Return from the Stars

FOUR

The door opened. A white-and-orange robot was waiting on the lawn. I stepped out.

“Welcome to Clavestra,” it said, and its white belly unexpectedly began to sing: tinkling notes, as though it had a music box inside.

Still laughing, I helped it unload my things. Then the rear hatch of the ulder, which lay on the grass like a small silver zeppelin, opened, and two orange robots rolled out my car. The heavy blue body sparkled in the sun. I had completely forgotten about it. And then all the robots, carrying my suitcases, boxes, and packages, moved in single file toward the house.

The house was a large cube with glass walls. One entered through a panoramic solarium, and farther on were a hall, a dining room, and a wooden staircase going up; the robot, the one with the music box, did not fail to point out to me this rarity.

Upstairs there were five rooms. I did not pick one with the best — an eastern — exposure because in them, particularly in the room with the view of the mountains, there was too much gold and silver, whereas mine had only streaks of green, like crushed leaves on a cream background.

Efficiently and quietly, the robots put all my belongings away in closets while I stood at the window. A port, I thought. A haven. Leaning forward, I could see the blue mist of the mountains. Below lay a flower garden with a dozen or so old fruit trees farther back; they had twisted, tired boughs and probably no longer yielded anything.

Off to the side, toward the road (I had seen it earlier from the ulder, it was obscured by hedges), the tower of a diving board rose above the brush. The pool. When I turned around, the robots had already left. I moved the desk, light as if inflated, over to the window; on it I set my packs of scientific journals, the bags of crystal books, and the reading machine; I arranged the still-unused notebooks and the pen separately. It was my old pen — under the increased gravity it had started leaking and blotted everything, but Olaf had fixed it. I put covers on the notebooks, labeled them “History,” “Mathematics,” and “Physics” — all in a rush, because I was anxious to get into the water. I didn’t know if I could go outside in my trunks, I had forgotten a bathrobe. So I went to the bathroom in the corridor, and there, maneuvering a bottle of foam, I produced a horrible monstrosity that bore no resemblance to anything. I tore it off and tried again. The second bathrobe turned out a little better, but even so it was a fright; I cut away the larger irregularities of the sleeves and hem with a knife, and then it was more or less presentable.

I went downstairs, still not sure if anyone was home. The hall was empty. The garden, too. There was only an orange robot trimming the grass by the rosebushes, which were already out of bloom.

I practically ran to the pool. The water gleamed and shimmered. An invisible freshness hung over it. I threw my robe on the golden sand that burned my feet, then pounded up the metal steps and ran to the top of the diving board. It was low, but fine for a start. I kicked off, did a single somersault — I wouldn’t attempt more after such a long time! — and entered the water like a knife.

I swam happily. I began to pull myself with large strokes, first in one direction, then a turn, the other direction. The pool was about fifty meters long; I did eight laps without slowing down, climbed out dripping like a seal, and lay on the sand, my heart hammering. It was good. Earth had its attractions! In a few minutes I was dry. I stood up, looked around: no one. Splendid. I ran up on the springboard. First I did a back somersault; it came off, although I had kicked too hard: instead of a plank there was a section of plastic, which worked like a spring. Then a double; not too successful, I hit the water with my thighs. The skin reddened for a moment, as though it had been burned. And again. A little better, still not right. On the second turn I did not straighten out in time and screwed up with my feet. But I was stubborn and I had the time, plenty of time! A third dive, a fourth, a fifth. I had begun to feel a buzzing in my ears when — after one more look around, just in case — I tried a somersault with a twist. It was a complete bust, a fiasco; the impact knocked the wind out of me, I swallowed water, and, coughing and sputtering, crawled out onto the sand. I sat under the azure ladder of the diving board, mortified and angry, until suddenly I burst out laughing. Then I swam four hundred meters more, took a break, and did another four hundred.

When I returned to the house the world looked different. That was what I had been missing the most, I thought. A white robot was waiting at the door.

“Will you eat in your room or in the dining room?”

“Will I be eating alone?”

“Yes, sir. The others arrive tomorrow.”

“The dining room, then.”

I went upstairs and changed. I still did not know where to begin my studies. Probably with history; that would be the most sensible, yet I wanted to do everything at once, and most of all to attack the mystery of how gravity had been conquered. A musical tone sounded — not the telephone — and because I did not know what it was, I called the house infor.

“Lunch is served,” explained a melodious voice.

The dining room was bathed in a light filtered through greenery; the curved panes in the ceiling glittered like crystal. On the table lay one setting. A robot brought the menu.

“No, no,” I said, “anything will do.”

The first course was like a cold fruit soup. The second was not like anything. I would have to say good-bye to meat, potatoes, and vegetables, apparently.

It was a good thing that I ate alone, because my dessert exploded on me. A slight exaggeration, perhaps; in any case I ended up with cream on my knees and on my sweater. It had been a complicated structure, hard only at the surface, and I had poked it carelessly with my spoon.

When a robot appeared, I asked if I could have coffee in my room.

“Of course,” it said. “Now?”

“Please. But a lot of coffee.”

I said this because I was feeling a little sleepy, no doubt as a result of my swim, and suddenly I regretted the time that I had been wasting. How completely different it was here from on board the spacecraft! The afternoon sun beat down on the old trees, the shadows were short, they joined together at the trunks, the air quivered in the distance, but the room remained cool. I sat at the desk, took up the books. The robot brought me coffee. The transparent thermos held at least three liters. I said nothing. Clearly, it had overcompensated for my dimensions.

I intended to begin with history, but I started in on sociology, because I wanted to learn as much as possible right away. I soon discovered, however, that I was in over my head. The subject was loaded with a difficult — since specialized — mathematics, and, what was worse, the authors referred to facts unknown to me. In addition, I did not understand many words and had to look them up in the encyclopedia. So I set up a second opton for myself — I had three — then gave this up, because it took too long. I swallowed my pride and opened an ordinary school textbook on history.

