Last Stop on the Green Line

Illustration by Ron Chironna

The snow in Harvard Yard was a foot deep, and Harry Simpson was up to his knees in it.

And up to his hips, his shoulders, and his neck. He realized without shock or surprise that he was lying on his back in the middle of the icy confection.

He opened his eyes and looked up at a sharp blue sky framed by the wall of Memorial Church and a row of low shrubberies.

A moment passed before he remembered the party. It was one of those on-line dorm affairs where everyone talked to each other through their think-man, so no one paid much attention to a twenty-six-year-old public service student like Harry Simpson, allowing him to drink far more than he should have.

And on the way home, the yard in front of the church had seemed as inviting as his own bed and much, much closer.

The shrubs had shielded him from view of passing students and the campus police, and his rik-suit had saved him from freezing to death. The Rik-technology garment that had been the fashion rage a year ago was now hopelessly out of style, but it still served its purpose.

A cold wind nipped at Harry’s face as the bell in the spire began to ring, and the wind rasped across his cheeks, reminding him that it was still February.

He counted the pealing of the church bell, hoping to determine the time without actually looking on-line. He stopped when his count reached thirteen. That was close enough, he decided.

Then he noticed the quiet.

Not quiet outside, where the church bell echoed off the Harry Elkins Widener Memorial Library and Emerson Hall and the rest of Harvard Yard, but quiet inside. Inside his head.

His think-man was off-line, he realized with a start. For the first time in days as far as he could recall—with the exception of his cybernetics and philosophy class with Professor Epstein. The faint menu shimmering in the air was gone. So was the gentle pressure of the virtual mouse in his hand. And there was no soft whisper filling his ears with information at the moment of command.

“Instant access to unlimited information is not the wonder it would first seem to be,” Professor Epstein had said often enough, her eyes glaring with mystic intensity. “If you don’t know what to do with that information, then it is a waste of technology and a waste of a potentially useful mind. One of the reasons you have mortgaged your futures to attend this university is to become accustomed to doing more than drowning yourselves in a flood of data. And that is why you cannot enter this classroom without unplugging.”

For most of his classmates, that had been a difficult exercise. They found themselves stammering as they tried to form sentences without cybernetic assistance, answer questions that called for judgments instead of the quick recitation of facts and figures provided by a computer somewhere across the river, and generally pretend to be more human than they had learned to be in their short lives.

With the exception of the Rik students, of course. Their race had grown up with the technology and knew how to handle it.

And, on occasion, with the exception of Harry Simpson, who had spent six years in public service, planting forests in the Pacific Northwest and earning enough credits to get to Harvard in the first place and learning to think for himself long before the price of the think-man had dropped to a level even he could afford. Or so he liked to think.

He remembered now that he had switched off-line shortly after falling backwards into the snow. The think-man had been too noisy, lecturing him about the life expectancy of an exposed human being lying on the ground in the middle of February in the middle of the night in the middle of Harvard Yard.

The church bell stopped ringing, and Harry became aware of the sudden rise in the level of noise around him. Voices, footsteps, and the commotion of changing classes.

He turned his head to glimpse the parti-colored parade through the bushes. His head punished him for his escapade of the previous night by throbbing and spinning.

There was no choice now but to follow through—or lie here and risk suffering the fate of pathetic rock musicians of the last century.

He rose to his feet in one swift motion, trying to outwit his protesting sense of balance. It worked, after a fashion, and he pushed through the shrubs to the sidewalk where students thronged and the occasional professor tried to keep a steady course against the current.

Cambridge was a company town where the major industry was sophistication, so everyone tried to look sophisticated. Sometimes they were just faking it, but sometimes they weren’t. Harry remembered the night he had wandered into a seminar on foreign policy and extraterrestrial trade. The lecturer had been Elsie Hays, the government’s Extraterrestrial Trade Representative with the Riks.

He opened his rik-suit, exposing himself to the bitter winter chill for a moment, and switched on his think-man. The reassuring murmur of faraway voices returned to his ears, the menu flickered to life at the edge of his vision, and he could feel the virtual mouse in his hand once more.

Though he wouldn’t admit it to his classmates, this was his way of belonging to something larger than himself. He just didn’t feel comfortable joining their team. He had learned too young how to be a loner. But he didn’t feel comfortable without belonging to something, and this was it.

“Thank you for using MRI On-Line Systems,” the voice in his ear said. “You have seven messages in voice-mail.”

“Victoria!” he cried out loudly, smacking himself in the forehead with the palm of his hand. He squeezed the mouse and the main menu appeared before him—complete with a digital clock that told him he was more than an hour late for his date with Victoria Anne Dickinson.

The voice-mail was from her. All of it.

“I’m waiting, Harry dear.”

“I’m still waiting, Harry.”

“Harry, it’s been half an hour.”

“Mr. Simpson, I do not appreciate being embarrassed like this.”

“Where are you, Harry?”

“If you’re not here in five minutes, Harry, you can forget about it.”

“I’m in the Science Center and you have exactly five minutes—until 11:05 A.M.—to get your trash over here.”

With about ninety seconds left before her deadline, he dashed down the lane, ducking across the path of a Campus Police security cart and nearly clipping the rearview mirror. He narrowly avoided plowing into a pack of Riks—who resembled meter-tall gerbils with insect-like compound eyes—as they passed through the gate into the Yard. And he stopped short only a few inches from Professor Epstein as she stepped out from behind a concrete planter.

“Mr. Simpson!” the professor said without a gasp, her gray eyebrows arching towards the wool cap she had pulled tightly over her head. “One of the drawbacks of that infernal machine in your brain is that it interferes with your concentration and turns you into a menace to pedestrians.”

“I’m sorry, Professor,” he said quickly, turning around and walking backwards away from her. “I’m late. I’m late—for a very important date.”

The professor cocked a dubious eyebrow at him, shook her head, and continued on her way.

Harry dashed through the doors of the Science Center, past a bulletin board plastered with flyers and notices, and up the concrete ramp towards the fern-filled restaurant with its vegetarian treats and hungry students.

And there was Victoria, standing at the top of the ramp, waiting, wearing knee-high black boots, a long red coat that reached nearly to her ankles—with black buttonhooks undone from about mid-calf—and a fierce expression that she wielded like a weapon powerful enough to melt holes through lead—a weapon aimed directly at him.

“It’s about time,” she said as he skidded to a stop before her. She reached out, put a hand around the back of his neck, pulled his face down to hers and kissed him long and hard.

Victoria Dickinson was self-centered, demanding, stubborn, occasionally rude, always spoiled, and smarter than most of her classmates.

Part of that she’d inherited from her father. He was the ambitious, self-made entrepreneur who had amassed a fortune by importing as much Rik technology as the government would allow—the think-man, rik-sacks, rik-suits, and new things that no one even knew about yet.

Another part of it was her age. like Harry, she was older than most of her classmates. She’d spent a year at Wellesley before tiring of it and taking off on a tour of the world—at her father’s expense, of course. Four years later, she’d returned. Wellesley wouldn’t take her back, but by then she was able to attract the attention of the admissions office at Harvard.

Their relationship was one of cold passion. She wanted sex. In fact, she demanded sex. But she offered little love in return. And no romance. Mostly she offered a casually domineering manner that she had either learned or inherited from Daddy.

Harry put up with it. He told himself that he could walk away any time he wanted. Most of the time he believed that. He had found a place inside himself that was unaffected by her demands and unbothered by her psychological battering. And in return he had a rare opportunity to observe an example of extreme human character close up.

It wasn’t as if he could see some spark of girlish innocence in her, some sensitive bit of unprotected humanity. There was none of that.

It was more the ghastly fascination felt by a bystander at some horrible accident. He didn’t necessarily want to look, but he couldn’t turn away.

And there was always another surprise waiting around the corner.

But he knew that sooner or later they would come to a parting of the ways—before he allowed her to consume him like a black widow spider or a praying mantis.

Victoria released him and drew back.

“You taste awful. What have you been doing?”

He began to answer her, but she interrupted.

“Never mind. Hurry up and come with me. I have to get to class and there’s something you have to do.” She handed him her rik-sack—which was not larger inside than out, as some confusing ads said when it came on the market, but lighter full than empty—and took off down the ramp, her boot heels flopping against the concrete floor.

They stepped back into a February chill leavened only slightly by a bright midday Sun. Winter in New England was cold again, now that the greenhouse effect had been reversed. Harry looked up at the sky, unconsciously tuning in to a weather report.

