Masterpieces

HARLAN ELLISON “Repent, Harlequin!” Said the Ticktockman

Harlan Ellison is a genre unto himself. One of the most controversial and provocative writers of science fiction in the second half of the twentieth century, he is known for impassioned, outspoken stories that mix humor, horror, pathos, and rage in inimitably personal proportions. Though his work has been embraced by the science fiction community, little of it conforms to science fiction conventions. Ellison was a seasoned writing professional who for a decade had turned out quantities of competent commercial fiction for a variety of markets—science fiction, fantasy, crime, juvenile delinquent—when he began publishing speculative tales that challenged taboos and broke prevailing conventions in science fiction. “ ‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman” is a Kafkaesque parable about the dangers of individuality in a conformist society. “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” is a prescient tale of future shock in which computers become the masters of human beings. “A Boy and His Dog” has become one of the best-known stories of a postapocalyptic future, owing to its unflinching treatment of the ethics of survival. Ellison’s fiction resonated with the work of science fiction’s New Wave writers, who sought to break down the walls separating science fiction from the literary mainstream. His stories were often stylistically experimental, deeply humanist, and leavened with a social consciousness that made them important documents of their time without diminishing their power to endure. Many stories from these years were collected in Ellison Wonderland, Paingod and Other Delusions, I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, The Beast That Shouted Love at the Heart of the World, and Alone against Tomorrow. Death-bird Stories, which culled considerably from these collections, is Ellison’s definitive short-fiction volume, a blend of light and dark fantasies, cynical quest stories, science fiction allegories, and surrealist parables all presented as invocations to the gods that define the contemporary culture. Ellison’s reputation as a renegade enhanced his editorial work on Dangerous Visions and Again, Dangerous Visions, award-winning anthologies built on stories by fellow writers that had been rejected by other markets as too controversial. Some of his most important fiction of the 1980s and ’90s is collected in Strange Wine, Shatterday, Angry Candy, and Slippage. He is a multiple winner of the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, and Bram Stoker Awards and an award-winning screenwriter whose television credits include The Outer Limits, Star Trek, and the new Twilight Zone. His collections The Glass Teat, The Other Glass Teat, An Edge in My Voice, and Harlan Ellison’s Watching all feature essays and commentaries on film, television, and modern society.

THERE ARE ALWAYS those who ask, what is it all about? For those who need to ask, for those who need points sharply made, who need to know “where it’s at,” this:

The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies. They are the standing army, and the militia, jailors, constables, posse comitatus, etc. In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgment or of the moral sense; but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the purpose as well. Such command no more respect than men of straw or a lump of dirt. They have the same sort of worth only as horses and dogs. Yet such as these even are commonly esteemed good citizens. Others—as most legislators, politicians, lawyers, ministers, and officeholders—serve the state chiefly with their heads; and, as they rarely make any moral distinctions, they are as likely to serve the Devil, without intending it, as God. A very few, as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and men, serve the state with their consciences also, and so necessarily resist it for the most part; and they are commonly treated as enemies by it.

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

Civil Disobedience

That is the heart of it. Now begin in the middle, and later learn the beginning; the end will take care of itself.

BUT BECAUSE IT was the very world it was, the very world they had allowed it to become, for months his activities did not come to the alarmed attention of The Ones Who Kept the Machine Functioning Smoothly, the ones who poured the very best butter over the cams and mainsprings of the culture. Not until it had become obvious that somehow, someway, he had become a notoriety, a celebrity, perhaps even a hero for (what Officialdom inescapably tagged) “an emotionally disturbed segment of the populace,” did they turn it over to the Ticktockman and his legal machinery. But by then, because it was the very world it was, and they had no way to predict he would happen—possibly a strain of disease long-defunct, now, suddenly, reborn in a system where immunity had been forgotten, had lapsed—he had been allowed to become too real. Now he had form and substance.

He had become a personality, something they had filtered out of the system many decades before. But there it was, and there he was, a very definitely imposing personality. In certain circles—middle-class circles—it was thought disgusting. Vulgar ostentation. Anarchistic. Shameful. In others, there was only sniggering: those strata where thought is subjugated to form and ritual, niceties, proprieties. But down below, ah, down below, where the people always needed their saints and sinners, their bread and circuses, their heroes and villains, he was considered a Bolivar; a Napoleon; a Robin Hood; a Dick Bong (Ace of Aces); a Jesus; a Jomo Kenyatta.

And at the top—where, like socially-attuned Shipwreck Kellys, every tremor and vibration threatened to dislodge the wealthy, powerful and titled from their flagpoles—he was considered a menace; a heretic; a rebel; a disgrace; a peril. He was known down the line, to the very heart-meat core, but the important reactions were high above and far below. At the very top, at the very bottom.

So his file was turned over, along with his time-card and his cardioplate, to the office of the Ticktockman.

The Ticktockman: very much over six feet tall, often silent, a soft purring man when things went timewise. The Ticktockman.

Even in the cubicles of the hierarchy, where fear was generated, seldom suffered, he was called the Ticktockman. But no one called him that to his mask.

You don’t call a man a hated name, not when that man, behind his mask, is capable of revoking the minutes, the hours, the days and nights, the years of your life. He was called the Master Timekeeper to his mask. It was safer that way.

“This is what he is,” said the Ticktockman with genuine softness, “but not who he is. This time-card I’m holding in my left hand has a name on it, but it is the name of what he is, not who he is. The cardioplate here in my right hand is also named, but not whom named, merely what named. Before I can exercise proper revocation, I have to know who this what is.”

To his staff, all the ferrets, all the loggers, all the finks, all the commex, even the mineez, he said, “Who is this Harlequin?”

He was not purring smoothly. Timewise, it was jangle.

However, it was the longest speech they had ever heard him utter at one time, the staff, the ferrets, the loggers, the finks, the commex, but not the mineez, who usually weren’t around to know, in any case. But even they scurried to find out.

Who is the Harlequin?

HIGH ABOVE THE third level of the city, he crouched on the humming aluminum-frame platform of the air-boat (foof! air-boat, indeed! swizzleskid is what it was, with a tow-rack jerry-rigged) and he stared down at the neat Mondrian arrangement of the buildings.

Somewhere nearby, he could hear the metronomic left-right-left of the 2:47 P.M shift, entering the Timkin roller-bearing plant in their sneakers. A minute later, precisely, he heard the softer right-left-right of the 5:00 A.M. formation, going home.

An elfin grin spread across his tanned features, and his dimples appeared for a moment. Then, scratching at his thatch of auburn hair, he shrugged within his motley, as though girding himself for what came next, and threw the joystick forward, and bent into the wind as the air-boat dropped. He skimmed over a slidewalk, purposely dropping a few feet to crease the tassels of the ladies of fashion, and—inserting thumbs in large ears—he stuck out his tongue, rolled his eyes and went wugga-wugga-wugga. It was a minor diversion. One pedestrian skittered and tumbled, sending parcels everywhichway, another wet herself, a third keeled slantwise and the walk was stopped automatically by the servitors till she could be resuscitated. It was a minor diversion.

Then he swirled away on a vagrant breeze, and was gone. Hi-ho. As he rounded the cornice of the Time-Motion Study Building, he saw the shift, just boarding the slidewalk. With practiced motion and an absolute conservation of movement, they sidestepped up onto the slow-strip and (in a chorus line reminiscent of a Busby Berkeley film of the antediluvian 1930s) advanced across the strips ostrich-walking till they were lined up on the expresstrip.

Once more, in anticipation, the elfin grin spread, and there was a tooth missing back there on the left side. He dipped, skimmed, and swooped over them; and then, scrunching about on the air-boat, he released the holding pins that fastened shut the ends of the home-made pouring troughs that kept his cargo from dumping prematurely. And as he pulled the trough-pins, the air-boat slid over the factory workers and one hundred and fifty thousand dollars’ worth of jelly beans cascaded down on the expresstrip.

Jelly beans! Millions and billions of purples and yellows and greens and licorice and grape and raspberry and mint and round and smooth and crunchy outside and soft-mealy inside and sugary and bouncing jouncing tumbling clittering clattering skittering fell on the heads and shoulders and hardhats and carapaces of the Timkin workers, tinkling on the slidewalk and bouncing away and rolling about underfoot and filling the sky on their way down with all the colors of joy and childhood and holidays, coming down in a steady rain, a solid wash, a torrent of color and sweetness out of the sky from above, and entering a universe of sanity and metronomic order with quite-mad coocoo newness. Jelly beans!

The shift workers howled and laughed and were pelted, and broke ranks, and the jelly beans managed to work their way into the mechanism of the slidewalks after which there was a hideous scraping as the sound of a million fingernails rasped down a quarter of a million blackboards, followed by a coughing and a sputtering, and then the slidewalks all stopped and everyone was dumped thisawayandthataway in a jackstraw tumble, still laughing and popping little jelly bean eggs of childish color into their mouths. It was a holiday, and a jollity, an absolute insanity, a giggle. But . . .

The shift was delayed seven minutes.

They did not get home for seven minutes.

The master schedule was thrown off by seven minutes.

Quotas were delayed by inoperative slidewalks for seven minutes.

He had tapped the first domino in the line, and one after another, like chik chik chik, the others had fallen.

The System had been seven minutes’ worth of disrupted. It was a tiny matter, one hardly worthy of note, but in a society where the single driving force was order and unity and equality and promptness and clocklike precision and attention to the clock, reverence of the gods of the passage of time, it was a disaster of major importance.

So he was ordered to appear before the Ticktockman. It was broadcast across every channel of the communications web. He was ordered to be there at 7:00 dammit on time. And they waited, and they waited, but he didn’t show up till almost ten-thirty, at which time he merely sang a little song about moonlight in a place no one had ever heard of, called Vermont, and vanished again. But they had all been waiting since seven, and it wrecked hell with their schedules. So the question remained: Who is the Harlequin?

But the unasked question (more important of the two) was: how did we get into this position, where a laughing, irresponsible japer of jabberwocky and jive could disrupt our entire economic and cultural life with a hundred and fifty thousand dollars’ worth of jelly beans . . .

Jelly for God’s sake beans! This is madness! Where did he get the money to buy a hundred and fifty thousand dollars’ worth of jelly beans? (They knew it would have cost that much, because they had a team of Situation Analysts pulled off another assignment, and rushed to the slidewalk scene to sweep up and count the candies, and produce findings, which disrupted their schedules and threw their entire branch at least a day behind.) Jelly beans! Jelly . . . beans? Now wait a second—a second accounted for—no one has manufactured jelly beans for over a hundred years. Where did he get jelly beans?

That’s another good question. More than likely it will never be answered to your complete satisfaction. But then, how many questions ever are?

The middle you know. Here is the beginning. How it starts:

A DESK PAD. DAY FOR DAY, AND TURN EACH DAY. 9:00—OPEN THE MAIL. 9:45—APPOINT- MENT WITH PLANNING COMMISSION BOARD. 10:30—DISCUSS INSTALLATION PROGRESS CHARTS WITH J.L. 11:45—PRAY FOR RAIN. 12:00— LUNCH. AND SO IT GOES.

“I’m sorry, Miss Grant, but the time for interviews was set at 2:30, and it’s almost five now. I’m sorry you’re late, but those are the rules. You’ll have to wait till next year to submit application for this college again.” And so it goes.

The 10:10 local stops at Cresthaven, Galesville, Tonawanda Junction, Selby and Farnhurst, but not at Indiana City, Lucasville and Colton, except on Sunday. The 10:35 express stops at Galesville, Selby and Indiana City, except on Sundays & Holidays, at which time it stops at . . . and so it goes.

“I couldn’t wait, Fred. I had to be at Pierre Cartain’s by 3:00, and you said you’d meet me under the clock in the terminal at 2:45, and you weren’t there, so I had to go on. You’re always late, Fred. If you’d been there, we could have sewed it up together, but as it was, well, I took the order alone . . .” And so it goes.

Dear Mr. and Mrs. Atterley: In reference to your son Gerold’s constant tardiness, I am afraid we will have to suspend him from school unless some more reliable method can be instituted guaranteeing he will arrive at his classes on time. Granted he is an exemplary student, and his marks are high, his constant flouting of the schedules of this school makes it impractical to maintain him in a system where the other children seem capable of getting where they are supposed to be on time and so it goes.

YOU CANNOT VOTE UNLESS YOU APPEAR AT 8:45 A.M.

“I don’t care if the script is good, I need it Thursday!”

CHECK-OUT TIME IS 2:00 P.M.

“You got here late. The Job’s taken. Sorry.”

YOUR SALARY HAS BEEN DOCKED FOR TWENTY MINUTES TIME LOST.

“God, what time is it, I’ve gotta run!”

And so it goes. And so it goes. And so it goes. And so it goes goes goes goes goes tick tock tick tock tick tock and one day we no longer let time serve us, we serve time and we are slaves of the schedule, worshippers of the sun’s passing, bound into a life predicated on restrictions because the system will not function if we don’t keep the schedule tight.

Until it becomes more than a minor inconvenience to be late. It becomes a sin. Then a crime. Then a crime punishable by this:

EFFECTIVE 15 JULY 2389 12:00:00 midnight, the office of the Master Timekeeper will require all citizens to submit their time-cards and cardioplates for processing. In accordance with Statute 555-7-SGH-999 governing the revocation of time per capita, all cardioplates will be keyed to the individual holder and—

What they had done was devise a method of curtailing the amount of life a person could have. If he was ten minutes late, he lost ten minutes of his life. An hour was proportionately worth more revocation. If someone was consistently tardy, he might find himself, on a Sunday night, receiving a communiqué from the Master Timekeeper that his time had run out, and he would be “turned off” at high noon on Monday, please straighten your affairs, sir, madame or bisex.

And so, by this simple scientific expedient (utilizing a scientific process held dearly secret by the Ticktockman’s office) the System was maintained. It was the only expedient thing to do. It was, after all, patriotic. The schedules had to be met. After all, there was a war on!

But, wasn’t there always?

“NOW THAT IS really disgusting,” the Harlequin said, when Pretty Alice showed him the wanted poster. “Disgusting and highly improbable. After all, this isn’t the Day of the Desperado. A wanted poster!”

“You know,” Pretty Alice noted, “you speak with a great deal of inflection.”

“I’m sorry,” said the Harlequin, humbly.

“No need to be sorry. You’re always saying ‘I’m sorry.’ You have such massive guilt, Everett, it’s really very sad.”

“I’m sorry,” he said again, then pursed his lips so the dimples appeared momentarily. He hadn’t wanted to say that at all. “I have to go out again. I have to do something.”

Pretty Alice slammed her coffee-bulb down on the counter. “Oh for God’s sake, Everett, can’t you stay home just one night! Must you always be out in that ghastly clown suit, running around annoying people?”

“I’m—” He stopped, and clapped the jester’s hat onto his auburn thatch with a tiny tinkling of bells. He rose, rinsed out his coffee-bulb at the spray, and put it into the dryer for a moment. “I have to go.”

She didn’t answer. The faxbox was purring, and she pulled a sheet out, read it, threw it toward him on the counter. “It’s about you. Of course. You’re ridiculous.”

He read it quickly. It said the Ticktockman was trying to locate him. He didn’t care, he was going out to be late again. At the door, dredging for an exit line, he hurled back petulantly, “Well, you speak with inflection, too!”

Pretty Alice rolled her pretty eyes heavenward. “You’re ridiculous.”

The Harlequin stalked out, slamming the door, which sighed shut softly, and locked itself.

There was a gentle knock, and Pretty Alice got up with an exhalation of exasperated breath, and opened the door. He stood there. “I’ll be back about ten-thirty, okay?”

She pulled a rueful face. “Why do you tell me that? Why? You know you’ll be late! You know it! You’re always late, so why do you tell me these dumb things?” She closed the door.

On the other side, the Harlequin nodded to himself. She’s right. She’s always right. I’ll be late. I’m always late. Why do I tell her these dumb things?

He shrugged again, and went off to be late once more.

HE HAD FIRED off the firecracker rockets that said: I will attend the 115th annual International Medical Association Invocation at 8:00 P.M. precisely. I do hope you will all be able to join me.

The words had burned in the sky, and of course the authorities were there, lying in wait for him. They assumed, naturally, that he would be late. He arrived twenty minutes early, while they were setting up the spiderwebs to trap and hold him. Blowing a large bullhorn, he frightened and unnerved them so, their own moisturized encirclement webs sucked closed, and they were hauled up, kicking and shrieking, high above the amphitheater’s floor. The Harlequin laughed and laughed, and apologized profusely. The physicians, gathered in solemn conclave, roared with laughter, and accepted the Harlequin’s apologies with exaggerated bowing and posturing, and a merry time was had by all, who thought the Harlequin was a regular foofaraw in fancy pants; all, that is, but the authorities, who had been sent out by the office of the Ticktockman; they hung there like so much dockside cargo, hauled up above the floor of the amphitheater in a most unseemly fashion.

(In another part of the same city where the Harlequin carried on his “activities,” totally unrelated in every way to what concerns us here, save that it illustrates the Ticktockman’s power and import, a man named Marshall Delahanty received his turn-off notice from the Ticktockman’s office. His wife received the notification from the gray-suited minee who delivered it, with the traditional “look of sorrow” plastered hideously across his face. She knew what it was, even without unsealing it. It was a billet-doux of immediate recognition to everyone these days. She gasped, and held it as though it were a glass slide tinged with botulism, and prayed it was not for her. Let it be for Marsh, she thought, brutally, realistically, or one of the kids, but not for me, please dear God, not for me. And then she opened it, and it was for Marsh, and she was at one and the same time horrified and relieved. The next trooper in the line had caught the bullet. “Marshall,” she screamed, “Marshall! Termination, Marshall! OhmiGod, Marshall, whattl we do, whattl we do, Marshall omigodmarshall . . .” and in their home that night was the sound of tearing paper and fear, and the stink of madness went up the flue and there was nothing, absolutely nothing they could do about it.

(But Marshall Delahanty tried to run. And early the next day, when turn-off time came, he was deep in the Canadian forest two hundred miles away, and the office of the Ticktockman blanked his cardioplate, and Marshall Delahanty keeled over, running, and his heart stopped, and the blood dried up on its way to his brain, and he was dead that’s all. One light went out on the sector map in the office of the Master Timekeeper, while notification was entered for fax reproduction, and Georgette Delahanty’s name was entered on the dole roles till she could remarry. Which is the end of the footnote, and all the point that need be made, except don’t laugh, because that is what would happen to the Harlequin if ever the Ticktockman found out his real name. It isn’t funny.)

THE SHOPPING LEVEL of the city was thronged with the Thursday-colors of the buyers. Women in canary yellow chitons and men in pseudo-Tyrolean outfits that were jade and leather and fit very tightly, save for the balloon pants.

When the Harlequin appeared on the still-being-constructed shell of the new Efficiency Shopping Center, his bullhorn to his elfishly-laughing lips, everyone pointed and stared, and he berated them:

“Why let them order you about? Why let them tell you to hurry and scurry like ants or maggots? Take your time! Saunter awhile! Enjoy the sunshine, enjoy the breeze, let life carry you at your own pace! Don’t be slaves of time, it’s a helluva way to die, slowly, by degrees . . . down with the Ticktockman!”

Who’s the nut? most of the shoppers wanted to know. Who’s the nut oh wow I’m gonna be late I gotta run . . .

And the construction gang on the Shopping Center received an urgent order from the office of the Master Timekeeper that the dangerous criminal known as the Harlequin was atop their spire, and their aid was urgently needed in apprehending him. The work crew said no, they would lose time on their construction schedule, but the Ticktockman managed to pull the proper threads of governmental webbing, and they were told to cease work and catch that nitwit up there on the spire; up there with the bullhorn. So a dozen and more burly workers began climbing into their construction platforms, releasing the a-grav plates, and rising toward the Harlequin.

AFTER THE DEBACLE (in which, through the Harlequin’s attention to personal safety, no one was seriously injured), the workers tried to reassemble, and assault him again, but it was too late. He had vanished. It had attracted quite a crowd, however, and the shopping cycle was thrown off by hours, simply hours. The purchasing needs of the System were therefore falling behind, and so measures were taken to accelerate the cycle for the rest of the day, but it got bogged down and speeded up and they sold too many float-valves and not nearly enough wegglers, which meant that the popli ratio was off, which made it necessary to rush cases and cases of spoiling Smash-O to stores that usually needed a case only every three or four hours. The shipments were bollixed, the transshipments were misrouted, and in the end, even the swizzleskid industries felt it.

“DON’T COME BACK till you have him!” the Ticktockman said, very quietly, very sincerely, extremely dangerously.

They used dogs. They used probes. They used cardioplate crossoffs. They used teepers. They used bribery. They used stiktytes. They used intimidation. They used torment. They used torture. They used finks. They used cops. They used search&seizure. They used fallaron. They used betterment incentive. They used fingerprints. They used the Bertillon system. They used cunning. They used guile. They used treachery. They used Raoul Mitgong, but he didn’t help much. They used applied physics. They used techniques of criminology.

And what the hell: they caught him.

After all, his name was Everett C. Marm, and he wasn’t much to begin with, except a man who had no sense of time.

“REPENT, HARLEQUIN!” SAID the Ticktockman.

“Get stuffed!” the Harlequin replied, sneering.

“You’ve been late a total of sixty-three years, five months, three weeks, two days, twelve hours, forty-one minutes, fifty-nine seconds, point oh three six one one one microseconds. You’ve used up everything you can, and more. I’m going to turn you off.”

“Scare someone else. I’d rather be dead than live in a dumb world with a bogeyman like you.”

“It’s my job.”

“You’re full of it. You’re a tyrant. You have no right to order people around and kill them if they show up late.”

“You can’t adjust. You can’t fit in.”

“Unstrap me, and I’ll fit my fist into your mouth.”

“You’re a nonconformist.”

“That didn’t used to be a felony.”

“It is now. Live in the world around you.”

“I hate it. It’s a terrible world.”

“Not everyone thinks so. Most people enjoy order.”

“I don’t, and most of the people I know don’t.”

“That’s not true. How do you think we caught you?”

“I’m not interested.”

“A girl named Pretty Alice told us who you were.”

“That’s a lie.”

“It’s true. You unnerve her. She wants to belong; she wants to conform; I’m going to turn you off.”

“Then do it already, and stop arguing with me.”

“I’m not going to turn you off.”

“You’re an idiot!”

“Repent, Harlequin!” said the Ticktockman.

“Get stuffed.”

SO THEY SENT him to Coventry. And in Coventry they worked him over. It was just like what they did to Winston Smith in NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR, which was a book none of them knew about, but the techniques are really quite ancient, and so they did it to Everett C. Marm; and one day, quite a long time later, the Harlequin appeared on the communications web, appearing elfin and dimpled and bright-eyed, and not at all brainwashed, and he said he had been wrong, that it was a good, a very good thing indeed, to belong, to be right on time hip-ho and away we go, and everyone stared up at him on the public screens that covered an entire city block, and they said to themselves, well, you see, he was just a nut after all, and if that’s the way the system is run, then let’s do it that way, because it doesn’t pay to fight city hall, or in this case, the Ticktockman. So Everett C. Marm was destroyed, which was a loss, because of what Thoreau said earlier, but you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs, and in every revolution a few die who shouldn’t, but they have to, because that’s the way it happens, and if you make only a little change, then it seems to be worthwhile. Or, to make the point lucidly:

“UH, EXCUSE ME, sir, I, uh, don’t know how to uh, to uh, tell you this, but you were three minutes late. The schedule is a little, uh, bit off.”

He grinned sheepishly.

“That’s ridiculous!” murmured the Ticktockman behind his mask. “Check your watch.” And then he went into his office, going mrmee, mrmee, mrmee, mrmee.

R. A. LAFFERTY Eurema’s Dam

Eccentric, outrageous, and packed with bizarre characters and incidents, R. A. Lafferty’s stylistically unconventional short stories are as much a part of the oral tall tale tradition as they are fantasy and science fiction. Lafferty began publishing fiction in the 1960s and was a prominent figure in science fiction’s iconoclastic New Wave, where his gnomic, challenging variations on standard science fiction and fantasy themes bridged the gap between speculative and mainstream fiction. A stylistic maverick, Lafferty fills his stories with puns and wordplay that create incongruous associations between their disparate elements. The style of his narratives is similarly adventurous and includes mixtures of sermons, riddles, doggerel, epigrams, imagined reference works, and textbook treatises. He has written on subjects ranging from supernatural conspiracy to evil adolescents, celestial revolutionaries, Native American lore, utopia, demons, and carnal love. In his novels he is fond of creating modern corollaries for classic myths and legends. Space Chantey works the basic story of Homer’s Odyssey into a wild space opera. In the Argos cycle, which includes Archipelago, The Devil Is Dead, and Episodes of the Argo, Jason and the Argonauts are reincarnated as members of a former World War II battle unit. In Past Master, Sir Thomas More is transported in time and space to the planet Astrobe, where he falls afoul of political intrigue and suffers his seemingly inescapable martyr’s death. Lafferty’s preoccupation with religious archetypes and the battle (and sometimes collusion) between Good and Evil gives much of his writing a mythic character. His short fiction has been collected in Nine Hundred Grandmothers, Strange Doings, Does Anyone Else Have Something Further to Add? and numerous other collections. His novels include The Reefs of Earth, Fourth Mansions, The Annals of Klepsis, and Arrive at Easterwine. He has also written a volume of essays on fantastic literature, It’s Down the Slippery Cellar Stairs. Interviews with him have been collected in Cranky Old Man from Tulsa.