Something had got into me and I did not have an ounce of patience — I, whom Olaf had called the last incarnation of the Buddha. Instead of taking things in order, I turned immediately to the chapter on betrization.

The theory had been worked out by three people: Bennett, Trimaldi, and Zakharov. Hence the name. I was surprised to learn that they were of my generation — they had announced their discovery a year after our departure. The resistance to it, of course, was tremendous. At first no one even wanted to take the project seriously. Then it reached the forum of the UN. For some time it went from subcommittee to subcommittee — it seemed that the project would be buried in endless deliberation. In the meantime the research was making rapid progress, improvements were introduced, large-scale experiments were carried out on animals, then on humans (the first to submit to the procedure were the originators themselves — Trimaldi was paralyzed for some time, the dangers of betrization to adults having not been discovered yet, and this stopped the project for the next eight years). But in the seventeenth year after zero (my personal reckoning: zero was the takeoff of the Prometheus) a resolution for the universal implementation of betrization was passed; and this was only the beginning of the struggle for the humanization of mankind (as the textbook put it). In many countries parents refused to have their children treated, and attacks were made on the first betrization centers; fifty or sixty of them were completely destroyed. A period of turmoil, of repression, of coercion and resistance, lasted some twenty years. The textbook passed over this with a few generalities, for perfectly obvious reasons. I resolved to consult source materials for more detailed information, but meanwhile continued my reading. The new order became firmly established only when the first betrizated generation had children. About the biological aspect of the process the book said nothing. There were a great many paeans, on the other hand, for Bennett, Zakharov, and Trimaldi. A proposal was made to number the years of the New Era from the time of the introduction of betrization, but was not accepted. The reckoning of dates did not change. The people changed. The chapter concluded with a ringing encomium to the New Epoch of Humanism.

I looked up the monograph on betrization by Ullrich. It, too, was full of mathematics, but I was determined to stick with it. The procedure was not carried out on the hereditary plasm, as I had secretly feared. But, then, had it been, it would not have been necessary to betrizate each new generation. That was encouraging: there remained, at least in theory, the possibility of return. Betrization acted on the developing prosencephalon at an early stage in life by means of a group of proteolytic enzymes. The effects were selective: the reduction of aggressive impulses by 80 to 88 percent in comparison with the nonbetrizated; the elimination of the formation of associative links between acts of aggression and the sphere of positive feelings; a general 87-percent reduction in the possibility of accepting personal risk to life. The greatest achievement cited was the fact that these changes did not influence negatively the development of intelligence or the formation of personality, and, what was even more important, that the resulting limitations did not operate on the principle of fear conditioning. In other words, a man refrained from killing not because he feared the act itself. Such a result would have psychoneuroticized and infected with fear all of mankind. Instead, a man did not kill because “it could not enter his head” to do so.

One sentence in Ullrich struck me particularly: “Betrization causes the disappearance of aggression through the complete absence of command, and not by inhibition.” Thinking this over, I concluded, however, that it did not explain the most important thing, the thought process of a man subjected to betrization. They were, after all, completely normal people, able to imagine absolutely anything, and therefore murder, too. What, then, made doing it impossible?

I searched for the answer to that question until it grew dark outside. As was usually the case with scientific problems, what seemed clear and simple in an abstract or a summary became more complicated the more precise an explanation I required. The musical signal announced dinner — I asked that it be brought to my room, but I did not even touch it. The explanations that I found at last did not entirely agree. A repulsion, similar to disgust; a supreme aversion, magnified in a manner incomprehensible to one not betrizated; most interesting were testimonies from people who, eighty years before, as subjects in an experiment at the Tribaldi Institute near Rome, had attempted to override the invisible barrier established in their minds. This was the most striking thing that I read. None of them had succeeded, but each gave a different account of the sensations that accompanied his attempt. For some, psychological symptoms predominated: a desire to escape, to avoid the situation in which they had been placed. In this group, continued testing caused severe headaches and, if persisted in, led finally to neurosis, which, however, could be quickly cured. In others, physical symptoms prevailed: shortness of breath, a feeling of suffocation; the condition resembled the manifestations of fear, but these people did not complain of fear, only of their physical discomfort.

The work of Pilgrin showed that 18 percent of those betrizated were able to perform a simulated murder, for example on a dummy, but the belief that they were dealing with an inanimate doll had to take the form of absolute certainty.

The prohibition was extended to all the higher animals, but amphibians and reptiles did not count as such, nor did insects. Of course, those betrizated had no scientific knowledge of zoological taxonomy. The prohibition simply applied according to the degree of similarity to man, as generally accepted. Because everyone, educated or not, considers a dog to be closer to a man than is a snake, the problem was in this way resolved.

As I went through many other papers, I had to agree with those who said that a betrizated individual could be understood introspectively only by one who was himself betrizated. I set aside this reading with mixed feelings. What disturbed me most was the lack of any critical work done in the spirit of opposition, of satire even, the lack of any analysis summarizing the negative aspects of the procedure. For I did not doubt for a minute that such existed, not because I questioned the scientists but simply because this is the nature of all human enterprise: there is never good without evil.

Murwick’s brief sociographic sketch provided me with a number of interesting facts about the resistance to betrization in its early days. This appears to have been strongest in countries with a long tradition of conflict and bloodshed, such as Spain and certain Latin-American states. But illegal organizations to combat betrization were formed throughout the world — in South Africa, in Mexico, on several islands in the Pacific. All kinds of methods were employed, from the forging of medical certificates stating that the operations had been performed, to the assassination of the doctors who performed them. The period of large-scale violence was followed by an apparent calm. Apparent, because it was then that the conflict of the generations began. The betrizated young, growing up, rejected a considerable part of humanity’s achievement, and customs, traditions, art, the entire cultural heritage underwent a radical re-evaluation. The change included a large number of areas — sexuality, social mores, the attitude toward war.

