. Across his chest and back hung the halves of a sandwich sign. The front said: GOD IS ASHAMED! When the man saw them coming, he executed a small heel-turn to reveal the letters on the back of the sign: HE SHALL COME AGAIN TO JUDGE!

“I can’t understand them,” Hurkos said.

Gnossos smiled a thin smile. “Some day, they will all be gone.”

“But why are there these people?” Sam asked. “Don’t the medics prevent mental infirmities in babies?”

“Well,” the poet said, shortening his giant strides to match the smaller steps of his companions, “the original concept of the empire was complete freedom. Mental infirmities were weeded out, true. As a result, the number of religious people dropped over the years. But one cannot limit another man’s beliefs under a system of complete freedom. Religious persons were allowed to practice their beliefs. Though their children might be born as mentally sound as possible, the parents raised them and passed their own superstitions on to their offspring. The number of religious dwindled. But as long as they procreated — and this is a strong part of their faith, these Christians — they would always have children to indoctrinate, to warp. It’s a pity, certainly. But, after all, they are responsible and it is their life and their child. A man can waste what is his if he so choose. I guess.”

“Know the Word,” the Christian said as they drew abreast of him. He handed Gnossos and Sam pamphlets — yellow paper with red print. They were so wrinkled and tattered that it was evident many people had handed them right back in the past. The short-lived traffic of each pamphlet had worn it severely.

“I’ll take one too,” Hurkos said, holding his hand out.

The Christian made no reply. Hurkos asked again.

“Will you ask this person of tainted blood to cease speaking to me?” the bearded one asked Sam. He was obviously distressed, running his thin, bony hands up and down the edges of the chest sign, toying with little splinters projecting from the edge of the plastic square.

“Tainted blood?”

“They don’t like Mues,” Gnossos explained. “They would never speak to one unless they were dying and needed help. Then, it would be God’s will that they spoke.”

“Why are Mues — tainted?” Sam asked.

“A Mue is not a creation of God, but the work of man,” the Christian snapped. “A Mue is a violation of God’s holy powers of creation.” His eyes gleamed fanatically.

“Prejudice,” Gnossos said. “It’s part of the dogma of every religion — sometimes heavily disguised but always there. Do you know the history of your church, old man?”

The Christian shuffled his feet. He was beginning to feel that it might be best to stay out of an argument with these particular pagans, but his fanatic devotion could not be totally denied. “Of course I do. In the beginning there was—”

“It doesn’t start that far back.” Gnossos laughed. He licked his lips, anxious to launch into the old man. “It doesn’t start with the darkness and the light and the first seven days. It comes along much later. Millennia later. There’s no church until man decides he needs a means of social climbing, something to make him superior to his neighbors. So he forms a church, a religion. By forming it, he can say that he knows what and why God is. He can say he knows the purpose of all things and can, therefore, be a cut above other men.”

“God chose Saint Peter to start the church, to be above other men.”

Gnossos smiled patronizingly, almost a saint himself — except for the sharp blade that was his tongue. “I doubt that. You’ll pardon me if I sound distrustful, but I doubt that very much. History is simply littered with men who said God had chosen them to be a leader. Most of them fell flat on their faces. Most of them got trampled down and smashed in the flow of Time and History, which are two things bigger than any man.”

“False prophets!” the sign-carrier growled.

“So what makes you think Saint Peter wasn’t a false prophet?”

“What he started is still with us.”

“Duration does not prove worth. Wars lasted a damn sight longer than your religion has, but they were finished and done away with because they were not good things. Besides, your faith is just barely with us. It seems Saint Peter’s work is facing the end that war faced.”

Sam made a face, launched into the conversation again. “But why hate Hurkos for not being directly God-created? If God gave men the power to invent and use the Artificial Womb, then He was involved in the creation of the Mues, though—”

“Men usurped the power,” the Christian said.

“But if God is all-powerful, men could not usurp anything of His. Why, He would crush men who tried—”

Gnossos put a hand on Sam’s shoulder. “It is not for this reason that Christians hate Mues. As I said, they have to feel superior. There are so few people they can look down on anymore; the Mue offers a perfect scapegoat. Because he is often abnormal physically — whether it be a detrimental physical difference or a beautiful, functional difference — they have something to feel superior about. ‘I am not like you,’ they say. ‘I am normal. I am whole.’”

A crowd had begun to form around the debate. People strained over one another’s shoulders, trying to hear and get a look at the verbal combatants. This seemed to please Gnossos, but it irritated the Christian.

“And my dear fellow,” Gnossos continued in a friendly tone raised a bit for the benefit of those at the back of the crowd, “do you know who started many of the worst wars in the past three thousand years?”

“Satan’s forces”

“No. God, it should be so simple as you say. No, it was Christians, the very people who preached against war. In—”

The bearded man showed his teeth in what could have been a snarl if he had added sound. “I will not pursue this argument any longer. You are in Satan’s employ.” He moved quickly, pushing at the crowd that had gathered. They hesitated, then parted to let him through. He had, very shortly, been lost in the breast of the night to be suckled by its darkness.

“You don’t imagine you did any good,” Hurkos said as the crowd around them dispersed and they began walking again. “You don’t imagine you got through that bony structure he calls a head, do you?”