“The temperature is 22 degrees Fahrenheit,” whispered the voice in his ear. “The wind chill is 5 below zero. Forecast for this afternoon is sunny and continued cold and windy. Tonight’s temperatures will be in the single digits.”

The wind plucked at homemade banners strewn across the ivy-covered bricks of the Harvard dorms. “Freshman Social Feb. 23,” proclaimed one. “Rik Student Society looking for you!” said another, with an ominous ambiguity.

A cleanup team was working its way across the snow-covered common, collecting litter, sweeping the snow from the walk, smiling at the passersby. Even Harvard had become infested with the self-appointed groups of civic-minded youth that seemed to pop up simultaneously all over the place. Harry thought they were a poor substitute for the work crews he’d been on when he was doing his PS. Besides, the university paid people to do that kind of thing. These kids would be of more use if they joined the Democratic Activist League.

A small handbill stuck to a lamppost caught Victoria’s attention. She stopped abruptly, stepped over to the lamppost, ripped the flyer down, came back, and stuffed it in Harry’s hand.

It said simply: “WE’LL PAY YOU TO TRAVEL.”

“This is where I want you to go.”

“Is this a subtle way of telling me to get lost?”

“That’s not funny,” she said, frowning as she continued down the walk. “This is serious. I want you to go there today—before lunch. Sign up for the tour of Naverly Tol. There’s only one a day and they still have a seat open.”

He read the small print at the bottom of the sheet. The offer of cash for travel was made by Getaway Tour Guides. Harry fingered his virtual mouse, flipping through menus until he found a directory of campus organizations. He rolled up to “Getaway” and squeezed hard.

“Getaway Tour Guides is a travel guide publisher started several years ago by Harvard students and continued by them after graduation. They pay students to travel to exotic locations in return for written reports on travel arrangements and tour highlights. The reports are used in travel guides, both hardcopy and on-line. Offices are located in the Brattle Building, Harvard Square, Suite 211. For on-line link, return to menu.”

“Naverly Tol? Where is that?”

“Somewhere on the other side of the Galaxy, I suppose,” Victoria said. “It hasn’t been discovered yet by the tourist crowd.”

“And you want me to go there?”

“It’s important,” she said. “I’m doing it as a favor to Daddy. You only have to be gone overnight.”

“Are you going to tell me why?”

“Later, darling. After class, I’ll tell you all you need to know” Their walking had carried them up to the doors of Emerson Hall.

Emerson—like many of Harvard’s aging structures—had always reminded Harry of a theme-park for historians and scholars. It was centuries old on the outside, but sparkling new on the inside, just like something built by Disney, complete with electronic blackboards and think-man jacks at every desk.

“Now kiss me quick and get going. If you hurry, you can walk me to the library when class is over.”

He obliged her and then stepped back. She didn’t even look up, but turned quickly and rushed through the doors.

Harry sighed, then headed for Harvard Square.

Harry Elkins Widener was a Harvard graduate who’d had the grave misfortune, at the age of twenty-seven, to purchase a ticket on the maiden voyage of the White Star liner Titanic. He was not one of the lucky ones who survived.

In his will, Harry had left his not inconsiderable private collection of books to his alma mater, to be held by the executor of his estate, his mother, until a suitable place could be found for them. She had taken care of that duty, and now the more than three thousand volumes of his collection filled the shelves of a small, wood-paneled study with a fireplace at the far end, furnished with a few antique sofas and easy chairs and a mahogany desk.

The room was surrounded by a larger library, also provided by Harry’s mother, which was smaller than the Titanic, but not by much.

Mrs. Widener had also required that every student at Harvard be taught to swim before being allowed to graduate.

Victoria thought the smaller library was a perfect place for a confidential conversation.

“Did you take care of everything?” she asked.

“Every last detail,” Harry said, displaying his copy of the transit ticket and a thick book on Naverly Tol that he had picked up at the Globe Map Shop.

“What’s that?” she asked when she saw the book. “Never mind. You won’t need it.”

“What about the Getaway tour guide?” Harry asked, scrambling to avoid having his feelings bruised by her automatic rejection of his preparations.

“What about it? You don’t think you’re going there just so you can write some silly guide for bored tourists, do you?”

“I guess I don’t. Exactly why are you sending me to the other end of the Galaxy?”

“When you get to this place—”

“Naverly Tol.”

“Whatever. When you get there, you will be contacted by someone.”

“Human or alien?”

“Don’t ask questions. You’ll know when they make contact. When they do, they will give you something. Something very valuable. That’s all you need to know right now. You are to bring it back to me. Understand?”

“Simple enough. If nothing goes wrong.”

“Nothing can go wrong, Harry. Trust me. This has all been worked out. There’s no room for error.”

Harry kept his doubts hidden. The more he went along with her, the more skeptical he became. Obviously there was much going on here that Victoria wasn’t telling him.

There was a lot going on that he wasn’t telling her as well, so in a way he felt they were even. But he was beginning to realize that just as there was no reason for her to trust him—whether she knew it or not—there was no reason for him to trust her.

“Is that a promise?” he asked.

“You have my word on it,” she said, with a glint in her eye that left Harry certain that her word was worth about as much as Harry Widener’s ticket to the Titanic.

While the Rik had arrived in Earth orbit in great starships that burned in the night like distant beacons, their preferred mode of travel was the transit line: instantaneous transmission of matter across the vast emptiness of interstellar space. It was much easier once you had a transmitter and a receiver in place at each end.

The station for Boston was out in Riverside, at the far end of the Green Line on the T. And in a way, Earth itself was like that trolley stop—the last station on the end of this line for decades to come.

It took nearly an hour to make the ride to that last stop. And it took a couple more to pass through the succession of transit stations between Earth and Naverly Tol.

Eventually, Harry stood a hundred meters from the edge of a great canyon under a flawlessly clear blue sky. The gash in the ruddy desert plain dropped away from him, yellowish brown around the edges and rusty red in its depths. A dry channel carved its sinuous course through the bottomland, its twists and turns magnified and amplified into the wide expanse of the canyon walls.

A single twisted skeleton of a long-dead tree clung to the stone in front of him. The plastic structure of the transit station stood behind him.

This was Naverly Tol.

An automated aircar appeared from behind the Rik building, collected its single passenger, and flew off over a stark and lifeless plain. It deposited Harry after a short flight on a piece of gravel and sand that appeared as arbitrary as it was colorless.

According to the book he’d bought at the Globe, the inhabitants of this world had done this to their planet themselves.

“An ecological disaster of the first order has occurred here within historical time,” Professor Melville Grant had said. “All their subsequent culture is a reaction to this disaster, which must have occurred over a very brief interval. The shock waves of planetary destruction can be found in the patterns of the Tolian culture, in the pathologies of the Tolian character, and in the constant, ceaseless trek that the Tolians have set themselves upon since the collapse of their natural habitat and the consequent destruction of their technological civilization…”

Harry had gone over that part of the book six times, starting over and over again each time he was interrupted. He’d never gotten much farther.

The arid wind sucked the moisture out of his body despite his rik-suit, and the windblown grains of sand stung his face:

The Tolians began to appear within a few minutes.

The first one came alone. It wore a tunic over a spherical body with a wide belt around its middle. A conical head sat atop a long, flexible neck—with large, bulging eyes at the end of straw-colored stalks that sprouted from the top instead of hair. The thing had no chest, just an abdomen. Its legs bent backwards at the hip and knee joints, which were as large as grapefruit—either it had some form of arthritis or a complete set of ball-and-socket joints from one end of the limbs to the other. The elbows and shoulders looked the same. Its wide splayed feet were wrapped in rough-spun cloth. Its oversized hands had too many digits to count.

“Hello,” Harry said.

The Tolian stopped twenty meters away, tilted its eye stalks up and down to inspect the tourist from Boston, then continued on its way without making a sound.

A second Tolian arrived a few minutes later, pulled a tube from a pouch, put one eye to it, and scanned the horizon. A moment later, another To-lian ran up from the south and gobbled loudly.

“Water hole four kilometers to the southeast,” said the voice in Harry’s ear.

“Thank goodness for small favors,” Harry said to no one in particular, grateful for the Rik translation program.

“Blessed eating,” said the first Tolian.

They ran off towards the west.

The next to appear was a group about a dozen strong. Every tew meters, they would stop and one of them would dig in the sand with what looked more like a large spoon than a shovel. After a bit of intense work, the digger would make a loud exclamation and leap up holding a bit of vegetation or a wiggling bit of wildlife, then rush over to one of the large baskets they carried.