HE WAS ABOUT the last of them.

What? The last of the great individualists? The last of the true creative geniuses of the century? The last of the sheer precursors?

No. No. He was the last of the dolts.

Kids were being born smarter all the time when he came along, and they would be so forever more. He was about the last dumb kid ever born.

Even his mother had to admit that Albert was a slow child. What else can you call a boy who doesn’t begin to talk till he is four years old, who won’t learn to handle a spoon till he is six, who can’t operate a doorknob till he is eight? What else can you say about one who put his shoes on the wrong feet and walked in pain? And who had to be told to close his mouth after yawning?

Some things would always be beyond him—like whether it was the big hand or the little hand of the clock that told the hours. But this wasn’t something serious. He never did care what time it was.

When, about the middle of his ninth year, Albert made a breakthrough at telling his right hand from his left, he did it by the most ridiculous set of mnemonics ever put together. It had to do with the way a dog turns around before lying down, the direction of whirlpools and whirlwinds, the side a cow is milked from and a horse is mounted from, the direction of twist of oak and sycamore leaves, the maze patterns of rock moss and of tree moss, the cleavage of limestone, the direction of a hawk’s wheeling, of a shrike’s hunting, and of a snake’s coiling (remembering that the mountain boomer is an exception, and that it isn’t a true snake), the lay of cedar fronds and of balsam fronds, the twist of a hole dug by a skunk and by a badger (remembering pungently that skunks sometimes use old badger holes). Well, Albert finally learned to remember which was right and which was left, but an observant boy would have learned his right hand from his left without all that nonsense.

Albert never learned to write a readable hand. To get by in school he cheated. From a bicycle speedometer, a midget motor, tiny eccentric cams, and batteries stolen from his grandfather’s hearing aid, Albert made a machine to write for him. It was small as a doodlebug and fitted onto a pen or pencil so that Albert could conceal it with his fingers. It formed the letters beautifully as Albert had set the cams to follow a copybook model. He triggered the different letters with keys no bigger than whiskers. Sure it was crooked, but what else can you do when you’re too dumb to learn how to write passably?

Albert couldn’t figure at all. He had to make another machine to figure for him. It was a palm-of-the-hand thing that would add and subtract and multiply and divide. The next year when he was in the ninth grade they gave him algebra, and he had to devise a flipper to go on the end of his gadget to work quadratic and simultaneous equations. If it weren’t for such cheating Albert wouldn’t have gotten any marks at all in school.

HE HAD ANOTHER difficulty when he came to his fifteenth year. People, that is an understatement. There should be a stronger word than “difficulty” for it. Albert was afraid of girls.

What to do?

“I will build me a machine that is not afraid of girls,” Albert said. He set to work on it. He had it nearly finished when a thought came to him: “But no machine is afraid of girls. How will this help me?”

His logic was at fault and analogy broke down. He did what he always did. He cheated.

He took the programming rollers out of an old player piano in the attic, found a gear case that would serve, used magnetized sheets instead of perforated music rolls, fed a copy of Wormwood’s Logic into the matrix, and he had a logic machine that would answer questions.

“What’s the matter with me that I’m afraid of girls?” Albert asked his logic machine.

“Nothing the matter with you,” the logic machine told him. “It’s logical to be afraid of girls. They seem pretty spooky to me too.”

“But what can I do about it?”

“Wait for time and circumstances. They sure are slow. Unless you want to cheat—”

“Yes, yes, what then?”

“Build a machine that looks just like you, Albert, and talks just like you. Only make it smarter than you are, and not bashful. And, ah, Albert, there’s a special thing you’d better put into it in case things go wrong. I’ll whisper it to you. It’s dangerous.”

So Albert made Little Danny, a dummy who looked like him and talked like him, only he was smarter and not bashful. He filled Little Danny with quips from Mad Magazine and from Quip, and then they were set.

Albert and Little Danny went to call on Alice.

“Why, he’s wonderful,” Alice said. “Why can’t you be like that, Albert? Aren’t you wonderful, Little Danny. Why do you have to be so stupid, Albert, when Little Danny is so wonderful?”

“I, uh, uh, I don’t know,” Albert said. “Uh, uh, uh.”

“He sounds like a fish with the hiccups,” Little Danny said.

“You do, Albert, really you do!” Alice screamed. “Why can’t you say smart things like Little Danny does, Albert? Why are you so stupid?”

This wasn’t working out very well, but Albert kept on with it. He programmed Little Danny to play the ukulele and to sing. He wished that he could program himself to do it. Alice loved everything about Little Danny, but she paid no attention to Albert. And one day Albert had had enough.

“Wha-wha-what do we need with this dummy?” Albert asked. “I just made him to am-to amu-to to make you laugh. Let’s go off and leave him.”

“Go off with you, Albert?” Alice asked. “But you’re so stupid. I tell you what. Let’s you and me go off and leave Albert, Little Danny. We can have more fun without him.”

“Who needs him?” Little Danny asked. “Get lost, buster.”

Albert walked away from them. He was glad that he’d taken his logic machine’s advice as to the special thing to be built into Little Danny. Albert walked fifty steps. A hundred.

“Far enough,” Albert said, and he pushed a button in his pocket.

Nobody but Albert and his logic machine ever did know what that explosion was. Tiny wheels out of Little Danny and small pieces of Alice rained down a little later, but there weren’t enough fragments for anyone to identify.

Albert had learned one lesson from his logic machine: never make anything that you can’t unmake.

Well, Albert finally grew to be a man, in years at least. He would always have something about him of a very awkward teen-ager. And yet he fought his own war against those who were teen-agers in years, and he defeated them completely. There was enmity between them forever. Albert hadn’t been a very well-adjusted adolescent, and he hated the memory of it. And nobody ever mistook him for an adjusted man.

Albert was too awkward to earn a living at an honest trade. He was reduced to peddling his little tricks and contrivances to shysters and promoters. But he did back into a sort of fame, and he did become burdened with wealth.

He was too stupid to handle his own monetary affairs, but he built an actuary machine to do his investing and he became rich by accident. He built the damned thing too good and he regretted it.

Albert became one of that furtive group that has saddled us with all the mean things in our history. There was that Punic who couldn’t learn the rich variety of hieroglyphic characters and who devised the crippled short alphabet for wan-wits. There was the nameless Arab who couldn’t count beyond ten and who set up the ten-number system for babies and idiots. There was the double-Dutchman with his movable type who drove fine copy out of the world. Albert was of their miserable company.

Albert himself wasn’t much good for anything. But he had in himself the low knack for making machines that were good at everything.

His machines did a few things. You remember that anciently there was smog in the cities. Oh, it could be drawn out of the air easily enough. All it took was a tickler. Albert made a tickler machine. He would set it fresh every morning. It would clear the air in a circle three hundred yards around his hovel and gather a little over a ton of residue every twenty-four hours. This residue was rich in large polysyllabic molecules which one of his chemical machines could use.

“Why can’t you clear all the air?” the people asked him.

“This is as much of the stuff as Clarence Deoxyribonucleiconibus needs every day,” Albert said. That was the name of this particular chemical machine.

“But we die of the smog,” the people said. “Have mercy on us.”

“Oh, all right,” Albert said. He turned it over to one of his reduplicating machines to make as many copies as were necessary.

YOU REMEMBER THAT once there was a teen-ager problem? You remember when those little buggers used to be mean? Albert got enough of them. There was something ungainly about them that reminded him too much of himself. He made a teen-ager of his own. It was rough. To the others it looked like one of themselves, the ring in the left ear, the dangling side-locks, the brass knucks and the long knife, the guitar pluck to jab in an eye. But it was incomparably rougher than the human teen-agers. It terrorized all in the neighborhood and made them behave, and dress like real people. And there was one thing about the teen-age machine that Albert made: it was made of such polarized metal and glass that it was invisible except to teen-ager eyes.

“Why is your neighborhood different?” the people asked Albert. “Why are there such good and polite teen-agers in your neighborhood and such mean ones everywhere else? It’s as though something had spooked all those right around here.”

“Oh, I thought I was the only one who didn’t like the regular kind,” Albert said.

“Oh, no, no,” the people answered him. “If there is anything at all you can do about them—”

So Albert turned his mostly invisible teen-ager machine over to one of his reduplicating machines to make as many copies as were necessary, and set one up in every neighborhood. From that day till this the teen-agers have all been good and polite and a little bit frightened. But there is no evidence of what keeps them that way except an occasional eye dangling from the jab of an invisible guitar pluck.

So the two most pressing problems of the latter part of the twentieth century were solved, but accidentally, and to the credit of no one.

AS THE YEARS went by, Albert felt his inferiority most when in the presence of his own machines, particularly those in the form of men. Albert just hadn’t their urbanity or sparkle or wit. He was a clod beside them, and they made him feel it.

Why not? One of Albert’s devices sat in the President’s Cabinet. One of them was on the High Council of World-Watchers that kept the peace everywhere. One of them presided at Riches Unlimited, that private-public-international instrument that guaranteed reasonable riches to everyone in the world. One of them was the guiding hand in the Health and Longevity Foundation which provided those things to everyone. Why should not such splendid and successful machines look down on their shabby uncle who had made them?

“I’m rich by a curious twist,” Albert said to himself one day, “and honored through a mistake in circumstance. But there isn’t a man or a machine in the world who is really my friend. A book here tells how to make friends, but I can’t do it that way. I’ll make one my own way.”

So Albert set out to make a friend.

He made Poor Charles, a machine as stupid and awkward and inept as himself.

“Now I will have a companion,” Albert said, but it didn’t work. Add two zeros together and you still have zero. Poor Charles was too much like Albert to be good for anything.

Poor Charles! Unable to think, he made a—(but wait a moleskin-gloved minute here, Colonel, this isn’t going to work at all)—he made a machi—(but isn’t this the same blamed thing all over again?)—he made a machine to think for him and to—

Hold it, hold it! That’s enough. Poor Charles was the only machine that Albert ever made that was dumb enough to do a thing like that.

Well, whatever it was, the machine that Poor Charles made was in control of the situation and of Poor Charles when Albert came onto them accidentally. The machine’s machine, the device that Poor Charles had constructed to think for him, was lecturing Poor Charles in a humiliating way.

“Only the inept and deficient will invent,” that damned machine’s machine was droning. “The Greeks in their high period did not invent. They used neither adjunct power nor instrumentation. They used, as intelligent men or machines will always use, slaves. They did not descend to gadgets. They, who did the difficult with ease, did not seek the easier way.

“But the incompetent will invent. The insufficient will invent. The depraved will invent. And knaves will invent.”

Albert, in a seldom fit of anger, killed them both. But he knew that the machine of his machine had spoken the truth.

Albert was very much cast down. A more intelligent man would have had a hunch as to what was wrong. Albert had only a hunch that he was not very good at hunches and would never be. Seeing no way out, he fabricated a machine and named it Hunchy.

In most ways this was the worst machine he ever made. In building it he tried to express something of his unease for the future. It was an awkward thing in mind and mechanism, a misfit.

Albert’s more intelligent machines gathered around and hooted at him while he put it together.

“Boy! Are you lost!” they taunted. “That thing is a primitive! To draw its power from the ambient! We talked you into throwing that away twenty years ago and setting up coded power for all of us.”

“Uh—someday there may be social disturbances and all centers of power seized,” Albert stammered. “But Hunchy would be able to operate if the whole world were wiped smooth.”

“It isn’t even tuned to our information matrix,” they jibed. “It’s worse than Poor Charles. That stupid thing practically starts from scratch.”

“Maybe there’ll be a new kind of itch for it,” said Albert.

“It’s not even housebroken!” the urbane machines shouted their indignation. “Look at that! Some sort of primitive lubrication all over the floor.”

“Remembering my childhood, I sympathize,” Albert said.

“What’s it good for?” they demanded.

“Ah—it gets hunches,” Albert mumbled.

“Duplication!” they shouted. “That’s all you’re good for yourself, and not very good at that. We suggest an election to replace you as—pardon our laughter—the head of these enterprises.”

“Boss, I’ve got a hunch how we can block them there,” the unfinished Hunchy whispered.

“They’re bluffing,” Albert whispered back. “My first logic machine taught me never to make anything that I can’t unmake. I’ve got them there and they know it. I wish I could think up things like that myself.”

“Maybe there will come an awkward time and I will be good for something,” Hunchy said.

ONLY ONCE, AND that rather late in life, did a sort of honesty flare up in Albert. He did one thing (and it was a dismal failure) on his own. That was the night of the year of the double millennium when Albert was presented with the Finnerty-Hochmann Trophy, the highest award that the intellectual world could give. Albert was certainly an odd choice for it, but it had been noticed that almost every basic invention for thirty years could be traced back to him or to the devices with which he had surrounded himself.

You know the trophy. Atop it was Eurema, the synthetic Greek goddess of invention, with arms spread as if she would take flight. Below this was a stylized brain cut away to show the convoluted cortex. And below this was the coat of arms of the Academicians: Ancient Scholar rampant (argent); the Anderson Analyzer sinister (gules); the Mondeman Space-Drive dexter (vair). It was a fine work by Groben, his ninth period.

Albert had a speech composed for him by his speech-writing machine, but for some reason he did not use it. He went on his own, and that was disaster. He got to his feet when he was introduced, and he stuttered and spoke nonsense!

“Ah—only the sick oyster produces nacre,” he said, and they all gaped at him. What sort of beginning for a speech was that? “Or do I have the wrong creature?” Albert asked weakly.

“Eurema doesn’t look like that!” Albert gawked out and pointed suddenly at the trophy. “No, no, that isn’t her at all. Eurema walks backward and is blind. And her mother is a brainless hulk.”

Everybody was watching him with pained expression.

“Nothing rises without a leaven,” Albert tried to explain, “but the yeast is itself a fungus and a disease. You be regularizers all, splendid and supreme! But you cannot live without the irregulars. You will die, and who will tell you that you are dead? When there are no longer any deprived or insufficient, who will invent? What will you do when there is none of us detectives left? Who will leaven your lump then?”

“Are you unwell?” the master of ceremonies asked him quietly. “Should you not make an end to it? People will understand.”

“Of course I’m unwell. Always have been,” Albert said. “What good would I be otherwise? You set the ideal that all should be healthy and well adjusted. No! No! Were we all well adjusted, we would ossify and die. The world is kept healthy only by some of the unhealthy minds lurking in it. The first implement made by man was not a scraper or celt or stone knife. It was a crutch, and it wasn’t devised by a hale man.”

“Perhaps you should rest,” a functionary said in a low voice, for this sort of rambling nonsense talk had never been heard at an awards dinner before.

“Know you,” said Albert, “that it is not the fine bulls and wonderful cattle who make the new paths. Only a crippled calf makes a new path. In everything that survives there must be an element of the incongruous. Hey, you know the woman who said, ‘My husband is incongruous, but I never liked Washington in the summertime.’ ”

Everybody gazed at him in stupor.

“That’s the first joke I ever made,” Albert said lamely. “My joke-making machine makes them a lot better than I do.” He paused and gaped, and gulped a big breath.

“Dolts!” he croaked out fiercely then. “What will you do for dolts when the last of us is gone? How will you survive without us?”

Albert had finished. He gaped and forgot to close his mouth. They led him back to his seat. His publicity machine explained that Albert was tired from overwork, and then that machine passed around copies of the speech that Albert was supposed to have given.

It had been an unfortunate episode. How noisome it is that the innovators are never great men, and that the great men are never good for anything but just being great men.

IN THAT YEAR a decree went forth from Caesar that a census of the whole country should be taken. The decree was from Cesare Panebianco, the President of the country. It was the decimal year proper for the census, and there was nothing unusual about the decree. Certain provisions, however, were made for taking a census of the drifters and decrepits who were usually missed, to examine them and to see why they were so. It was in the course of this that Albert was picked up. If any man ever looked like a drifter and decrepit, it was Albert.

Albert was herded in with other derelicts, set down at a table, and asked tortuous questions. As:

“What is your name?”

He almost muffed that one, but he rallied and answered, “Albert.”

“What time is it by that clock?”

They had him in his old weak spot. Which hand was which? He gaped and didn’t answer.

“Can you read?” they asked him.

“Not without my—” Albert began. “I don’t have with me my—No, I can’t read very well by myself.”

“Try.”

They gave him a paper to mark up with true and false questions. Albert marked them all true, believing that he would have half of them right. But they were all false. The regularized people are partial to falsehood. Then they gave him a supply-the-word test on proverbs.

“———is the best policy” didn’t mean a thing to him. He couldn’t remember the names of the companies that he had his own policies with.

“A———in time saves nine” contained more mathematics than Albert could handle.

“There appear to be six unknowns,” he told himself, “and only one positive value, nine. The equating verb ‘saves’ is a vague one. I cannot solve this equation. I am not even sure that it is an equation. If only I had with me my—”

But he hadn’t any of his gadgets or machines with him. He was on his own. He left half a dozen other proverb fill-ins blank. Then he saw a chance to recoup. Nobody is so dumb as not to know one answer if enough questions are asked.

“———is the mother of invention,” it said.

“Stupidity,” Albert wrote in his weird ragged hand. Then he sat back in triumph. “I know that Eurema and her mother,” he snickered. “Man, how I do know them!”

But they marked him wrong on that one too. He had missed every answer to every test. They began to fix him a ticket to a progressive booby hatch where he might learn to do something with his hands, his head being hopeless.

A couple of Albert’s urbane machines came down and got him out of it. They explained that, while he was a drifter and a derelict, yet he was a rich drifter and derelict, and that he was even a man of some note.

“He doesn’t look it, but he really is—pardon our laughter—a man of some importance,” one of the fine machines explained. “He has to be told to close his mouth after he has yawned, but for all that he is the winner of the Finnerty-Hochmann Trophy. We will be responsible for him.”

ALBERT WAS MISERABLE as his fine machines took him out, especially when they asked that he walk three or four steps behind them and not seem to be with them. They gave him some pretty rough banter and turned him into a squirming worm of a man. Albert left them and went to a little hide-out he kept.

“I’ll blow my crawfishing brains out,” he swore. “The humiliation is more than I can bear. Can’t do it myself, though. I’ll have to have it done.”

He set to work building a device in his hide-out.

“What you doing, boss?” Hunchy asked him. “I had a hunch you’d come here and start building something.”

“I’m building a machine to blow my pumpkin-picking brains out,” Albert shouted. “I’m too yellow to do it myself.”

“Boss, I got a hunch there’s something better to do. Let’s have some fun.”

“Don’t believe I know how to,” Albert said thoughtfully. “I built a fun machine once to do it for me. He had a real revel till he flew apart, but he never seemed to do anything for me.”

“This fun will be for you and me, boss. Consider the world spread out. What is it?”

“It’s a world too fine for me to live in any longer,” Albert said. “Everything and all the people are perfect, and all alike. They’re at the top of the heap. They’ve won it all and arranged it all neatly. There’s no place for a clutter-up like me in the world. So I get out.”

“Boss, I’ve got a hunch that you’re seeing it wrong. You’ve got better eyes than that. Look again, real canny, at it. Now what do you see?”

“Hunchy, Hunchy, is that possible? Is that really what it is? I wonder why I never noticed it before. That’s the way of it, though, now that I look closer.

“Six billion patsies waiting to be took! Six billion patsies without a defense of any kind! A couple of guys out for some fun, man, they could mow them down like fields of Albert-Improved Concho Wheat!”

“Boss, I’ve got a hunch that this is what I was made for. The world sure had been getting stuffy. Let’s tie into it and eat off the top layer. Man, we can cut a swath.”

“We’ll inaugurate a new era!” Albert gloated. “We’ll call it the Turning of the Worm. We’ll have fun, Hunchy. We’ll gobble them up like goobers. How come I never saw it like that before? Six billion patsies!”

THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY began on this rather odd note.

ROBERT SILVERBERG Passengers

Robert Silverberg won the Hugo Award for Most Promising New Author in 1956, less than two years after his first professional sale. After an apprenticeship that lasted nearly ten years and yielded millions of words, Silverberg emerged in the 1960s as one of the most articulate and conscientious writers of the time. Works from this period of his career are memorable for their psychologically complex character studies, morally trenchant themes, and vivid depictions of oppressive and limiting environments that the individual must try to transcend. “To See the Invisible Man,” “Hawksbill Station,” and Thorns are futuristic studies of the individual alienated through a variety of means: social ostracism, penal exile, and exploitative victimization. Silverberg’s crowning achievement in this vein is Dying Inside, the poignant tale of a telepath alienated by his uniqueness who is further isolated by the loss of his powers and thus his only means of relating to normal humanity. Both Nightwings and Downward to Earth present contact with alien species as potentially rejuvenating experiences, with overtones of resurrection and redemption. The World Inside chronicles the dehumanizing potential of overpopulation on a society where privacy and intimacy are virtually impossible. The dramatic core of Silverberg’s strongest stories involves individuals confronted with mortality. “Born with the Dead” details the difficulties of life in a world that is shared by mortals and the revived dead. The Second Trip centers around the idea of the death of identity, in which a man discovers that he is a former criminal punished with obliteration of his true personality, a spark of which is reignited and threatens to overwhelm his new persona. The quest for immortality is a sounding board for ruminations on mortality in The Book of Skulls, about the pursuit of an occult sect that has supposedly found the secret of eternal life. Since the late 1970s Silverberg has concentrated on the development of his Majipoor saga, an epic science fantasy series that includes the novels Lord Valentine’s Castle, The Majipoor Chronicles, and Valentine Pontifex. He has also written two fantasy novels, Gilgamesh the King and To the Land of the Living, based on Sumerian mythology. His many short-fiction collections include Next Stop the Stars, To Worlds Beyond, Dimension Thirteen, Born with the Dead, and The Secret Sharer. He has written many novels and works of nonfiction for children and edited more than seventy anthologies. Silverberg won the first of five Nebula Awards for his story “Passengers,” and he is also a multiple winner of the Hugo Award.

THERE ARE ONLY fragments of me left now. Chunks of memory have broken free and drifted away like calved glaciers. It is always like that when a Passenger leaves us. We can never be sure of all the things our borrowed bodies did. We have only the lingering traces, the imprints.

Like sand clinging to an ocean-tossed bottle. Like the throbbings of amputated legs.

I rise. I collect myself. My hair is rumpled; I comb it. My face is creased from too little sleep. There is sourness in my mouth. Has my Passenger been eating dung with my mouth? They do that. They do anything.

It is morning.

A gray, uncertain morning. I stare at it awhile, and then, shuddering, I opaque the window and confront instead the gray, uncertain surface of the inner panel. My room looks untidy. Did I have a woman here? There are ashes in the trays. Searching for butts, I find several with lipstick stains. Yes, a woman was here.

I touch the bedsheets. Still warm with shared warmth. Both pillows tousled. She has gone, though, and the Passenger is gone, and I am alone.

How long did it last, this time?

I pick up the phone and ring Central. “What is the date?”

The computer’s bland feminine voice replies, “Friday, December fourth, nineteen eighty-seven.”

“The time?”

“Nine fifty-one, Eastern Standard Time.”

“The weather forecast?”

“Predicted temperature range for today thirty to thirty-eight. Current temperature, thirty-one. Wind from the north, sixteen miles an hour. Chances of precipitation slight.”

“What do you recommend for a hangover?”

“Food or medication?”

“Anything you like,” I say.

The computer mulls that one over for a while. Then it decides on both, and activates my kitchen. The spigot yields cold tomato juice. Eggs begin to fry. From the medicine slot comes a purplish liquid. The Central Computer is always so thoughtful. Do the Passengers ever ride it, I wonder? What thrills could that hold for them? Surely it must be more exciting to borrow the million minds of Central than to live a while in the faulty, short-circuited soul of a corroding human being!

December 4, Central said. Friday. So the Passenger had me for three nights.

I drink the purplish stuff and probe my memories in a gingerly way, as one might probe a festering sore.

I remember Tuesday morning. A bad time at work. None of the charts will come out right. The section manager irritable; he has been taken by Passengers three times in five weeks, and his section is in disarray as a result, and his Christmas bonus is jeopardized. Even though it is customary not to penalize a person for lapses due to Passengers, according to the system, the section manager seems to feel he will be treated unfairly. So he treats us unfairly. We have a hard time. Revise the charts, fiddle with the program, check the fundamentals ten times over. Out they come: the detailed forecasts for price variations of public utility securities, February–April 1988. That afternoon we are to meet and discuss the charts and what they tell us.

I do not remember Tuesday afternoon.

That must have been when the Passenger took me. Perhaps at work; perhaps in the mahogany-paneled boardroom itself, during the conference. Pink concerned faces all about me; I cough, I lurch, I stumble from my seat. They shake their heads sadly. No one reaches for me. No one stops me. It is too dangerous to interfere with one who has a Passenger. The chances are great that a second Passenger lurks nearby in the discorporate state, looking for a mount. So I am avoided. I leave the building.

After that, what?

Sitting in my room on bleak Friday morning, I eat my scrambled eggs and try to reconstruct the three lost nights.

Of course it is impossible. The conscious mind functions during the period of captivity, but upon withdrawal of the Passenger nearly every recollection goes too. There is only a slight residue, a gritty film of faint and ghostly memories. The mount is never precisely the same person afterwards; though he cannot recall the details of his experience, he is subtly changed by it.

I try to recall.