“No. But I can’t resist trying. He is unreachable by this time. Besides, even if he doubted his faith, he would not allow himself to give that doubt prominence in this thoughts. He has forsaken concrete eternity via the immortality drugs, and now he has nothing to cling to but the hopes of his religion, the promises of his God.”

“Gives me the shivers,” Sam said.

“This is all getting much too morbid,” Gnossos said. “Let’s find a hotel and settle down. My feet are killing me, and there is no telling how much running we might have to do to catch Sam if he gets another order.”

Breadloaf finished the last morsels of his sandwich, licked his gums to remove the sticky salad dressing, took a long swallow of hot, black coffee, and leaned back in his chair as if it were a womb he was asking to swallow him. The room was dark, for the thing behind the Shield was not a thing for well-lighted rooms. Its details were brought out too fully in light. Blackness allowed merciful obscurity.

Cinnabar horsemen riding green stallions exploded across the screen, were gone in a wash of lavender…

He liked to pick out patterns in the explosions of color, choose and name them as a young boy might do with clouds seen from a green grass-covered hill in summer.

A dragon’s mouth holding the broken body of an amber… amber… amber knight…

Alexander Breadloaf III wondered whether his father had sat like this, watching the patterns and trying to make something of them. It was a seeking after order, certainly, that was the purpose of watching them. Had his father sat, his great leonine head bowed in contemplation, his heavy brows run together from the forehead-wrinkling concentration? Had he laced his thick fingers behind his waterfall of white hair and watched — actually studied — the Prisoner of the Shield, as the family had come to speak of it?

He doubted it. His father had been a man of hard work and strenuous action. He had built his father’s small fortune into a very large fortune, an almost incalculable sum of money. When his engineers accidently stumbled across the Shield while looking for a non-matter force for construction purposes, when they discovered, to their horror, what lay beyond. The old man took the practical angle. He knew there was a fortune to be made here, more than his already formidable masses of wealth. He had only to enslave the powers already trapped behind the Shield and turn them to work for him. The Shield was maintained. But the powers could never be enslaved. To agree to slavery, the slave must have fear of his master. There was no fear in the Prisoner. Absolutely none.

Brilliant flashes of white rippled like fish through a sudden sea of smoky burgundy…

His heart thudded at the bright light, even though he knew the Shield was impenetrable. Take one molecule and expand it. Expand it some more. Make it bigger and bigger and bigger — but don’t disturb its natural particle balance. You have a Shield. It will hold back anything, stand against even nuclear power of the highest magnitude. But you also have a doorway into a higher dimension. A barred doorway. No, really more like an unbreakable window. But that window turns the higher dimension into a prison, squeezes it into a confined space (a law of opposites which equalizes the pressure created by the expanding first molecule). The higher dimension is then bound within the tiny limits. It and its inhabitants are trapped, unable to move or to get out.

Brilliant white on yellow like cat’s-eye marbles…

No, his father had never sat here like this. He was too practical for melancholia. Along about the second hundred years of the Prisoner’s confinement, the old fellow had realized — probably with a great deal of bitterness — he could never enslave it and demand things of it. And as the years passed he came to maintain the Shield only because to let it go off would mean the end of his family and possibly all human life. The Prisoner would be seeking revenge — an omnipotent, terrible revenge of finality. By the days of Alexander the Third, this fear of the Prisoner had been compounded by a feeling of moral obligation. The sanity and progress of the empire depended on keeping the Prisoner imprisoned. Always, in the rear of his mind, was the fear that the thing would escape. Sometimes that fear surged to the fore. Times like this. He wanted to run into the streets and scream about the charge behind the Shield. But the Breadloafs had done this thing, had trapped this beast. It would be up to them to watch it for all eternity. And perhaps beyond.

Finally, when watching was not quite enough, Alexander walked to the Shield, stood with a hand upon the coursing energy. “How did you,” he said at length to the thing beyond, “become like this?”

It could only thought-speak to him when he was touching the Shield. Even then, the words were tiny and distant: Letmeout, letmeout…

“How did you become like this?”

Letmeout, letmeout, letmeout…

That was its constant cry. Sometimes there were bloodcurdling threats. But he knew — and it knew — that the threats could not be carried out. Not as long as the Shield was there. It would never answer his question: “How did you become like this?” Not today. It had answered previously, but only when it thought it had something to gain.

“How did you become like this?”

And it had said: I have always been like this…

On hydro-beds, reclining, they opened their ears. The hotel room was pleasant and spacious. Gnossos lay before the door so that Sam would have to crawl over him to get out. The lights were soft but adequate, the wine sweet upon their tongues. It was certainly a time for verses.

Then it was time to sleep. The wine had been drunk, the verses spoken, and the darkness crept over them. For a time, at least…

A dream. A dream of an empty tomb and rotting bodies. Except for one single body which stood and walked for the doorway. But there were demons that sprang from nowhere, grasping the body and flinging it down among the corpses, and commanded it to stay dead. Always and everywhere there were slavering, keening demons…

Then Hurkos lost the thread of the alien thoughts and the trio woke as one. They were all perspiring. The dim glow of the lamps seemed suddenly too dim for the circumstances.

“Not mine again?” Sam asked.

“Relayed from whatever implanted your hypnotic commands. Very far away.”

But the odor of spoiled flesh had carried over into reality.

“Well,” Gnossos said, grumbling and standing, “I can’t sleep now.”

They agreed.