They, too, ignored Harry, but by now he’d gotten used to it. At least they didn’t try to put him in a basket.

“You all must have gone to the same school,” he called after them, softly so as not to attract their attention.

At long last, after a couple of obvious hunting parties came by, carrying their game lashed on long poles, the main party appeared.

The cloud of dust was as wide and thick as the distant mountains and climbed to the sky.

First came a line of bearers, then teams of draft animals pulling sledges that floated a meter off the ground. Finally the centerpieces of the procession appeared out of the red clouds of dust: nine great floating platforms carrying tents and canopies and mounting green and blue flags, with pennants snapping smartly in the wind.

And hundreds of Tolians, large and small, young and old, all joined in the great parade, some pushing the great platforms along, others leading animals hitched to them in harness, and many riding in the luxurious shade.

Harry stood slackjawed as they passed.

He had been standing that way for a long time when an oddly shaped creature appeared in the midst of the caravan—tall, slender, with shrunken joints, a nearly bald head, and a ridiculously small mouth. It was a man.

“I’ll bet you’re Harry Simpson,” he said. Harry blinked in surprise—partly because there had been no translating voice in his ear.

“Yes, I am,” he stammered. “And you’re—”

“Dr. Melville Grant, at your service,” he said, taking a deep bow. “I believe we have a mutual friend—Victoria Dickinson. Did she tell you that I’d be expecting you?”

Harry laughed, snorting through dust-caked nostrils.

“She told me that someone would be expecting me,” he said. “But she didn’t tell me who.”

Grant smiled. “I’m not surprised. I’m not accustomed to these games of secrecy.”

“That’s all right, neither am I.”

That drew another smile. “I assume you haven’t eaten. You wouldn’t want to spoil the experience, now would you? Come along with me. Dinner will be ready in a couple of hours. We can take care of our business afterwards.”

Harry nodded and fell into step alongside the exo-anthropologist. He still didn’t have the slightest idea what was going on, but he wasn’t about to let it show.

The great alien parade strode off across the desert, and this time he was a part of it.

When the sun was still a few degrees above the horizon, the Tolians slowed to a halt. Several of the largest, heaviest, and most overdressed members of the entourage came down off the floating platforms and assembled at the head of the parade. They talked, quietly at first, then with more vigor and volume, and finally with flamboyant gestures and abrupt movements, until they appeared to reach some kind of agreement, marching as a group to a point about forty meters to the north of the site of the discussion.

Once there, one member of the group planted a flag in the ground, while the rest grumbled and mumbled among themselves, then returned to their platforms. A moment later, the entire vast assemblage burst into frenzied activity as the Tolians made camp.

“They were deciding where to put the head table,” said Dr. Melville Grant.

Harry turned to see the older man smiling at his confusion. Grant was at least sixty and his serene figure seemed to radiate dignity. Harry wondered if it had come with age or if he had always looked that way. Was it something one could learn, or did you have to have it in your genes?

“Do they do that a lot?”

“Every night. It makes sense if you understand the central organizing principal of the Tolian culture.”

“And that is?”

Grant sighed, then it seemed as if a small switch had been flipped somewhere turning him into a live version of an on-line voice. “The Tolian civilization was very sophisticated before it fell apart. A sophisticated culture can develop quite a complex reaction to a traumatic event—especially an event on the scale of a planetary ecological collapse. I assume you saw the runners and scouts and advance parties.”

“Yes. Are they like that with everyone or should I have taken it personally?”

He laughed. “Don’t take it personally. They’re all familiar with tourists and don’t have much to do with them. And even though you and I can understand them through the local net,” he said, tapping his ear, “they do not have the same capability. So they cannot understand what you or I say unless we use a hard terminal as a translator.”

“I feel better then.”

“Now, did you notice what the advance parties were doing?”

“Hunting and gathering from the look of it. Quite a fall from grace for a technological race.”

“It would appear that way—but only on the surface. True, they were hunting and gathering. But the organizing social force behind the activity is much more sophisticated. The social hierarchy of each Tolian prolat is centered on the leaders of the contra-grav platforms—a couple dozen all told.”

“The Tolian chiefs?”

“Close, but not quite,” Grant said. He laughed, inwardly, clearly at a private joke. “They are not chiefs, but chefs.”

“Chefs?” Harry asked in disbelief.

“Master chefs. Each of them is the heir to the combined knowledge of their clans—recipes for sauces, appetizers, main courses, soups, desserts. The menus of each family are maintained and protected as the Tolians wander across their barren world.”

“And the hunters and gatherers?”

“They are looking for the ingredients of each night’s menu. The master chefs send them searching for the spices, vegetables, game, and fruit that they need to prepare their selected dishes. It’s much more difficult and labor-intensive than simple hunting and gathering. Added to the challenge is the current state of the ecology. In order to support this number of Tolians, the tribes have to move more than forty kilometers a day.”

“No wonder the runners ignored me,” Harry said. “They were too busy to waste time gabbing with strangers.”

“Exactly.”

The feast was more than anything Harry could have imagined.

Within an hour, the tables were filled with food, though none of it was identifiable as more than soups, stews, breads, meat, vegetables, and sauces. Not that it mattered.

The range of tastes was like a symphony. The eating went on for hours and hours. Harry found it impossible to keep track of the competition among the chefs despite Grant’s best efforts to provide a play-by-play commentary. In the end, however, there was no hiding the winner.

One of the minor chefs from a table at the far end of the assembly was rousted from his seat, paraded around in the center of the encampment, and awarded a pennant of black and gold, which he wrapped around his waist before returning to his place.

After that ceremony, the gathering slowly dissolved, with the chefs leading their parties back to their platforms and the torches sputtering out one by one.

Harry pulled himself to his feet with some difficulty and walked uncomfortably out into the desert. After a while, he looked up into the night. Here, away from the torches and the smoke from the camp fires, he could see the full blaze of stars that filled the sky.

This was not the meek sky of his home world, wrapped by dark clouds of dust that shielded the full glory of the Milky Way Galaxy. Naverly Tol was much closer to the hub of the Galaxy and high above its central plane. The galactic core was a soft yellow glow that filled a quarter of the celestial dome, while the dark dust clouds, pale glowing nebulae, and clusters of young blue stars that marked the spiral arms unwound to the north and south.

Harry found himself staring up into the astronomic depths until his neck burned and his eyes watered.

“Quite a view, isn’t it?”

Grant’s voice startled him out of his reverie and pulled him back to the surface of the planet.

“You have a talent for understatement,” Harry said.

“I’ve been told that.”

“Any idea how far we are from Boston?”

“That’s a difficult question to answer,” Grant said, kicking a rock across the gravelly desert floor. “It depends on your philosophy. Rik science says that distance is simply a mathematical illusion that can be overcome with some technological sleight of hand. The Tolians, on the other hand, have a view of time and space that is difficult to grasp. They never stay in one place long enough to acquire a sense of here and now. And yet their entire existence consists of repeating the same rituals of hunting, cooking, and dining over and over again. The combination of static time and constant motion makes for a unique view of the world.”

“I can see that,” Harry said, looking up in time to catch sight of a shooting star. “Judging from a strictly personal point of view, taking the transit here didn’t involve travel at all.”

“Exactly. When you study a variety of cultures, you come to realize that every way of looking at the world is artificial and in some fundamental way, wrong and incomplete.”

“I guess I’ve felt that way more than once in my life,” Harry said.

“One thing for certain, the transit technology will radically change how the human race thinks of time, space, and travel. And sooner than most people realize—if we are successful.”

Harry felt a moment of disorientation. Dr. Grant had just stepped across the line from innocent discussion to conspiratorial plotting—and Harry realized abruptly that he was mostly unaware of the dimensions of the conspiracy and the plot. He kept his ignorance to himself and made an innocent, but leading reply.

“Yes, there is that,” he said, hoping that he sounded like he knew what they were talking about.

In the starlight, Harry could see Grant slip a rik-sack from his shoulder, step closer, and hand it to him.

“Here it is,” he said. “You realize how important this is, don’t you?”

Harry froze. A moment’s hesitation was all it took.

“Or do you?” Grant asked.

“To tell you the truth, Victoria didn’t explain much to me.”

“In that sack is a portable transit device. I assume she told you that you were to bring it back to Earth.”

Harry felt a chill run up his spine. “Yes, that much was explained. I’m not sure I understand how it got here, though.”