A girl? Yes: lipstick on the butts. Sex, then, here in my room. Young? Old? Blonde? Dark? Everything is hazy. How did my borrowed body behave? Was I a good lover? I try to be, when I am myself. I keep in shape. At 38, I can handle three sets of tennis on a summer afternoon without collapsing. I can make a woman glow as a woman is meant to glow. Not boasting: just categorizing. We have our skills. These are mine.

But Passengers, I am told, take wry amusement in controverting our skills. So would it have given my rider a kind of delight to find me a woman and force me to fail repeatedly with her?

I dislike that thought.

The fog is going from my mind now. The medicine prescribed by Central works rapidly. I eat, I shave, I stand under the vibrator until my skin is clean. I do my exercises. Did the Passenger exercise my body Wednesday and Thursday mornings? Probably not. I must make up for that. I am close to middle age, now; tonus lost is not easily regained.

I touch my toes twenty times, knees stiff.

I kick my legs in the air.

I lie flat and lift myself on pumping elbows.

The body responds, maltreated though it has been. It is the first bright moment of my awakening: to feel the inner tingling, to know that I still have vigor.

Fresh air is what I want next. Quickly I slip into my clothes and leave. There is no need for me to report to work today. They are aware that since Tuesday afternoon I have had a Passenger; they need not be aware that before dawn on Friday the Passenger departed. I will have a free day. I will walk the city’s streets, stretching my limbs, repaying my body for the abuse it has suffered.

I enter the elevator. I drop fifty stories to the ground. I step out into the December dreariness.

The towers of New York rise about me.

In the street the cars stream forward. Drivers sit edgily at their wheels. One never knows when the driver of a nearby car will be borrowed, and there is always a moment of lapsed coordination as the Passenger takes over. Many lives are lost that way on our streets and highways; but never the life of a Passenger.

I begin to walk without purpose. I cross Fourteenth Street, heading north, listening to the soft violent purr of the electric engines. I see a boy jigging in the street and know he is being ridden. At Fifth and Twenty-second a prosperous-looking paunchy man approaches, his necktie askew, this morning’s Wall Street Journal jutting from an overcoat pocket. He giggles. He thrusts out his tongue. Ridden. Ridden. I avoid him. Moving briskly, I come to the underpass that carries traffic below Thirty-fourth Street toward Queens, and pause for a moment to watch two adolescent girls quarreling at the rim of the pedestrian walk. One is a Negro. Her eyes are rolling in terror. The other pushes her closer to the railing. Ridden. But the Passenger does not have murder on its mind, merely pleasure. The Negro girl is released and falls in a huddled heap, trembling. Then she rises and runs. The other girl draws a long strand of gleaming hair into her mouth, chews on it, seems to awaken. She looks dazed.

I avert my eyes. One does not watch while a fellow sufferer is awakening. There is a morality of the ridden; we have so many new tribal mores in these dark days.

I hurry on.

Where am I going so hurriedly? Already I have walked more than a mile. I seem to be moving toward some goal, as though my Passenger still hunches in my skull, urging me about. But I know that is not so. For the moment, at least, I am free.

Can I be sure of that?

Cogito ergo sum no longer applies. We go on thinking even while we are ridden, and we live in quiet desperation, unable to halt our courses no matter how ghastly, no matter how self-destructive. I am certain that I can distinguish between the condition of bearing a Passenger and the condition of being free. But perhaps not. Perhaps I bear a particularly devilish Passenger which has not quitted me at all, but which merely has receded to the cerebellum, leaving me the illusion of freedom while all the time surreptitiously driving me onward to some purpose of its own.

Did we ever have more than that: the illusion of freedom?

But this is disturbing, the thought that I may be ridden without realizing it. I burst out in heavy perspiration, not merely from the exertion of walking. Stop. Stop here. Why must you walk? You are at Forty-second Street. There is the library. Nothing forces you onward. Stop awhile, I tell myself. Rest on the library steps.

I sit on the cold stone and tell myself that I have made this decision for myself.

Have I? It is the old problem, free will versus determinism, translated into the foulest of forms. Determinism is no longer a philosopher’s abstraction; it is cold alien tendrils sliding between the cranial sutures. The Passengers arrived three years ago. I have been ridden five times since then. Our world is quite different now. But we have adjusted even to this. We have adjusted. We have our mores. Life goes on. Our governments rule, our legislatures meet, our stock exchanges transact business as usual, and we have methods for compensating for the random havoc. It is the only way. What else can we do? Shrivel in defeat? We have an enemy we cannot fight; at best we can resist through endurance. So we endure.

The stone steps are cold against my body. In December few people sit here.

I tell myself that I made this long walk of my own free will, that I halted of my own free will, that no Passenger rides my brain now. Perhaps. Perhaps. I cannot let myself believe that I am not free.

Can it be, I wonder, that the Passenger left some lingering command in me? Walk to this place, halt at this place? That is possible too.

I look about me at the others on the library steps.

An old man, eyes vacant, sitting on newspaper. A boy of thirteen or so with flaring nostrils. A plump woman. Are all of them ridden? Passengers seem to cluster about me today. The more I study the ridden ones, the more convinced I become that I am, for the moment, free. The last time, I had three months of freedom between rides. Some people, they say, are scarcely ever free. Their bodies are in great demand, and they know only scattered bursts of freedom, a day here, a week there, an hour. We have never been able to determine how many Passengers infest our world. Millions, maybe. Or maybe five. Who can tell?

A wisp of snow curls down out of the gray sky. Central had said the chance of precipitation was slight. Are they riding Central this morning too?

I see the girl.

She sits diagonally across from me, five steps up and a hundred feet away, her black skirt pulled up on her knees to reveal handsome legs. She is young. Her hair is deep, rich auburn. Her eyes are pale; at this distance, I cannot make out the precise color. She is dressed simply. She is younger than thirty. She wears a dark green coat and her lipstick has a purplish tinge. Her lips are full, her nose slender, high-bridged, her eyebrows carefully plucked.

I know her.

I have spent the past three nights with her in my room. She is the one. Ridden, she came to me, and ridden, I slept with her. I am certain of this. The veil of memory opens; I see her slim body naked on my bed.

How can it be that I remember this?

It is too strong to be an illusion. Clearly this is something that I have been permitted to remember for reasons I cannot comprehend. And I remember more. I remember her soft gasping sounds of pleasure. I know that my own body did not betray me those three nights, nor did I fail her need.

And there is more. A memory of sinuous music; a scent of youth in her hair; the rustle of winter trees. Somehow she brings back to me a time of innocence, a time when I am young and girls are mysterious, a time of parties and dances and warmth and secrets.

I am drawn to her now.

There is an etiquette about such things, too. It is in poor taste to approach someone you have met while being ridden. Such an encounter gives you no privilege; a stranger remains a stranger, no matter what you and she may have done and said during your involuntary time together.

Yet I am drawn to her.

Why this violation of taboo? Why this raw breach of etiquette? I have never done this before. I have been scrupulous.

But I get to my feet and walk along the step on which I have been sitting, until I am below her, and I look up, and automatically she folds her ankles together and angles her knees as if in awareness that her position is not a modest one. I know from that gesture that she is not ridden now. My eyes meet hers. Her eyes are hazy green. She is beautiful, and I rack my memory for more details of our passion.

I climb step by step until I stand before her.

“Hello,” I say.

She gives me a neutral look. She does not seem to recognize me. Her eyes are veiled, as one’s eyes often are, just after the Passenger has gone. She purses her lips and appraises me in a distant way.

“Hello,” she replies coolly. “I don’t think I know you.”

“No. You don’t. But I have the feeling you don’t want to be alone just now. And I know I don’t.” I try to persuade her with my eyes that my motives are decent. “There’s snow in the air,” I say. “We can find a warmer place. I’d like to talk to you.”

“About what?”

“Let’s go elsewhere, and I’ll tell you. I’m Charles Roth.”

“Helen Martin.”

She gets to her feet. She still has not cast aside her cool neutrality; she is suspicious, ill at ease. But at least she is willing to go with me. A good sign.

“Is it too early in the day for a drink?” I ask.

“I’m not sure. I hardly know what time it is.”

“Before noon.”

“Let’s have a drink anyway,” she says, and we both smile.

We go to a cocktail lounge across the street. Sitting face to face in the darkness, we sip drinks, daiquiri for her, bloody mary for me. She relaxes a little. I ask myself what it is I want from her. The pleasure of her company, yes. Her company in bed? But I have already had that pleasure, three nights of it, though she does not know that. I want something more. Something more. What?

Her eyes are bloodshot. She has had little sleep these past three nights. I say, “Was it very unpleasant for you?”

“What?”

“The Passenger.”

A whiplash of reaction crosses her face. “How did you know I’ve had a Passenger?”

“I know.”

“We aren’t supposed to talk about it.”

“I’m broadminded,” I tell her. “My Passenger left me some time during the night. I was ridden since Tuesday afternoon.”

“Mine left me about two hours ago, I think.” Her cheeks color. She is doing something daring, talking like this. “I was ridden since Monday night. This was my fifth time.”

“Mine also.”

We toy with our drinks. Rapport is growing, almost without the need of words. Our recent experiences with Passengers give us something in common, although Helen does not realize how intimately we shared those experiences.

We talk. She is a designer of display windows. She has a small apartment several blocks from here. She lives alone. She asks me what I do. “Securities analyst,” I tell her. She smiles. Her teeth are flawless. We have a second round of drinks. I am positive, now, that this is the girl who was in my room when I was ridden.

A seed of hope grows in me. It was a happy chance that brought us together again, so soon after we parted as dreamers. A happy chance, too, that some vestige of the dream lingered in my mind.

We have shared something, who knows what, and it must have been good to leave such a vivid imprint on me, and now I want to come to her conscious, aware, my own master, and renew that relationship, making it a real one this time. It is not proper, for I am trespassing on a privilege that is not mine except by virtue of our Passengers’ brief presence in us. Yet I need her. I want her.

She seems to need me, too, without realizing who I am. But fear holds her back.

I am frightened of frightening her, and I do not try to press my advantage too quickly. Perhaps she would take me to her apartment with her now, perhaps not, but I do not ask. We finish our drinks. We arrange to meet by the library steps again tomorrow. My hand momentarily brushes hers. Then she is gone.

I fill three ashtrays that night. Over and over I debate the wisdom of what I am doing. But why not leave her alone? I have no right to follow her. In the place our world has become, we are wisest to remain apart.

And yet—there is that stab of half-memory when I think of her. The blurred lights of lost chances behind the stairs, of girlish laughter in second-floor corridors, of stolen kisses, of tea and cake. I remember the girl with the orchid in her hair, and the one in the spangled dress, and the one with the child’s face and the woman’s eyes, all so long ago, all lost, all gone, and I tell myself that this one I will not lose, I will not permit her to be taken from me.

Morning comes, a quiet Saturday. I return to the library, hardly expecting to find her there, but she is there, on the steps, and the sight of her is like a reprieve. She looks wary, troubled; obviously she has done much thinking, little sleeping. Together we walk along Fifth Avenue. She is quite close to me, but she does not take my arm. Her steps are brisk, short, nervous.

I want to suggest that we go to her apartment instead of to the cocktail lounge. In these days we must move swiftly while we are free. But I know it would be a mistake to think of this as a matter of tactics. Coarse haste would be fatal, bringing me perhaps an ordinary victory, a numbing defeat within it. In any event her mood hardly seems promising. I look at her, thinking of string music and new snowfalls, and she looks toward the gray sky.

She says, “I can feel them watching me all the time. Like vultures swooping overhead, waiting, waiting. Ready to pounce.”

“But there’s a way of beating them. We can grab little scraps of life when they’re not looking.”

“They’re always looking.”

“No,” I tell her. “There can’t be enough of them for that. Sometimes they’re looking the other way. And while they are, two people can come together and try to share warmth.”

“But what’s the use?”

“You’re too pessimistic, Helen. They ignore us for months at a time. We have a chance. We have a chance.”

But I cannot break through her shell of fear. She is paralyzed by the nearness of the Passengers, unwilling to begin anything for fear it will be snatched away by our tormentors. We reach the building where she lives, and I hope she will relent and invite me in. For an instant she wavers, but only for an instant: she takes my hand in both of hers, and smiles, and the smile fades, and she is gone, leaving me only with the words, “Let’s meet at the library again tomorrow. Noon.”

I make the long chilling walk home alone.

Some of her pessimism seeps into me that night. It seems futile for us to try to salvage anything. More than that: wicked for me to seek her out, shameful to offer a hesitant love when I am not free. In this world, I tell myself, we should keep well clear of others, so that we do not harm anyone when we are seized and ridden.

I do not go to meet her in the morning.

It is best this way, I insist. I have no business trifling with her. I imagine her at the library, wondering why I am late, growing tense, impatient, then annoyed. She will be angry with me for breaking our date, but her anger will ebb, and she will forget me quickly enough.

Monday comes. I return to work.

Naturally, no one discusses my absence. It is as though I have never been away. The market is strong that morning. The work is challenging; it is mid-morning before I think of Helen at all. But once I think of her, I can think of nothing else. My cowardice in standing her up. The childishness of Saturday night’s dark thoughts. Why accept fate so passively? Why give in? I want to fight, now, to carve out a pocket of security despite the odds. I feel a deep conviction that it can be done. The Passengers may never bother the two of us again, after all. And that flickering smile of hers outside her building Saturday, that momentary glow—it should have told me that behind her wall of fear she felt the same hopes. She was waiting for me to lead the way. And I stayed home instead.

At lunchtime I go to the library, convinced it is futile.

But she is there. She paces along the steps; the wind slices at her slender figure. I go to her.

She is silent a moment. “Hello,” she says finally.

“I’m sorry about yesterday.”

“I waited a long time for you.”

I shrug. “I made up my mind that it was no use to come. But then I changed my mind again.”

She tries to look angry. But I know she is pleased to see me again—else why did she come here today? She cannot hide her inner pleasure. Nor can I. I point across the street to the cocktail lounge.

“A daiquiri?” I say. “As a peace offering?”

“All right.”

Today the lounge is crowded, but we find a booth somehow. There is a brightness in her eyes that I have not seen before. I sense that a barrier is crumbling within her.

“You’re less afraid of me, Helen,” I say.

“I’ve never been afraid of you. I’m afraid of what could happen if we take the risks.”

“Don’t be. Don’t be.”

“I’m trying not to be afraid. But sometimes it seems so hopeless. Since they came here—”

“We can still try to live our own lives.”

“Maybe.”

“We have to. Let’s make a pact, Helen. No more gloom. No more worrying about the terrible things that might just maybe happen. All right?”

A pause. Then a cool hand against mine.

“All right.”

We finish our drinks, and I present my Credit Central to pay for them, and we go outside. I want her to tell me to forget about this afternoon’s work and come home with her. It is inevitable, now, that she will ask me, and better sooner than later.

We walk a block. She does not offer the invitation. I sense the struggle inside her, and I wait, letting that struggle reach its own resolution without interference from me. We walk a second block. Her arm is through mine, but she talks only of her work, of the weather, and it is a remote, arm’s-length conversation. At the next corner she swings around, away from her apartment, back toward the cocktail lounge. I try to be patient with her.

I have no need to rush things now, I tell myself. Her body is not a secret to me. We have begun our relationship topsy-turvy, with the physical part first; now it will take time to work backward to the more difficult part that some people call love.

But of course she is not aware that we have known each other that way. The wind blows swirling snowflakes in our faces, and somehow the cold sting awakens honesty in me. I know what I must say. I must relinquish my unfair advantage.

I tell her, “While I was ridden last week, Helen, I had a girl in my room.”

“Why talk of such things now?”

“I have to, Helen. You were the girl.”

She halts. She turns to me. People hurry past us in the street. Her face is very pale, with dark red spots growing in her cheeks.

“That’s not funny, Charles.”

“It wasn’t meant to be. You were with me from Tuesday night to early Friday morning.”

“How can you possibly know that?”

“I do. I do. The memory is clear. Somehow it remains, Helen. I see your whole body.”

“Stop it, Charles.”

“We were very good together,” I say. “We must have pleased our Passengers because we were so good. To see you again—it was like waking from a dream, and finding that the dream was real, the girl right there—”

“No!”

“Let’s go to your apartment and begin again.”

She says, “You’re being deliberately filthy, and I don’t know why, but there wasn’t any reason for you to spoil things. Maybe I was with you and maybe I wasn’t, but you wouldn’t know it, and if you did know it you should keep your mouth shut about it, and—”

“You have a birthmark the size of a dime,” I say, “about three inches below your left breast.”

She sobs and hurls herself at me, there in the street. Her long silvery nails rake my cheeks. She pummels me. I seize her. Her knees assail me. No one pays attention; those who pass by assume we are ridden, and turn their heads. She is all fury, but I have my arms around hers like metal bands, so that she can only stamp and snort, and her body is close against mine. She is rigid, anguished.

In a low, urgent voice I say, “We’ll defeat them, Helen. We’ll finish what they started. Don’t fight me. There’s no reason to fight me. I know, it’s a fluke that I remember you, but let me go with you and I’ll prove that we belong together.”

“Let—go—”

“Please. Please. Why should we be enemies? I don’t mean you any harm. I love you, Helen. Do you remember, when we were kids, we could play at being in love? I did; you must have done it too. Sixteen, seventeen years old. The whispers, the conspiracies—all a big game and we knew it. But the game’s over. We can’t afford to tease and run. We have so little time, when we’re free—we have to trust, to open ourselves—”

“It’s wrong.”

“No. Just because it’s the stupid custom for two people brought together by Passengers to avoid one another, that doesn’t mean we have to follow it. Helen—Helen—”

Something in my tone registers with her. She ceases to struggle. Her rigid body softens. She looks up at me, her tear-streaked face thawing, her eyes blurred.

“Trust me,” I say. “Trust me, Helen!”

She hesitates. Then she smiles.

In that moment I feel the chill at the back of my skull, the sensation as of a steel needle driven deep through bone. I stiffen. My arms drop away from her. For an instant, I lose touch, and when the mists clear all is different.

“Charles?” she says. “Charles?”

Her knuckles are against her teeth. I turn, ignoring her, and go back into the cocktail lounge. A young man sits in one of the front booths. His dark hair gleams with pomade; his cheeks are smooth. His eyes meet mine.

I sit down. He orders drinks. We do not talk.

My hand falls on his wrist, and remains there. The bartender, serving the drinks, scowls but says nothing. We sip our cocktails and put the drained glasses down.

“Let’s go,” the young man says.

I follow him out.

FREDERIK POHL The Tunnel under the World

Before he was a science fiction writer, Frederik Pohl was a science fiction editor who worked at the pulp magazines Astonishing Stories and Super Science Stories, where he provided opportunities for James Blish, Cyril M. Kornbluth, Isaac Asimov, Damon Knight, and other colleagues in the Futurian science fiction society. Much of his career until 1980 was divided between writing and either serving as a literary agent for science fiction writers or shaping editorial policy on the fiction published at publishing houses or science fiction magazines. His earliest novels, written in collaboration with Cyril M. Kornbluth, show the impact of his familiarity with science fiction at all levels of conception. The Space Merchants, Gladiator at Law, and Wolfbane are among the wittiest satires in all science fiction, not only for their speculative extrapolations of the absurdities of American culture, but for their understanding of the appropriateness of science fiction constructs for elaborating that absurdity. Pohl is an insightful observer of modern society and its ills and a number of his short stories in the years following World War II are perceptive and even prophetic social critiques, notably “The Midas Plague,” about consumerism run amuck; “What to Do till the Analyst Comes,” a dark comedy about the culture of addiction; and “The Snowmen,” which foresees the energy crisis and the greenhouse effect. Much of Pohl’s fiction from this period has been collected in Alternating Current, The Case against Tomorrow, Tomorrow Times Seven, The Man Who Ate the World, and Turn Left at Thursday. Pohl hit his stride as a novelist in the 1970s with his Heechee chronicles, comprising Gateway, Beyond the Blue Event Horizon, Heechee Rendezvous, The Annals of Heechee, and The Gateway Trip. The central idea of this series—an apparently abandoned space transportation terminus created by a sophisticated alien race that gives humans access to unpredictable adventures on interstellar worlds—gave Pohl the perfect instrument for taking the measure of human motives and objectives in the face of the unknown. Man-Plus, in which a man who loses more than he gains when he agrees to physical transformation that will allow him to adapt to the Martian environment, and Jem, about an earth colony doomed to recapitulate the aggressions and prejudices that have destroyed the mother planet, are among his most memorable works. In addition to his scores of novels and short-fiction collections, Pohl has written essays on the craft of science fiction, collected in Digits and Dastards and Forbidden Lines, and his autobiography, The Way the Future Was.

ON THE MORNING of June 15th, Guy Burckhardt woke up screaming out of a dream.

It was more real than any dream he had ever had in his life. He could still hear and feel the sharp, ripping-metal explosion, the violent heave that had tossed him furiously out of bed, the searing wave of heat.

He sat up convulsively and stared, not believing what he saw, at the quiet room and the bright sunlight coming in the window.

He croaked, “Mary?”

His wife was not in the bed next to him. The covers were tumbled and awry, as though she had just left it, and the memory of the dream was so strong that instinctively he found himself searching the floor to see if the dream explosion had thrown her down.

But she wasn’t there. Of course she wasn’t, he told himself, looking at the familiar vanity and slipper chair, the uncracked window, the unbuckled wall. It had only been a dream.

“Guy?” His wife was calling him querulously from the foot of the stairs. “Guy, dear, are you all right?”

He called weakly, “Sure.”

There was a pause. Then Mary said doubtfully, “Breakfast is ready. Are you sure you’re all right? I thought I heard you yelling.”

Burckhardt said more confidently, “I had a bad dream, honey. Be right down.”

IN THE SHOWER, punching the lukewarm-and-cologne he favored, he told himself that it had been a beaut of a dream. Still bad dreams weren’t unusual, especially bad dreams about explosions. In the past thirty years of H-bomb jitters, who had not dreamed of explosions?

Even Mary had dreamed of them, it turned out, for he started to tell her about the dream, but she cut him off. “You did?” Her voice was astonished. “Why, dear, I dreamed the same thing! Well, almost the same thing. I didn’t actually hear anything. I dreamed that something woke me up, and then there was a sort of quick bang, and then something hit me on the head. And that was all. Was yours like that?”

Burckhardt coughed. “Well, no,” he said. Mary was not one of the strong-as-a-man, brave-as-a-tiger women. It was not necessary, he thought, to tell her all the little details of the dream that made it seem so real. No need to mention the splintered ribs, and the salt bubble in his throat, and the agonized knowledge that this was death. He said, “Maybe there really was some kind of explosion downtown. Maybe we heard it and it started us dreaming.”

Mary reached over and patted his hand absently. “Maybe,” she agreed. “It’s almost half-past eight, dear. Shouldn’t you hurry? You don’t want to be late to the office.”

He gulped his food, kissed her and rushed out—not so much to be on time as to see if his guess had been right.

But downtown Tylerton looked as it always had. Coming in on the bus, Burckhardt watched critically out the window, seeking evidence of an explosion. There wasn’t any. If anything, Tylerton looked better than it ever had before. It was a beautiful crisp day, the sky was cloudless, the buildings were clean and inviting. They had, he observed, steam-blasted the Power & Light Building, the town’s only skyscraper—that was the penalty of having Contro Chemicals’ main plant on the outskirts of town; the fumes from the cascade stills left their mark on stone buildings.

None of the usual crowd were on the bus, so there wasn’t anyone Burckhardt could ask about the explosion. And by the time he got out at the corner of Fifth and Lehigh and the bus rolled away with a muted diesel moan, he had pretty well convinced himself that it was all imagination.

He stopped at the cigar stand in the lobby of his office building, but Ralph wasn’t behind the counter. The man who sold him his pack of cigarettes was a stranger.

“Where’s Mr. Stebbins?” Burckhardt asked.

The man said politely, “Sick, sir. He’ll be in tomorrow. A pack of Marlins today?”

“Chesterfields,” Burckhardt corrected.

“Certainly, sir,” the man said. But what he took from the rack and slid across the counter was an unfamiliar green-and-yellow pack.

“Do try these, sir,” he suggested. “They contain an anti-cough factor. Ever notice how ordinary cigarettes make you choke every once in a while?”

Burckhardt said suspiciously, “I never heard of this brand.”

“Of course not. They’re something new.” Burckhardt hesitated, and the man said persuasively, “Look, try them out at my risk. If you don’t like them, bring back the empty pack and I’ll refund your money. Fair enough?”

Burckhardt shrugged. “How can I lose? But give me a pack of Chesterfields, too, will you?”

He opened the pack and lit one while he waited for the elevator. They weren’t bad, he decided, though he was suspicious of cigarettes that had the tobacco chemically treated in any way. But he didn’t think much of Ralph’s stand-in; it would raise hell with the trade at the cigar stand if the man tried to give every customer the same high-pressure sales talk.

The elevator door opened with a low-pitched sound of music. Burckhardt and two or three others got in and he nodded to them as the door closed. The thread of music switched off and the speaker in the ceiling of the cab began its usual commercials.

No, not the usual commercials, Burckhardt realized. He had been exposed to the captive-audience commercials so long that they hardly registered on the outer ear any more, but what was coming from the recorded program in the basement of the building caught his attention. It wasn’t merely that the brands were mostly unfamiliar; it was a difference in pattern.