“So let’s go sightseeing again. Maybe the next command will be coming along soon now anyway.”

“Where to?” Hurkos asked. “Is it far? My feet still hurt.”

“Not far,” Gnossos assured them. But they knew a short step to this giant was two steps to them and a little stroll might turn into an arch-breaking trek. “There are a number of these places we could go. This one’s just around the corner. It’s called the Inferno.”

VIII

The Inferno was a bar. But more than a bar, a total experience. Everything in the place was geared to some sensory stimulation. Ebony and silver clouds drifted through the rooms and half-rooms, sifted in and out of alcoves and cubbyholes, some just for effect, some carrying scantily dressed performers. Floor panels popped open unexpectedly like the tops of jack-in-the-boxes, spewing out clowns in imagi-color costumes that were purple, yellow, red, green, or white, according to one’s mood. The shimmering fabrics manifested themselves in many ways, shifting color to match your feelings, even as they cheered you up. The floor revolved at a different speed than the walls and in a different direction than the ceiling. Strobe lights flashed. Smello-symphonies flushed through the room, twisting the patrons’ senses to moments of synasthesia where music became an olfactory sensation of indescribable delectability. The erotic cygian perfumes seeped through the air in blue mists, enflaming nostrils and tying the mass of total experience into a congealed whole that throbbed with each wave of the odoriferous substance.

They took a table in the corner, one almost hidden by shadows. The robotender in the center of the table delivered their drinks once Gnossos had compiled an order, punched it out on the silver keys, and deposited the proper amount of coins. They sat sipping the cool liquids and watching the two dozen or so characters in the bar.

“What’s so special about this place?” Sam asked, almost choking on a heavy breath of the perfume. “It isn’t unlike the Grande Hotel Lounge or a dozen other places we’ve been, for that matter.”

“Look at the people,” Gnossos said enigmatically.

Sam did. He could see no way in which they differed from empire norm in dress or habit. He said so.

“Look more closely,” the poet urged. “Look at their faces.”

Sam swung his gaze from the ruddy face to the more distant visages. And it was in their faces. The longer he watched, the clearer it became to the eye. But what, exactly, was it? He searched his mind, looking for a comparison, a simile that would make the vision into words. He was just about to give up when the proper words struck him. The look in these faces was much like the look in the faces of the scooterbeasts when they were penned in zoos. In a natural state, the scooterbeast moved as quickly as lightning across a storm sky. They were spinning, careening blurs to the eye. Penned, they pressed their faces to the glass walls and looked mournfully toward freedom, wishing to move again, to travel, to be lightning, to do what was denied them. “I see it,” he said to Gnossos.

“They’re Unnaturals.”

“The ones—”

“Who would like to kill,” Gnossos completed. “They are defects born with many of the old faults: with the desire to kill, an overwhelming greed, and bent toward self-gratification. There is nothing the government can do but take them and make them Sensitives. If they hurt anyone, they also feel the pain. Only ten times worse. Any pain they inflict is returned tenfold to their own nervous system. If they aid someone, they feel the other person’s pleasure. If they kill someone, they feel the death throes and terminal spasms ten times more intensely than the victim. None of them could tolerate that. They do not, therefore, kill or hurt.”

“And they look so normal,” Sam said.

“Outside. Outside, Sam. But on the inside—”

“He knows about the Unnaturals,” Hurkos said, “but he did not know about the Mues. That’s rather curious.”

“We’ll consider it over another drink,” Gnossos said. He placed the order, deposited the coins, waited for the liquor. None came. He pounded the robotender once, then bellowed for the human tapkeeper who was polishing glasses behind the bar. He was growing red-faced as he had been when his ship had collided with Sam’s. A false anger put on merely for the pleasure of appearing furious. The tapkeeper opened the gate in the bar and crossed the room with strides as sure and quick, almost, as Gnossos’. In his eyes glittered the tenseness, the trapped expression of the scooterbeast with his nose to glass.

“This thing is broken!” Gnossos roared. “I want my money back!”

“Here,” the human bartender said, flipping three coins to the poet. “Now all of you had better leave — please.”

“Why?” Sam asked. This was the second time he had encountered genuine rudeness — once with the Christian, now with the Unnatural. It puzzled him.

“This is not a Natural bar.”

“You’re a natural if I ever saw one,” Hurkos mumbled.

The bartender ignored the wit.

“We are allowed service anywhere,” Gnossos boomed. “Naturals and Unnaturals are not segregated!”

Shuffling his feet, a bit cowed, or taking a new line of tact, perhaps, the tapkeeper said, “It’s just for your own safety that I ask.” There was a mixure of fear and general uneasiness in his eyes now.

“Was that a threat?” Gnossos said, astonished. “Am I with the uncivilized?”

“Not a threat. It’s for your own safety, as I said. It’s because of him — that one.”

They followed the tapkeeper’s thumb as it jerked toward the man standing at the far corner of the bar. The stranger was clutching a glass of yellow liquid, taking large gulps of it without effort, swishing it about in his mouth as if it were mouthwash, chugging it down without a tear. He was huge, nearly as big as Gnossos, red-haired and red-eyed. His hammy hands clenched into fists, unclenched to grab his drink. Though physically a bit smaller than the poet, he had muscle where Gnossos had run somewhat to fat. The corded masses of tissue that were his arms seemed able to snap anything or anyone to pieces.