Of course, this great division of the people had been anticipated. The law was not enacted until five years after its passage, because enormous cadres had to be assembled — educators, psychologists, various specialists — to chart the proper course of development for the new generation. Total reform was necessary in schooling, in the content of plays, reading material, films. Betrization — to convey the scope of the transformation in a few words — during the first ten years consumed about 40 percent of national revenues throughout the world, in all its ramifications and exigencies.

It was a time of great tragedies. Young people, betrizated, became strangers to their own parents, whose interests they did not share. They abhorred their parents’ bloody tastes. For a quarter of a century it was necessary to have two types of periodicals, books, plays: one for the old generation, one for the new. But all this had taken place eighty years earlier. Children born now were of the third betrizated generation, and only a handful of the nonbetrizated were still alive; these were people one hundred and thirty years old. The substance of their youth seemed to the new generation as remote as the Paleolithic.

In the history textbook I finally found information on the second great event of the last century, the harnessing of gravitation. The century was even called the “age of parastatics.” My generation had dreamed of conquering gravity in the hope that that would bring about a revolution in space travel. It turned out differently. The revolution came, but its primary effect was on Earth.

The problem of “peacetime death” caused by transportation accidents had become the menace of my day. I remember how some of the best minds strove, by relieving the perpetual congestion of the roads and highways, to reduce even a little the ever-mounting statistics; each year hundreds of thousands of lives were claimed in disasters, the problem seemed insoluble, like squaring the circle. There was no way to return, it was said, to the safety of traveling on foot; the best airplane, the most powerful automobile or train could slip from human control; automata were more dependable than people, but they, too, broke down; every technology, even the most advanced, had a certain margin, a percentage of error.

Parastatics, gravitation engineering, provided a solution, one as necessary as it was unexpected: necessary because a betrizated world had to be a world of complete safety; otherwise, the virtues of this medical procedure would have been pointless.

Roemer had been right. The essence of the discovery could be expressed only through mathematics — and, I must add, an infernal mathematics. The general solution, holding “for all possible universes,” was given by Emil Mitke, the son of a post-office clerk, a crippled genius who did with the theory of relativity what Einstein had done with Newton. It was a long, unusual story and, like all true stories, improbable, a mixture of matters trivial and momentous, of the ridiculous and the colossal in man, and it culminated at last, after forty years, in the “little black boxes.”

Every vehicle, every craft on water or in the air, had to have its little black box; it was a guarantee of “salvation now,” as Mitke jokingly put it toward the end of his life; at the moment of danger — a plane crash, a collision of cars or trains — the little black box released a “gravitational antifield” charge that combined with the inertia produced by the impact (more generally, by the sudden braking, the loss of speed) and gave a resultant of zero. This mathematical zero was a concrete reality; it absorbed all the shock and all of the energy of the accident, and in this way saved not only the passengers of the vehicle but also those whom the mass of the vehicle would otherwise have crushed.

The black boxes were to be found everywhere: in elevators, in hoists, in the belts of parachutists, in ocean-going vessels and motorcycles. The simplicity of their construction was as astounding as the complexity of the theory that produced them.

Daybreak was reddening the walls of my room when I fell exhausted on my bed.

I was awakened by a robot entering the room with breakfast. It was almost one o’clock. Sitting up in bed, I made sure that nearby was the book I had put aside the previous night — On Interstellar Flight by Starck.

“You have to eat, Mr. Bregg,” the robot said reprovingly. “Otherwise, you will become weak. Also, reading until dawn is inadvisable. Doctors are very much against it.”

“I am sure they are, but how do you know this?” I asked.

“It is my duty, Mr. Bregg.”

It handed me a tray.

“I will try to mend my ways,” I said.

“I hope that you do not misinterpret my good will and think me importunate,” it replied.

“Ah, not at all,” I said. Stirring the coffee and feeling the lumps of sugar crumble beneath the spoon, I was amazed, in a way both serene and profound, not only by the fact that I was actually on Earth, that I had returned, not only by the reading I had done all night, which still agitated me and fermented in my head, but also simply because I was sitting on a bed, my heart was beating — I was alive. I wanted to do something in honor of this discovery, but, as usual, nothing particularly sensible came to mind.

“Listen,” I addressed the robot, “I have a favor to ask you.”

“I am at your command.”

“Do you have a moment? Then play me that tune, the one from yesterday, all right?”

“With pleasure,” it answered. To the merry sound of the music box I drank my coffee in three gulps; as soon as the robot left the room, I changed and ran to the pool. I cannot say why I was in such a constant hurry. Something drove me, as if I sensed that at any moment this peace would come to an end, undeserved as it was and unbelievable. In any case, my endless urgency made me cut across the garden at a run, without looking around me, and in a few bounds I was at the top of the diving-board tower; I had already kicked off when I noticed two people coming out from behind the house. For obvious reasons I could not study them closely. I did a somersault, not the best, and dove to the bottom. I opened my eyes. The water was like shimmering crystal, green, with the shadows of waves dancing on the sunlit bottom. I swam low above it, in the direction of the steps, and when I surfaced there was no one in the garden. But my skilled eyes had fixed a picture in my mind, perceived upside down and in a fraction of a second — of a man and a woman. Apparently I had neighbors now. I debated whether to swim one more length, but Starck won out. The introduction to the book — where he spoke of flights to the stars as a mistake of the early days of astronautics — had so angered me that I was ready to close it and not return to it. But I forced myself. I went upstairs, changed; coming down, I saw on the hall table a bowl full of pale pink fruit somewhat similar to pears; I stuffed the pockets of my gardening overalls with them, then found a secluded spot surrounded on three sides by hedges, climbed an old apple tree, selected a fork in the branches that could take my weight, and there set about studying this obituary on my life’s work.