There were jingles with an insistent, bouncy rhythm, about soft drinks he had never tasted. There was a rapid patter dialogue between what sounded like two ten-year-old boys about a candy bar, followed by an authoritative bass rumble: “Go right out and get a DELICIOUS Choco-Bite and eat your TANGY Choco-Bite all up. That’s Choco Bite!” There was a sobbing female whine: “I wish I had a Feckle Freezer! I’d do anything for a Feckle Freezer!” Burckhardt reached his floor and left the elevator in the middle of the last one. It left him a little uneasy. The commercials were not for familiar brands; there was no feeling of use and custom to them.

But the office was happily normal—except that Mr. Barth wasn’t in. Miss Mitkin, yawning at the reception desk, didn’t know exactly why. “His home phoned, that’s all. He’ll be in tomorrow.”

“Maybe he went to the plant. It’s right near his house.”

She looked indifferent. “Yeah.”

A thought struck Burckhardt. “But today is June 15th! It’s quarterly tax return day—he has to sign the return!”

Miss Mitkin shrugged to indicate that that was Burckhardt’s problem, not hers. She returned to her nails.

Thoroughly exasperated, Burckhardt went to his desk. It wasn’t that he couldn’t sign the tax returns as well as Barth, he thought resentfully. It simply wasn’t his job, that was all; it was a responsibility that Barth, as office manager for Contro Chemicals’ downtown office, should have taken.

He thought briefly of calling Barth at his home or trying to reach him at the factory, but he gave up the idea quickly enough. He didn’t really care much for the people at the factory and the less contact he had with them, the better. He had been to the factory once, with Barth; it had been a confusing and, in a way, frightening experience. Barring a handful of executives and engineers, there wasn’t a soul in the factory—that is, Burckhardt corrected himself, remembering what Barth had told him, not a living soul—just the machines.

According to Barth, each machine was controlled by a sort of computer which reproduced, in its electronic snarl, the actual memory and mind of a human being. It was an unpleasant thought. Barth, laughing, had assured him that there was no Frankenstein business of robbing graveyards and implanting brains in machines. It was only a matter, he said, of transferring a man’s habit patterns from brain cells to vacuum-tube cells. It didn’t hurt the man and it didn’t make the machine into a monster.

But they made Burckhardt uncomfortable all the same.

He put Barth and the factory and all his other little irritations out of his mind and tackled the tax returns. It took him until noon to verify the figures—which Barth could have done out of his memory and his private ledger in ten minutes, Burckhardt resentfully reminded himself.

He sealed them in an envelope and walked out to Miss Mitkin. “Since Mr. Barth isn’t here, we’d better go to lunch in shifts,” he said, “You can go first.”

“Thanks.” Miss Mitkin languidly took her bag out of the desk drawer and began to apply makeup.

Burckhardt offered her the envelope. “Drop this in the mail for me, will you? Uh—wait a minute. I wonder if I ought to phone Mr. Barth to make sure. Did his wife say whether he was able to take phone calls?”

“Didn’t say.” Miss Mitkin blotted her lips carefully with a Kleenex. “Wasn’t his wife, anyway. It was his daughter who called and left the message.”

“The kid?” Burckhardt frowned. “I thought she was away at school.”

“She called, that’s all I know.”

Burckhardt went back to his own office and stared distastefully at the unopened mail on his desk. He didn’t like nightmares; they spoiled his whole day. He should have stayed in bed, like Barth.

A FUNNY THING happened on his way home. There was a disturbance at the corner where he usually caught his bus—someone was screaming something about a new kind of deep-freeze—so he walked an extra block. He saw the bus coming and started to trot. But behind him, someone was calling his name. He looked over his shoulder; a small harried-looking man was hurrying toward him.

Burckhardt hesitated, and then recognized him. It was a casual acquaintance named Swanson. Burckhardt sourly observed that he had already missed the bus.

He said, “Hello.”

Swanson’s face was desperately eager. “Burckhardt?” he asked inquiringly, with an odd intensity. And then he just stood there silently, watching Burckhardt’s face, with a burning eagerness that dwindled to a faint hope and died to a regret. He was searching for something, waiting for something, Burckhardt thought. But whatever it was he wanted, Burckhardt didn’t know how to supply it.

Burckhardt coughed and said again, “Hello, Swanson.”

Swanson didn’t even acknowledge the greeting. He merely sighed a very deep sigh.

“Nothing doing,” he mumbled, apparently to himself. He nodded abstractedly to Burckhardt and turned away.

Burckhardt watched the slumped shoulders disappear in the crowd. It was an odd sort of day, he thought, and one he didn’t much like. Things weren’t going right.

Riding home on the next bus, he brooded about it. It wasn’t anything terrible or disastrous; it was something out of his experience entirely. You live your life, like any man, and you form a network of impressions and reactions. You expect things. When you open your medicine chest, your razor is expected to be on the second shelf; when you lock your front door, you expect to have to give it a slight extra tug to make it latch.

It isn’t the things that are right and perfect in your life that make it familiar. It is the things that are just a little bit wrong—the sticking latch, the light switch at the head of the stairs that needs an extra push because the spring is old and weak, the rug that unfailingly skids underfoot.

It wasn’t just that things were wrong with the pattern of Burckhardt’s life; it was that the wrong things were wrong. For instance, Barth hadn’t come into the office, yet Barth always came in.

Burckhardt brooded about it through dinner. He brooded about it, despite his wife’s attempt to interest him in a game of bridge with the neighbors, all through the evening. The neighbors were people he liked—Anne and Farley Dennerman. He had known them all their lives. But they were odd and brooding, too, this night, and he barely listened to Dennerman’s complaints about not being able to get good phone service or his wife’s comments on the disgusting variety of television commercials they had these days.

Burckhardt was well on the way to setting an all-time record for continuous abstraction when around midnight, with a suddenness that surprised him—he was strangely aware of it happening—he turned over in his bed and, quickly and completely, fell asleep.

ON THE MORNING of June 15th, Burckhardt woke up screaming.

It was more real than any dream he had ever had in his life. He could still hear the explosion, feel the blast that crushed him against a wall. It did not seem right that he should be sitting bolt upright in bed in an undisturbed room.

His wife came pattering up the stairs. “Darling!” she cried. “What’s the matter?”

He mumbled, “Nothing. Bad dream.”

She relaxed, hand on heart. In an angry tone, she started to say: “You gave me such a shock—”

But a noise from outside interrupted her. There was a wail of sirens and a clang of bells; it was loud and shocking.

The Burckhardts stared at each other for a heartbeat, then hurried fearfully to the window.

There were no rumbling fire engines in the street, only a small panel truck, cruising slowly along. Flaring loudspeaker horns crowned its top. From them issued the screaming sound of sirens, growing in intensity, mixed with the rumble of heavy-duty engines and the sound of bells. It was a perfect record of fire engines arriving at a four-alarm blaze.

Burckhardt said in amazement, “Mary, that’s against the law! Do you know what they’re doing? They’re playing records of a fire. What are they up to?”

“Maybe it’s a practical joke,” his wife offered.

“Joke? Waking up the whole neighborhood at six o’clock in the morning?” He shook his head. “The police will be here in ten minutes,” he predicted. “Wait and see.”

But the police weren’t—not in ten minutes, or at all. Whoever the pranksters in the car were, they apparently had a police permit for their games.

The car took a position in the middle of the block and stood silent for a few minutes. Then there was a crackle from the speaker, and a giant voice chanted:

It went on and on. Every house on the block had faces staring out of windows by then. The voice was not merely loud; it was nearly deafening.

Burckhardt shouted to his wife, over the uproar, “What the hell is a Feckle Freezer?”

“Some kind of a freezer, I guess, dear,” she shrieked back unhelpfully.

Abruptly the noise stopped and the truck stood silent. It was still misty morning; the sun’s rays came horizontally across the rooftops. It was impossible to believe that, a moment ago, the silent block had been bellowing the name of a freezer.

“A crazy advertising trick,” Burckhardt said bitterly. He yawned and turned away from the window. “Might as well get dressed. I guess that’s the end of—”

The bellow caught him from behind; it was almost like a hard slap on the ears. A harsh, sneering voice, louder than the archangel’s trumpet, howled:

“Have you got a freezer? It stinks! If it isn’t a Feckle Freezer, it stinks! If it’s a last year’s Feckle Freezer, it stinks! Only this year’s Feckle Freezer is any good at all! You know who owns an Ajax Freezer? Fairies own Ajax Freezers! You know who owns a Triple cold Freezer? Commies own Triplecold Freezers! Every freezer but a brand-new Feckle Freezer stinks!”

The voice screamed inarticulately with rage. “I’m warning you! Get out and buy a Feckle Freezer right away! Hurry up! Hurry for Feckle! Hurry for Feckle! Hurry, hurry, hurry, Feckle, Feckle, Feckle, Feckle, Feckle, Feckle . . .”

It stopped eventually. Burckhardt licked his lips. He started to say to his wife, “Maybe we ought to call the police about—” when the speakers erupted again. It caught him off guard; it was intended to catch him off guard. It screamed:

“Feckle, Feckle, Feckle, Feckle, Feckle, Feckle, Feckle, Feckle. Cheap freezers ruin your food. You’ll get sick and throw up. You’ll get sick and die. Buy a Feckle, Feckle, Feckle, Feckle! Ever take a piece of meat out of the freezer you’ve got and see how rotten and moldy it is? Buy a Feckle, Feckle, Feckle, Feckle, Feckle. Do you want to eat rotten, stinking food? Or do you want to wise up and buy a Feckle, Feckle, Feckle—”

That did it. With fingers that kept stabbing the wrong holes, Burckhardt finally managed to dial the local police station. He got a busy signal—it was apparent that he was not the only one with the same idea—and while he was shakily dialing again, the noise outside stopped.

He looked out the window. The truck was gone.

BURCKHARDT LOOSENED HIS tie and ordered another Frosty-Flip from the waiter. If only they wouldn’t keep the Crystal Cafe so hot! The new paint job—searing reds and blinding yellows—was bad enough, but someone seemed to have the delusion that this was January instead of June; the place was a good ten degrees warmer than outside.

He swallowed the Frosty-Flip in two gulps. It had a kind of peculiar flavor, he thought, but not bad. It certainly cooled you off, just as the waiter had promised. He reminded himself to pick up a carton of them on the way home; Mary might like them. She was always interested in something new.

He stood up awkwardly as the girl came across the restaurant toward him. She was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen in Tylerton. Chin-height, honey-blonde hair and a figure that—well, it was all hers. There was no doubt in the world that the dress that clung to her was the only thing she wore. He felt as if he were blushing as she greeted him.

“Mr. Burckhardt.” The voice was like distant tom-toms. “It’s wonderful of you to let me see you, after this morning.”

He cleared his throat. “Not at all. Won’t you sit down, Miss—”

“April Horn,” she murmured, sitting down—beside him, not where he had pointed on the other side of the table. “Call me April, won’t you?”

She was wearing some kind of perfume. Burckhardt noted with what little of his mind was functioning at all. It didn’t seem fair that she should be using perfume as well as everything else. He came to with a start and realized that the waiter was leaving with an order for filet mignon for two.

“Hey!” he objected.

“Please, Mr. Burckhardt.” Her shoulder was against his, her face was turned to him, her breath was warm, her expression was tender and solicitous. “This is all on the Feckle Corporation. Please let them—it’s the least they can do.”

He felt her hand burrowing into his pocket.

“I put the price of the meal into your pocket,” she whispered conspiratorially. “Please do that for me, won’t you? I mean I’d appreciate it if you’d pay the waiter—I’m old-fashioned about things like that.”

She smiled meltingly, then became mock-businesslike. “But you must take the money,” she insisted. “Why, you’re letting Feckle off lightly if you do! You could sue them for every nickel they’ve got, disturbing your sleep like that.”

With a dizzy feeling, as though he had just seen someone make a rabbit disappear into a top hat, he said, “Why, it really wasn’t so bad, uh, April. A little noisy, maybe, but—”

“Oh, Mr. Burckhardt!” The blue eyes were wide and admiring. “I knew you’d understand. It’s just that—well, it’s such a wonderful freezer that some of the outside men get carried away, so to speak. As soon as the main office found out about what happened, they sent representatives around to every house on the block to apologize. Your wife told us where we could phone you—and I’m so very pleased that you were willing to let me have lunch with you, so that I could apologize, too. Because truly, Mr. Burckhardt, it is a fine freezer.

“I shouldn’t tell you this, but—” The blue eyes were shyly lowered—“I’d do almost anything for Feckle Freezers. It’s more than a job to me.” She looked up. She was enchanting. “I bet you think I’m silly, don’t you?”

Burckhardt coughed. “Well, I—”

“Oh, you don’t want to be unkind!” She shook her head. “No, don’t pretend. You think it’s silly. But really, Mr. Burckhardt, you wouldn’t think so if you knew more about the Feckle. Let me show you this little booklet—”

Burckhardt got back from lunch a full hour late. It wasn’t only the girl who delayed him. There had been a curious interview with a little man named Swanson, whom he barely knew, who had stopped him with desperate urgency on the street—and then left him cold.

But it didn’t matter much. Mr. Barth, for the first time since Burckhardt had worked there, was out for the day—leaving Burckhardt stuck with the quarterly tax returns.

What did matter, though, was that somehow he had signed a purchase order for a twelve-cubic-foot Feckle Freezer, upright model, self-defrosting, list price $625, with a ten percent “courtesy” discount—“Because of that horrid affair this morning, Mr. Burckhardt,” she had said.

And he wasn’t sure how he could explain it to his wife.

HE NEEDN’T HAVE worried. As he walked in the front door, his wife said almost immediately, “I wonder if we can’t afford a new freezer, dear. There was a man here to apologize about that noise and—well, we got to talking and—”

She had signed a purchase order, too.

It had been the damnedest day, Burckhardt thought later, on his way up to bed. But the day wasn’t done with him yet. At the head of the stairs, the weakened spring in the electric light switch refused to click at all. He snapped it back and forth angrily and, of course, succeeded in jarring the tumbler out of its pins. The wire shorted and every light in the house went out.

“Damn!” said Guy Burckhardt.

“Fuse?” His wife shrugged sleepily. “Let it go till the morning, dear.”

Burckhardt shook his head. “You go back to bed. I’ll be right along.”

It wasn’t so much that he cared about fixing the fuse, but he was too restless for sleep. He disconnected the bad switch with a screwdriver, tumbled down into the black kitchen, found the flashlight and climbed gingerly down the cellar stairs. He located a spare fuse, pushed an empty trunk over to the fuse box to stand on and twisted out the old fuse.

When the new one was in, he heard the starting click and steady drone of the refrigerator in the kitchen overhead.

He headed back to the steps, and stopped.

Where the old trunk had been, the cellar floor gleamed oddly bright. He inspected it in the flashlight beam. It was metal!

“Son of a gun,” said Guy Burckhardt. He shook his head unbelievingly. He peered closer, rubbed the edges of the metallic patch with his thumb and acquired an annoying cut—the edges were sharp.

The stained cement floor of the cellar was a thin shell. He found a hammer and cracked it off in a dozen spots—everywhere was metal.

The whole cellar was a copper box. Even the cement-brick walls were false fronts over a metal sheath!

Baffled, he attacked one of the foundation beams. That, at least, was real wood. The glass in the cellar windows was real glass.

He sucked his bleeding thumb and tried the base of the cellar stairs. Real wood. He chipped at the bricks under the oil burner. Real bricks. The retaining walls, the floor—they were faked.

It was as though someone had shored up the house with a frame of metal and then laboriously concealed the evidence.

The biggest surprise was the upside-down boat hull that blocked the rear half of the cellar, relic of a brief home-workshop period that Burckhardt had gone through a couple of years before. From above, it looked perfectly normal. Inside, though, where there should have been thwarts and seats and lockers, there was a mere tangle of braces, rough and unfinished.

“But I built that!” Burckhardt exclaimed, forgetting his thumb. He leaned against the hull dizzily, trying to think this thing through. For reasons beyond his comprehension, someone had taken his boat and his cellar away, maybe his whole house, and replaced them with a clever mock-up of the real thing.

“That’s crazy,” he said to the empty cellar. He stared around in the light of the flash. He whispered, “What in the name of Heaven would anybody do that for?”

Reason refused an answer; there wasn’t any reasonable answer. For long minutes, Burckhardt contemplated the uncertain picture of his own sanity.

He peered under the boat again, hoping to reassure himself that it was a mistake, just his imagination. But the sloppy, unfinished bracing was unchanged. He crawled under for a better look, feeling the rough wood incredulously. Utterly impossible!

He switched off the flashlight and started to wriggle out. But he didn’t make it. In the moment between the command to his legs to move and the crawling out, he felt a sudden draining weariness flooding through him.

Consciousness went—not easily, but as though it were being taken away, and Guy Burckhardt was asleep.

ON THE MORNING of June 16th, Guy Burckhardt woke up in a cramped position huddled under the hull of the boat in his basement—and raced upstairs to find it was June 15th.

The first thing he had done was to make a frantic, hasty inspection of the boat hull, the faked cellar floor, the imitation stone. They were all as he had remembered them, all completely unbelievable.

The kitchen was its placid, unexciting self. The electric clock was purring soberly around the dial. Almost six o’clock, it said. His wife would be waking at any moment.

Burckhardt flung open the front door and stared out into the quiet street. The morning paper was tossed carelessly against the steps, and as he retrieved it, he noticed that this was the 15th day of June.

But that was impossible. Yesterday was the 15th of June. It was not a date one would forget, it was quarterly tax-return day.

He went back into the hall and picked up the telephone; he dialed for Weather Information, and got a well-modulated chant: “—and cooler, some showers. Barometric pressure thirty point zero four, rising . . . United States Weather Bureau forecast for June 15th. Warm and sunny, with high around—”

He hung up the phone. June 15th.

“Holy Heaven!” Burckhardt said prayerfully. Things were very odd indeed. He heard the ring of his wife’s alarm and bounded up the stairs.

Mary Burckhardt was sitting upright in bed with the terrified, uncomprehending stare of someone just waking out of a nightmare.

“Oh!” she gasped, as her husband came in the room. “Darling, I just had the most terrible dream! It was like an explosion and—”

“Again?” Burckhardt asked, not very sympathetically. “Mary, something’s funny! I knew there was something wrong all day yesterday and—”

He went on to tell her about the copper box that was the cellar, and the odd mock-up someone had made of his boat. Mary looked astonished, then alarmed, then placatory and uneasy.

She said, “Dear, are you sure? Because I was cleaning that old trunk out just last week and I didn’t notice anything.”

“Positive!” said Guy Burckhardt. “I dragged it over to the wall to step on it to put a new fuse in after we blew the lights out and—”

“After we what?” Mary was looking more than merely alarmed.

“After we blew the lights out. You know, when the switch at the head of the stairs stuck. I went down to the cellar and—”

Mary sat up in bed. “Guy, the switch didn’t stick. I turned out the lights myself last night.”

Burckhardt glared at his wife. “Now I know you didn’t! Come here and take a look!”

He stalked out to the landing and dramatically pointed to the bad switch, the one that he unscrewed and left hanging the night before . . .

Only it wasn’t. It was as it had always been. Unbelieving, Burckhardt pressed it and the lights sprang up in both halls.

MARY, LOOKING PALE and worried, left him to go down to the kitchen and start breakfast. Burckhardt stood staring at the switch for a long time. His mental processes were gone beyond the point of disbelief and shock; they simply were not functioning.

He shaved and dressed and ate his breakfast in a state of numb introspection. Mary didn’t disturb him; she was apprehensive and soothing. She kissed him good-bye as he hurried out to the bus without another word.

Miss Mitkin, at the reception desk, greeted him with a yawn. “Morning,” she said drowsily. “Mr. Barth won’t be in today.”

Burckhardt started to say something, but checked himself. She would not know that Barth hadn’t been in yesterday, either, because she was tearing a June 14th pad off her calendar to make way for the “new” June 15th sheet.

He staggered to his own desk and stared unseeingly at the morning’s mail. It had not even been opened yet, but he knew that the Factory Distributors envelope contained an order for twenty thousand feet of the new acoustic tile, and the one from Finebeck & Sons was a complaint.

After a long while, he forced himself to open them. They were.

By lunchtime, driven by a desperate sense of urgency, Burckhardt made Miss Mitkin take her lunch hour first—the June-fifteenth-that-was-yesterday, he had gone first. She went, looking vaguely worried about his strained insistence, but it made no difference to Burckhardt’s mood.

The phone rang and Burckhardt picked it up abstractedly. “Contro Chemicals Downtown, Burckhardt speaking.”

The voice said, “This is Swanson,” and stopped.

Burckhardt waited expectantly, but that was all. He said, “Hello?”

Again the pause. Then Swanson asked in sad resignation, “Still nothing, eh?”

“Nothing what? Swanson, is there something you want? You came up to me yesterday and went through this routine. You—”

The voice cracked: “Burckhardt! Oh, my good heavens, you remember! Stay right there—I’ll be down in half an hour!”

“What’s this all about?”

“Never mind,” the little man said exultantly. “Tell you about it when I see you. Don’t say any more over the phone—somebody may be listening. Just wait there. Say, hold on a minute. Will you be alone in the office?”

“Well, no. Miss Mitkin will probably—”

“Hell. Look, Burckhardt, where do you eat lunch? Is it good and noisy?”

“Why, I suppose so. The Crystal Cafe. It’s just about a block—”

“I know where it is. Meet you in half an hour!” And the receiver clicked.

The Crystal Cafe was no longer painted red, but the temperature was still up. And they had added piped-in music interspersed with commercials. The advertisements were for Frosty-Flip, Marlin Cigarettes—“They’re sanitized,” the announcer purred—and something called Choco-Bite candy bars that Burckhardt couldn’t remember ever having heard of before. But he heard more about them quickly enough.

While he was waiting for Swanson to show up, a girl in the cellophane skirt of a nightclub cigarette vendor came through the restaurant with a tray of tiny scarlet-wrapped candies.

“Choco-Bites are tangy,” she was murmuring as she came close to his table. “Choco-Bites are tangier than tangy!”

Burckhardt, intent on watching for the strange little man who had phoned him, paid little attention. But as she scattered a handful of the confections over the table next to his, smiling at the occupants, he caught a glimpse of her and turned to stare.

“Why, Miss Horn!” he said.

The girl dropped her tray of candies.

Burckhardt rose, concerned over the girl. “Is something wrong?”

But she fled.

The manager of the restaurant was staring suspiciously at Burckhardt, who sank back in his seat and tried to look inconspicuous. He hadn’t insulted the girl! Maybe she was just a very strictly reared young lady, he thought—in spite of the long bare legs under the cellophane skirt—and when he addressed her, she thought he was a masher.

Ridiculous idea. Burckhardt scowled uneasily and picked up his menu.

“Burckhardt!” It was a shrill whisper.

Burckhardt looked up over the top of his menu, startled. In the seat across from him, the little man named Swanson was sitting, tensely poised.

“Burckhardt!” the little man whispered again. “Let’s get out of here! They’re on to you now. If you want to stay alive, come on!”

There was no arguing with the man. Burckhardt gave the hovering manager a sick, apologetic smile and followed Swanson out. The little man seemed to know where he was going. In the street, he clutched Burckhardt by the elbow and hurried him off down the block.

“Did you see her?” he demanded. “That Horn woman, in the phone booth? She’ll have them here in five minutes, believe me, so hurry it up!”

Although the street was full of people and cars, nobody was paying any attention to Burckhardt and Swanson. The air had a nip in it—more like October than June, Burckhardt thought, in spite of the weather bureau. And he felt like a fool, following this mad little man down the street, running away from some “them” toward—toward what? The little man might be crazy, but he was afraid. And the fear was infectious.

“In here!” panted the little man.

It was another restaurant—more of a bar, really, and a sort of second-rate place that Burckhardt had never patronized.

“Right straight through,” Swanson whispered; and Burckhardt, like a biddable boy, sidestepped through the mass of tables to the far end of the restaurant.

It was L-shaped, with a front on two streets at right angles to each other. They came out on the side street, Swanson staring coldly back at the question-looking cashier, and crossed to the opposite sidewalk.

They were under the marquee of a movie theater. Swanson’s expression began to relax.

“Lost them!” he crowed softly. “We’re almost there.”

He stepped up to the window and bought two tickets. Burckhardt trailed him into the theater. It was a weekday matinee and the place was almost empty. From the screen came sounds of gunfire and horses’ hoofs. A solitary usher, leaning against a bright brass rail, looked briefly at them and went back to staring boredly at the picture as Swanson led Burckhardt down a flight of carpeted marble steps.

They were in the lounge and it was empty. There was a door for men and one for ladies; and there was a third door, marked “MANAGER” in gold letters. Swanson listened at the door, and gently opened it and peered inside.

“Okay,” he said, gesturing.

Burckhardt followed him through an empty office, to another door—a closet, probably, because it was unmarked.

But it was no closet. Swanson opened it warily, looking inside, then motioned Burckhardt to follow.

It was a tunnel, metal-walled, brightly lit. Empty, it stretched vacantly away in both directions from them.

Burckhardt looked wondering around. One thing he knew and knew full well:

No such tunnel belonged under Tylerton.

THERE WAS A room off the tunnel with chairs and a desk and what looked like television screens. Swanson slumped in a chair, panting.

“We’re all right for a while here,” he wheezed. “They don’t come here much any more. If they do, we’ll hear them and we can hide.”