“Who’s he?” Gnossos asked.

“Black Jack Buronto.”

“You’ve got to be kidding,” Hurkos said, slumping even further into his chair. “You must be.”

“Henry Buronto’s his name, but he wins all the time at the gaming tables, so they call him Black Jack. And he carries one too — a blackjack, that is.”

A great many Unnaturals carried crude weapons, wishing they could use them, but never daring to because of the pain echoes that would engulf their sensitized brains. Clearly, Gnossos was fascinated by Buronto. Here was someone a bit different. A poet is, of course, a man of insight if he is a poet of any worth. But he is not a jaded guru if he is fascinated by things unique. Indeed, it is just such a fascination that he needs to hone his mind on. Buronto was unique. Here was someone smiled on by Fortune at the gambing tables. Here was someone, perhaps, stronger than himself. And here was someone, for some reason, to be feared.

“He’s dangerous,” the tapkeeper said.

“Dangerous because he carries a blackjack and wins at cards?”

“No. Dangerous because he would use the blackjack. He could kill all three of you—split-split-splat—just like that.” The tapkeeper wrung his hands like dishcloths. He cast a glance at all three of them, searching for some sign of weakness, then looked back to Buronto.

Almost as if he had seen a signal, Buronto started across the room, directly toward them.

“Please leave,” the tapkeeper said.

“I think maybe we had better,” Sam suggested.

“Why?” Gnossos asked. “The blackjack bit? He won’t hurt us. Remember, every pain we feel, he feels ten times over.”

“But—” the tapkeeper began.

“You’re talking about me,” Buronto said, stepping up to their table. And his voice was like the voice of a canary-high and sweet and melodic. The trio stared at one another for a moment, astounded. The tiny voice again seeped from the massive throat. “Were you talking about me?”

Sam tittered, then let go and burst out laughing. Gnossos followed with his thunder-laugh. Hurkos fought it, seeming to be comfortable in his recently self-imposed melancholy and reluctant to leave it.

Buronto spoke again: “Stop laughing at me!”

The word “laughing” was so high-pitched that his voice cracked in the middle of it. And Hurkos too burst out laughing, spraying the table with saliva he had been fighting to hold back with the laugh.

“Stop it! Stop it!” Buronto shouted.

But the tension within the three of them had been at a peak. They had been restless, nervous, on edge since the encounter with the jelly-mass. The constant state of expectancy had honed their nerves to sharp, thin wires that were ready to vibrate wildly if only slightly plucked. And big Black Jack Buronto’s voice — or the strange anachronism that passed for a voice — had been the tuning fork that had set them all roaring as the tension drained. They laughed wildly. They laughed without control, tears streaming down their faces. They laughed all out of proportion to the joke.

“Oh, no, no, no,” the tapkeeper moaned. He chanted it over and over as if it were a litany.

“Shut up!” Buronto roared squeakily. His mouth was foaming. Little flecks of mad white… He brought a colossal fist down on the simu-wood table, knocked all the glasses off. But this too only served to send the trio into paroxysms of laughter. Hurkos was leaning on Gnossos, and Sam had his head thrown back, howling.

Black Jack muttered something incomprehensible, all meaning flooded away by burning rage. Clasping one fist in the other, he smashed the wedge of his flesh onto the tabletop, shattered the thing into two halves that stood separately for a moment until the weight of the broken top pulled the laminated leg apart and the table collapsed into the laps of the three Naturals. They ceased their laughter.

Buronto now had a face like a jungle animal. Great swatches of ugly blue discolored the uniform red of his countenance. His teeth were bared and foam-flecked. He snarled and spat and screeched unintelligible things between his teeth. He was mad as all hell and all hell could not have prevailed against him had he turned on it. He latched onto Hurkos’ chair, ripped it out from under the Mue and sent him crashing to the floor.

“What the hell?” Gnossos said to the tapkeeper. “He’s an Unnatural, but he’s also a Sensitive!”

“He’s a Sensitive, yes,” the tapkeeper shouted as. Black Jack smashed Hurkos’ chair into the wall again and again, more violent with each vicious swing. “He’s a Sensitive and feels the victim’s pain. But he was more of an Unnatural than the doctors knew. He was also a masochist!”

The color drained from the poet’s face as snowy realization swept in to take its place. “Then he likes being a Sensitive because—”

The bartender finished: “He likes to feel pain!”

Buronto had finished with the chair. There was nothing left of it that could be pounded against the wall. Splinters and scraps of plastic lay over the floor and surrounding tables. The wall was worse for the encounter too. Black Jack Buronto, obviously, would not care if he killed a hundred men. A thousand. He turned to them, plodding through the mounting wreckage. He tossed aside anything that stood in his way, knocking over tables, smashing chairs and lamps and robotenders. He lashed out at Hurkos, struck a blow that sent the small Mue tumbling across another table and crashing to the floor in a cloud of broken glass.

Gnossos stepped up to take a swing at the maddened Buronto, but he was a Natural. It was impossible for him to strike out at a fellow man, no matter how deserving of punishment that fellow man might be. Had Buronto been an animal, the case would have been simpler. But he was not. And a thousand years of sanity made Gnossos check his blow even before he started it. And Buronto delivered a punch that set the poet down hard. As Gnossos and Hurkos struggled to gain their feet, Black Jack heaved a table out of the way and came for Sam.