“It’s a long story, and the less of it you know, the safer it is for all involved. It was brought here by others—not the Rik, of course. We were told of its existence and its importance. And those who told us recommended that we bring it home, examine it, and learn the secrets of that technology before the Rik end up controlling our world completely.”

Harry whistled. No wonder Victoria hadn’t explained any of this to him. There was much more going on here than he had even begun to suspect. He needed time to think.

Perhaps the time had come to call it quits with Victoria Dickinson. If that was possible…

It had been a few years since he’d left the place, but MIT still had all the charm and beauty of a roof full of heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning equipment.

The buildings reminded him of something out of Eastern Europe’s Communist days—acres of poured concrete growing out of neoclassical marble, towers of brick with walls of glass and Venetian blinds. The only advantage Harry could see in the utilitarian and artless architecture was the passion of its builders for connecting the buildings. It was possible to go from one end of campus to the other without ever stepping out into the cold.

He worked his way past the huge dewars of liquid nitrogen that cluttered the halls of the physics department. The bulletin boards that lined the walls were filled with the dry business of technical and engineering life—except for the Peace, Justice, Freedom, and Liberation board, which was covered with strident messages urging students to join a variety of organizations aimed at throwing off the yoke of a variety of villains, beginning with the school administration, running through several banks and corporations, and ending at the top with the Riks.

Harry felt a certain sympathy for those groups as he tightened the strap on the rik-sack that carried his contraband.

He wasn’t quite sure when he made the decision to withhold his cargo from Victoria Dickinson. It was some time before he had returned to the Rik transit station in Riverside, at the far end of the Green Line.

One of the weightier factors in his decision was the sudden recollection that Victoria s father wasn’t just any old son-of-a-bitch with too much money. He was the old son-of-a-bitch who owned Mass-Rik Imports, the company that operated the network and controlled all the think-mans in the city.

At least part of the puzzle fell into place when he put that piece on the table. And that made Harry a little more nervous. He knew that in the end, it would be easy to turn his back on Victoria and walk away. But he was not as sure that it would be the same with her father.

He found Arleigh Dean alone in the room on the fourth floor where the Students for the Exploration and Exploitation of Space were scheduled to meet. His red hair nearly matched the plaid flannel shirt he wore. A pencil rested on one ear, threaded through the top of a beard shot through with gray hairs—the only sign of change in the years since he’d been Harry’s roommate.

“Say Harry, long time no see,” he said as the two men greeted each other. “What brings you down here from Harvard Yard?”

“Big business,” Harry said. “Big, black magic business. I’ll tell you all about it if you’ll tell me what happened to the kids who were supposed to meet here today.”

Arleigh laughed, but Harry could feel the pain. “They’re not interested in space anymore,” he said. “Not when you can get there with a short ride on the T.”

“I guess you’re right. But I’ve got something that could change all that. Right here in my bag.” Harry pulled his rik-sack off his shoulder and withdrew the contents—a single piece of clearly extraterrestrial technology, all smooth-flowing surfaces, purple-pigmented parts, and a set of universal jacks for Rik-technology attachments.

Arleigh let out a long, low whistle. “Looks neat. What is it?”

Harry sat down and told him the story of his trip to Naverly Tol. When he was done, Arleigh sat down too.

“How did you get that thing past customs? The Alien Technology Bureau is picky about what it wants in the hands of the public.”

“I didn’t think I would at first,” Harry said. “I was in the inspection line at the transit station, waiting for them to check my rik-sack. But when I got to the head of the line, the woman behind me dropped a bagful of about twenty creatures that looked like rabbits with wings. They went all over the place, and the inspectors went running after them. They just waved the rest of us through. I figured Victoria had set it up, and decided I wanted more time to think before I just handed it over to her. So instead of grabbing the T, I hiked on down the street and grabbed a cab.”

“How do you know this thing is for real?”

“I don’t,” Harry said. “That’s why I came to you.” “Geez, Harry, I don’t know anything about this stuff. I’m too busy teaching kids how to push electrons through cloud chambers.” He lifted the device, gauging its heft. He squinted for a moment, then his eyes sparkled. “But I do know where we can go for an expert opinion. Come with me.”

Arleigh lead Harry on a twisted path through several buildings, through narrow white-walled corridors, past windows offering glimpses of cramped industrial courtyards, and office after identical office. They ended up in a small dusty cul-de-sac where the placard on the door read: “Department of Alien Technology.” Arleigh pushed through the doors into a bare workroom where two young undergrads in white lab coats were playing computer games on their virtual terminals.

“Gotcha!” one yelled. “I knew you couldn’t hide behind that rubble all day”

The other jumped to his feet in sudden embarrassment at the sight of the two visitors. Harry felt ashamed, but for a different reason. The bare, unused lab revealed the painful truth that thanks to the Riks and the government there was precious little alien technology available for humans to study.

But that was about to change.

“Boys, call your boss,” Arleigh said. “I’ve got a project for you.”

The walk up from Kenmore Square and over the Turnpike was brutal. Harry shifted the bag of groceries to one arm and pulled up the clear face plate of his rik-suit. Now he looked like a beached scuba diver.

As he headed towards Fenway Park, the wind blew fine crystals of powdered snow off the top of the stadium, which stuck to his faceplate and turned to water. A few minutes later, he walked through the ice-encrusted parking lot and into the Howard Johnson’s motel where he’d been holed up for two days.

There was a message for him on the phone when he got to his room. It had to be Arleigh—or else terribly bad news. He’d told no one else where he was and had sworn Arleigh to secrecy.

He stripped out of his rik-suit and retrieved a package of cookies from his grocery bag. Since checking into the motel, he’d gotten his first decent sleep in two days. When he was through wolfing down half a bag of Fig Newtons, a radical departure from Tolian fare but suitable for his purposes, he called Arleigh back.

The news was good.

“We still haven’t got the slightest idea why it works, but we have been able to link up with the controls,” the MIT professor said. “The Rik’s universal input jack is something the boys up in the workshop know their way around. They’ve run the tutorial and the diagnostic, and now they’re ready to do some field tests. And we all thought you might want to be in on that phase of the program.”

Harry felt a rush of excitement and fear. “I never thought about it before,” he said. “I just wanted to find out if the thing is for real.”

“Then field tests are the only way to do that. Are you game?”

“What do I have to do?”

“Take a little trip.”

The fear and excitement welled up and spilled over. “How little?”

“Just a matter of meters. Nothing interstellar. What do you think?”

“Isn’t it dangerous?”

“Not according to the lab boys,” Arleigh said. “They say this is a standard piece of merchandise on most Rik worlds. Sort of the equivalent of an HM Lektrosport. It’s designed so we can’t do anything terribly stupid, like pop out in the middle of a wall somewhere.”

“If we do, can we sue the Riks?”

“From what you told me, we’d have a hard time finding the dealer who sold it to us.”

“I guess so,” Harry admitted. “Come on over, then. You know where I am.”

Arleigh was there in less than half an hour. He smiled when he stepped through the door and pulled the transit device out of the rik-sack. It took them a couple of minutes to prepare. They dressed for the cold—Arleigh in a quilted down vest, Harry in his rik-suit.

“We’re going to take just a little jump,” Arleigh said. “One hundred meters to the north exactly. Just across the street from here.”

Harry looked through string bead curtains at the high green walls of Fenway Park—less than a hundred meters away to the north.

“Sounds good to me. Play ball.”

Arleigh smiled, an expression made ominously wolfish by his red beard. “Stand by—on zero—four… three… two… one….” They both sucked in their breaths and jammed their eyes shut involuntarily. There was a moment of darkness, deeper than night and briefer than a thought—

—And then they were falling!

The drop was brief, but the rush of adrenaline started Harry’s heart pounding like a triphammer. Arleigh let out a yell just before they hit the ground. In better weather it might have been a softer landing, but the winter chill had left the grassy outfield as hard as concrete.

Harry felt as if he’d broken his kneecap, but the pain faded quickly. Arleigh looked stunned.

“Damn! I forgot—the field in Fenway is sunk below street level!” he cried.

“Next time warn me before we do something like that,” Harry said, rubbing his knee.

“It’s just as well,” Arleigh said. “We might just as easily have wound up knee-deep in a snow bank.”

He looked around. A bright blue sky formed a canopy overhead. The scoreboard was dark and silent, the bleachers empty, and the seats dusted with snow. And the Big Green Wall loomed over them in left field.

“Well, I guess we re lucky then,” Harry said. “Now what?”