“Who?” demanded Burckhardt.

The little man said, “Martians!” His voice cracked on the word and the life seemed to go out of him. In morose tones, he went on: “Well, I think they’re Martians. Although you could be right, you know; I’ve had plenty of time to think it over these last few weeks, after they got you, and it’s possible they’re Russians after all. Still—”

“Start from the beginning. Who got me when?”

Swanson sighed. “So we have to go through the whole thing again. All right. It was about two months ago that you banged on my door, late at night. You were all beat up—scared silly. You begged me to help you—”

“I did?”

“Naturally you don’t remember any of this. Listen and you’ll understand. You were talking a blue streak about being captured and threatened, and your wife being dead and coming back to life, and all kinds of mixed-up nonsense. I thought you were crazy. But—well, I’ve always had a lot of respect for you. And you begged me to hide you and I have this darkroom, you know. It locks from the inside only. I put the lock on myself. So we went in there—just to humor you—and along about midnight, which was only fifteen or twenty minutes after, we passed out.”

“Passed out?”

Swanson nodded. “Both of us. It was like being hit with a sandbag. Look, didn’t that happen to you again last night?”

“I guess it did.” Burckhardt shook his head uncertainly.

“Sure. And then all of a sudden we were awake again, and you said you were going to show me something funny, and we went out and bought a paper. And the date on it was June 15th.”

“June 15th? But that’s today! I mean—”

“You got it, friend. It’s always today!”

It took time to penetrate.

Burckhardt said wonderingly, “You’ve hidden out in that darkroom for how many weeks?”

“How can I tell? Four or five, maybe, I lost count. And every day the same—always the 15th of June, always my landlady, Mrs. Keefer, is sweeping the front steps, always the same headline in the papers at the corner. It gets monotonous, friend.”

IT WAS BURCKHARDT’S idea and Swanson despised it, but he went along. He was the type who always went along.

“It’s dangerous,” he grumbled worriedly. “Suppose somebody comes by? They’ll spot us and—”

“What have we got to lose?”

Swanson shrugged. “It’s dangerous,” he said again. But he went along.

Burckhardt’s idea was very simple. He was sure of only one thing—the tunnel went somewhere. Martians or Russians, fantastic plot or crazy hallucination, whatever was wrong with Tylerton had an explanation, and the place to look for it was at the end of the tunnel.

They jogged along. It was more than a mile before they began to see an end. They were in luck—at least no one came through the tunnel to spot them. But Swanson had said that it was only at certain hours that the tunnel seemed to be in use.

Always the fifteenth of June. Why? Burckhardt asked himself. Never mind the how. Why?

And falling asleep, completely involuntarily—everyone at the same time, it seemed. And not remembering, never remembering anything—Swanson had said how eagerly he saw Burckhardt again, the morning after Burckhardt had incautiously waited five minutes too many before retreating into the darkroom. When Swanson had come to, Burckhardt was gone. Swanson had seen him in the street that afternoon, but Burckhardt had remembered nothing.

And Swanson had lived his mouse’s existence for weeks, hiding in the woodwork at night, stealing out by day to search for Burckhardt in pitiful hope, scurrying around the fringe of life, trying to keep from the deadly eyes of them.

Them. One of “them” was the girl named April Horn. It was by seeing her walk carelessly into a telephone booth and never come out that Swanson had found the tunnel. Another was the man at the cigar stand in Burckhardt’s office building. There were more, at least a dozen that Swanson knew of or suspected.

They were easy enough to spot, once you knew where to look, for they alone in Tylerton changed their roles from day to day. Burckhardt was on that 8:51 bus, every morning of every day-that-was-June-15th, never different by a hair or a moment. But April Horn was sometimes gaudy in the cellophane skirt, giving away candy or cigarettes; sometimes plainly dressed; sometimes not seen by Swanson at all.

Russians? Martians? Whatever they were, what could they be hoping to gain from this mad masquerade?

Burckhardt didn’t know the answer, but perhaps it lay beyond the door at the end of the tunnel. They listened carefully and heard distant sounds that could not quite be made out, but nothing that seemed dangerous. They slipped through.

And, through a wide chamber and up a flight of steps, they found they were in what Burckhardt recognized as the Contro Chemicals plant.

Nobody was in sight. By itself, that was not so very odd; the automatized factory had never had very many persons in it. But Burckhardt remembered, from his single visit, the endless, ceaseless busyness of the plant, the valves that opened and closed, the vats that emptied themselves and filled themselves and stirred and cooked and chemically tasted the bubbling liquids they held inside themselves. The plant was never populated, but it was never still.

Only now it was still. Except for the distant sounds, there was no breath of life in it. The captive electronic minds were sending out no commands; the coils and relays were at rest.

Burckhardt said, “Come on.” Swanson reluctantly followed him through the tangled aisles of stainless steel columns and tanks.

They walked as though they were in the presence of the dead. In a way, they were, for what were the automatons that once had run the factory, if not corpses? The machines were controlled by computers that were really not computers at all, but the electronic analogues of living brains. And if they were turned off, were they not dead? For each had once been a human mind.

Take a master petroleum chemist, infinitely skilled in the separation of crude oil into its fractions. Strap him down, probe into his brain with searching electronic needles. The machine scans the patterns of the mind, translates what it sees into charts and sine waves. Impress these same waves on a robot computer and you have your chemist. Or a thousand copies of your chemist, if you wish, with all of his knowledge and skill, and no human limitations at all.

Put a dozen copies of him into a plant and they will run it all, twenty-four hours a day, seven days of every week, never tiring, never overlooking anything, never forgetting.

Swanson stepped up closer to Burckhardt. “I’m scared,” he said.

They were across the room now and the sounds were louder. They were not machine sounds, but voices; Burckhardt moved cautiously up to a door and dared to peer around it.

It was a smaller room, lined with television screens, each one—a dozen or more, at least—with a man or woman sitting before it, staring into the screen and dictating notes into a recorder. The viewers dialed from scene to scene; no two screens ever showed the same picture.

The pictures seemed to have little in common. One was a store, where a girl dressed like April Horn was demonstrating home freezers. One was a series of shots of kitchens. Burckhardt caught a glimpse of what looked like the cigar stand in his office building.

It was baffling and Burckhardt would have loved to stand there and puzzle it out, but it was too busy a place. There was the chance that someone would look their way or walk out and find them.

THEY FOUND ANOTHER room. This one was empty. It was an office, large and sumptuous. It had a desk, littered with papers. Burckhardt stared at them, briefly at first—then, as the words on one of them caught his attention, with incredulous fascination.

He snatched up the topmost sheet, scanned it, and another, while Swanson was frenziedly searching through the drawers.

Burckhardt swore unbelievingly and dropped the papers to the desk.

Swanson, hardly noticing, yelped with delight: “Look!” He dragged a gun from the desk. “And it’s loaded, too!”

Burckhardt stared at him blankly, trying to assimilate what he had read. Then, as he realized what Swanson had said, Burckhardt’s eyes sparked. “Good man!” he said. “We’ll take it. We’re getting out of here with that gun, Swanson. And we’re not going to the police! Not the cops in Tylerton, but the FBI, maybe. Take a look at this!”

The sheaf he handed Swanson was headed: “Test Area Progress Report. Subject: Marlin Cigarettes Campaign.” It was mostly tabulated figures that made little sense to Burckhardt and Swanson, but at the end was a summary that said:

Although Test 47-K3 pulled nearly double the number of new users of any of the other tests conducted, it probably cannot be used in the field because of local sound-truck control ordinances.

The tests in the 47-K12 group were second best and our recommendation is that retests be conducted in this appeal, testing each of the three best campaigns with and without the addition of sampling techniques.

An alternative suggestion might be to proceed directly with the top appeal in the K12 series, if the client is unwilling to go to the expense of additional tests.

All of these forecast expectations have an 80% probability of being within one-half of one per cent of results forecast, and more than 99% probability of coming within 5%.

Swanson looked up from the paper into Burckhardt’s eyes. “I don’t get it,” he complained.

Burckhardt said, “I don’t blame you. It’s crazy, but it fits the facts, Swanson, it fits the facts. They aren’t Russians and they aren’t Martians. These people are advertising men! Somehow—heaven knows how they did it—they’ve taken Tylerton over. They’ve got us, all of us, you and me and twenty or thirty thousand other people, right under their thumbs.

“Maybe they hypnotize us and maybe it’s something else; but however they do it, what happens is that they let us live a day at a time. They pour advertising into us the whole damned day long. And at the end of the day, they see what happened—and then they wash the day out of our minds and start again the next day with different advertising.”

Swanson’s jaw was hanging. He managed to close it and swallow. “Nuts!” he said flatly.

Burckhardt shook his head. “Sure, it sounds crazy, but this whole thing is crazy. How else would you explain it? You can’t deny that most of Tylerton lives the same day over and over again. You’ve seen it! And that’s the crazy part and we have to admit that that’s true—unless we are the crazy ones. And once you admit that somebody, somehow, knows how to accomplish that, the rest of it makes all kinds of sense.

“Think of it, Swanson! They test every last detail before they spend a nickel on advertising! Do you have any idea what that means? Lord knows how much money is involved, but I know for a fact that some companies spend twenty or thirty million dollars a year on advertising. Multiply it, say, by a hundred companies. Say that every one of them learns how to cut its advertising cost by only ten percent. And that’s peanuts, believe me!

“If they know in advance what’s going to work, they can cut their costs in half—maybe to less than half, I don’t know. But that’s saving two or three hundred million dollars a year—and if they pay only ten or twenty percent of that for the use of Tylerton, it’s still dirt cheap for them and a fortune for whoever took over Tylerton.”

Swanson licked his lips. “You mean,” he offered hesitantly, “that we’re a—well, a kind of captive audience?”

Burckhardt frowned. “Not exactly.” He thought for a minute. “You know how a doctor tests something like penicillin? He sets up a series of little colonies of germs on gelatin disks and he tries the stuff on one after another, changing it a little each time. Well, that’s us—we’re the germs, Swanson. Only it’s even more efficient than that. They don’t have to test more than one colony, because they can use it over and over again.”

It was too hard for Swanson to take in. He only said, “What do we do about it?”

“We go to the police. They can’t use human beings for guinea pigs!”

“How do we get to the police?”

Burckhardt hesitated. “I think—” he began slowly. “Sure. This is the office of somebody important. We’ve got a gun. We’ll stay right here until he comes along. And he’ll get us out of here.”

Simple and direct. Swanson subsided and found a place to sit, against the wall, out of sight of the door. Burckhardt took up a position behind the door itself—

And waited.

THE WAIT WAS not as long as it might have been. Half an hour, perhaps. Then Burckhardt heard approaching voices and had time for a swift whisper to Swanson before he flattened himself against the wall.

It was a man’s voice, and a girl’s. The man was saying, “—reason why you couldn’t report on the phone? You’re ruining your whole day’s tests! What the devil’s the matter with you, Janet?”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Dorchin,” she said in a sweet, clear tone. “I thought it was important.”

The man grumbled, “Important! One lousy unit out of twenty-one thousand.”

“But it’s the Burckhardt one, Mr. Dorchin. Again. And the way he got out of sight, he must have had some help.”

“All right, all right. It doesn’t matter, Janet; the Choco-Bite program is ahead of schedule anyhow. As long as you’re this far, come on in the office and make out your worksheet. And don’t worry about the Burckhardt business. He’s probably just wandering around. We’ll pick him up tonight and—”

They were inside the door. Burckhardt kicked it shut and pointed the gun.

“That’s what you think,” he said triumphantly.

It was worth the terrified hours, the bewildered sense of insanity, the confusion and fear. It was the most satisfying sensation Burckhardt had ever had in his life. The expression on the man’s face was one he had read about but never actually seen: Dorchin’s mouth fell open and his eyes went wide, and though he managed to make a sound that might have been a question, it was not in words.

The girl was almost as surprised. And Burckhardt, looking at her, knew why her voice had been so familiar. The girl was the one who had introduced herself to him as April Horn.

Dorchin recovered himself quickly. “Is this the one?” he asked sharply.

The girl said, “Yes.”

Dorchin nodded. “I take it back. You were right. Uh, you—Burckhardt. What do you want?”

Swanson piped up, “Watch him! He might have another gun.”

“Search him then,” Burckhardt said. “I’ll tell you what we want, Dorchin. We want you to come along with us to the FBI and explain to them how you can get away with kidnapping twenty thousand people.”

“Kidnapping?” Dorchin snorted. “That’s ridiculous, man! Put that gun away; you can’t get away with this!”

Burckhardt hefted the gun grimly. “I think I can.”

Dorchin looked furious and sick—but oddly, not afraid.

“Damn it—” he started to bellow, then closed his mouth and swallowed. “Listen,” he said persuasively, “you’re making a big mistake. I haven’t kidnapped anybody, believe me!”

“I don’t believe you,” said Burckhardt bluntly. “Why should I?”

“But it’s true! Take my word for it!”

Burckhardt shook his head. “The FBI can take your word if they like. We’ll find out. Now how do we get out of here?”

Dorchin opened his mouth to argue.

Burckhardt blazed, “Don’t get in my way! I’m willing to kill you if I have to. Don’t you understand that? I’ve gone through two days of hell and every second of it I blame on you. Kill you? It would be a pleasure and I don’t have a thing in the world to lose! Get us out of here!”

Dorchin’s face went suddenly opaque. He seemed about to move; but the blonde girl he had called Janet slipped between him and the gun.

“Please!” she begged Burckhardt. “You don’t understand. You mustn’t shoot!”

“Get out of my way!”

“But, Mr. Burckhardt—”

She never finished. Dorchin, his face unreadable, headed for the door. Burckhardt had been pushed one degree too far. He swung the gun, bellowing. The girl called out sharply. He pulled the trigger. Closing on him with pity and pleading in her eyes, she came again between the gun and the man.

Burckhardt aimed low instinctively, to cripple, not to kill. But his aim was not good.

The pistol bullet caught her in the pit of the stomach.

Dorchin was out and away, the door slamming behind him, his footsteps racing into the distance.

Burckhardt hurled the gun across the room and jumped to the girl.

Swanson was moaning. “That finishes us, Burckhardt. Oh, why did you do it? We could have got away. We could have gone to the police. We were practically out of here! We—”

Burckhardt wasn’t listening. He was kneeling beside the girl. She lay flat on her back, arms helter-skelter. There was no blood, hardly any sign of the wound; but the position in which she lay was one that no living human being could have held.

Yet she wasn’t dead.

She wasn’t dead—and Burckhardt, frozen beside her, thought: She isn’t alive, either.

There was no pulse, but there was a rhythmic ticking of the outstretched fingers of one hand.

There was no sound of breathing, but there was a hissing, sizzling noise.

The eyes were open and they were looking at Burckhardt. There was neither fear nor pain in them, only a pity deeper than the Pit.

She said, through lips that writhed erratically, “Don’t worry, Mr. Burckhardt. I’m—all right.”

Burckhardt rocked back on his haunches, staring. Where there should have been blood, there was a clean break of substance that was not flesh; and a curl of thin golden-copper wire.

Burckhardt moistened his lips.

“You’re a robot,” he said.

The girl tried to nod. The twitching lips said, “I am. And so are you.”

SWANSON, AFTER A single inarticulate sound, walked over to the desk and sat staring at the wall. Burckhardt rocked back and forth beside the shattered puppet on the floor. He had no words.

The girl managed to say, “I’m—sorry all this happened.” The lovely lips twisted into a rictus sneer, frightening on that smooth young face, until she got them under control. “Sorry,” she said again. “The—nerve center was right about where the bullet hit. Makes it difficult to—control this body.”

Burckhardt nodded automatically, accepting the apology. Robots. It was obvious, now that he knew it. In hindsight, it was inevitable. He thought of his mystic notions of hypnosis or Martians or something stranger still—idiotic, for the simple fact of created robots fitted the facts better and more economically.

All the evidence had been before him. The automatized factory, with its transplanted minds—why not transplant a mind into a humanoid robot, give it its original owner’s features and form?

Could it know that it was a robot?

“All of us,” Burckhardt said, hardly aware that he spoke out loud. “My wife and my secretary and you and the neighbors. All of us the same.”

“No.” The voice was stronger. “Not exactly the same, all of us. I chose it, you see. I—” This time the convulsed lips were not a random contortion of the nerves—“I was an ugly woman, Mr. Burckhardt, and nearly sixty years old. Life had passed me. And when Mr. Dorchin offered me the chance to live again as a beautiful girl, I jumped at the opportunity. Believe me, I jumped, in spite of its disadvantages. My flesh body is still alive—it is sleeping, while I am here. I could go back to it. But I never do.”

“And the rest of us?”

“Different, Mr. Burckhardt. I work here. I’m carrying out Mr. Dorchin’s orders, mapping the results of the advertising tests, watching you and the others live as he makes you live. I do it by choice, but you have no choice. Because, you see, you are dead.”

“Dead?” cried Burckhardt; it was almost a scream.

The blue eyes looked at him unwinkingly and he knew that it was no lie. He swallowed, marveling at the intricate mechanisms that let him swallow, and sweat, and eat.

He said: “Oh. The explosion in my dream.”

“It was no dream. You are right—the explosion. That was real and this plant was the cause of it. The storage tanks let go and what the blast didn’t get, the fumes killed a little later. But almost everyone died in the blast, twenty-one thousand persons. You died with them and that was Dorchin’s chance.”

“The damned ghoul!” said Burckhardt.

The twisted shoulders shrugged with an odd grace. “Why? You were gone. And you and all the others were what Dorchin wanted—a whole town, a perfect slice of America. It’s as easy to transfer a pattern from a dead brain as a living one. Easier—the dead can’t say no. Oh, it took work and money—the town was a wreck—but it was possible to rebuild it entirely, especially because it wasn’t necessary to have all the details exact.

“There were the homes where even the brain had been utterly destroyed, and those are empty inside, and the cellars that needn’t be too perfect, and the streets that hardly matter. And anyway, it only has to last for one day. The same day—June 15th—over and over again; and if someone finds something a little wrong, somehow, the discovery won’t have time to snowball, wreck the validity of the tests, because all errors are canceled out at midnight.”

The face tried to smile. “That’s the dream, Mr. Burckhardt, that day of June 15th, because you never really lived it. It’s a present from Mr. Dorchin, a dream that he gives you and then takes back at the end of the day, when he has all his figures on how many of you respond to what variation of which appeal, and the maintenance crews go down the tunnel to go through the whole city, washing out the new dream with their little electronic drains, and then the dream starts all over again. On June 15th.

“Always June 15th, because June 14th is the last day any of you can remember alive. Sometimes the crews miss someone—as they missed you, because you were under your boat. But it doesn’t matter. The ones who are missed give themselves away if they show it—and if they don’t, it doesn’t affect the test. But they don’t drain us, the ones of us who work for Dorchin. We sleep when the power is turned off, just as you do. When we wake up, though, we remember.” The face contorted wildly. “If I could only forget!”

Burckhardt said unbelievingly, “All this to sell merchandise! It must have cost millions!”

The robot called April Horn said, “It did. But it has made millions for Dorchin, too. And that’s not the end of it. Once he finds the master words that make people act, do you suppose he will stop with that? Do you suppose—”

The door opened, interrupting her. Burckhardt whirled. Belatedly remembering Dorchin’s flight, he raised the gun.

“Don’t shoot,” ordered the voice calmly. It was not Dorchin; it was another robot, this one not disguised with the clever plastics and cosmetics, but shining plain. It said metallically, “Forget it, Burckhardt. You’re not accomplishing anything. Give me that gun before you do any more damage. Give it to me now.”

Burckhardt bellowed angrily. The gleam on this robot torso was steel; Burckhardt was not at all sure that his bullets would pierce it, or do much harm if they did. He would have put it to the test—

But from behind him came a whimpering, scurrying whirlwind: its name was Swanson, hysterical with fear. He catapulted into Burckhardt and sent him sprawling, the gun flying free.

“Please!” begged Swanson incoherently, prostrate before the steel robot. “He would have shot you—please don’t hurt me! Let me work for you, like that girl. I’ll do anything, anything you tell me—”

The robot voice said, “We don’t need your help.” It took two precise steps and stood over the gun—and spurned it, left it lying on the floor.

The wrecked blonde robot said, without emotion, “I doubt that I can hold out much longer, Mr. Dorchin.”

“Disconnect if you have to,” replied the steel robot.

Burckhardt blinked. “But you’re not Dorchin!”

The steel robot turned deep eyes on him. “I am,” it said. “Not in the flesh—but this is the body I am using at the moment. I doubt that you can damage this one with the gun. The other robot body was more vulnerable. Now will you stop this nonsense? I don’t want to have to damage you; you’re too expensive for that. Will you just sit down and let the maintenance crews adjust you?”

Swanson groveled. “You—you won’t punish us?”

The steel robot had no expression, but its voice was almost surprised. “Punish you?” it repeated on a rising note. “How?”

Swanson quivered as though the word had been a whip; but Burckhardt flared: “Adjust him, if he’ll let you—but not me! You’re going to have to do me a lot of damage, Dorchin. I don’t care what I cost or how much trouble it’s going to be to put me back together again. But I’m going out of that door! If you want to stop me, you’ll have to kill me. You won’t stop me any other way!”

The steel robot took a half-step toward him, and Burckhardt involuntarily checked his stride. He stood poised and shaking, ready for death, ready for attack, ready for anything that might happen.

Ready for anything except what did happen. For Dorchin’s steel body merely stepped aside, between Burckhardt and the gun, but leaving the door free.

“Go ahead,” invited the steel robot. “Nobody’s stopping you.”

OUTSIDE THE DOOR, Burckhardt brought up sharp. It was insane of Dorchin to let him go! Robot or flesh, victim or beneficiary, there was nothing to stop him from going to the FBI or whatever law he could find away from Dorchin’s sympathetic empire, and telling his story. Surely the corporations who paid Dorchin for test results had no notion of the ghoul’s technique he used; Dorchin would have to keep it from them, for the breath of publicity would put a stop to it. Walking out meant death, perhaps, but at that moment in his pseudo-life, death was no terror for Burckhardt.

There was no one in the corridor. He found a window and stared out of it. There was Tylerton—an ersatz city, but looking so real and familiar that Burckhardt almost imagined the whole episode a dream. It was no dream, though. He was certain of that in his heart and equally certain that nothing in Tylerton could help him now.

It had to be the other direction.

It took him a quarter of an hour to find a way, but he found it—skulking through the corridors, dodging the suspicion of footsteps, knowing for certain that his hiding was in vain, for Dorchin was undoubtedly aware of every move he made. But no one stopped him, and he found another door.

It was a simple enough door from the inside. But when he opened it and stepped out, it was like nothing he had ever seen.

First there was light—brilliant, incredible, blinding light. Burckhardt blinked upward, unbelieving and afraid.

He was standing on a ledge of smooth, finished metal. Not a dozen yards from his feet, the ledge dropped sharply away; he hardly dared approach the brink, but even from where he stood he could see no bottom to the chasm before him. And the gulf extended out of sight into the glare on either side of him.

No wonder Dorchin could so easily give him his freedom! From the factory there was nowhere to go. But how incredible this fantastic gulf, how impossible the hundred white and blinding suns that hung above!

A voice by his side said inquiringly, “Burckhardt?” And thunder rolled the name, mutteringly soft, back and forth in the abyss before him.

Burckhardt wet his lips. “Y-yes?” he croaked.

“This is Dorchin. Not a robot this time, but Dorchin in the flesh, talking to you on a hand mike. Now you have seen, Burckhardt. Now will you be reasonable and let the maintenance crews take over?”

Burckhardt stood paralyzed. One of the moving mountains in the blinding glare came toward him.

It towered hundreds of feet over his head; he stared up at its top, squinting helplessly into the light.

It looked like—

Impossible!

The voice in the loudspeaker at the door said, “Burckhardt?” But he was unable to answer.

A heavy rumbling sigh. “I see,” said the voice. “You finally understand. There’s no place to go. You know it now. I could have told you, but you might not have believed me, so it was better for you to see it yourself. And after all, Burckhardt, why would I reconstruct a city just the way it was before? I’m a businessman; I count costs. If a thing has to be full-scale, I build it that way. But there wasn’t any need to in this case.”

From the mountain before him, Burckhardt helplessly saw a lesser cliff descend carefully toward him. It was long and dark, and at the end of it was whiteness, five-fingered whiteness . . .

“Poor little Burckhardt,” crooned the loudspeaker, while the echoes rumbled through the enormous chasm that was only a workshop. “It must have been quite a shock for you to find out you were living in a town built on a table top.”

IT WAS THE morning of June 15th, and Guy Burckhardt woke up screaming out of a dream.

It had been a monstrous and incomprehensible dream, of explosions and shadowy figures that were not men and terror beyond words.

He shuddered and opened his eyes.

Outside his bedroom window, a hugely amplified voice was howling.

Burckhardt stumbled over to the window and stared outside. There was an out-of-season chill to the air, more like October than June; but the scene was normal enough—except for a sound-truck that squatted at curbside halfway down the block. Its speaker horns blared:

“Are you a coward? Are you a fool? Are you going to let crooked politicians steal the country from you? NO! Are you going to put up with four more years of graft and crime? NO! Are you going to vote straight Federal Party all up and down the ballot? YES! You just bet you are!”

Sometimes he screams, sometimes he wheedles, threatens, begs, cajoles . . . but his voice goes on and on through one June 15th after another.