Patrons were moving out of the doors, hiding behind stable objects, not anxious to get involved but not about to lose out on a good show like this. They waved bottles, hooted, howled, and cheered for Buronto.

And at that moment, the second hypnotic order came to Sam…

A chaos of noise obliterated the lesser noise in the bar. Sam’s eyes glossed. He wobbled for a moment as neither he nor the mysterious hypnotic master was fully in control of his temporal self. Then, determinedly, he set out for the door. Buronto, seeing the move and misjudging it for retreat, snarled and leaped over the fallen furniture, reaching the door first. “Not yet. I hurt you first!”

He reached with great, corded hands for Sam…

And suddenly doubled up as Sam struck him a blow in the stomach that would have crumbled a wall — because a wall would not have given as Buronto’s stomach did. And Buronto’s stomach certainly gave — gave up to Sam’s wrist. Whoever was controlling Sam’s body did not seem to have anything against violence. The giant offed, stumbled, but still managed to clutch Sam’s shoulder. Sam brought a foot up, twisted away, and slammed the foot into Buronto’s gut, sent him to his knees. Then he was past the Unnatural and through the door.

“After him!” Gnossos shouted. “He’s gotten another order!” The two of them ran past the gasping Buronto and outside. But in the dimness of the night, the streets were empty. Sam was a long time gone.

IX

The water, chemicals, and lubricants flowed about him in invisible pipes. No, not invisible. Materially nonexistent. There were tubes of force that clothed the liquids. No cumbersome, unreliable, destructible metal fixtures, only pure, raw force adapted to do a better job. Gurgling, the fluids flowed from one part of the giant mechanism to another, covering the block-by-a-block machine quickly and efficiently. This was the machine that kept the Shield up, however, and he was frightened because it all seemed so flimsy. He knew that forces, bent and shaped, were better than actual material parts that could wear out or fail from structural flaws. Still, all those liquids flowing through nothingness, and all of them vital to the maintenence of the Shield…

Click!

Breadloaf whirled around—

Click!

And around again!

Clicker-click-tick, hmmmmmmm.

The noises bothered him; he interpreted every sound as the beginning of the breakdown. Okay, he had seen it. Now he could leave. He walked to the door, hesitated and looked around. There were other clicks and a muffled clank. He would go insane just listening to it operate, he told himself. Before the horror of a possible breakdown could flood his mind with sewage of ridiculous fears, he stepped into the hall and closed the door behind. Grudgingly, and yet with a profound sense of relief, he went back to his office.

The orders were coming to Sam in a swift series now. Between the accomplishment of one thing and the next order, there were only seconds in which he had control of himself and knew precisely who he was. He could never remember what it was he had done on the last order, and was engulfed by the next before he really had a chance to investigate his surroundings.

Now he was standing in a great chamber full of machines. That made him — or rather his hypnotic master through him — feel uneasy. Machines, machines, machines. Humming, gurgling, sputtering. He had broken in. The street door had not been locked, for hardly anyone locked anything these days. No need to, without crimes being committed. But this floor had been sealed. His last order had been to break in here where things flowed through pipes he could not see and machinery throbbed with an overwhelming purpose. But what had he done before that? And what would he do next?

Then the chaos and the noises came, and he was moving…

When he came out, a package he had been holding under his arm was gone. He had not had time to examine it. He did not know what he had done with it. Or what it had been.

Then the chaos and the noises came, and he was moving…

Breadloaf rubbed his fists in his eyes, pulled open a desk drawer and fumbled in it for anti-snooze tablets. He found a bottle, popped two pills in his mouth, swallowed without benefit of water. Recapping the bottle, he withdrew a second container of tiny nerve pills. He was in the process of swallowing one of these when the door flew open, crashing into its slot with a sharp, ear-shattering crash. There was a man standing there, eyes like vacant, unseeing marbles, his hands flung outward like the hands of a stage magician. The tips of his fingers glowed and vibrated with some hideous power that was immediately a thing to be called evil.

And from the fingernails came darts.

Needles of sleep.

They bit into Breadloaf, spreading their red warmth, pulling him down into a Shieldless darkness that forced but denied him to scream…

When Sam was in control of his body again, the first thing that struck his attention was the man slumped in the chair-seemingly unconscious — behind the desk. His every muscle was taut beneath the surface relaxation, as if the death penalty had been the only alternative to unconsciousness. Secondly, there was the screen. It was to the right of him, and for a moment it had been in a low-key color series of magenta and black. Abruptly, it spewed forth oranges and whites and creams that splashed across the room and grabbed his eyes.

He walked to the screen, stared at it. An indescribable chill swept up and down his spine. It was as if the colors were alive and wanted out.

“What do you want? Who are you?”

The voice startled him, and he leaped, his heart pounding. But it had not been the colors; it had been the man, Sam walked to the massive desk. “My name is Sam. I was—”

“What do you want? Why did you do this to me?”

“Do what?”

“I can’t move, damn you!”

Sam hesitated, looked about the room, sensing a ghost scene of what must have transpired. “I paralyzed you?”

Breadloaf’s thin lips moved, and his eyes revolved like ball bearings in well-oiled grooves. Yet the rest of his body was carved from wood, stiff and immovable. “You and the darts beneath your fingernails. What the hell kind of man are you!”