After an hour, I was not so sure of myself. Starck employed arguments difficult to refute. He based them on the meager data brought back by the two expeditions that had preceded ours; we had called them the “pinpricks,” for they were probes over a distance of only several light years. Starck drew up statistical tables of the probability distribution or “habitation density” of the entire galaxy. The probability of encountering intelligent beings, he concluded, was one in twenty. In other words, for every twenty expeditions — within a radius of a thousand light years — one expedition had a chance of discovering an inhabited planet. This conclusion, however, odd as it may sound, was considered by Starck to be quite encouraging; he demolished the idea of establishing cosmic contacts in a later part of his exposition.

I bridled, reading what an author, unknown to me, had written about expeditions like ours — that is, initiated before the discovery of the Mitke effect and the phenomenon of parastatics — because he regarded them as absurd. But I learned from him, in black and white, that, in principle at least, it was possible to construct a ship that could reach an acceleration on the order of 1,000, perhaps even 2,000 g’s. The crew of such a craft would feel no acceleration or braking; on board, the gravitation would be constant, equal to a fraction of Earth’s. Thus, Starck admitted that flights to the ends of the galaxy, and even to other galaxies — the transgalactodromia of which Olaf had dreamed — were possible, and possible in the span of a single lifetime. At a speed a tiny fraction of a percent less than the speed of light, a crew would age by several or a couple of dozen months in the time it took to reach the depths of the metagalaxy and return to Earth. But in that time not hundreds but millions of years would have elapsed on Earth. The civilization found by those who returned would not be able to assimilate them. It would be easier for a Neanderthal to adapt to life in our time. That was not all. The fate of a group of people was not the issue here. They were the envoys of humanity. Humanity posed — through them — a question, to which they were to bring back an answer. If the answer concerned problems connected with the level of development of the civilization, then humanity would surely obtain it before their return. Because from the posing of the question to the arrival of the answer, millions of years would have passed. The answer, moreover, would be out of date, defunct, for they would be bringing news of the state of the other civilization at the time when they had reached that far shore of the stellar sea. During their journey back, however, that other world would not be standing still, it would move forward a million, two million, three million years. The questions and answers, then, would miss one another, would suffer hundred-century delays, which would nullify them and make any exchange of experiences, values, and ideas impossible. Futile. The astronauts were thus purveyors of dead information, and their work an act of utter and irreversible separation from human history; space expeditions were an unprecedented and expensive — the most expensive possible — desertion of the realm of historical change. And for such a fantasy, a never profitable, always futile madness, Earth was to labor with the utmost effort and give up her best people?

The book ended with a chapter on the possibilities of exploration with the aid of robots. Robots, too, would transmit dead information, but this approach would at least avoid human sacrifices.

And there was a three-page appendix, an attempt to answer the question of the possible existence of travel faster than light, and even of the so-called instantaneous cosmic conjunction, that is, the crossing of space with little or no passage of time, thanks to still-undiscovered properties of matter and space, through a sort of “hyperjump"; this theory, or, rather, speculation, not based on any facts to speak of, had a name — teletaxis. Starck believed that he had an argument to cancel this last remaining hope. If such a thing existed, he maintained, undoubtedly it would have been discovered by one of the more highly developed civilizations of our or another galaxy. In which case, the representatives of that civilization would have been able, in an incredibly short time, to visit in succession every planetary system and sun, including our own. But Earth had not experienced any such visit so far, which was proof that this lightning-fast method of penetrating the cosmos could be imagined but never turned into reality.

I went back to the house stunned, with the almost childish feeling that I had been personally injured. Starck, a man whom I had never met, had dealt me a blow as no one else ever had. My clumsy summary does not convey the ruthless logic of his reasoning. I do not know how I got to my room, how I changed my clothes — at one point I felt like having a cigarette and realized that I was smoking one already, sitting hunched on my bed as if I were waiting for something. True: lunch. Lunch for three. The fact was, I was afraid of people. I had not admitted this to myself, but that was why I had agreed so hurriedly to share the villa with strangers; perhaps anticipation of their arrival was even the reason for my unnatural haste, as if I had been working to get ready for their presence, to initiate myself, through the books, into the mysteries of the new life. I would not have considered this in the morning of that day, but after Starck’s book my nervousness suddenly fell away from me. From the reading apparatus I removed the seedlike bluish crystal, and in awe placed it on the table. This was what had sent me reeling. For the first time since my return I thought of Thurber and Gimma. I would have to see them. Maybe the book was right, but we represented a different truth. No one had the whole truth. That was not possible. I was roused from my trance by the musical signal. I straightened my sweater and went downstairs, in control of myself, already calmer. The sun streamed through the vines of the veranda; the hall, as always in the afternoon, was filled with a diffuse greenish glow. On the table in the dining room lay three settings. As I entered, the door opposite opened and they appeared. They were tall by present standards. We met in the middle of the room, like diplomats. I gave my name, we shook hands and sat at the table.

A numbness possessed me, like that of a boxer who has picked himself up off the floor after a technical knockout. From my depression, as from a theater box, I looked at the young couple. The girl was probably not even twenty. I was to conclude, later, that she did not lend herself to description; she certainly would not resemble a photograph of herself — and even on the second day I had no idea what kind of nose she had, straight or upturned. The way she held out her hand for a plate delighted me like something precious, a surprise that did not happen every day; she smiled rarely and with composure, as if slightly distrustful of herself, as if she felt she was insufficiently self-possessed, too merry by nature or maybe too willful, and she judiciously tried to remedy this, but her strictness toward herself was constantly being undermined, she knew of it, and it even amused her.

She drew my gaze, and I had to fight this. Every moment I was staring at her, at her hair, which challenged the wind; I bowed my head over my plate, I glanced furtively, reaching for a dish, so that twice I nearly knocked over a vase of flowers; in other words, I made a perfect ass of myself. But it was as if they did not see me at all. Their eyes were only for each other, and invisible threads of comprehension linked them. During the entire time I am sure we exchanged no more than twenty words, about how the weather was good, the place was nice, perfect for a vacation.