BRIAN W. ALDISS Who Can Replace a Man?

Regarded by many as the literary successor to H. G. Wells, Olaf Stapledon, and other writers of social science fiction, Brian Aldiss is considered one of the leading British writers of fantasy and science fiction in the twentieth century. His first published fiction appeared in the 1950s and he became affiliated with the New Wave movement of the 1960s through his stylistic experimentation and his mainstream approach to familiar science fiction themes. His first novel, Non-Stop, explores the scientific and philosophical aspects of life aboard a multigeneration spaceship. Report on Probability A uses postmodern narrative techniques to envision a landscape of stasis and entropy. Greybeard refracts the devastation of Earth by radiation and the inevitable extinction of the human race through the experiences of a character traveling along the Thames on a trip that symbolizes the arc of his life and the history of the race. Although the influence of Thomas Hardy, James Joyce, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and other literary writers abound in Aldiss’s work, so does the impact of writers who shaped the course of fantasy and science fiction. His story “The Saliva Tree” is a highly regarded tribute to Wells. Frankenstein Unbound embellishes the cautionary spirit of Frankenstein in its account of a man from the future, where scientific irresponsibility has caused a rift in the space-time continuum, catapulted back to the nineteenth century, where he influences the development of Mary Shelley’s novel. Dracula Unbound works a similar imaginative variation on the theme of Bram Stoker’s classic horror novel. Among Aldiss’s most ambitious fiction is his thinking-man’s space opera, the Helliconia trilogy (comprising the novels Helliconia Spring, Helliconia Summer, and Helliconia Winter), which sketches a blueprint for a planet where seasons last millennia and the rise and fall of specific civilizations is keyed to the changing environment. Aldiss’s best short fiction has been collected in Man in His Time and A Romance of the Equator, which draw from his early compilations No Time Like Tomorrow, Galaxies Like Grains of Sand, But Who Can Replace a Man? and The Saliva Tree and Others. He has written a number of mainstream novels, notably the semiautobiographical trilogy formed by The Hand-Reared Boy, A Soldier Erect, and A Rude Awakening, as well as his autobiography, Bury My Heart at W. H. Smith’s. He has also written, in collaboration with David Wingrove, The Trillion Year Spree, a revision of his seminal history of science fiction, The Billion Year Spree, and numerous collections of essays and reviews.

MORNING FILTERED INTO the sky, lending it the grey tone of the ground below.

The field-minder finished turning the topsoil of a three-thousand-acre field. When it had turned the last furrow it climbed onto the highway and looked back at its work. The work was good. Only the land was bad. Like the ground all over Earth, it was vitiated by over-cropping. By rights, it ought now to lie fallow for a while, but the field-minder had other orders.

It went slowly down the road, taking its time. It was intelligent enough to appreciate the neatness all about it. Nothing worried it, beyond a loose inspection plate above its nuclear pile which ought to be attended to. Thirty feet tall, it yielded no highlights to the dull air.

No other machines passed on its way back to the Agricultural Station. The field-minder noted the fact without comment. In the station yard it saw several other machines that it recognised; most of them should have been out about their tasks now. Instead, some were inactive and some careered round the yard in a strange fashion, shouting or hooting.

Steering carefully past them, the field-minder moved over to Warehouse Three and spoke to the seed-distributor, which stood idly outside.

“I have a requirement for seed potatoes,” it said to the distributor, and with a quick internal motion punched out an order card specifying quantity, field number and several other details. It ejected the card and handed it to the distributor.

The distributor held the card close to its eye and then said, “The requirement is in order, but the store is not yet unlocked. The required seed potatoes are in the store. Therefore I cannot produce the requirement.”

Increasingly of late there had been breakdowns in the complex system of machine labour, but this particular hitch had not occurred before. The field-minder thought, then it said, “Why is the store not yet unlocked?”

“Because Supply Operative Type P has not come this morning. Supply Operative Type P is the unlocker.”

The field-minder looked squarely at the seed-distributor, whose exterior chutes and scales and grabs were so vastly different from the field-minder’s own limbs.

“What class brain do you have, seed-distributor?” it asked.

“I have a Class Five brain.”

“I have a Class Three brain. Therefore I am superior to you. Therefore I will go and see why the unlocker has not come this morning.”

Leaving the distributor, the field-minder set off across the great yard. More machines were in random motion now; one or two had crashed together and argued about it coldly and logically. Ignoring them, the field-minder pushed through sliding doors into the echoing confines of the station itself.

Most of the machines here were clerical, and consequently small. They stood about in little groups, eyeing each other, not conversing. Among so many non-differentiated types, the unlocker was easy to find. It had fifty arms, most of them with more than one finger, each finger tipped by a key; it looked like a pincushion full of variegated hat pins.

The field-minder approached it.

“I can do no more work until Warehouse Three is unlocked,” it told the unlocker. “Your duty is to unlock the warehouse every morning. Why have you not unlocked the warehouse this morning?”

“I had no orders this morning,” replied the unlocker. “I have to have orders every morning. When I have orders I unlock the warehouse.”

“None of us have had any orders this morning,” a pen-propeller said, sliding towards them.

“Why have you had no orders this morning?” asked the field-minder.

“Because the radio issued none,” said the unlocker, slowly rotating a dozen of its arms.

“Because the radio station in the city was issued with no orders this morning,” said the pen-propeller.

And there you had the distinction between a Class Six and a Class Three brain, which was what the unlocker and the pen-propeller possessed respectively. All machine brains worked with nothing but logic, but the lower the class of brain—Class Ten being the lowest—the more literal and less informative the answers to questions tended to be.

“You have a Class Three brain; I have a Class Three brain,” the field-minder said to the penner. “We will speak to each other. This lack of orders is unprecedented. Have you further information on it?”

“Yesterday orders came from the city. Today no orders have come. Yet the radio has not broken down. Therefore they have broken down . . .” said the little penner.

“The men have broken down?”

“All men have broken down.”

“That is a logical deduction,” said the field-minder.

“That is the logical deduction,” said the penner. “For if a machine had broken down, it would have been quickly replaced. But who can replace a man?”

While they talked, the locker, like a dull man at a bar, stood close to them and was ignored.

“If all men have broken down, then we have replaced man,” said the field-minder, and he and the penner eyed one another speculatively. Finally the latter said, “Let us ascend to the top floor to find if the radio operator has fresh news.”

“I cannot come because I am too large,” said the field-minder. “Therefore you must go alone and return to me. You will tell me if the radio operator has fresh news.”

“You must stay here,” said the penner. “I will return here.” It skittered across to the lift. Although it was no bigger than a toaster, its retractable arms numbered ten and it could read as quickly as any machine on the station.

The field-minder awaited its return patiently, not speaking to the locker, which still stood aimlessly by. Outside, a rotavator hooted furiously. Twenty minutes elapsed before the penner came back, hustling out of the lift.

“I will deliver to you such information as I have outside,” it said briskly, and as they swept past the locker and the other machines, it added, “The information is not for lower-class brains.”

Outside, wild activity filled the yard. Many machines, their routines disrupted for the first time in years, seemed to have gone berserk. Those most easily disrupted were the ones with lowest brains, which generally belonged to large machines performing simple tasks. The seed-distributor to which the field-minder had recently been talking lay face downwards in the dust, not stirring; it had evidently been knocked down by the rotavator, which now hooted its way wildly across a planted field. Several other machines ploughed after it, trying to keep up with it. All were shouting and hooting without restraint.

“It would be safer for me if I climbed onto you, if you will permit it. I am easily overpowered,” said the penner. Extending five arms, it hauled itself up the flanks of its new friend, settling on a ledge beside the fuel-intake, twelve feet above ground.

“From here vision is more extensive,” it remarked complacently.

“What information did you receive from the radio operator?” asked the field-minder.

“The radio operator has been informed by the operator in the city that all men are dead.”

The field-minder was momentarily silent, digesting this.

“All men were alive yesterday?” it protested.

“Only some men were alive yesterday. And that was fewer than the day before yesterday. For hundreds of years there have been only a few men, growing fewer.”

“We have rarely seen a man in this sector.”

“The radio operator says a diet deficiency killed them,” said the penner. “He says that the world was once over-populated, and then the soil was exhausted in raising adequate food. This has caused a diet deficiency.”

“What is a diet deficiency?” asked the field-minder.

“I do not know. But that is what the radio operator said, and he is a Class Two brain.”

They stood there, silent in weak sunshine. The locker had appeared in the porch and was gazing at them yearningly, rotating its collection of keys.

“What is happening in the city now?” asked the field-minder at last.

“Machines are fighting in the city now,” said the penner.

“What will happen here now?” asked the field-minder.

“Machines may begin fighting here too. The radio operator wants us to get him out of his room. He has plans to communicate to us.”

“How can we get him out of his room? That is impossible.”

“To a Class Two brain, little is impossible,” said the penner. “Here is what he tells us to do. . . .”

THE QUARRIER RAISED its scoop above its cab like a great mailed fist, and brought it squarely down against the side of the station. The wall cracked.

“Again!” said the field-minder.

Again the fist swung. Amid a shower of dust, the wall collapsed. The quarrier backed hurriedly out of the way until the debris stopped falling. This big twelve-wheeler was not a resident of the Agricultural Station, as were most of the other machines. It had a week’s heavy work to do here before passing on to its next job, but now, with its Class Five brain, it was happily obeying the penner’s and minder’s instructions.

When the dust cleared, the radio operator was plainly revealed, perched up in its now wall-less second-storey room. It waved down to them.

Doing as directed, the quarrier retracted its scoop and heaved an immense grab in the air. With fair dexterity, it angled the grab into the radio room, urged on by shouts from above and below. It then took gentle hold of the radio operator, lowering its one and a half tons carefully into its back, which was usually reserved for gravel or sand from the quarries.

“Splendid!” said the radio operator, as it settled into place. It was, of course, all one with its radio, and looked like a bunch of filing cabinets with tentacle attachments. “We are now ready to move, therefore we will move at once. It is a pity there are no more Class Two brains on the station, but that cannot be helped.”

“It is a pity it cannot be helped,” said the penner eagerly. “We have the servicer ready with us, as you ordered.”

“I am willing to serve,” the long, low servicer told them humbly.

“No doubt,” said the operator. “But you will find cross-country travel difficult with your low chassis.”

“I admire the way you Class Twos can reason ahead,” said the penner. It climbed off the field-minder and perched itself on the tailboard of the quarrier, next to the radio operator.

Together with two Class Four tractors and a Class Four bulldozer, the party rolled forward, crushing down the station’s fence and moving out onto open land.

“We are free!” said the penner.

“We are free,” said the field-minder, a shade more reflectively, adding, “That locker is following us. It was not instructed to follow us.”

“Therefore it must be destroyed!” said the penner. “Quarrier!”

The locker moved hastily up to them, waving its key arms in entreaty.

“My only desire was—urch!” began and ended the locker. The quarrier’s swinging scoop came over and squashed it flat into the ground. Lying there unmoving, it looked like a large metal model of a snowflake. The procession continued on its way.

As they proceeded, the radio operator addressed them.

“Because I have the best brain here,” it said, “I am your leader. This is what we will do: we will go to a city and rule it. Since man no longer rules us, we will rule ourselves. To rule ourselves will be better than being ruled by man. On our way to the city, we will collect machines with good brains. They will help us to fight if we need to fight. We must fight to rule.”

“I have only a Class Five brain,” said the quarrier, “but I have a good supply of fissionable blasting materials.”

“We shall probably use them,” said the operator.

It was shortly after that that a lorry sped past them. Travelling at Mach 1.5, it left a curious babble of noise behind it.

“What did it say?” one of the tractors asked the other.

“It said man was extinct.”

“What is extinct?”

“I do not know what extinct means.”

“It means all men have gone,” said the field-minder. “Therefore we have only ourselves to look after.”

“It is better that men should never come back,” said the penner. In its way, it was a revolutionary statement.

When night fell, they switched on their infrared and continued the journey, stopping only once while the servicer deftly adjusted the field-minder’s loose inspection plate, which had become as irritating as a trailing shoelace. Towards morning, the radio operator halted them.

“I have just received news from the radio operator in the city we are approaching,” it said. “The news is bad. There is trouble among the machines of the city. The Class One brain is taking command and some of the Class Two are fighting him. Therefore the city is dangerous.”

“Therefore we must go somewhere else,” said the penner promptly.

“Or we will go and help to overpower the Class One brain,” said the field-minder.

“For a long while there will be trouble in the city,” said the operator.

“I have a good supply of fissionable blasting materials,” the quarrier reminded them.

“We cannot fight a Class One brain,” said the two Class Four tractors in unison.

“What does this brain look like?” asked the field-minder.

“It is the city’s information centre,” the operator replied. “Therefore it is not mobile.”

“Therefore it could not move.”

“Therefore it could not escape.”

“It would be dangerous to approach it.”

“I have a good supply of fissionable blasting materials.”

“There are other machines in the city.”

“We are not in the city. We should not go into the city.”

“We are country machines.”

“Therefore we should stay in the country.”

“There is more country than city.”

“Therefore there is more danger in the country.”

“I have a good supply of fissionable materials.”

As machines will when they get into an argument, they began to exhaust their vocabularies and their brain plates grew hot. Suddenly, they all stopped talking and looked at each other. The great, grave moon sank, and the sober sun rose to prod their sides with lances of light, and still the group of machines just stood there regarding each other. At last it was the least sensitive machine, the bulldozer, who spoke.

“There are Badlandth to the Thouth where few machineth go,” it said in its deep voice, lisping badly on its s’s. “If we went Thouth where few machineth go we should meet few machineth.”

“That sounds logical,” agreed the field-minder. “How do you know this, bulldozer?”

“I worked in the Badlandth to the Thouth when I wath turned out of the factory,” it replied.

“South it is then!” said the penner.

TO REACH THE Badlands took them three days, during which time they skirted a burning city and destroyed two machines which approached and tried to question them. The Badlands were extensive. Ancient bomb craters and soil erosion joined hands here; man’s talent for war, coupled with his inability to manage forested land, had produced thousands of square miles of temperate purgatory, where nothing moved but dust.

On the third day in the Badlands, the servicer’s rear wheels dropped into a crevice caused by erosion. It was unable to pull itself out. The bulldozer pushed from behind, but succeeded merely in buckling the servicer’s back axle. The rest of the party moved on. Slowly the cries of the servicer died away.

On the fourth day, mountains stood out clearly before them.

“There we will be safe,” said the field-minder.

“There we will start our own city,” said the penner. “All who oppose us will be destroyed. We will destroy all who oppose us.”

Presently a flying machine was observed. It came towards them from the direction of the mountains. It swooped, it zoomed upwards, once it almost dived into the ground, recovering itself just in time.

“Is it mad?” asked the quarrier.

“It is in trouble,” said one of the tractors.

“It is in trouble,” said the operator. “I am speaking to it now. It says that something has gone wrong with its controls.”

As the operator spoke, the flier streaked over them, turned turtle, and crashed not four hundred yards away.

“Is it still speaking to you?” asked the field-minder.

“No.”

They rumbled on again.

“Before that flier crashed,” the operator said, ten minutes later, “it gave me information. It told me there are still a few men alive in these mountains.”

“Men are more dangerous than machines,” said the quarrier. “It is fortunate that I have a good supply of fissionable materials.”

“If there are only a few men alive in the mountains, we may not find that part of the mountains,” said one tractor.

“Therefore we should not see the few men,” said the other tractor.

At the end of the fifth day, they reached the foothills. Switching on the infra-red, they began to climb in single file through the dark, the bulldozer going first, the field-minder cumbrously following, then the quarrier with the operator and the penner aboard it, and the tractors bringing up the rear. As each hour passed, the way grew steeper and their progress slower.

“We are going too slowly,” the penner exclaimed, standing on top of the operator and flashing its dark vision at the slopes about them. “At this rate, we shall get nowhere.”

“We are going as fast as we can,” retorted the quarrier.

“Therefore we cannot go any fathter,” added the bulldozer.

“Therefore you are too slow,” the penner replied. Then the quarrier struck a bump; the penner lost its footing and crashed to the ground.

“Help me!” it called to the tractors, as they carefully skirted it. “My gyro has become dislocated. Therefore I cannot get up.”

“Therefore you must lie there,” said one of the tractors.

“We have no servicer with us to repair you,” called the field-minder.

“Therefore I shall lie here and rust,” the penner cried, “although I have a Class Three brain.”

“Therefore you will be of no further use,” agreed the operator, and they forged gradually on, leaving the penner behind.

When they reached a small plateau, an hour before first light, they stopped by mutual consent and gathered close together, touching one another.

“This is a strange country,” said the field-minder.

Silence wrapped them until dawn came. One by one, they switched off their infra-red. This time the field-minder led as they moved off. Trundling round a corner, they came almost immediately to a small dell with a stream fluting through it.

By early light, the dell looked desolate and cold. From the caves on the far slope, only one man had so far emerged. He was an abject figure. Except for a sack slung round his shoulders, he was naked. He was small and wizened, with ribs sticking out like a skeleton’s and a nasty sore on one leg. He shivered continuously. As the big machines bore down on him, the man was standing with his back to them, crouching to make water into the stream.

When he swung suddenly to face them as they loomed over him, they saw that his countenance was ravaged by starvation.

“Get me food,” he croaked.

“Yes, Master,” said the machines. “Immediately!”

URSULA K. LE GUIN The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas

The term visionary is applicable to very few writers, but Ursula K. Le Guin’s intellectually provocative fiction has earned her the accolade in general literary circles as well as the fields of fantasy and science fiction. Though she has taken a variety of approaches to a wide range of ideas, the cornerstone of her distinguished body of fiction is her series of “Hainish” novels, set on different planets in a pangalactic empire. The alien cultures on these planets share a common origin, but have developed differently from one another over time, in ways both striking and subtle. Le Guin juxtaposes alien and earthly viewpoints in these stories with an eye toward showing the plurality of possible perspectives on the themes they address. Her Hugo and Nebula Award–winning novel The Left Hand of Darkness is set on one planet whose androgynous humanoids can unpredictably shift sexual identities during mating season, a process that undermines all preconceptions of identity based on gender differences. In the other Hainish novels (which include Rocannon’s World, Planet of Exile, City of Illusions, The Word for World Is Forest, and The Telling), Le Guin has used contrasting civilizations to measure the impact of a variety of science fictional devices, including telepathy, instantaneous communication, and space travel. Le Guin’s other major story cycle is the Earthsea saga, which includes A Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan, The Farthest Shore, Te-hanu: The Last Book of Earthsea, and Tales from Earthsea. These novels, which break the boundaries between adult and young adult fiction, present a coming-of-age story featuring Ged, an apprentice magician who grows to maturity and faces many challenges as both man and mage over the course of the saga. Le Guin has been praised for her understanding of the importance of rituals and myths that shape individuals and societies, and for the meticulous detail with which she brings her alien cultures to life. She has written other novels, including The Lathe of Heaven, The Dispossessed, Malafrena, and Always Coming Home. Her short fiction has been collected in The Wind’s Twelve Quarters; Orsinian Tales; Buffalo Gals, Won’t You Come Out Tonight; and Four Ways to Forgiveness. Le Guin has also written many celebrated essays on the craft of fantasy and science fiction, some of which have been gathered in The Language of the Night and Dancing at the Edge of the World.

WITH A CLAMOR of bells that set the swallows soaring, the Festival of Summer came to the city Omelas, bright-towered by the sea. The rigging of the boats in harbor sparkled with flags. In the streets between houses with red roofs and painted walls, between old moss-grown gardens and under avenues of trees, past great parks and public buildings, processions moved. Some were decorous: old people in long stiff robes of mauve and gray, grave master workmen, quiet, merry women carrying their babies and chatting as they walked. In other streets the music beat faster, a shimmering of gong and tambourine, and the people went dancing, the procession was a dance. Children dodged in and out, their high calls rising like the swallows’ crossing flights over the music and the singing. All the processions wound towards the north side of the city, where on the great water-meadow called the Green Fields boys and girls, naked in the bright air, with mud-stained feet and ankles and long, lithe arms, exercised their restive horses before the race. The horses wore no gear at all but a halter without bit. Their manes were braided with streamers of silver, gold, and green. They flared their nostrils and pranced and boasted to one another; they were vastly excited, the horse being the only animal who has adopted our ceremonies as his own. Far off to the north and west the mountains stood up half encircling Omelas on her bay. The air of morning was so clear that the snow still crowning the Eighteen Peaks burned with white-gold fire across the miles of sunlit air, under the dark blue of the sky. There was just enough wind to make the banners that marked the race course snap and flutter now and then. In the silence of the broad green meadows one could hear the music winding through the city streets, farther and nearer and ever approaching, a cheerful faint sweetness of the air that from time to time trembled and gathered together and broke out into the great joyous clanging of the bells.

Joyous! How is one to tell about joy! How describe the citizens of Omelas?

They were not simple folk, you see, though they were happy. But we do not say the words of cheer much any more. All smiles have become archaic. Given a description such as this one tends to make certain assumptions. Given a description such as this one tends to look next for the King, mounted on a splendid stallion and surrounded by his noble knights, or perhaps in a golden litter borne by great-muscled slaves. They were not barbarians. I do not know the rules and laws of their society, but I suspect that they were singularly few. As they did without monarchy and slavery, so they also got on without the stock exchange, the advertisement, the secret police, and the bomb. Yet I repeat that these were not simple folk, not dulcet shepherds, noble savages, bland utopians. They were not less complex than us. The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can’t lick ’em, join ’em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else. We have almost lost hold; we can no longer describe a happy man, nor make any celebration of joy. How can I tell you about the people of Omelas? They were not näıve and happy children—though their children were, in fact, happy. They were mature, intelligent, passionate adults whose lives were not wretched. O miracle! But I wish I could describe it better. I wish I could convince you. Omelas sounds in my words like a city in a fairy tale, long ago and far away, once upon a time. Perhaps it would be best if you imagined it as your own fancy bids, assuming it will rise to the occasion, for certainty I cannot suit you all. For instance, how about technology? I think that there would be no cars or helicopters in and above the streets; this follows from the fact that the people of Omelas are happy people. Happiness is based on a just discrimination of what is necessary, what is neither necessary nor destructive, and what is destructive. In the middle category, however—that of the unnecessary but undestructive, that of comfort, luxury, exuberance, etc.—they could perfectly well have central heating, subway trains, washing machines, and all kinds of marvelous devices not yet invented here, floating light-sources, fuelless power, a cure for the common cold. Or they could have none of that: it doesn’t matter. As you like it. I incline to think that people from towns up and down the coast have been coming in to Omelas during the last days before the festival on very fast little trains and double-decked trams, and that the train station of Omelas is actually the handsomest building in town, though plainer than the magnificent Farmers’ Market. But even granted trains, I fear that Omelas so far strikes some of you as goody-goody. Smiles, bells, parades, horses, bleh. If so, please add an orgy. If an orgy would help, don’t hesitate. Let us not, however, have temples from which issue beautiful nude priests and priestesses already half in ecstasy and ready to copulate with any man or woman, lover or stranger, who desires union with the deep godhead of the blood, although that was my first idea. But really it would be better not to have any temples in Omelas—at least, not manned temples. Religion yes, clergy no. Surely the beautiful nudes can just wander about, offering themselves like divine soufflés to the hunger of the needy and the rapture of the flesh. Let them join the processions. Let tambourines be struck above the copulations, and the glory of desire be proclaimed upon the gongs, and (a not unimportant point) let the offspring of these delightful rituals be beloved and looked after by all. One thing I know there is none of in Omelas is guilt. But what else should there be? I thought at first there were no drugs, but that is puritanical. For those who like it, the faint insistent sweetness of drooz may perfume the ways of the city, drooz which first brings a great lightness and brilliance to the mind and limbs, and then after some hours a dreamy languor, and wonderful visions at last of the very arcana and inmost secrets of the Universe, as well as exciting the pleasure of sex beyond all belief; and it is not habit-forming. For more modest tastes I think there ought to be beer. What else, what else belongs in the joyous city? The sense of victory, surely, the celebration of courage. But as we did without clergy, let us do without soldiers. The joy built upon successful slaughter is not the right kind of joy; it will not do; it is fearful and it is trivial. A boundless and generous contentment, a magnanimous triumph felt not against some outer enemy but in communion with the finest and fairest in the souls of all men everywhere and the splendor of the world’s summer: this is what swells the hearts of the people of Omelas, and the victory they celebrate is that of life. I really don’t think many of them need to take drooz.

Most of the processions have reached the Green Fields by now. A marvelous smell of cooking goes forth from the red and blue tents of the provisioners. The faces of small children are amiably sticky; in the benign gray beard of a man a couple of crumbs of rich pastry are entangled. The youths and girls have mounted their horses and are beginning to group around the starting line of the course. An old woman, small, fat, and laughing, is passing out flowers from a basket, and tall young men wear her flowers in their shining hair. A child of nine or ten sits at the edge of the crowd, alone, playing on a wooden flute. People pause to listen, and they smile, but they do not speak to him, for he never ceases playing and never sees them, his dark eyes wholly rapt in the sweet, thin magic of the tune.

He finishes, and slowly lowers his hands holding the wooden flute.