Sam lifted his hands and looked at them. The nails were discolored as if fine bits of flesh had puffed into ashes beneath them, leaving blackened pits. He rubbed one, but the color was definitely not on the surface.

“What kind of man are you!” Breadloaf roared this time, panic flushing every word, every word cored with fear.

“I don’t know,” Sam said finally. “Is there some way I can help you?”

Breadloaf was breathing heavily. “Yes! Go get help!”

“I can’t do that,” Sam said. He stood on the carpet, shuffling one foot over the other, feeling somewhat the hypocrite.

“Why? Why can’t you?”

“It won’t let me.”

“It?”

Briefly, he recounted his story — the jelly-mass, the hypnotic commands. When he finished, the other man’s eyes were wide — too wide to contain anything but horror. “The Prisoner!” he croaked.

“What?”

“The Prisoner of the Shield. You’re under its direction!”

Sam turned instinctively toward the portal of wavering colors. “Then they are alive!”

Breadloaf was laughing, and Sam could not get him to stop. It was not the laughter of him and Hurkos and Gnossos in the Inferno. This was laughter at the inevitability of some unknown tragedy. He could sense that, but he could not stop the other man. Neither could he leave to get help. His feet would carry him toward the doorway but not through it. There was a mental block that kept him within the room. His memory began to clear slightly, and he could remember what else he had done in this building. He had planted some sort of bomb in the machinery below. And it must be the machinery that kept this… this Shield going.

“A thousand years,” Breadloaf shouted between whoops of laughter. “For a thousand years it tried the same things over and over, and we thought it was too dense to attempt anything different. Instead, it was pretending stupidity, making us lax. And it worked. Just when we were feeling secure, it takes you and breaks in with ridiculous ease. A thousand years to the Prisoner are like but a day to us.” He laughed again, harshly.

There was sweat on Sam’s upper lip. He wiped it off and became aware of perspiration all over him. He was frightened. A thousand years behind the Shield. And it had only been playing around, using the time as a diversion. A score of centuries had meant nothing to it. He watched it with a loathing that touched the deepest part of him. Were the colors its true appearance or merely the effects of it filtered by the Shield? He thought the colors were a front, not the true nature of it. The true nature could not be something so beautiful and vibrant, surely. A blue splotch rippled up from the bottom, seemed to form a question mark like one would find on a large tronicsign—

Tronicsign!

He remembered seeing the high tronicsign band that ran around all four sides of the Breadloaf Building, carrying letters twenty feet tall. Perhaps the control console was up here. If it was, he could spell out a message for Gnossos and Hurkos. Surely they would be looking for him. It was almost a certainty they could see the towering tronicsign from anywhere in this part of the city. If they were in this part of the city…

“The tronicsign controls,” he asked-said.

“What?” Breadloaf’s eyes slid back and forth in the sockets liked trapped animals.

“The advertising screen. The light letters. Where are the controls for the light letters?”

“Why?”

“Where are they?” There was a tone of command in his voice that he had not known he possessed.

“There’s a master set in the main lounge, but I have a secondary plug-in set in the wall cabinet — over there.”

He found it, plugged it in, began typing out a message that the big boards would hold in glowing — red? amber? blue? — letters. He decided on crimson words against a black background. GNOSSOS/HURKOS… “What floor is this?” he asked Breadloaf.

“Top.”

TOP FLOOR. EXECUTIVE OFFICE. COME QUICKLY. SAM.

There would be waiting then. He paced the carpet briskly, now and then trying to go out of the door but always discovering that the hypnotic suggestions prohibited that. Finally, they came. And they demanded explanations.

He gave them the few he could, told them about the bomb planted below, the bomb that would wreck the machinery, shut down the Shield, and set the Prisoner free — whatever the Prisoner might be. He gave them the location of it, told them how to remove it and how to handle it: gently. They ran to get it. It seemed like a very long time that they were gone — time enough to construct a thousand possible deaths that might result if the bomb exploded. Just when he was ready to count them as deserters, they returned with the bomb and the timer, carrying it as if it were a piece of delicate and expensive crystal.

Carefully, Sam disconnected the timer, lifted the halves of the casing apart, and poured the volatile liquid out of the single window behind Breadloaf’s massive desk. Four breaths were released simultaneously as he turned and said, “It’s okay.”

“Then this is it!” Gnossos said, the first to recover completely. He paced back and forth, looking at the Shield, stopping to touch it, to examine the point where it went flush with the wall. “This is the thing that has been directing you. But if it is trapped behind this Shield, how did it get to you to hypnotize you? And how did it whip up that jelly-cored ship?”

“I think I can… shed some light on that,” Breadloaf grunted. He was still paralyzed, but his fingers were tingling, and he could move his thumbs. The effects were beginning to wear away.

They turned to him. Gnossos crossed the room. “What light?”

“He—” Breadloaf began.

“Sam,” Sam identified himself.

Breadloaf blinked appreciation. “Yes. Sam. I think you are all operating under a false assumption. The Prisoner did not get Sam. He did not kidnap Sam. Sam is the Prisoner’s creation.”

“Creation?” Gnossos snorted.

“Yes. The Prisoner imagined Sam, built his imaginings into a concrete entity. It was probably done with a last big burst of the Prisoner’s energies.”

“That’s absurd!”