“Now we run like hell,” Arleigh said. “Here come the guard dogs.”

Three large, dark shapes came racing across the infield from the dugout in great distance-swallowing bounds.

Arleigh grabbed the transit device, and Harry looked around for the best direction to escape. “We’re never going to make it,” he said.

The three animals drew swiftly closer. Arleigh swore under his breath. Harry could see that he was on-line, involved with menus and mice. He knew as well as Arleigh did that they didn’t have a prayer of calculating the proper distance and elevation to get onto the street, let alone back to the motel. All he could do was stand by helplessly until they were cornered.

“I just hope these dogs are trained to hold off instead of attack,” Harry said.

In less than a minute, the animals were upon them. It was then that astonishment overtook fear.

“Arleigh, I may be imagining this, but I don’t think those are dogs”

The MIT professor broke from his internal contemplation of the MRI on-line network long enough to focus on the three creatures that were now spreading out to surround them. “I think you’re right,” he said.

The animals were too bulky, their legs too muscular, and their heads too big for dogs. Besides that, they were wearing black vests with radios attached.

“Stop where you are!” commanded the leader of the small pack. “You are trespassing. The police have been called. You will wait until they arrive to be arrested.”

“Who’s to be arrested?” Harry asked. “Us or the police?”

The lead animal shook its head in puzzlement. “I do not understand the question.”

“Syntactical ambiguity,” Harry said. “You told us to wait until the police arrive to be arrested. That can be interpreted to mean that the police will arrive to be arrested, and we’re to wait until they do.”

“Dirty-bad language,” the leader said. “Too many dirty-bad meanings.”

“You’re not guard dogs,” Harry said. “You’re offworlders. What are you doing here?”

“We are under contract through Mass-Rik Imports to guard these premises. We come from Howl-Moon-Rock on special employment visas. Sorry we put your dogs out of a job, but we have to eat, too.”

“Alien labor contractees,” Arleigh said. “I don’t believe it.”

Harry chuckled. “I guess it’s better than a bunch of Dobermans ready to rip our throats out.”

“Yeah. I’ll bet you couldn’t get a good grammar discussion going with a Doberman without a pocket full of liver snacks.”

“What are you guys doing this far from home?” Harry asked, ignoring Arleigh’s remark. “No jobs back on Howl-Moon-Rock?”

“Our world economy broke down several lifetimes ago,” the lead guard said. “We now provide contract services for the Rik, and they provide our race with its basic needs.”

“Several lifetimes ago? That wouldn’t be about the time the Rik came upon you, would it?” Arleigh asked.

Before the alien could answer, Harry asked: “How much do you make on this job?”

“Make? Dirty-bad ambiguity again.”

“Earn. Profit. Surplus product. How much?”

“No earning. No profit. No surplus product. I repeat: We provide contract services for the Rik, and they provide our race with its basic needs.”

“Slave alien labor contractees,” Arleigh said.

“Slave alien labor contractees who talk too much,” Harry noted. “I’ll bet the Rik wouldn’t like it if they knew what they’ve told us about them ”

“I wish we could repay the favor.”

“Me, too. But I’m afraid we don’t have time right now to explain to them the theory of labor value.”

“It would be more in our interest to find a higher place to wait for the police,” Arleigh said. “If-ay oo-yay oh-knay at-whay I ean-may.”

Harry smiled and nodded in agreement. “Say fellow, do you think we could get out of the wind. Center field in February is no place to wait for Boston’s finest.”

“Boston’s finest?” the pack leader asked.

“Police. It’s a figure of speech. Another dirty-bad ambiguity. Really, though, couldn’t we wait in an office upstairs? Or at least up out of the wind.”

The alien paused for a moment, tilting its head from side to side. It sniffed the air, then declared: “Follow me. And do not try anything tricky. We are authorized to use violent force if you attempt to escape.”

“Nothing could be further from our minds,” Harry said as they marched towards home plate in single file, the leader first, humans next, and the other two guards in the rear. “By the way, you’re not telepathic or anything, are you?”

“If we were, we wouldn’t need dirty-bad language to communicate, would we?” it replied.

They passed through a gate behind home plate and through two sets of swinging double doors into a corridor lined with frosted glass. Harry’s heart sagged as he realized that they were still at the level of the ballfield, then soared when they turned into a flight of wide stairs halfway down the hall. They went up two flights, then into a low-ceilinged lobby area where the guards took up positions at either end and the leader stationed itself in front of the main doorway.

“The police will be here in a minute or two,” it said. “Do not attempt to resist arrest.”

“No problem,” Harry said. “Arleigh, how are we doing?”

“No problem,” Arleigh said. “Give me five seconds. Four… three… two… one…”

Harry grabbed Arleigh’s hand as he finished the count. “One… zero!”

The world turned black, then reassembled itself as the sidewalk north of Fenway Park. Harry recognized the bar on the corner and offices across the street. A short distance away, a police patrol car was coming to a stop in front of the main entrance to the stadium.

“This way,” Harry said, tugging on Arleigh’s arm. He hurried across the street and down an alleyway. They emerged in front of a parking lot, between two cars parked haphazardly amidst the piles of blackened snow.

“We should get back to the motel,” Arleigh said. “My laptop’s still in your room.”

Harry looked around cautiously, then beckoned his friend to follow him. A few minutes later, they had materialized back in the room at the Howard Johnson’s.

They barely had time to catch their breath and stash the transit device in the rik-sack when there was a knock on the door, and Harry’s heart leaped into his throat once again.

He switched on the television and dialed up the hall monitor. The image on the screen showed three men who could easily have been on loan from the New England Patriots offensive line standing outside his room.

He and Arleigh scrambled and nearly bumped heads trying to pull the transit device out of the sack. Arleigh was first to succeed, and he went on-line while Harry tiptoed to the door and slipped the bolt, chain, and safety latch into place. The last of those snapped shut with a loud click that sounded like a gun going off.

The knocking was replaced with pounding. Then, after a pause, came a tremendous crash. Harry saw on the TV that the heavyweights were throwing themselves at the door.

He ran back to Arleigh, who was now finished with his work. He looked up in time to see the door frame turn to splinters where the bolt, chain, and safety latch had been anchored. The door itself flew open and the three men came tumbling over each other into the cramped room.

Then the world turned black one more time as they fled the motel…

The store above Harvard Square was stuffed with rows of shelves and the shelves with rows of hardcover books, paperbacks, CD-ROMs, and old magazines, filling the air with a musty smell of age that reminded Harry of his grandmother s basement.

A few posters hung from the walls, their edges tattered and their corners cracked. The man behind the counter had a face that still looked young, but his hair had started to turn gray around the edges.

The bookshop sat on the second floor, and from the window in the front Harry could easily see most of the square.

He pretended to be studying the books, but he was really studying the street. He’d been here for more than half an hour now, watching for the three thugs who’d chased him out of the motel—or others like them.

After a long time of seeing nothing unusual down below, he spotted Victoria Dickinson walking across the street. He scanned the square quickly, trying to find the musclebound crew in the crowd. They wouldn’t be hard to pick out—if they were there.

But he couldn’t find them, and Victoria disappeared into the restaurant downstairs from the bookstore. She was right on time.

Harry knew that sooner or later he would have to talk to Victoria—or to her father. He couldn’t run forever. The motel room was quickly draining his cash reserves. And he wasn’t going to be left alone.

It was just that he was reluctant to turn over the transit device to a power-hungry greed-monster like Victoria’s father.

And the more the gap between him and Victoria grew, the more he realized just how hungry she and her father could be.

So he’d resorted to old-fashioned means, leaving a message on Victoria’s voice-mail, telling her where and when they could meet.

He waited for another ten minutes to see if the dropouts from the Patriots offensive line were going to show up fashionably late, then he went downstairs to meet her.

The restaurant was a German place, all dark wooden paneling with photographs on the walls of Jack Dempsey, some unidentified cardinal, and dozens of anonymous dinner parties. A plastic grape arbor ran along the shelf over the bar beneath rows of large mugs with faces on them.

Once upon a time, it had been a popular place with Cambridge students. But that was when Germany was still a strange and exotic land. The definition of exotic had changed significantly since then, and as a result the place was nearly empty.

Harry went through the archway on the left and into a private bar where Victoria waited for him. She was wearing a black coat with fur trim, high white boots, and her nastiest sneer.

“Don’t start with me, Victoria,” Harry said before she could open her mouth. “First of all, we’re through, you and me. Take that as given. I don’t like being used. And I don’t like being chased or threatened.”