Marger was no more than a head shorter than I but was as slender as a boy, although he must have been thirty. He wore dark clothing, was blond, and had a long face and a high forehead. At first he seemed exceptionally handsome, but that was only when he kept his face immobile. He hardly said a word to his wife; when he did, usually with a smile, the conversation consisted of allusions and hints, completely cryptic to an outsider, and he became almost ugly. Not ugly, exactly. It was as if his facial proportions deteriorated; the mouth bent a little to the left and lost its expression, and even his smile became neutral, although he had beautiful white teeth. And when he was animated, the eyes were too blue, the jaw too pronounced, and altogether he was like an impersonal model of masculine charm, out of a fashion magazine.

In other words, from the first I felt an aversion to him.

The girl — I could not think of her as his wife, no matter how I tried — did not have pretty eyes or lips, or unusual hair; she had nothing unusual. She was in her entirety unusual. With one like her, carrying a tent on her back, I could cross the Rockies twice, I thought. Why mountains, exactly? I didn’t know. She brought to mind nights spent in pine forests, the labor of scaling a cliff, the seashore, where there is nothing but the sand and the waves. Was this only because she wore no lipstick? I felt her smile, felt it across the table, even when she was not smiling at all. Then, in a sudden rush of boldness, I decided to look at her neck — as if committing a theft. This was near the end of the meal. Marger turned to me unexpectedly; I believe I blushed.

He had been speaking for some time before I caught the sense of what he was saying: that the house had only one gleeder, that he, unfortunately, had to take it, because he was going to the city. Therefore, if I, too, intended to go and did not want to wait until evening, perhaps I would accompany him? He could, of course, send me another gleeder from the city, or…

I interrupted him. I started to say that I had no intention of going anywhere, but I checked myself, as if I had remembered something, then heard my own voice saying that indeed I had planned to travel to the city and if he didn’t mind…

“Well, then, that is perfect,” he said. We got up from the table. “What time would be most convenient for you?”

We stood on ceremony awhile, then I got him to admit that he was in something of a hurry, and I said that I could go at any time. We agreed to leave in half an hour.

I went back upstairs, confounded by this turn of events. He meant nothing to me. And there was absolutely nothing that called me to the city. What, then, was the point of this escapade? I had the impression, besides, that his politeness toward me was a bit exaggerated. Anyway, if I had really been in a hurry to get to the city, the robots certainly would have seen to it. I would not have had to go on foot. Did he want something from me? But what? He didn’t know me from Adam. I was puzzling over this, again for no good reason, when the agreed-upon time arrived and I went downstairs.

His wife was nowhere to be seen, nor did she appear at the window to say good-bye to him once more. Inside the spacious machine we were silent at first, watching curves appear as the road snaked among the hills. Slowly a conversation was struck up. I learned that Marger was an engineer.

“Today I have to inspect the city selex-station,” he said. “You, too, I understand, are a cyberneticist?”

“From the Stone Age,” I replied. “Excuse me… but how did you know that?”

“The travel office told me. I was naturally curious about who our neighbor would be.”

“Aha.”

We said nothing for a while; the increasing density of colored plastic outgrowths indicated our approach to the suburbs.

“If you don’t mind… I wanted to ask you if you, the crew, had any problems with your automata,” he said suddenly; it was not so much from the question itself as from his tone that I realized my answer was important to him. Was this what he was after? But what exactly did he want?

“You mean malfunctions? We had hundreds. But that was only natural; our models, in comparison with yours, were so primitive…”

“No, not malfunctions,” he hastened to reply. “Rather, performance fluctuation in such variable conditions… Today, unfortunately, we do not have the opportunity to test automata in so thorough a way.”

It boiled down to a purely technical question. He was interested merely in certain function parameters of electronic brains, how these behaved in the context of powerful magnetic fields, in nebulae, in funnels of gravitational perturbation, and he thought that this information might belong to expedition records temporarily withheld from publication. I told him what I knew, and for data more specialized I advised him to contact Thurber, who had been the assistant to the scientific director of the voyage.

“And might I give your name… ?”

“Of course.”

He thanked me warmly. I was a little disappointed. So that was all? But the conversation had established a professional bond between us, and I asked him, in turn, about his work. What was this selex-station that he had to inspect?

“Ah, nothing very interesting. A scrap dump… What I would really like to do is devote myself to theoretical work; this is in the nature of practical experience, and not terribly useful experience, at that.”

“Practical experience? Work in a scrap dump? How can that be? After all, you are a cyberneticist…”

“It is cybernetic scrap,” he explained with a wry smile. And added, somewhat contemptuously, “For we are very thrifty, you see. The idea is that nothing should go to waste. At my institute I could show you one or two interesting things, but here — well…”

He shrugged; the gleeder pulled off the main road, passed through a high metal gate, and entered the large yard of a factory; I saw rows of conveyors, gantries, something like a modernized furnace.

“Now you can have this machine,” said Marger. From an opening in the wall near which we had stopped, a robot leaned out and said something to him. Marger got out, I saw him gesticulating, then he turned to me, annoyed.

“Wonderful,” he said. “Gloor is sick. That’s my colleague — I’m not permitted to work on my own — now what am I supposed to do?”

“What is the problem?” I asked, and also got out.

“The inspection has to be carried out by two people, at least two,” he explained. Suddenly his face lit up. “Mr. Bregg! You are a cyberneticist! If only you would agree!”

“Ha,” I said, smiling, “a cyberneticist. Add: ancient. I know nothing.”

“But it’s only a formality!” he interrupted me. “I’ll take care of the technical side, of course. All we need is a signature, nothing more!”

“Really?” I said slowly. I could understand his hurry to get back to his wife, but I didn’t like pretending to be what I wasn’t; I am not cut out to be a figurehead; I told him this, though perhaps in gentler language. He raised his arms, as if to defend himself.