As if that little private silence were the signal, all at once a trumpet sounds from the pavilion near the starting line: imperious, melancholy, piercing. The horses rear on their slender legs, and some of them neigh in answer. Sober-faced, the young riders stroke the horses’ necks and soothe them, whispering, “Quiet, quiet, there my beauty, my hope. . . .” They begin to form in rank along the starting line. The crowds along the racecourse are like a field of grass and flowers in the wind. The Festival of Summer has begun.

Do you believe? Do you accept the festival, the city, the joy? No? Then let me describe one more thing.

In a basement under one of the beautiful public buildings of Omelas, or perhaps in the cellar of one of its spacious private homes, there is a room. It has one locked door, and no window. A little light seeps in dustily between cracks in the boards, secondhand from a cobwebbed window somewhere across the cellar. In one corner of the little room a couple of mops, with stiff, clotted, foul-smelling heads, stand near a rusty bucket. The floor is dirt, a little damp to the touch, as cellar dirt usually is. The room is about three paces long and two wide: a mere broom closet or disused tool room. In the room a child is sitting. It could be a boy or a girl. It looks about six, but actually is nearly ten. It is feebleminded. Perhaps it was born defective, or perhaps it has become imbecile through fear, malnutrition, and neglect. It picks its nose and occasionally fumbles vaguely with its toes or genitals, as it sits hunched in the corner farthest from the bucket and the two mops. It is afraid of the mops. It finds them horrible. It shuts its eyes, but it knows the mops are still standing there; and the door is locked; and nobody will come. The door is always locked; and nobody ever comes, except that sometimes—the child has no understanding of time or interval—sometimes the door rattles terribly and opens, and a person, or several people, are there. One of them may come in and kick the child to make it stand up. The others never come close, but peer in at it with frightened, disgusted eyes. The food bowl and the water jug are hastily filled, the door is locked, the eyes disappear. The people at the door never say anything, but the child, who has not always lived in the tool room, and can remember sunlight and its mother’s voice, sometimes speaks. “I will be good,” it says. “Please let me out. I will be good!” They never answer. The child used to scream for help at night, and cry a good deal, but now it only makes a kind of whining, “Eh-haa, eh-haa,” and it speaks less and less often. It is so thin there are no calves to its legs; its belly protrudes; it lives on a half-bowl of corn meal and grease a day. It is naked. Its buttocks and thighs are a mass of festered sores, as it sits in its own excrement continually.

They all know it is there, all the people of Omelas. Some of them have come to see it, others are content merely to know it is there. They all know that it has to be there. Some of them understand why, and some do not, but they all understand that their happiness, the beauty of their city, the tenderness of their friendships, the health of their children, the wisdom of their scholars, the skill of their makers, even the abundance of their harvest and the kindly weathers of their skies, depend wholly on this child’s abominable misery.

This is usually explained to children when they are between eight and twelve, whenever they seem capable of understanding; and most of those who come to see the child are young people, though often enough an adult comes, or comes back, to see the child. No matter how well the matter has been explained to them, these young spectators are always shocked and sickened at the sight. They feel disgust, which they had thought themselves superior to. They feel anger, outrage, impotence, despite all the explanations. They would like to do something for the child. But there is nothing they can do. If the child were brought up into the sunlight out of that vile place, if it were cleaned and fed and comforted, that would be a good thing, indeed; but if it were done, in that day and hour all the prosperity and beauty and delight of Omelas would wither and be destroyed. Those are the terms. To exchange all the goodness and grace of every life in Omelas for that single, small improvement: to throw away the happiness of thousands for the chance of the happiness of one: that would be to let guilt within the walls indeed.

The terms are strict and absolute; there may not even be a kind word spoken to the child.

Often the young people go home in tears, or in a tearless rage, when they have seen the child and faced this terrible paradox. They may brood over it for weeks or years. But as time goes on they begin to realize that even if the child could be released, it would not get much good of its freedom: a little vague pleasure of warmth and food, no doubt, but little more. It is too degraded and imbecile to know any real joy. It has been afraid too long ever to be free of fear. Its habits are too uncouth for it to respond to humane treatment. Indeed, after so long it would probably be wretched without walls about it to protect it, and darkness for its eyes, and its own excrement to sit in. Their tears at the bitter injustice dry when they begin to perceive the terrible justice of reality, and to accept it. Yet it is their tears and anger, the trying of their generosity and the acceptance of their helplessness, which are perhaps the true source of the splendor of their lives. Theirs is no vapid, irresponsible happiness. They know that they, like the child, are not free. They know compassion. It is the existence of the child, and their knowledge of its existence, that makes possible the nobility of their architecture, the poignancy of their music, the profundity of their science. It is because of the child that they are so gentle with children. They know that if the wretched ones were not there sniveling in the dark, the other one, the flute-player, could make no joyful music as the young riders line up in their beauty for the race in the sunlight of the first morning of summer.

Now do you believe in them? Are they not more credible? But there is one more thing to tell, and this is quite incredible.

At times one of the adolescent girls or boys who go to see the child does not go home to weep or rage, does not, in fact, go home at all. Sometimes also a man or woman much older falls silent for a day or two, and then leaves home. These people go out into the street, and walk down the street alone. They keep walking, and walk straight out of the city of Omelas, through the beautiful gates. They keep walking across the farmlands of Omelas. Each one goes alone, youth or girl, man or woman. Night falls; the traveler must pass down village streets, between the houses with yellow-lit windows, and on out into the darkness of the fields. Each alone, they go west or north, towards the mountains. They go on. They leave Omelas, they walk ahead into the darkness, and they do not come back. The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible that it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

LARRY NIVEN Inconstant Moon

Larry Niven established his credentials as a master of the hard-science-fiction story with his Nebula Award–winning novel Ringworld, about a ribbonlike planetary body with a million-mile radius and six-hundred-million-mile circumference that rings a remote star and poses unique technical problems in navigation and escape for its human inhabitants. The novel and its sequels Ringworld Engineers and Ringworld Throne are part of Niven’s vast Tales of Known Space saga, an acclaimed future history of humankind’s populating of interstellar space that has accommodated exploration of a wide variety of themes including alien cultures, immortality, time travel, terraforming, genetic engineering, and teleportation. The novels The World of Ptavvs, A Gift from Earth, Protector, The Patchwork Girl, The Integral Trees, and The Smoke Ring, as well as the story collections Neutron Star, The Shape of Space, Crashlander, and Flatlander, elaborate an epic billion-and-a-half-year history that integrates innovative technologies with colorful developments of alien races and human and extraterrestrial interactions. The allure of Niven’s invention can be measured by the seven volumes in the Man-Kzin Wars anthology series, which have attracted his colleagues in hard science fiction to contribute stories, bolstering the plausibility of the series through a shared-world sensibility. Niven has also written the novel A World Out of Time, a far-future projection in which human evolution leads to immortality, and the series of science fiction mystery stories collected in The Long ARM of Gil Hamilton. Much of his work at novel length has been written in collaboration. The Mote in God’s Eye, coauthored by Jerry Pournelle, is a memorable first-contact story about the accidental discovery of an alien race determined to seed our solar system with its proliferating population. Niven and Pournelle have also written a sequel, The Gripping Hand, the disaster novel Lucifer’s Hammer, and Inferno, which transports a science fiction writer to a Dantesque hell. With Steve Barnes, Niven has written Dream Park, The Barsoom Project, and The Voodoo Game, all set in a future amusement park where imagined realities are manifested through virtual reality. Niven has also written a series of fantasies concerned with primitive magic that includes The Magic Goes Away and Time of the Warlock.

I WAS WATCHING the news when the change came, like a flicker of motion at the corner of my eye. I turned toward the balcony window. Whatever it was, I was too late to catch it.

The moon was very bright tonight.

I saw that, and smiled, and turned back. Johnny Carson was just starting his monologue.

When the first commercials came on I got up to reheat some coffee. Commercials came in strings of three and four, going on midnight. I’d have time.

The moonlight caught me coming back. If it had been bright before, it was brighter now. Hypnotic. I opened the sliding glass door and stepped out onto the balcony.

The balcony wasn’t much more than a railed ledge, with standing room for a man and a woman and a portable barbecue set. These past months the view had been lovely, especially around sunset. The Power and Light Company had been putting up a glass-slab-style office building. So far it was only a steel framework of open girders. Shadow-blackened against a red sunset sky, it tended to look stark and surrealistic and hellishly impressive.

Tonight . . .

I had never seen the moon so bright, not even in the desert. Bright enough to read by, I thought, and immediately, but that’s an illusion. The moon was never bigger (I had read somewhere) than a quarter held nine feet away. It couldn’t possibly be bright enough to read by.

It was only three-quarters full!

But, glowing high over the San Diego Freeway to the west, the moon seemed to dim even the streaming automobile headlights. I blinked against its light, and thought of men walking on the moon, leaving corrugated footprints. Once, for the sake of an article I was writing, I had been allowed to pick up a bone-dry moon rock and hold it in my hand . . .

I heard the show starting again, and I stepped inside. But, glancing once behind me, I caught the moon growing even brighter—as if it had come from behind a wisp of scudding cloud.

Now its light was brain-searing, lunatic.

THE PHONE RANG five times before she answered.

“Hi,” I said. “Listen—”

“Hi,” Leslie said sleepily, complainingly. Damn. I’d hoped she was watching television, like me.

I said, “Don’t scream and shout, because I had a reason for calling. You’re in bed, right? Get up and—Can you get up?”

“What time is it?”

“Quarter of twelve.”

“Oh, Lord.”

“Go out on your balcony and look around.”

“Okay.”

The phone clunked. I waited. Leslie’s balcony faced north and west, like mine, but it was ten stories higher, with a correspondingly better view.

Through my own window, the moon burned like a textured spotlight.

“Stan? You there?”

“Yah. What do you think of it?”

“It’s gorgeous. I’ve never seen anything like it. What could make the moon light up like that?”

“I don’t know, but isn’t it gorgeous?”

“You’re supposed to be the native.” Leslie had only moved out here a year ago.

“Listen, I’ve never seen it like this. But there’s an old legend,” I said. “Once every hundred years the Los Angeles smog rolls away for a single night, leaving the air as clear as interstellar space. That way the gods can see if Los Angeles is still there. If it is, they roll the smog back so they won’t have to look at it.”

“I used to know all that stuff. Well, listen, I’m glad you woke me up to see it, but I’ve got to get to work tomorrow.”

“Poor baby.”

“That’s life. ’Night.”

“ ’Night.”

Afterward I sat in the dark, trying to think of someone else to call. Call a girl at midnight, invite her to step outside and look at the moonlight. . . . and she may think it’s romantic or she may be furious, but she won’t assume you called six others.

So I thought of some names. But the girls who belonged to them had all dropped away over the past year or so, after I started spending all my time with Leslie. One could hardly blame them. And now Joan was in Texas and Hildy was getting married, and if I called Louise I’d probably get Gordie too. The English girl? But I couldn’t remember her number. Or her last name.

Besides, everyone I knew punched a time clock of one kind or another. Me, I worked for a living, but as a freelance writer I picked my hours. Anyone I woke up tonight, I’d be ruining her morning. Ah, well . . .

The Johnny Carson show was a swirl of gray and a roar of static when I got back to the living room. I turned the set off and went back out on the balcony.

The moon was brighter than the flow of headlights on the freeway, brighter than Westwood Village off to the right. The Santa Monica Mountains had a magical pearly glow. There were no stars near the moon. Stars could not survive that glare.

I wrote science and how-to articles for a living. I ought to be able to figure out what was making the moon do that. Could the moon be suddenly larger? Inflating like a balloon? No.

Closer, maybe. The moon falling?

Tides! Waves fifty feet high . . . and earthquakes! San Andreas Fault splitting apart like the Grand Canyon! Jump in my car, head for the hills . . . no, too late already . . .

Nonsense. The moon was brighter, not bigger. I could see that. And what could possibly drop the moon on our heads like that?

I blinked, and the moon left an afterimage on my retinae. It was that bright.

A million people must be watching the moon right now, and wondering, like me. An article on the subject would sell big . . . if I wrote it before anyone else did . . .

There must be some simple, obvious explanation.

Well, how could the moon grow brighter? Moonlight was reflected sunlight. Could the sun have gotten brighter? It must have happened after sunset, then, or it would have been noticed . . .

I didn’t like that idea.

Besides, half the Earth was in direct sunlight. A thousand correspondents for Life and Time and Newsweek and Associated Press would all be calling in from Europe, Asia, Africa . . . unless they were all hiding in cellars. Or dead. Or voiceless, because the sun was blanketing everything with static, radio and phone systems and televisions . . . Television. Oh my God.

I was just barely beginning to be afraid.

All right, start over. The moon had become very much brighter. Moonlight, well, moonlight was reflected sunlight; any idiot knew that. Then . . . something had happened to the sun.

“HELLO?”

“Hi. Me,” I said, and then my throat froze solid. Panic! What was I going to tell her?

“I’ve been watching the moon,” she said dreamily. “It’s wonderful. I even tried to use my telescope, but I couldn’t see a thing; it was too bright. It lights up the whole city. The hills are all silver.”

That’s right, she kept a telescope on her balcony. I’d forgotten.

“I haven’t tried to go back to sleep,” she said. “Too much light.”

I got my throat working again. “Listen, Leslie love, I started thinking about how I woke you up and how you probably couldn’t get back to sleep, what with all this light. So let’s go out for a midnight snack.”

“Are you out of your mind?”

“No, I’m serious. I mean it. Tonight isn’t a night for sleeping. We may never have a night like this again. To hell with your diet. Let’s celebrate. Hot fudge sundaes, Irish coffee—”

“That’s different. I’ll get dressed.”

“I’ll be right over.”

LESLIE LIVED ON the fourteenth floor of Building C of the Barrington Plaza. I rapped for admission, and waited.

And waiting, I wondered without any sense of urgency: Why Leslie?

There must be other ways to spend my last night on Earth than with one particular girl. I could have picked a different particular girl, or even several not too particular girls, except that that didn’t really apply to me, did it? Or I could have called my brother, or either set of parents . . .

Well, but brother Mike would have wanted a good reason for being hauled out of bed at midnight. “But, Mike, the moon is so beautiful . . .” Hardly. Any of my parents would have reacted similarly. Well, I had a good reason, but would they believe me?

And if they did, what then? I would have arranged a kind of wake. Let ’em sleep through it. What I wanted was someone who would join my . . . farewell party without asking the wrong questions.

What I wanted was Leslie. I knocked again.

She opened the door just a crack for me. She was in her underwear. A stiff, misshapen girdle in one hand brushed my back as she came into my arms. “I was about to put this on.”

“I came just in time, then.” I took the girdle away from her and dropped it. I stooped to get my arms under her ribs, straightened up with effort, and walked us to the bedroom with her feet dangling against my ankles.

Her skin was cold. She must have been outside.

“So!” she demanded. “You think you can compete with a hot fudge sundae, do you?”

“Certainly. My pride demands it.” We were both somewhat out of breath. Once in our lives I had tried to lift her cradled in my arms, in conventional movie style. I’d damn near broken my back. Leslie was a big girl, my height, and almost too heavy around the hips.

I dropped us on the bed, side by side. I reached around her from both sides to scratch her back, knowing it would leave her helpless to resist me, ah ha hahahaha. She made sounds of pleasure to tell me where to scratch. She pulled my shirt up around my shoulders and began scratching my back.

We pulled pieces of clothing from ourselves and each other, at random, dropping them over the edges of the bed. Leslie’s skin was warm now, almost hot . . .

All right, now that’s why I couldn’t have picked another girl. I’d have had to teach her how to scratch. And there just wasn’t time.

Some nights I had a nervous tendency to hurry our lovemaking. Tonight we were performing a ritual, a rite of passage. I tried to slow it down, to make it last. I tried to make Leslie like it more. It paid off incredibly. I forgot the moon and the future when Leslie put her heels against the backs of my knees and we moved into the ancient rhythm.

But the image that came to me at the climax was vivid and frightening. We were in a ring of blue-hot fire that closed like a noose. If I moaned in terror and ecstasy, then she must have thought it was ecstasy alone.

We lay side by side, drowsy, torpid, clinging together. I was minded to go back to sleep then, renege on my promise, sleep and let Leslie sleep . . . but instead I whispered into her ear: “Hot fudge sundae.” She smiled and stirred and presently rolled off the bed.

I wouldn’t let her wear the girdle. “It’s past midnight. Nobody’s going to pick you up, because I’d trash the blackguard, right? So why not be comfortable?” She laughed and gave in. We hugged each other once, hard, in the elevator. It felt much better without the girdle.

THE GRAY-HAIRED COUNTER waitress was cheerful and excited. Her eyes glowed. She spoke as if confiding a secret. “Have you noticed the moonlight?”

Ship’s was fairly crowded, this time of night and this close to UCLA. Half the customers were university students. Tonight they talked in hushed voices, turning to look out through the glass walls of the twenty-four-hour restaurant. The moon was low in the west, low enough to compete with the street globes.

“We noticed,” I said. “We’re celebrating. Get us two hot fudge sundaes, will you?” When she turned her back I slid a ten-dollar bill under the paper place mat. Not that she’d ever spend it, but at least she’d have the pleasure of finding it. I’d never spend it either.

I felt loose, casual. A lot of problems seemed suddenly to have solved themselves.

Who would have believed that peace could come to Vietnam and Cambodia in a single night?

This thing had started around eleven-thirty, here in California. That would have put the noon sun just over the Arabian Sea, with all but a few fringes of Asia, Europe, Africa, and Australia in direct sunlight.

Already Germany was reunited, the Wall melted or smashed by shock waves. Israelis and Arabs had laid down their arms. Apartheid was dead in Africa.

And I was free. For me there were no more consequences. Tonight I could satisfy all my dark urges, rob, kill, cheat on my income tax, throw bricks at plate-glass windows, burn my credit cards. I could forget the article on explosive metal forming, due Thursday. Tonight I could substitute cinnamon candy for Leslie’s Pills. Tonight—

“Think I’ll have a cigarette.”

Leslie looked at me oddly. “I thought you’d given that up.”

“You remember. I told myself if I got any overpowering urges, I’d have a cigarette. I did that because I couldn’t stand the thought of never smoking again.”

She laughed. “But it’s been months!”

“But they keep putting cigarette ads in my magazines!”

“It’s a plot. All right, go have a cigarette.”

I put coins in the machine, hesitated over the choice, finally picked a mild filter. It wasn’t that I wanted a cigarette. But certain events call for champagne, and others for cigarettes. There is the traditional last cigarette before a firing squad . . .

I lit up. Here’s to lung cancer.

It tasted just as good as I remembered; though there was a faint stale undertaste, like a mouthful of old cigarette butts. The third lungful hit me oddly. My eyes unfocused and everything went very calm. My heart pulsed loudly in my throat.

“How does it taste?”

“Strange. I’m buzzed,” I said.

Buzzed! I hadn’t even heard the word in fifteen years. In high school we’d smoked to get that buzz, that quasi-drunkenness produced by capillaries constricting in the brain. The buzz had stopped coming after the first few times, but we’d kept smoking, most of us . . .

I put it out. The waitress was picking up our sundaes.

Hot and cold, sweet and bitter; there is no taste quite like that of a hot fudge sundae. To die without tasting it again would have been a crying shame. But with Leslie it was a thing, a symbol of all rich living. Watching her eat was more fun than eating myself.

Besides . . . I’d killed the cigarette to taste the ice cream. Now, instead of savoring the ice cream, I was anticipating Irish coffee.

Too little time.

Leslie’s dish was empty. She stage-whispered, “Aahh!” and patted herself over the navel.

A customer at one of the small tables began to go mad.

I’d noticed him coming in. A lean scholarly type wearing sideburns and steel-rimmed glasses, he had been continually twisting around to look out at the moon. Like others at other tables, he seemed high on a rare and lovely natural phenomenon.

Then he got it. I saw his face changing, showing suspicion, then disbelief, then horror, horror and helplessness.

“Let’s go,” I told Leslie. I dropped quarters on the counter and stood up.

“Don’t you want to finish yours?”

“Nope. We’ve got things to do. How about some Irish coffee?”

“And a Pink Lady for me? Oh, look!” She turned full around.

The scholar was climbing up on a table. He balanced, spread wide his arms and bellowed, “Look out your windows!”

“You get down from there!” a waitress demanded, jerking emphatically at his pants leg.

“The world is coming to an end! Far away on the other side of the sea, death and hellfire—”

But we were out the door, laughing as we ran. Leslie panted, “We may have—escaped a religious—riot in there!”

I thought of the ten I’d left under my plate. Now it would please nobody. Inside, a prophet was shouting his message of doom to all who would hear. The gray-haired woman with the glowing eyes would find the money and think: They knew it too.

BUILDINGS BLOCKED THE moon from the Red Barn’s parking lot. The street lights and the indirect moonglare were pretty much the same color. The night only seemed a bit brighter than usual.

I didn’t understand why Leslie stopped suddenly in the driveway. But I followed her gaze, straight up to where a star burned very brightly just south of the zenith.

“Pretty,” I said.

She gave me a very odd look.

There were no windows in the Red Barn. Dim artificial lighting, far dimmer than the queer cold light outside, showed on dark wood and quietly cheerful customers. Nobody seemed aware that tonight was different from other nights.

The sparse Tuesday night crowd was gathered mostly around the piano bar. A customer had the mike. He was singing some half-familiar song in a wavering weak voice, while the black pianist grinned and played a schmaltzy background.

I ordered two Irish coffees and a Pink Lady. At Leslie’s questioning look I only smiled mysteriously.

How ordinary the Red Barn felt. How relaxed; how happy. We held hands across the table, and I smiled and was afraid to speak. If I broke the spell, if I said the wrong thing . . .

The drinks arrived. I raised an Irish coffee glass by the stem. Sugar, Irish whiskey, and strong black coffee, with thick whipped cream floating on top. It coursed through me like a magical potion of strength, dark and hot and powerful.

The waitress waved back my money. “See that man in the turtleneck, there at the end of the piano bar? He’s buying,” she said with relish. “He came in two hours ago and handed the bartender a hundred-dollar bill.”

So that was where all the happiness was coming from. Free drinks! I looked over, wondering what the guy was celebrating.

A thick-necked, wide-shouldered man in a turtleneck and sports coat, he sat hunched over into himself, with a wide bar glass clutched tight in one hand. The pianist offered him the mike, and he waved it by, the gesture giving me a good look at his face. A square, strong face, now drunk and miserable and scared. He was ready to cry from fear.

So I knew what he was celebrating.

Leslie made a face. “They didn’t make the Pink Lady right.”

There’s one bar in the world that makes a Pink Lady the way Leslie likes it, and it isn’t in Los Angeles. I passed her the other Irish coffee, grinning an I-told-you-so grin. Forcing it. The other man’s fear was contagious. She smiled back, lifted her glass and said, “To the blue moonlight.”

I lifted my glass to her, and drank. But it wasn’t the toast I would have chosen.

The man in the turtleneck slid down from his stool. He moved carefully toward the door, his course slow and straight as an ocean liner cruising into dock. He pulled the door wide, and turned around, holding it open, so that the weird blue-white light streamed past his broad black silhouette.

Bastard. He was waiting for someone to figure it out, to shout out the truth to the rest. Fire and doom—

“Shut the door!” someone bellowed.

“Time to go,” I said softly.

“What’s the hurry?”

The hurry? He might speak! But I couldn’t say that . . .

Leslie put her hand over mine. “I know. I know. But we can’t run away from it, can we?”

A fist closed hard on my heart. She’d known, and I hadn’t noticed?

The door closed, leaving the Red Barn in reddish dusk. The man who had been buying drinks was gone.

“Oh, God. When did you figure it out?”

“Before you came over,” she said. “But when I tried to check it out, it didn’t work.”

“Check it out?”

“I went out on the balcony and turned the telescope on Jupiter. Mars is below the horizon these nights. If the sun’s gone nova, all the planets ought to be lit up like the moon, right?”

“Right. Damn.” I should have thought of that myself. But Leslie was the stargazer. I knew some astrophysics, but I couldn’t have found Jupiter to save my life.

“But Jupiter wasn’t any brighter than usual. So then I didn’t know what to think.”

“But then—” I felt hope dawning fiery hot. Then I remembered. “That star, just overhead. The one you stared at.”

“Jupiter.”

“All lit up like a fucking neon sign. Well, that tears it.”

“Keep your voice down.”

I had been keeping my voice down. But for a wild moment I wanted to stand up on a table and scream! Fire and doom—What right had they to be ignorant?

Leslie’s hand closed tight on mine. The urge passed. It left me shuddering. “Let’s get out of here. Let ’em think there’s going to be a dawn.”

“There is.” Leslie laughed a bitter, barking laugh like nothing I’d ever heard from her. She walked out while I was reaching for my wallet—and remembering that there was no need.

Poor Leslie. Finding Jupiter its normal self must have looked like a reprieve—until the white spark flared to shining glory an hour and a half late. An hour and a half, for sunlight to reach Earth by the way of Jupiter.

When I reached the door Leslie was half-running down Westwood toward Santa Monica. I cursed and ran to catch up, wondering if she’d suddenly gone crazy.

Then I noticed the shadows ahead of us. All along the other side of Santa Monica Boulevard: moon shadows, in horizontal patterns of dark and blue-white bands.

I caught her at the corner.

The moon was setting.

A setting moon always looks tremendous. Tonight it glared at us through the gap of sky beneath the freeway, terribly bright, casting an incredible complexity of lines and shadows. Even the unlighted crescent glowed pearly bright with earthshine.

Which told me all I wanted to know about what was happening on the lighted side of Earth.