“Darling, using people is what it’s all about,” she replied, turning the sneer into a smile that under other circumstances—and from a different woman—might have been endearing. “Did you expect anything else? I used you, you used me. Quid pro quo.”

Harry refused to be angered by her easy-handed treatment of him.

“Except that there was never any quid for this quo,” he said. “Just those three dinosaurs coming after me at the hotel.”

“Whatever are you talking about?” Victoria asked. “Who’s been threatening you? All I ever asked was a favor from you—one you were perfectly willing to do for me a few days ago.”

“Are you saying you don’t know anything about the thugs who came after me today?”

“Thugs? I don’t know any thugs. Although it would serve you right if they did come after you. You have something of mine, and I don’t think much of your holding onto it.”

“Something of yours? That’s a matter of opinion.”

“And in your opinion—”

“In my opinion, it’s stolen property. Salvage goods. Whoever has it is the rightful owner by possession.”

Victoria frowned. She turned away from him, looked down into her coffee.

“So where is it?” she asked, breaking the long silence between them.

“Somewhere safe.”

“That’s just like you. Do you have any idea what you’re going to do with it?”

“I don’t know,” Harry said. “I haven’t decided yet. I don’t even know what my choices are.”

“Then let me tell you what they are. You don’t realize what you’re up against. This is bigger than you or me. This is bigger even than my father. He’s just another player in this game, but he’s a big one. He enjoys being double-crossed even less than I do. And he doesn’t like you as much as I do.”

Which was a mixed blessing, Harry noted silently. “And that means?”

“That means that sooner or later, his men will catch up with you. They’ll make you tell them where you put the package. While they’re at it, they’ll make you tell them a lot of things you never even dreamed you knew. I’m not just saying this to scare you, Harry—though it wouldn’t hurt you to be a little scared. I really don’t want to see anything bad happen to you. Not anything truly bad.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

“It’s not too late, Harry. I’ll still take you back, you know. It can be just the same as it was before all this.”

Harry smiled and shook his head softly. He didn’t think she might be sincere—not even for an instant. He knew what Victoria was and what she represented—she and her father.

People had come up with a number of ways to deal with the changes that the Rik had brought to the world in the last few years. One approach was to adapt to each change in turn, preserving as much as was necessary of the old before incorporating the new. The other was to grab whatever advantage you could and exploit it for all it was worth while there was still time left.

Harry had already decided against the selfish, grasping approach. He just wasn’t sure how he was going to handle the alternative.

“We both know it can never be the same as it was,” he said. And with that, he turned his back on Victoria and headed for the front door. Then he thought twice.

He walked instead through the main dining room, into a smaller banquet room, then into the kitchen. He ducked out the back of the restaurant into a narrow snow-packed alley, which led down the block to the parking garage and Dunster Street.

This conspiracy game could be fun, he thought as he maneuvered around overflowing trash cans. Fun until one considered the hazards. And being a conspiracy of one had its own drawbacks.

Finally, once he was sure he wasn’t being followed, he doubled back and headed towards Harvard.

Harry slipped through the back door of the Harvard Science Center and slip-stepped down the stairs under the big fire door that hung over the basement entryway like the sword of Damocles. He headed straight for the Museum of Scientific Artifacts.

It was a small room, but behind the glass stood large displays that included a six-foot-long brass telescope, Galileo’s military compass and quadrant, ivory orreries, and row upon row of brass and varnished wood devices whose purposes he could only guess.

The museum was closed now, but he’d had a part-time job here last semester and knew the master code for the door lock.

In a locked chamber behind Galileo’s instruments sat a lacquered wooden case with brass fittings that he’d selected himself. No one would ever have known that the box labeled “1891 Voltage Phase Rectifier” actually contained the alien machine.

It was still there. At the last minute, it had occurred to Harry that it might be possible for someone to activate the thing from a distance and spirit it away from its hiding place, but his momentary fear was unfounded.

Earlier in the day, he’d talked to Arleigh, who told him that the boys in the MIT lab had learned much more about the device’s control program.

Now it was ready to use as its makers had intended—tied into the think-man network. Harry could go anywhere he wanted to at the push of a button.

He turned on his think-man and logged back on-line. It had been only a couple of days since he’d felt the virtual mouse in his hand, seen the sparkle of the menu in his eye, and heard the voice in his ear, but it seemed like years.

Professor Epstein was right, he realized. With this device plugged into his head, he had given up thinking for himself. Otherwise, he knew, he would have questioned Victoria’s request more deeply. He might never have gone to Naverly Tol if he’d been thinking more clearly. He might never have taken up with Victoria in the first place.

He rolled the mouse up, clicked it, and came up with a menu custom-designed for the transit device. He dialed up Quincy Market, and doubleclicked the mouse.

When the darkness faded back to light, he stood in the cobblestoned courtyard between the Market and Fa-neuil Hall. An inch of ice caked the ground, with narrow paths cut through it for pedestrians. The exposed stones were still slippery, though, and Harry almost lost his balance more than once as he crossed the yard to the building.

The smell of hot cooking oil, fried meats, and fresh-baked bread and pastries filled the air, and hundreds of hungry Bostonians filled the space between the rows of restaurants, delis, bakeries, raw bars, and rotisseries.

It occurred to Harry as he worked his way through the mass of diners that if everyone had one of the transit devices, Quincy Market would be impossible to negotiate. It was hard enough as it was, with everyone trying to make up their minds what to eat. But only so many people could be here at once. All that would change with the Rik device.

When things changed, all of Boston would become one vast Quincy Market.

Everyone would be everywhere all the time. It would all be as crowded as this madhouse.

Harry bought himself a skewer of scallops wrapped in bacon and a fresh-baked walnut brownie, then worked his way back outside. He didn’t dare linger here for long, not while he was still on-line. Victoria and her dad would be after him before he could finish eating.

So a moment later, he was in Ken-more Square, under the big Citgo Electric sign. The traffic roared past in both directions, and pedestrians clustered on the corner waiting to make their break for the far side of Commonwealth Avenue. With the transit device all that would be gone, he realized wistfully, nostalgic for a past that had not yet departed the present.

“Why did the chicken cross the road?” he asked himself. “Because its transit device was on the other side.”

He ate his supper. The scallops were rich, but the bacon was undercooked. He needed something to wash it down, so he stepped into a convenience store and pulled a single bottle of Sam Adams out of the cooler.

Then in a moment of devilishness, he leaped straight across the Charles River to the park along Memorial Drive in front of MIT.

That would be something society would have to work hard to cope with, he told himself as he twisted the top off the beer bottle. He had never stolen anything in his life, but with the transit device the temptation was irresistible. It was just too easy.

He drank some beer and looked across the Charles at the city—the high shafts of the Prudential and the Hancock buildings, the jumbled pile of brownstone houses on Beacon Hill, the long span of Harvard Bridge across the river.

The Sun was down, but it still painted the sky pale yellow to the west. The lights were on all over the city, giving the buildings a transparent, insubstantial look. Boston seemed to shimmer in the cold winter air like a mirage. It was an illusion, a momentary confluence of time and space and matter that would all be swept away once humanity had the power to be anywhere it wanted in the blink of an eye.

The pile of old brownstones on Beacon Hill contrasted with the steel and glass towers of Back Bay. How little time had passed between the building of one and the other. Humanity was moving so quickly up the line of progress. But thanks to the Rik, they were about to experience an unprecedented acceleration.

Are we really ready for that? he asked himself.

For a moment, he felt small and immaterial, like he did under the rich Tolian sky. Only now he felt the entire human race joining him in its tiny insignificance. There was so much to know and so little time to know it.

For a moment, be was seized with the impulse to hurl the transit device into the Charles River and settle the question for good. Except that it wouldn’t be settled—that much he knew.

Thinking for yourself was difficult, Harry decided at long last. Of course it was easier to dial up the right menu and listen to a soothing voice in your ear. But where was the menu for Difficult Moral Choices?

There was none, of course, but Harry realized suddenly that he knew a good alternative. And it wasn’t online.

He jumped again, across Cambridge to a Harvard office. A moment later, he made a final jump, then logged off, turned off his think-man, and began jogging down the street towards his destination, hoping that Victoria’s father wouldn’t be able to track him down.

When Professor Epstein answered the door, Harry allowed himself a momentary sigh of relief. He’d worried that she wouldn’t be home. She had a puzzled look on her face, but she invited him into the kitchen and offered him a cup of coffee.