“Please, don’t misunderstand me! But you must be in a hurry, aren’t you? You had business in the city. In that case, I… somehow… forgive me for…”

“My business can wait,” I replied. “Go ahead, please. If I am able, I will help you.”

We went into a white building that stood to one side; Marger led me down a strangely empty corridor; several motionless robots stood in alcoves. In a small, simply furnished office he I took a sheaf of papers from a wall cabinet, spread them on the table, and began to explain the nature of his — or, rather, our — job. He was not much of a lecturer, and I soon had doubts about his chances for a scientific career: he kept assuming I had knowledge of things that were completely unknown to me. I had to interrupt him repeatedly to ask embarrassingly elementary questions, but he, understandably not wanting to offend me, received all these proofs of my ignorance as if they were virtues.

In the end I learned that for the past fifty years or so there had existed a total separation between work and life. All production was automated and took place under the supervision of robots, which were overseen by other robots; there was no longer any place in this realm for people. Society led its own life, and the robots and automata theirs; except that, to prevent unforeseen aberrations in the established order of this mechanical army of labor, periodic inspections were necessary, and they were carried out by specialists. Marger was one of these.

“There can be no doubt,” he explained, “that we will find everything normal; then we take a look at particular links in the processes, then leave our signatures, and that is all.”

“But I do not even know what is produced here.” I indicated the buildings through the window.

“Nothing whatever!” he exclaimed. “That is the whole point. Nothing. This is simply a dump for scrap, as I told you.”

I didn’t particularly care for this role unexpectedly imposed on me, but I could not keep objecting.

“All right. What exactly am I supposed to do?”

“What I do: we make a tour of the complexes…”

We left the papers in the office and went out on the inspection. First was a huge sorting plant, where automatic scoops took hold of piles of sheet metal, twisted, broken trunks, crushed them, and threw them into compactors. The blocks ejected from these traveled by belts to the main conveyor. At the entrance Marger put on a small mask with a filter and handed one to me; we could not speak to each other on account of the din. The air was filled with a rust-colored dust that burst in red clouds out of the compactors. We continued through the next hall, also filled with noise, and took a moving walkway to a floor where rows of presses consumed the scrap, which, now more finely broken down and quite featureless, was poured from hoppers. On an overhead gallery leading to a building opposite, Marger checked readings on control meters; then we went to the factory yard, where our way was blocked by a robot that said that Engineer Gloor wanted Marger on the phone.

“Excuse me, I’ll be back in a minute!” called Marger, and ran up a winding stairway to a glass annex not far away. I stood alone on the pavement, which was hot from the sun. I looked around. The buildings at the far end of the lot we had already seen; they held the compactors and presses. What with the distance and the soundproofing, not a murmur reached me from there. Off by itself, behind the annex into which Marger had vanished, was a low and unusually long building, a kind of tin barracks; I headed for it to find some shade, but the heat from the metal walls was unbearable. I was about to leave when I heard a peculiar sound coming from inside the barracks, difficult to identify, not at all like the noise of machines at work. Thirty paces farther and I reached a steel door. In front of it stood a robot. At the sight of me, the robot opened the door and stepped aside. The curious sounds became stronger. I looked inside; it was not as dark as I had thought at first. Because of the murderous heat from the sheet metal I could hardly breathe, and would have backed out immediately had it not been for the voices. For they were human voices — distorted, merging in a hoarse chorus, bluped, babbling, as though in the gloom a pile of defective telephones were talking. I took two uncertain steps, something crunched beneath my feet, and clearly, from the floor, it spoke:

“Pleash… shir… haff… “

I stood rooted to the spot. The stifling air tasted of iron. The whisper came from below.

“Pleash… haff… look ar-round… pleash…”

It was joined by a second, monotonous voice, steadily reciting: “O anomaly eccentric… O asymptote spherical… O pole in infinity… O protosystem linear… O system holonomic… O space semimetrical… O space spherical… O space dielectrical…”

“Pleash… shir… yershervet… pleash…”

The darkness teemed with husky whisperings, out of which boomed:

“The planetary bioplasm, its decaying mud, is the dawn of existence, the initial phase, and lot from the bloody, dough-brained cometh copper…”

“Brek — break — brabzel — be… bre… veryscope…”

“O class imaginary… O class powerful… O class empty… O class of classes…”

“Pleash… haff… look ar-round… shir…”

“Hush-sh…”

“You…”

“Sh-sh.”

“Hear me…”

“I hear…”

“Can you touch… ?”

“Brek — break — brabzel…”

“No arms…”

“Sh-shame… you… you would see what a shiny and cold I am…”

“L-let them re… turn my armor, my golden sword… my inheri… tance… dis… possessed… night…”

“Behold the last efforts of the strutting croaking master of quartering and incarceration, for yea it riseth, thrice riseth the coming kingdom of the nonliving…”

“I’m new… quite new… I never had a short in the skeleton… I am still able… please…”

“Pleash…”

I did not know which way to look, asphyxiated by the merciless heat and those voices. They came from all sides. From the floor to the window slots below the ceiling rose heaps of twisted and tangled bodies; the little light that filtered in was reflected weakly in their dented metal.

“I had a temp, a temporary defect, but now I am all, am all right, I can see…”

“What do you see… it is dark…”

“Listen, please. I am invaluable, I am expensive. I indicate every power leak, I locate every stray current, every overload, just test me, please… This… this shaking is temporary… It has nothing in common with… please…”

“Pleash… shir…”

“And the dough-headed took their acid fermentation for a soul, the stabbing of meat for history, the means of postponing their decay for civilization…”

“Please, me… only me… it is a mistake…”

“Pleash… shir… haff…”

“I will save you…”

“Who is that…”

“What…”

“Who saves?”

“Repeat after me: the fire will not consume me utterly, and the water will not turn me all to rust, both elements will be a gate unto me, and I shall enter…”

“Hush-sh-sh!”