Breadloaf tried to shake his head, only succeeded in making his lips quiver and his eyes tremble. “No. The Prisoner concentrated, summed up all his resources, and shaped a man and a ship. The ship was not a machine, for machines are alien to the Prisoner’s mind. Some places, the dimensions are rather close, due to the warping of the higher dimension. Perhaps at one of these places he forced his thoughts through the thin barrier and made Sam and the ship.”

“But why not force himself through at one of those spots?” Hurkos asked.

“He could not do that with what energies he had left. You see, he is much, much larger than the ship and Sam put together, larger by an infinite degree. He is the entire higher dimension!”

Ocher birds flittered over green and blue oceans…

“One creature is an entire dimension?”

Breadloaf coughed. “If that creature is God, yes. And that is precisely who the Prisoner of the Shield is!”

X

“God!” Gnossos shouted.

Hurkos wandered next to the Shield, pressed his face to it, looking into the colors that swirled, folded upon themselves and became new colors, Here, brought to him through modern science, was the being that prayer could not yield. Technology had replaced faith and with far better results.

“The dreams,” Gnossos said, turning to the dazzling display on the screen. “The dreams Hurkos took from it were the dreams of a paranoid, then; they were the dreams of a being obsessed with demon-persecution.”

Sam’s mind whirled in a nighmare landscape of doubt and nearly unconquerable mountains of unbelief. “And the machines were not machines at all, for God is not the Father of the machine. God is the Father of life, the Father of man who makes the machines. God could imitate the exterior of a machine, but the only way He could make it work was to create a life form — the jelly-mass — to imitate the workings of one. He knows us, physically, but He doesn’t know what we have within us.”

“And God feared machines because they were something above His abilities. He feared the Mues and chose to ignore their existence in your training because they were things beyond His powers — the results of men usurping His rights.”

“A thousand years,” Breadloaf muttered.

“How could you stand it?” Gnossos asked, turning from the Shield. “How could you sit there, knowing?”

“Sometimes, after I had left here and gone into the streets and smelled the fresh air, I thought I could never come back. But when I thought of how much worse it would be if He ever escaped…”

“Of course,” Gnossos said sympathetically. “For a thousand years, men have grown gradually saner, have broken communications with their barbaric past. It’s all because He’s been trapped in your warped dimension tank and can’t influence anything. Isn’t that it?”

Breadloaf sighed. He was able to make fists of his hands now, and he sat exercising them. “That’s it exactly. My father thought he could enslave the Prisoner and make Him work for the family. We knew who He was. He wasted no time in telling us that, in demanding to be set free. But we could not master Him. It became clear that we could never let Him out. At first, of course, it was for the family’s safety. He could, and would, wipe out every Breadloaf. Then, after a few hundred years, when we saw what the empire was becoming, how much better it seemed, how much saner were the councils of man, we realized that much of the ugliness of life had been God’s doing. We had even stronger reasons for keeping Him locked up. If He were ever released”—Breadloaf wriggled an arm at last—“war would come again. Famine as we have never known it. Pestilence. Disease. We have but one choice: keep Him contained.”

“Correction, please. You have no choice but to release Him!”

The voice drew their attention to the door. A man stood there — a Christian judging from his beard. There were a dozen others standing behind him, dirty, unshaven, dressed in the rags of self-denial. One of them was the sign-carrier Gnossos had argued with in the streets what seemed like an eternity ago. He was smiling now, sans sign. He stepped into the room. “Isn’t it strange whom God should choose as His liberators?”

“How did they—” Breadloaf began, struggling against his stiff body.

“I told them!” Sam shouted. The series of hypnotic orders flashed through his memory now. What God had ordered him to do was a burning clarity. He recited the posthypnotic commands that had followed their landing on Hope: “Find a temple and tell the Christians that God is being held prisoner by the Breadloaf family in the Breadloaf Building; I will give you flames upon your tongue as a sign to convince them. In a Sell-All Hardwaremat, purchase these chemicals and pieces of equipment: ester of glycerin, nitric acid, a watch, a spool of number twenty-six copper wire, and a small construction detonator. Next prepare a bomb of glyceryl tinitrate. Next, break into the Breadloaf Building, plant the bomb by force pump A3A45 in the basement. Next, render Alexander Breadloaf III helpless via drug darts.” He had told the Christians then. They were here on his word.

“It isn’t your fault,” Gnossos said.

Then the echo of an explosion rumbled through the floors of the building, shook the walls. The Christians were destroying the machinery that maintained the Shield. They were planting new bombs to do what Sam’s first one didn’t have a chance to do.

A second explosion rocked the floor even more violently…

And the Shield blinked…

… was gone…

Breadloaf screamed a piercing scream, a thing that he had only half finished with when the black bird with the forty million eyes and the claws of brass swept from the vacant spot in the wall, swooped out on the cold winds and descended on him. The room had expanded, it seemed, to the size of a dozen galaxies. The room was erupting on the way to becoming the macrocosm itself. Yet all of it was filled with them and this thing from beyond their dimension so that it seemed, in another and confounding way, that the chamber had shrunk to the size of a small closet.

There was no up or down.

The stars had lost their glitter and consumed themselves.

With a tongue of sequined pebbles, the darkness ate the light.