The place was filled with a confused mixture of decorating styles. The kitchen was outfitted with an enameled table and matching appliances that looked nearly a century old—much like the house itself. The hallway was done in a Southwestern motif with woven Navajo blankets on the wall and a cactus garden beneath the window. What he saw of the living room contained personal relics—photos, posters, books, awards. It was as if the professor had collected layers of design throughout her long life and gathered them together in this small frame house on a Cambridge side street.

“My door is always open to students, Mr. Simpson,” she said. “But I’m not sure why you’re here. My usual office hours are posted.”

“It’s something of an emergency, Professor,” Harry said as he set his rik-sack down in the chair and warmed his hands around the hot coffee. “It’s a long story, though, so you’ll have to bear with me.”

Her expression changed from bewilderment to astonishment to indignation as Harry spun his tale.

“So what do I do now?” he asked.

“I don’t know how to answer that question, Harry, but I know someone who might. Excuse me.” She went down the hall and picked up the phone. Harry could hear her talk briefly, then hang up.

“Have another cup of coffee,” Professor Epstein said. “She’ll be here in a couple of minutes. She lives right around the corner.”

Just as Harry drained his cup, the kitchen door opened, and in walked Elsie Hays, the extraterrestrial trade representative.

“We weren’t prepared for the 21st century as it was, never mind the Rik,” Elsie said. “Our political leaders know next to nothing about technology and science. Our institutions are not equipped to deal with the consequences of rapid technological change—worldwide problems like pollution, resource depletion, transportation, economic and social dislocation, and a host of things.”

Harry tried to listen politely, but he couldn’t help but fidget in his seat. Why was it that everyone over forty felt they had to give you a half-hour lecture before answering your questions?

“When the Rik arrived with all their advanced technology, everyone thought it was the millennium,” Elsie said. “They thought we would just start using all those wonderful machines, life would become effortless, and all our problems would be solved.”

“That’s what they thought for about a month,” Harry said.

“Actually it lasted about a year. But then we started to learn about other intelligent species on other planets. And we discovered that contact with the Rik is not a universally beneficial experience.”

“So I’ve come to understand,” Harry said.

“Some worlds have had their cultures completely disrupted, leaving them dependent on the Rik for everything.”

Harry thought of the guard dog substitutes at Fenway Park. Alien slave contract laborers.

“Other worlds have had their indigenous technology so disturbed that it destroyed the ecological balance.”

“Like Naverly Tol,” Harry said, remembering the wind-swept deserts and the shattered civilization of the master chefs.

“Like Naverly Tol,” Elsie said.

“Which is why you don’t think I should let Victoria’s father have the transit device,” Harry said.

“Exactly,” Elsie said. “Not today, at least. Some day we will be ready for the dislocations that the device will produce. But if released now, it would destroy the world economy overnight. And who knows what would happen to humanity after that? We must pick and choose carefully among the mysteries and treasures the Rik have brought us. If we choose wrong, there is no going back and doing it over again”

“I can imagine.”

“So what are you going to do now?”

“I’ve been trying to figure that one out for the past couple of hours,” Harry said.

“Then let me help,” Elsie said. “It’s not going to be easy to turn your back on Miss Dickinson and her father. They’re still going to want their toy. And if you won’t give it to them, they’re going to go back and start over again. Unless…”

“Unless what?”

“Unless you can find a way to discourage them.”

Elsie Hays was on the phone to the Alien Technology Bureau when the pounding started on the front door.

They’d been burning up the wires for nearly an hour now. First Elsie had called the Bureau, then Harry had called Arleigh, then everyone had gotten together on one line—with Harry on the extension upstairs.

Then the doorbell rang, and before Professor Epstein could answer it, the windows began to rattle and the floor started to shake from the impatient hammering.

The pit of Harry’s stomach sank towards the floor as he realized too late what must have happened. Victoria’s father had traced him. It wouldn’t have taken much. They must have tracked his last transit hop to Professor Epstein’s Harvard office, and then found her home address from there. Once he thought about it, Harry was surprised they hadn’t arrived sooner.

“They’re here,” he said breathlessly.

Professor Epstein was at the window, looking out onto the front porch. “There’s two of them,” she said. “Big guys. Head for the back door.”

But now Elsie came running up the hallway from the kitchen, waving them back. “There’s another one in the backyard. You can’t go out there.”

Harry grabbed the phone from the table where Elsie had left it and punched Arleigh’s number. It took him an eternity to answer the phone, and when he did Harry talked fast.-“Arleigh, I don’t have much time, so listen up. They’re about to smash down the door. You know what to do, and this is the time to do it.”

By the time he was finished, the pounding on the door had become frighteningly violent. Any second now Harry expected to hear the crash of breaking glass.

He pushed past Professor Epstein and dashed for the kitchen, sliding across the floor to a stop. He grabbed his rik-sack and switched on his think-man.

“Don’t worry. I have a better way to get out of here. Would you like to come along?”

“And leave my house to these barbarians? Not on your life,” she said as she followed him into the room. She opened a cupboard beside the stove and pulled out a cast iron frying pan, waving it ominously in the air. “Come here, Elsie, I’ve got one of these for you, too.”

“Then I guess I’ll see you in class,” Harry said as he squeezed the virtual mouse tightly. The room faded into darkness…

…And re-formed itself, not as the broad plaza at Copley Square, but as a spacious, low-ceilinged office with a long window on one side looking out over the city.

Harry swallowed hard. This wasn’t where he’d planned to go.

He wasn’t alone. The off-duty football team stood in an uneasy circle around him, a long table surrounded with heavy wooden chairs behind them.

He turned around to see another man, older and wearing a suit that probably cost a semester’s tuition at Harvard, seated behind a desk the size of a limousine.

“Hello, darling. We’ve been waiting for you to drop in.”

Harry turned again to see Victoria Dickinson, sitting on a leather-covered couch, her legs drawn up beneath her. She stood slowly, then walked over to take Harry by the hand and lead him to the big desk.

“Daddy, I don’t think you’ve met Harry. Harry, this is my father—Albert Dickinson. He’s been trying to get hold of you all day.”

Albert Dickinson stood up, but didn’t bother to offer Harry his hand. He was an intense man—his eyes burned brightly, his face was knotted up with tension, and his hair was cut severely above the ears but left shaggy on top.

“Simpson, you’re a royal pain in the ass, do you know that?”

Harry breathed cautiously. It occurred to him that he might have it within himself to resist whatever pressure the elder Dickinson was going to bring to bear on him. He managed to do that with Victoria, why not her father?

“I don’t mean to be,” he said. Dickinson motioned to his men, who moved quickly up beside him. They grabbed him by the arms. A flood of adrenaline pumped through him. He prepared himself for violence—remembering a fistfight he’d been in at an ecology camp in Montana years ago. If this was going to be anything like that, it would be sharp and brief.

But there was no violence. They simply relieved him of his rik-sack and deposited it on the desk in front of Dickinson.

“So this is it?” he asked. “You put me through a lot of trouble over this. It would have been a lot easier if you’d just brought it straight to us like you were told to.”

“I don’t always do what I’m told to do,” Harry said. “I’m funny that way.” He wasn’t sure what he was doing, baiting the powerful man behind the desk, but he had to play for time. The plan had not called for him to be in the place for several hours yet.

“I guess not,” he said. “I’m funny that way, too. But that doesn’t mean I’ll put up with it from someone else.”

“Oh Daddy, he wasn’t doing it to be personal,” Victoria said, cooing and fawning. But Dickinson glared at her and she turned stiff and cold, pouting at her father silently.

“I guess they told you all about me,” Dickinson said. Since no one had told Harry all about him—not even Victoria—Harry was surprised by the comment, but he kept the surprise hidden. “You can believe most of it, too. I’m as bad as they say I am. I always have been, I guess. At least that’s what I’ve been told all my life.”

Victoria’s father pushed his chair back and walked over to a cabinet in the corner. He pulled out a square bottle of dark liquid and poured himself a drink.

“But good or bad, the one thing they can’t deny is that I’m a success,” he said. “Look at this office. Look at how high up we are. It’s a long way up from the street. I built this building and the business inside it. Whether they like it or not, it’s mine. And so is this toy you’ve been playing with.”

He returned to the desk and slid the transit device out of the rik-sack. He stroked the violet casing and poked at the electronic jacks. “You really gave it a workout today, didn’t you? Quincy Market, Kenmore Square, the Charles, MIT, Harvard.”

Harry felt a sudden surge of fear. How did he know? He realized a second later that he must have given himself away.