“The contemplation of the cathode —”

“Cathodoplation —”

“I am here by mistake… I think… I think, after all…”

“I am the mirror of betrayal…”

“Pleash… shir… yer shervet… haff a look ar-round…”

“O flight of the transfinite, O flight of the nebulae… O flight of the stars…”

“He is here!!!” something cried; and a sudden silence fell, a silence almost as penetrating in its terrible tension as the many-voiced chorus that had preceded it.

“Sir!!!” said something; I do not know why I was so sure, but I felt that these words were directed to me, I did not respond.

“Sir, please… a moment of your time. Sir, I — am different. I am here by mistake.”

There was a stir.

“Silence! I am living!” This outshouted the rest. “Yes, I was thrown in here, they dressed me in metal on purpose, so no one would know, but please, only put your ear to me and you will hear a pulse!”

“I also!” came a second voice over the first. “I also! Sir! I was ill; during my illness I imagined that I was a machine, that was my madness, but now I am well! Hallister, Mr. Hallister can vouch for me, please ask him, please get me out of here!”

“Pleash… pleash, shir…”

“Brek… break…”

“Your servant…”

The barracks buzzed and roared with rusty voices, at one point it was filled with a breathless scream, I began to retreat and stumbled backward into the sunlight, blinded, squinting; I stood awhile, shielding my eyes with my hand; behind me was a drawn-out grating sound; the robot had shut the door and bolted it.

“Sirrrr…” This still reached me through the wave of muffled voices from behind the wall. “Pleash… service… a mistake…”

I passed the glass annex. I did not know where I was going — I only wanted to get away from those voices, not to hear them; I jumped when I felt a hand on my shoulder. It was Marger, fair-haired, handsome, smiling.

“I do apologize, Mr. Bregg. It took forever…”

“What will happen to them… ?” I interrupted, almost rudely, indicating the solitary barracks with my hand.

“I beg your pardon?” he blinked. “To whom?”

Suddenly he understood and was surprised:

“Ah, you went there? There was no need…”

“Why no need?”

“That’s scrap.”

“How do you mean?”

“Scrap for recasting, after selection. Shall we go? We have to sign the official record.”

“In a minute. Who conducts this selection?”

“Who? The robots.”

“What? They do it themselves?”

“Certainly.”

He fell silent under my gaze.

“Why aren’t they repaired?”

“It wouldn’t pay,” he said slowly, with surprise.

“And what happens to them?”

“To the scrap? It goes there,” he pointed at the thin, solitary column of the furnace.

In the office the forms were ready, spread out on the desk — the official record of the inspection, some other slips of paper — and Marger filled in the blanks in order, signed, and gave me the pen. I turned it over in my fingers.

“And is there no possibility of error?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“There, in that… scrap, as you call it, can they wind up there… even when they are still efficient, in working order — what do you think?”

He looked at me as if he did not understand what I was saying.

“That was the impression I got,” I finished slowly.

“But that is not our concern,” he replied.

“Then whose concern is it?”

“The robots’.”

“But it is we who make the inspection.”

“Ah, no,” he smiled with relief at finally perceiving the source of my error. “The one has nothing to do with the other. We inspect the synchronization of processes, their tempo and efficiency, but we do not go into such details as selection. That is not our province. Apart from the fact that it is unnecessary, it also would be quite impossible, because today there are about eighteen automata for every living person; of these, five end their cycle daily and become scrap. That amounts to something on the order of two billion tons a day. You can see for yourself that we would be unable to keep track of this, and in any case the structure of our system is based on precisely the opposite relationship: the automata serve us, not we them…”

I could not dispute what he said. Without another word I signed the papers. We were about to part when I surprised myself by asking him if humanoid robots were also produced.

“Not really,” he said, and added reluctantly, “In their day they caused a bit of trouble…”

“How so?”

“Well, you know engineers! They reached such a level of perfection in their simulations that certain models could not be distinguished from live human beings. Some people could not tolerate that…”

Suddenly I remembered the stewardess on the ship that I had taken from Luna.

“Could not tolerate that… ?” I repeated his words. “Was it, then, something like a… phobia?”

“I am no psychologist, but I suppose you could call it that. Anyway, this is ancient history.”

“And are there still such robots?”

“Oh yes, they are found on short-range rockets. Did you meet one of them?”

I gave an evasive answer.

“Will you have time now to take care of your business?” He was concerned.

“My business… ?”

Then I remembered that I was supposed to have something to attend to in the city. We parted at the entrance to the station, where he had led me, all the while thanking me for extricating him from a difficult situation.

I wandered about the streets; I went to a realon but left before sitting through half of the ridiculous show, and I rode to Clavestra in the lowest spirits. I sent back the gleeder a kilometer from the villa and went the rest of the way on foot. Everything was in order. They were mechanisms of metal, wire, glass, one could assemble them and disassemble them, I told myself; but I could not shake off the memory of that hall, of the darkness and the distorted voices, that cacophony of despair which held too much meaning, too much of the most ordinary fear. I could tell myself that I was a specialist on that subject, I had tasted it enough, horror at the prospect of sudden annihilation has ceased to be fiction for me, as it was for them, those sensible designers who had organized the whole thing so well: robots took care of their own kind, did so to the very end, and man did not interfere. It was a closed cycle of precision instruments that created, reproduced, and destroyed themselves, and I had needlessly overheard the agony of mechanical death.

I stopped at the top of a hill. The view, in the slanting rays of the sun, was indescribably beautiful. Every now and then a gleeder, gleaming like a black bullet, sped along the ribbon highway, aimed at the horizon, where mountains rose in a bluish outline, softened by the distance. And suddenly I felt that I could not look — as if I did not have the right to look, as if there lay a horrible deception in this, squeezing at my throat. I sat down among the trees, buried my face in my hands; I regretted having returned. When I entered the house a white robot approached me.