Sam was tumbling around within and yet without God, smashing against the pinions of the tremendous feathers, caught alternately in winds as cold as ice and as hot as volcano hearts. On and off, as he fought the crushing expanses of blackness that clutched at him with a million oiled talons, he saw Alexander Breadloaf. He saw him first without skin — peeled and bloody. Next he saw him blackened and a thing of ash. The ashes became other dark birds that bored into the belly of the omnipotent black bird and revitalized it with their frenzy. He saw lightning flashing from Breadloaf’s charred nostrils and worms eating the man’s black tongue. He saw him undergo all the punishments of all imagined hells. And he feared greatly the moment when God would turn on the rest of them, come with claws and with fangs to eat out their livers with His silver-plated teeth.

Feathers sprouted from Breadloaf, black feathers that were oily and bent. With His beak, the thing that was God plucked the feathers from the man, leaving gaping holes that seeped yellow…

There was no warmth; neither was there cold.

Everywhere was fear.

Then, abruptly and without announcement, there were words in his mind. They were Hurkos’ familiar tones: Listen. Listen to me. I can see Him. I can see God!

I can see Him too! Sam thought-screamed.

No. I mean, I can see Him with my psionic powers. There is nothing to Him! He’s so damned small!

Clarify yourself! This was from Gnossos.

He is puny. He is not large and forceful. The room is not expanding. Breadloaf is not being charred or eaten by worms. God is trying to frighten Breadloaf to death. Fear and illusions are the only weapons He has left. He has lost His greatest powers. Perhaps from centuries of confinement and the last surge of energy needed to create Sam. He is drained.

But all this, Sam thought.

A damn fake! I’ll send you the true picture. I’m looking, directly through His illusions and delusions. I can see. I’ll broadcast.

In an eye blink, the room was normal. Breadloaf was uncharred. But he was dead. His eyes were blank, fish-belly things. His hand clutched his chest above his heart. The tiny transmitter in his heart would be yelling for the medics. He would be reached in time — here in the city — to be given a new heart before brain damage occurred. He would live again.

“Where?” Gnossos asked.

Then they saw it. It was poised on the rim of the Shield itself. It was a small, pink, formless thing. It had not refrained from transferring itself simply because it was too big. It had sent Sam first for the simple reason that Sam would be more effective than it would have been. For a moment the dreams surged back, but Hurkos used his own, greater powers to fight them away. Then the Mue raised a chair, smashed it into the pink slug. Again, again, and again. He mashed with a fury that Sam would not have guessed him to possess.

And Hurkos killed God.

XI

Breadloaf came through the door of the saloon, stopped a moment to search them out, then smiled as he sighted them. Only seven hours had passed since he had died, but he looked healthy and cheerful. More cheerful, in fact, than they had ever seen him look. He made his way through the crowd, nodding to friends, stopping now and again to shake hands with those who were oblivious to his recent adventure. Finally he reached their table, sat down. “I passed the church on the way. The Christians are moving out of their homes in the basements, bundles on their backs. In a way, it’s a shame. Their lives have amounted to nothing.”

“They can take the shots now,” Hurkos said. He was relaxed for the first time in a long, long while. He had gotten his revenge, more revenge than any man could hope for. Sam had wondered, at first, if Hurkos could be deranged, for he had, after all, killed. But he had not killed a man. Therein lay the key. What he had killed was a rung lower than Man, really, therefore an animal. “They can live eternally.”

“Some of them probably will. But they are old, remember. Fifty, some sixty, while the rest of us are thirty or under. It will not be completely pleasant to be eternally near-old in an age of eternal youth.”

“Tragic and ironic,” Gnossos said, sipping his drink. “How do you feel?”

“Better than ever,” Breadloaf answered punching the robotender for drinks and trying unsuccessfully to ward off Gnossos’ hand as it thrust coins into the machine.

“I guess so,” Hurkos said. Then: “Gnossos, I killed God tonight. How’s that for an epic poem?”

“I’ve been thinking,” the poet said. “But it would have been better if He had been a Goliath. There is nothing particularly heroic about smashing a helpless slug to pulp.”

Sam finished his drink, set the glass down. “I’m going for a walk,” he said, standing. “I’ll be back in a while.” Before anyone could speak, he turned for the door, struggling through the crowd, and stepped outside. Night was giving way to day; a touch of golden dawn tinted the horizon already.

“You all right?” Gnossos asked, stepping out beside him.

“I’m not sick, if that’s what you mean. Not exactly.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I know what you mean.”

“The purpose of life: to overcome your creator.”

“But what can a walk do? Me? I’m getting drunk.”

“Yeah,” Sam said slowly. “But you know that won’t work. Maybe I’ll get drunk too, later. But now I’ll walk.”

“Want me to come along?”

“No.”

Sam stepped off the curb and into the cobblestoned street. The ways here were twisted, for the aesthetic quality was supposed to be reminiscent of an old Earth city — though much cleaner and far more efficient. He found streets that tangled in on themselves, twisted through tree-dotted parks and between quaint old buildings. With him were memories of the chamber beyond Breadloaf’s office wall, pictures of cold emptiness. He could still feel the cool breeze rippling through his hair from the gaping, empty tank.

He walked past the park where the lake stretched away in the distance. There was a gentle slapping of its waves against the pilings of the free-form walkway that bridged its shallower portions. There was the sound of fish jumping now and again. Somewhere a dog barked. And in his mind, there were questions.

Who was he?

What had been his past?

And where — oh, where! — was he bound?