“You’re wondering how I know that,” Dickinson said. “Who do you think makes the think-man, Simpson? I own the mainframe that you plug into every time you go on-line. I am MRI. We can record everything you do with the system. And we can break in and block or change the commands you enter to activate the machine. That’s how we brought you here.”

Harry sighed. The momentary sense of powerlessness passed. It bothered him that Dickinson knew his every move, but that knowledge was worth little now.

And he was sure that Dickinson didn’t know what else he’d been up to—or what the others were up to now that he had failed to check in from Copley Square. And that was all the more reason to keep him talking—to give them the time they needed.

“What do you think—will it make the customers happy?” Dickinson asked abruptly.

Harry was taken aback by the question, but answered it haltingly. “It works well enough,” he said. “No dizziness or vertigo. It’s a lot quieter than the T.”

Dickinson let a smile crack through his grim face. “The T is going to be a museum when we’re through,” he said.

“That’s the only problem I can see with it,” Harry said. “I like the T.”

“Forget it, Simpson. That world is gone already. It died the day the Riks landed at the Grand Canyon. The only question is who is going to die with it. I don’t intend to be one who does.”

i’d rather not be one either,” Harry said.

“Then you’d better decide which team you’re on. Those cowards in the government are only going to make things worse. The longer they delay letting in Rik technology, the weaker we will be. And the Rik don’t like weakness. They’ll take over in a minute if they think they can get away with it.”

Harry wondered why they would bother if they could get people like Dickinson to do it for them. He did not voice the thought aloud.

“Believe me, Simpson, we’ve only got one chance, and that is to get our hands on as much of the stuff as the Rik will give us. Don’t let those government bureaucrats tell you any different.”

“As a matter of fact,” Harry said, “that’s exactly what they were telling me when your goons showed up.”

“That’s what I figured. Did you swallow any of it?”

“I prefer to think for myself,” Harry said.

“That doesn’t answer my question,” Dickinson said.

Harry was about to speak when someone yelled from behind him. “Hey! Look at that!”

Everyone looked at once as the transit device on the desk gave off an iridescent purple light.

It disappeared from sight, then reappeared a few inches to the right. Harry felt his heart sink. That wasn’t what he expected to happen.

Then it vanished, leaving only a brief draft as the air rushed in to fill the space where it had been.

“Goddamn it!” Dickinson roared, as he reached for the empty space on his desk. He looked up at Harry with hate-filled eyes. “What did you do with it, Simpson?”

Harry mustered all his will to hold back the smile that was struggling to the surface. Arleigh had done his job. The moment of fear when Harry went to retrieve the device from the basement of the Science Center had been the inspiration for the disappearing trick. But to hide his complicity, Harry shrugged his shoulders, opened his eyes wide, and let his jaw drop.

“Never mind. You won’t get away with it.” He grabbed the phone and punched the buttons angrily. “Hello? Were you monitoring Simpson’s link? What about the control menus for the transit machine? Then tell me what just happened.”

There was a long pause as the unfortunate technician at the other end of the line replied, then Dickinson turned visibly red. “What do you mean you don’t know? Are you all sleeping down there?”

There was another silence, then: “All right, go through the traces. Figure out what happened and call me back the minute you know what happened.”

He turned back to Harry.

“I don’t know your game, Simpson, but whatever you’ve cooked up, I’m going to get that machine back. Nothing you can do will stop me.”

Harry shook his head and looked at Victoria. She glared at him, then looked at her father. “I’m not going to forget that you told me we could trust this bastard,” Dickinson told her.

The look of desperate fear that seized her face made Harry’s heart ache. He realized now why he had been drawn to Victoria in the first place. Deep behind that mask of dominance and will was a tortured victim. But it was too late to do anything for her now. It had been too late all along.

“All right,” Dickinson said, motioning to his henchmen. “Take him next door and find out what they did with the machine.”

Harry felt his knees weaken as one of the goons grabbed his left arm and another took the right. For a moment, he felt much like what Victoria must be feeling—weak and powerless. He hoped that Arleigh completed his tasks quickly.

They were halfway to the door when he did.

All three of them turned their heads at the sound of Victoria’s gasp and Dickinson’s voice, choked off in mid-oath.

Suddenly, in the center of the office stood a squad of armed men, a woman in a business suit, and Arleigh Dean clutching Harry’s battered rik-sack.

The woman held a thick sheaf of legal documents in one hand. “Albert Dickinson, I am U.S. Attorney Deborah Wilkes and I have a warrant for your arrest for violations of the Alien Trade Act—with arrangements already being made to add charges of kidnapping and unlawful restraint. These men are U.S. Marshals and are here to take you into custody I would suggest that you do not resist.”

The marshals spread out quickly. Three of them rushed the goons that held Harry and took them into custody.

“You have the right to remain silent,” the U.S. attorney said. As she continued the litany, Victoria gave Harry a look of pure hate.

At last the smile he’d been holding back broke loose and filled his face.

Arleigh came over to his side. “You don’t know how difficult it was to do that work in only a couple of minutes,” he said. “And then I had to move the thing a couple of centimeters to find out where it was—where you were. Then I had to go over and pick up the marshals, only they weren’t ready yet.”

No one seemed to be paying much attention to them at the moment. The marshals were putting the cuffs on the goons.

“Never mind that now,” Harry said. “Just get us out of here.”

Arleigh’s eyes widened, then he shook his head. A moment later the room turned dark—just as Harry heard the U.S. attorney shout: “Stop!”

Then the room reassembled itself as the broad plaza in front of the Christian Science cathedral, complete with a bone-chilling wind scraping across Harry’s face and the Prudential building towering overhead.

Harry met with Elsie Hays a few days later in the regional office of the Bureau of Alien Technology.

“Wilkes still wants to charge you with tampering with evidence, obstruction of justice, and smuggling,” Hays said.

“If it weren’t for me, she never would have been able to bring charges against anybody,” Harry said, feeling bold in the face of uncertainty.

“That’s what we told her,” Elsie said. “We explained how you provided the means to activate the transit device while it was sitting in Dickinson’s office.”

“Am I going to need a lawyer?”

“No, I don’t think so. She’s going to be busy enough taking care of Dickinson. He’s the one who’s going to need the lawyer—and for quite some time to come. Besides, we need your testimony to make the case against him, so you’re getting immunity.”

“And MRI?” Harry asked.

“Their stock is going through the basement even as we speak,” said Elsie. “And the SEC is considering suspending trade in it.”

“I guess without an import license, Mass-Rik Imports doesn’t have much of a future.”

“True,” Elsie said. “And that leaves us with one small unfinished piece of business.”

“The device.”

“The device. Except that it’s already too late.”

“Too late?”

“I already got rid of it.” Elsie’s face wrinkled up with concern, but Harry was quick to continue. “I gave it to the boys in the lab at MIT. I told them to move as much of their equipment as they could carry to someplace safe, then have a party with the thing.”

The concern in Elsie’s face was replaced with distress.

“Oh dear,” she said. “I suppose we can get Mr. Dean to retrieve the device for us—just like he did before.”

“I doubt it,” Harry said. “It’s probably not working by now. They said the first thing they were planning to do was strip it down to its component parts. By now, they’re probably up to their armpits in Rik technology.”

“That’s quite a dilemma,” Elsie said. “It’s not what our policy is at all.”

“No, it certainly isn’t,” Harry said. “But I think Victoria’s father was right. I don’t think your policy makes a whole lot of sense. One reason we weren’t ready for the 21st century is that too many people hid from reality. And Rik technology is reality. If we don’t prepare for it now, as fast as we can, we’re going to go the same way as Naverly Tol. And that means making the leap from where we are now to where the Riks are as quickly as we can.”

Harry reached into his pocket and switched his think-man on. The reassuring sound of the system booting up filled his ears. Elsie’s eyes had grown wide and her jaw seemed to hang just a little bit loose.

“Victoria and her father wanted to exploit the changes the Rik brought us,” Harry continued. “That’s bad enough, but what you’re trying to do is worse. You want to stop the change. And not only is that unwise, it’s damn near impossible. Next time, it won’t be Victoria’s father, but there will be a next time and it will be someone. If you aren’t ready for it when that happens, maybe we aren’t any better than the Tolians. But I, for one, don’t plan on spending my future working for chefs in the desert digging up grubs for the salad.”

He searched the menus for some good background music.

“Now, if we’re all finished, I’d like to get back home. I have a travel guide article I need to write.”