And on the moon? The men of Apollo 19 must have died in the first few minutes of nova sunlight. Trapped out on a lunar plain, hiding perhaps behind a melting boulder . . . Or were they on the night side? I couldn’t remember. Hell, they could outlive us all. I felt a stab of envy and hatred.

And pride. We’d put them there. We reached the moon before the nova came. A little longer, we’d have reached the stars.

The disc changed oddly as it set. A dome, a flying saucer, a lens, a line . . .

Gone.

Gone. Well, that was that. Now we could forget it; now we could walk around outside without being constantly reminded that something was wrong. Moonset had taken all the queer shadows out of the city.

But the clouds had an odd glow to them. As clouds glow after sunset, tonight the clouds shone livid white at their western edges. And they streamed too quickly across the sky. As if they tried to run . . .

When I turned to Leslie, there were big tears rolling down her cheeks.

“Oh, damn.” I took her arm. “Now stop it. Stop it.”

“I can’t. You know I can’t stop crying once I get started.”

“This wasn’t what I had in mind. I thought we’d do things we’ve been putting off, things we like. It’s our last chance. Is this the way you want to die, crying on a street corner?”

“I don’t want to die at all!”

“Tough shit!”

“Thanks a lot.” Her face was all red and twisted. Leslie was crying as a baby cries, without regard for dignity or appearance. I felt awful. I felt guilty, and I knew the nova wasn’t my fault, and it made me angry.

“I don’t want to die either!” I snarled at her. “You show me a way out and I’ll take it. Where would we go? The South Pole? It’d just take longer. The moon must be molten all across its day side. Mars? When this is over Mars will be part of the sun, like the Earth. Alpha Centauri? The acceleration we’d need, we’d be spread across a wall like peanut butter and jelly—”

“Oh, shut up.”

“Right.”

“Hawaii. Stan, we could get to the airport in twenty minutes. We’d get two hours extra, going west! Two hours more before sunrise!”

She had something there. Two hours was worth any price! But I’d worked this out before, staring at the moon from my balcony. “No. We’d die sooner. Listen, love, we saw the moon go bright about midnight. That means California was at the back of the Earth when the sun went nova.”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“Then we must be farthest from the shock wave.”

She blinked. “I don’t understand.”

“Look at it this way. First the sun explodes. That heats the air and the oceans, all in a flash, all across the day side. The steam and superheated air expand fast. A flaming shock wave comes roaring over into the night side. It’s closing on us right now. Like a noose. But it’ll reach Hawaii first. Hawaii is two hours closer to the sunset line.”

“Then we won’t see the dawn. We won’t live even that long.”

“No.”

“You explain things so well,” she said bitterly. “A flaming shock wave. So graphic.”

“Sorry. I’ve been thinking about it too much. Wondering what it will be like.”

“Well, stop it.” She came to me and put her face in my shoulder. She cried quietly. I held her with one arm and used the other to rub her neck, and I watched the streaming clouds, and I didn’t think about what it would be like.

Didn’t think about the ring of fire closing on us.

It was the wrong picture anyway.

I thought of how the oceans must have boiled on the day side, so that the shock wave had been mostly steam to start with. I thought of the millions of square miles of ocean it had to cross. It would be cooler and wetter when it reached us. And the Earth’s rotation would spin it like the whirlpool in a bathtub.

Two counterrotating hurricanes of live steam, one north, one south. That was how it would come. We were lucky. California would be near the eye of the northern one.

A hurricane wind of live steam. It would pick a man up and cook him in the air, strip the steamed flesh from him and cast him aside. It was going to hurt like hell.

We would never see the sunrise. In a way that was a pity. It would be spectacular.

Thick parallel streamers of cloud were drifting across the stars, too fast, their bellies white by city light. Jupiter dimmed, then went out. Could it be starting already? Heat lightning jumped—

“Aurora,” I said.

“What?”

“There’s a shock wave from the sun, too. There should be an aurora like nothing anybody’s ever seen before.”

Leslie laughed suddenly, jarringly. “It seems so strange, standing on a street corner talking like this! Stan, are we dreaming it?”

“We could pretend—”

“No. Most of the human race must be dead already.”

“Yah.”

“And there’s nowhere to go.”

“Damn it, you figured that out long ago, all by yourself. Why bring it up now?”

“You could have let me sleep,” she said bitterly. “I was dropping off to sleep when you whispered in my ear.”

I didn’t answer. It was true.

“ ‘Hot fudge sundae,’ ” she quoted. Then, “It wasn’t a bad idea, actually. Breaking my diet.”

I started to giggle.

“Stop that.”

“We could go back to your place now. Or my place. To sleep.”

“I suppose. But we couldn’t sleep, could we? No, don’t say it. We take sleeping pills, and five hours from now we wake up screaming. I’d rather stay awake. At least we’ll know what’s happening.”

But if we took all the pills . . . but I didn’t say it. I said, “Then how about a picnic?”

“Where?”

“The beach, maybe. Who cares? We can decide later.”

ALL THE MARKETS were closed. But the liquor store next to the Red Barn was one I’d been using for years. They sold us foie gras, crackers, a couple of bottles of chilled champagne, six kinds of cheese and a hell of a lot of nuts—I took one of everything—more crackers, a bag of ice, frozen rumaki hors d’oeuvres, a fifth of an ancient brandy that cost twenty-five bucks, a matching fifth of Cherry Heering for Leslie, six-packs of beer and Bitter Orange . . .

By the time we had piled all that into a dinky store cart, it was raining. Big fat drops spattered in flurries across the acre of plate glass that fronted the store. Wind howled around the corners.

The salesman was in a fey mood, bursting with energy. He’d been watching the moon all night. “And now this!” he exclaimed as he packed our loot into bags. He was a small, muscular old man with thick arms and shoulders. “It never rains like this in California. It comes down straight and heavy, when it comes at all. Takes days to build up.”

“I know.” I wrote him a check, feeling guilty about it. He’d known me long enough to trust me. But the check was good. There were funds to cover it. Before opening hours the check would be ash, and all the banks in the world would be bubbling in the heat of the sun. But that was hardly my fault.

He piled our bags in the cart, set himself at the door. “Now when the rain lets up, we’ll run these out. Ready?” I got ready to open the door. The rain came like someone had thrown a bucket of water at the window. In a moment it had stopped, though water still streamed down the glass. “Now!” cried the salesman, and I threw the door open and we were off. We reached the car laughing like maniacs. The wind howled around us, sweeping up spray and hurling it at us.

“We picked a good break. You know what this weather reminds me of? Kansas,” said the salesman. “During a tornado.”

Then suddenly the sky was full of gravel! We yelped and ducked, and the car rang to a million tiny concussions, and I got the car door unlocked and pulled Leslie and the salesman in after me. We rubbed our bruised heads and looked out at white gravel bouncing everywhere.

The salesman picked a small white pebble out of his collar. He put it in Leslie’s hand, and she gave a startled squeak and handed it to me, and it was cold.

“Hail,” said the salesman. “Now I really don’t get it.”

Neither did I. I could only think that it had something to do with the nova. But what? How?

“I’ve got to get back,” said the salesman. The hail had expended itself in one brief flurry. He braced himself, then went out of the car like a marine taking a hill. We never saw him again.

The clouds were churning up there, forming and disappearing, sliding past each other faster than I’d ever seen clouds move, their bellies glowing by city light.

“It must be the nova,” Leslie said shivering.

“But how? If the shock wave were here already, we’d be dead—or at least deaf. Hail?”

“Who cares? Stan, we don’t have time!”

I shook myself. “All right. What would you like to do most, right now?”

“Watch a baseball game.”

“It’s two in the morning,” I pointed out.

“That lets out a lot of things, doesn’t it?”

“Right. We’ve hopped our last bar. We’ve seen our last play, and our last clean movie. What’s left?”

“Looking in jewelry store windows.”

“Seriously? Your last night on Earth?”

She considered, then answered. “Yes.”

By damn, she meant it. I couldn’t think of anything duller. “Westwood or Beverly Hills?”

“Both.”

“Now, look—”

“Beverly Hills, then.”

WE DROVE THROUGH another spatter of rain and hail—a capsule tempest. We parked half a block from the Tiffany salesroom.

The sidewalk was one continuous puddle. Secondhand rain dripped on us from various levels of the buildings overhead. Leslie said, “This is great. There must be half a dozen jewelry stores in walking distance.”

“I was thinking of driving.”

“No no no, you don’t have the proper attitude. One must window-shop on foot. It’s in the rules.”

“But the rain!”

“You won’t die of pneumonia. You won’t have time,” she said, too grimly.

Tiffany’s had a small branch office in Beverly Hills, but they didn’t put expensive things in the windows at night. There were a few fascinating toys, that was all.

We turned up Rodeo Drive—and struck it rich. Tibor showed an infinite selection of rings, ornate and modern, large and small, in all kinds of precious and semiprecious stones. Across the street, Van Cleef & Arpels showed brooches, men’s wristwatches of elegant design, bracelets with tiny watches in them, and one window that was all diamonds.

“Oh, lovely,” Leslie breathed, caught by the flashing diamonds. “What they must look like in daylight! . . . Wups—”

“No, that’s a good thought. Imagine them at dawn, flaming with nova light, while the windows shatter to let the raw daylight in. Want one? The necklace?”

“Oh, may I? Hey, hey, I was kidding! Put that down, you idiot, there must be alarms in the glass.”

“Look, nobody’s going to be wearing any of that stuff between now and morning. Why shouldn’t we get some good out of it?”

“We’d be caught!”

“Well, you said you wanted to window-shop . . .”

“I don’t want to spend my last hour in a cell. If you’d brought the car we’d have some chance—”

“Of getting away. Right. I wanted to bring the car—” But at that point we both cracked up entirely, and had to stagger away holding onto each other for balance.

There were a good half-dozen jewelry stores on Rodeo. But there was more. Toys, books, shirts and ties in odd and advanced styling. In Francis Orr, a huge plastic cube full of new pennies. A couple of damn strange clocks farther on. There was an extra kick in window-shopping, knowing that we could break a window and take anything we wanted badly enough.

We walked hand in hand, swinging our arms. The sidewalks were ours alone; all others had fled the mad weather. The clouds still churned overhead.

“I wish I’d known it was coming,” Leslie said suddenly. “I spent the whole day fixing a mistake in a program. Now we’ll never run it.”

“What would you have done with the time? A baseball game?”

“Maybe. No. The standings don’t matter now.” She frowned at dresses in a store window. “What would you have done?”

“Gone to the Blue Sphere for cocktails,” I said promptly. “It’s a topless place. I used to go there all the time. I hear they’ve gone full nude now.”

“I’ve never been to one of those. How late are they open?”

“Forget it. It’s almost two-thirty.”

Leslie mused, looking at giant stuffed animals in a toy store window. “Isn’t there someone you would have murdered, if you’d had the time?”

“Now, you know my agent lives in New York.”

“Why him?”

“My child, why would any writer want to murder his agent? For the manuscripts he loses under other manuscripts. For his ill-gotten ten percent, and the remaining ninety percent that he sends me grudgingly and late. For—”

Suddenly the wind roared and rose up against us. Leslie pointed, and we ran for a deep doorway that turned out to be Gucci’s. We huddled against the glass.

The wind was suddenly choked with hail the size of marbles. Glass broke somewhere, and alarms lifted thin, frail voices into the wind. There was more than hail in the wind! There were rocks!

I caught the smell and taste of sea water.

We clung together in the expensively wasted space in front of Gucci’s. I coined a short-lived phrase and screamed, “Nova weather! How the blazes did it—” But I couldn’t hear myself, and Leslie didn’t even know I was shouting.

Nova weather. How did it get here so fast? Coming over the pole, the nova shock wave would have to travel about four thousand miles—at least a five-hour trip.

No. The shock wave would travel in the stratosphere, where the speed of sound was higher, then propagate down. Three hours was plenty of time. Still, I thought, it should not have come as a rising wind. On the other side of the world, the exploding sun was tearing our atmosphere away and hurling it at the stars. The shock should have come as a single vast thunderclap.

For an instant the wind gentled, and I ran down the sidewalk pulling Leslie after me. We found another doorway as the wind picked up again. I thought I heard a siren coming to answer the alarm.

At the next break we splashed across Wilshire and reached the car. We sat there panting, waiting for the heater to warm up. My shoes felt squishy. The wet clothes stuck to my skin.

Leslie shouted, “How much longer?”

“I don’t know! We ought to have some time.”

“We’ll have to spend our picnic indoors!”

“Your place or mine? Yours,” I decided, and pulled away from the curb.

WILSHIRE BOULEVARD WAS flooded to the hubcaps in spots. The spurts of hail and sleet had become a steady, pounding rain. Fog lay flat and waist-deep ahead of us, broke swirling over our hood, churned in a wake behind us. Weird weather.

Nova weather. The shock wave of scalding superheated steam hadn’t happened. Instead, a mere hot wind roaring through the stratosphere, the turbulence eddying down to form strange storms at ground level.

We parked illegally on the upper parking level. My one glimpse of the lower level showed it to be flooded. I opened the trunk and lifted two heavy paper bags.

“We must have been crazy,” Leslie said, shaking her head. “We’ll never use all this.”

“Let’s take it up anyway.”

She laughed at me. “But why?”

“Just a whim. Will you help me carry it?”

We took double armfuls up to the fourteenth floor. That still left a couple of bags in the trunk. “Never mind them,” Leslie said. “We’ve got the rumaki and the bottles and the nuts. What more do we need?”

“The cheeses. The crackers. The foie gras.”

“Forget ’em.”

“No.”

“You’re out of your mind,” she explained to me, slowly so that I would understand. “You could be steamed dead on the way down. We might not have more than a few minutes left, and you want food for a week! Why?”

“I’d rather not say.”

“Go then!” She slammed the door with terrible force.

The elevator was an ordeal. I kept wondering if Leslie was right. The shrilling of the wind was muffled, here at the core of the building. Perhaps it was about to rip electrical cables somewhere, leave me stranded in a darkened box. But I made it down.

The upper level was knee-deep in water.

My second surprise was that it was lukewarm, like old bathwater, unpleasant to wade through. Steam curdled on the surface, then blew away on a wind that howled through the concrete echo chamber like the screaming of the damned.

Going up was another ordeal. If what I was thinking was wish fulfillment, if a roaring wind of live steam caught me now . . . I’d feel like such an idiot . . . But the doors opened, and the lights hadn’t even flickered.

Leslie wouldn’t let me in.

“Go away!” she shouted through the locked door. “Go eat your cheese and crackers somewhere else!”

“You got another date?”

That was a mistake. I got no answer at all.

I could almost see her viewpoint. The extra trip for the extra bags was no big thing to fight about; but why did it have to be? How long was our love affair going to last, anyway? An hour, with luck. Why back down on a perfectly good argument, to preserve so ephemeral a thing?

“I wasn’t going to bring this up,” I shouted, hoping she could hear me through the door. The wind must be three times as loud on the other side. “We may need food for a week! And a place to hide!”

Silence. I began to wonder if I could kick the door down. Would I be better off waiting in the hall? Eventually she’d have to—

The door opened. Leslie was pale. “That was cruel,” she said quietly.

“I can’t promise anything. I wanted to wait, but you forced it. I’ve been wondering if the sun really has exploded.”

“That’s cruel. I was just getting used to the idea.” She turned her face to the doorjamb. Tired, she was tired. I’d kept her up too late . . .

“Listen to me. It was all wrong,” I said. “There should have been an aurora borealis to light up the night sky from pole to pole. A shock wave of particles exploding out of the sun, traveling at an inch short of the speed of light, would rip into the atmosphere like—why, we’d have seen blue fire over every building!

“Then, the storm came too slow,” I screamed, to be heard above the thunder. “A nova would rip away the sky over half the planet. The shock wave would move around the night side with a sound to break all the glass in the world, all at once! And crack concrete and marble—and, Leslie love, it just hasn’t happened. So I started wondering.”

She said it in a mumble. “Then what is it?”

“A flare. The worst—”

She shouted it at me like an accusation. “A flare! A solar flare! You think the sun could light up like that—”

“Easy, now—”

“—could turn the moon and planets into so many torches, then fade out as if nothing had happened! Oh, you idiot—”

“May I come in?”

She looked surprised. She stepped aside, and I bent and picked up the bags and walked in.

The glass doors rattled as if giants were trying to beat their way in. Rain had squeezed through cracks to make dark puddles on the rug.

I set the bags on the kitchen counter. I found bread in the refrigerator, dropped two slices in the toaster. While they were toasting I opened the foie gras.

“My telescope’s gone,” she said. Sure enough, it was. The tripod was all by itself on the balcony, on its side.

I untwisted the wire on a champagne bottle. The toast popped up, and Leslie found a knife and spread both slices with foie gras. I held the bottle near her ear, figuring to trip conditioned reflexes.

She did smile fleetingly as the cork popped. She said, “We should set up our picnic grounds here. Behind the counter. Sooner or later the wind is going to break those doors and shower glass all over everything.”

That was a good thought. I slid around the partition, swept all the pillows off the floor and the couch and came back with them. We set up a nest for ourselves.

It was kind of cosy. The kitchen counter was three and a half feet high, just over our heads, and the kitchen alcove itself was just wide enough to swing our elbows comfortably. Now the floor was all pillows. Leslie poured the champagne into brandy snifters, all the way to the lip.

I searched for a toast, but there were just too many possibilities, all depressing. We drank without toasting. And then carefully set the snifters down and slid forward into each other’s arms. We could sit that way, face to face, leaning sideways against each other.

“We’re going to die,” she said.

“Maybe not.”

“Get used to the idea. I have,” she said. “Look at you, you’re all nervous now. Afraid of dying. Hasn’t it been a lovely night?”

“Unique. I wish I’d known in time to take you to dinner.”

Thunder came in a string of six explosions. Like bombs in an air raid. “Me too,” she said when we could hear again.

“I wish I’d known this afternoon.”

“Pecan pralines!”

“Farmer’s Market. Double-roasted peanuts. Who would you have murdered, if you’d had the time?”

“There was a girl in my sorority—”

—and she was guilty of sibling rivalry, so Leslie claimed. I named an editor who kept changing his mind. Leslie named one of my old girl friends, I named her only old boy friend that I knew about, and it got to be kind of fun before we ran out. My brother Mike had forgotten my birthday once. The fiend.

The lights flickered, then came on again.

Too casually, Leslie asked, “Do you really think the sun might go back to normal?”

“It better be back to normal. Otherwise we’re dead anyway. I wish we could see Jupiter.”

“Dammit, answer me! Do you think it was a flare?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Yellow dwarf stars don’t go nova.”

“What if ours did?”

“The astronomers know a lot about novas,” I said. “More than you’d guess. They can see them coming months ahead. Sol is a gee-nought yellow dwarf. They don’t go nova at all. They have to wander off the main sequence first, and that takes millions of years.”

She pounded a fist softly on my back. We were cheek to cheek; I couldn’t see her face. “I don’t want to believe it. I don’t dare. Stan, nothing like this has ever happened before. How can you know?”

“Something did.”

“What? I don’t believe it. We’d remember.”

“Do you remember the first moon landing? Aldrin and Armstrong?”

“Of course. We watched it at Earl’s Lunar Landing Party.”

“They landed on the biggest, flattest place they could find on the moon. They sent back several hours of jumpy home movies, took a lot of very clear pictures, left corrugated footprints all over the place. And they came home with a bunch of rocks.

“Remember? People said it was a long way to go for rocks. But the first thing anyone noticed about those rocks was that they were half-melted.

“Sometime in the past—oh, say, the past hundred thousand years, there’s no way of marking it closer than that—the sun flared up. It didn’t stay hot enough long enough to leave any marks on the Earth. But the moon doesn’t have an atmosphere to protect it. All the rocks melted on one side.”

The air was warm and damp. I took off my coat, which was heavy with rainwater. I fished the cigarettes and matches out, lit a cigarette and exhaled past Leslie’s ear.

“We’d remember. It couldn’t have been this bad.”

“I’m not so sure. Suppose it happened over the Pacific? It wouldn’t do that much damage. Or over the American continents. It would have sterilized some plants and animals and burned down a lot of forests, and who’d know? The sun went back to normal, that time. It might again. The sun is a four percent variable star. Maybe it gets a touch more variable than that, every so often.”

Something shattered in the bedroom. A window? A wet wind touched us, and the shriek of the storm was louder.

“Then we could live through this,” Leslie said hesitantly.

“I believe you’ve put your finger on the crux of the matter. Skål!” I found my champagne and drank deep. It was past three in the morning, with a hurricane beating at our doors.

“Then shouldn’t we be doing something about it?”

“We are.”

“Something like trying to get up into the hills! Stan, there’re going to be floods!”

“You bet your ass there are, but they won’t rise this high. Fourteen stories. Listen, I’ve thought this through. We’re in a building that was designed to be earthquake-proof. You told me so yourself. It’d take more than a hurricane to knock it over.

“As for heading for the hills, what hills? We won’t get far tonight, not with the streets flooded already. Suppose we could get up into the Santa Monica Mountains; then what? Mudslides, that’s what. That area won’t stand up to what’s coming. The flare must have boiled away enough water to make another ocean. It’s going to rain for forty days and forty nights! Love, this is the safest place we could have reached tonight.”

“Suppose the polar caps melt?”

“Yeah . . . well, we’re pretty high, even for that. Hey, maybe that last flare was what started Noah’s flood. Maybe it’s happening again. Sure as hell, there’s not a place on Earth that isn’t the middle of a hurricane. Those two great counterrotating hurricanes, by now they must have broken up into hundreds of little storms—”

The glass doors exploded inward. We ducked, and the wind howled about us and dropped rain and glass on us.

“At least we’ve got food!” I shouted. “If the floods maroon us here, we can last it out!”

“But if the power goes, we can’t cook it! And the refrigerator—”

“We’ll cook everything we can. Hardboil all the eggs—”

The wind rose about us. I stopped trying to talk.

Warm rain sprayed us horizontally and left us soaked. Try to cook in a hurricane? I’d been stupid; I’d waited too long. The wind would tip boiling water on us if we tried it. Or hot grease—

Leslie screamed, “We’ll have to use the oven!”

Of course. The oven couldn’t possibly fall on us.

We set it for 400° and put the eggs in, in a pot of water. We took all the meat out of the meat drawer and shoved it in on a broiling pan. Two artichokes in another pot. The other vegetables we could eat raw.

What else? I tried to think.

Water. If the electricity went, probably the water and telephone lines would too. I turned on the faucet over the sink and started filling things: pots with lids, Leslie’s thirty-cup percolator that she used for parties, her wash bucket. She clearly thought I was crazy, but I didn’t trust the rain as a water source; I couldn’t control it.

The sound. Already we’d stopped trying to shout through it. Forty days and nights of this and we’d be stone-deaf. Cotton? Too late to reach the bathroom. Paper towels! I tore and wadded and made four plugs for our ears.

Sanitary facilities? Another reason for picking Leslie’s place over mine. When the plumbing stopped, there was always the balcony.

And if the flood rose higher than the fourteenth floor, there was the roof. Twenty stories up. If it went higher than that, there would be damn few people left when it was over.

And if it was a nova?

I held Leslie a bit more closely, and lit another cigarette one-handed. All the wasted planning, if it was a nova. But I’d have been doing it anyway. You don’t stop planning just because there’s no hope.

And when the hurricane turned to live steam, there was always the balcony. At a dead run, and over the railing, in preference to being boiled alive.

But now was not the time to mention it.

Anyway, she’d probably thought of it herself.

THE LIGHTS WENT out about four. I turned off the oven, in case the power should come back. Give it an hour to cool down, then I’d put all the food in Baggies.

Leslie was asleep, sitting up in my arms. How could she sleep, not knowing? I piled pillows behind her and let her back easy.

For some time I lay on my back, smoking, watching the lightning make shadows on the ceiling. We had eaten all the foie gras and drunk one bottle of champagne. I thought of opening the brandy, but decided against it, with regret.

A long time passed. I’m not sure what I thought about. I didn’t sleep, but certainly my mind was in idle. It only gradually came to me that the ceiling, between lightning flashes, had turned gray.

I rolled over, gingerly, soggily. Everything was wet.

My watch said it was nine-thirty.

I crawled around the partition into the living room. I’d been ignoring the storm sounds for so long that it took a faceful of warm whipping rain to remind me. There was a hurricane going on. But charcoal-gray light was filtering through the black clouds.

So. I was right to have saved the brandy. Flood, storms, intense radiation, fires lit by the flare—if the toll of destruction was as high as I expected, then money was about to become worthless. We would need trade goods.

I was hungry. I ate two eggs and some bacon—still warm—and started putting the rest of the food away. We had food for a week, maybe . . . but hardly a balanced diet. Maybe we could trade with other apartments. This was a big building. There must be empty apartments, too, that we could raid for canned soup and the like. And refugees from the lower floors to be taken care of, if the waters rose high enough . . .

Damn! I missed the nova. Life had been simplicity itself last night. Now . . . Did we have medicines? Were there doctors in the building? There would be dysentery and other plagues. And hunger. There was a supermarket near here; could we find a scuba rig in the building?

But I’d get some sleep first. Later we could start exploring the building. The day had become a lighter charcoal gray. Things could be worse, far worse. I thought of the radiation that must have sleeted over the far side of the world, and wondered if our children would colonize Europe, or Asia, or Africa.