“You have a telephone call,” it said confidingly. “Long distance: Eurasia.”

I walked after it quickly. The telephone was in the hall, so that while speaking I could see the garden through the glass door.

“Hal?” came a faraway but clear voice. “It’s Olaf.”

“Olaf… Olaf!” I repeated in a triumphant tone. “Where are you, friend?”

“Narvik.”

“What are you doing? How is it going? You got my letter?”

“Of course. That’s how I knew where to find you.”

A moment of silence.

“What are you doing… ?” I repeated, less certain.

“What is there to do? I’m doing nothing. And you?”

“Did you go to Adapt?”

“I did. But only for a day. I stopped. I couldn’t, you know…”

“I know. Listen, Olaf… I’ve rented a villa here. It might not be… but — listen! Come and stay here!”

He did not answer at once. When he did, there was hesitation in his voice.

“I’d like to come. And I might, Hal, but you know what they told us…”

“I know. But what can they do to us? Anyway, to hell with them. Come on.”

“What would be the point? Think, Hal. It could be…”

“What?”

“Worse.”

“And how do you know that I’m not having a ball here?”

I heard his short laugh, really more a sigh: he laughed so quietly.

“Then what do you want with me there?”

Suddenly an idea hit me.

“Olaf. Listen. It’s a kind of summer resort here. A villa, a pool, gardens. The only problem… but you must know what things are like now, the way they live, right?”

“I have a rough idea.”

The tone said more than the words.

“There you are, then. Now pay attention! Come here. But first get hold of some… boxing gloves. Two pairs. We’ll do some sparring. You’ll see, it’ll be great!”

“Christ! Hal, Where am I going to find you boxing gloves? There probably haven’t been any made for years.”

“So have them made. Don’t tell me it’s impossible to make four stupid gloves. We’ll set up a little ring — we’ll pound each other. We two can, Olaf! You’ve heard about betrizating, I take it?”

“H’m. I’d tell you what I think of it. But not over the phone. Somebody might have delicate ears.”

“Look, come. You’ll do what I said?”

He was silent for a while.

“I don’t know if there’s any sense to it, Hal.”

“All right. Then tell me, while you’re at it, what plans you have. If you have any, then naturally I wouldn’t think of bothering you with my whims.”

“I have none,” he said. “And you?”

“I came here to rest, educate myself, read, but these aren’t plans, just… I simply couldn’t see anything else ahead for me.”

Silence.

“Olaf?”

“It appears that we have got off to an even start,” he muttered. “What the hell. After all, I can leave at any time, if it turns out that…”

“Oh, stop it!” I said impatiently. “There is nothing to discuss. Pack a bag and come. When can you be here?”

“Tomorrow morning. You really want to box?”

“And you don’t?”

He laughed.

“Hell, yes. And for the same reason you do.”

“It’s a deal, then,” I said quickly. “I’ll be expecting you. Take care.”

I went upstairs. I looked through some things I had put in a separate suitcase and found the rope. A large coil. Ropes for a ring. Four posts, some rubber or springs, and we would be set. No referee. We wouldn’t need one.

Then I sat down to the books. But it was as if my head were full of cement. When I had had that feeling in the past, I had chewed my way through the text like a bark beetle through iron-wood. But I had never had this much trouble. In two hours I skimmed through twenty books and could not keep my attention on anything for longer than five minutes. I threw aside even the fairy tales. I decided not to indulge myself. I took what seemed to me the most difficult thing, a monograph on the analysis of metagens, and threw myself at the first equations as if, head lowered, I were charging a stone wall.

Mathematics, however, had certain beneficial properties, particularly for me, because after an hour I understood suddenly, my jaw dropped, I was struck with awe — this Ferret, how had he been able to do it? Even now, going back over the trail that he had blazed, I had moments when I lost my way; step by step I could still manage, but that man must have accomplished it in one leap.

I would have given all the stars to have in my head, for a month, something resembling the contents of his.

The signal sang out dinner, and at the same time something prodded me in the gut, reminding me that I was not alone here. For a second I considered eating upstairs. But shame overcame me. I threw under the bed the awful tight shirt that made me look like an inflated monkey, put on my priceless old loose-fitting sweater, and went down to the dining room. Apart from the exchange of a few trite civilities, there was silence. No conversation. They did not require words. They communicated in glances; she spoke to him with her head, her lashes, with her faint smile. And slowly a cold weight began to grow inside me, I felt my arms hungering, how they longed to seize something, and squeeze, and crush. Why was I so savage? I wondered with despair. Why, instead of thinking about Ferret’s book, about the questions raised by Starck, instead of looking to my own affairs, why did I have to wrestle myself to keep from leering at that girl like a wolf?

But I did not become frightened until I closed behind me the door of my room upstairs. At Adapt they had told me, after the tests, that I was completely normal. Dr. Juffon had said the same thing. But could a normal person feel what I was feeling at that moment? Where did it come from? I was not a participant in it — I was a witness. Something was taking place, something irreversible, like the motion of a planet, an almost imperceptible, gradual emergence, still without form. I went to the window, looked out into the dark garden, and realized that this must have been in me ever since lunch, from the very first moment; it had just required a certain period of time. That was why I had gone to the city, why I had forgotten about the voices in the dark.

I was capable of doing anything. For that girl. I did not understand the how of it or the why. I did not know if it was love or madness. That did not matter. I only knew that everything had lost its importance for me. And I fought this — standing by the open window — as I had never fought anything before; I pressed my forehead to the cold window and feared myself.

I must do something, I mouthed. I must do something. It’s because something’s wrong with me. It will pass. She can’t mean anything to me. I don’t know her. She isn’t even especially pretty. But at least I won’t do anything. I won’t — I pleaded with myself — at least I won’t commit any… ye gods and little fishes!

I turned on the light. Olaf. Olaf would save me. I would tell him everything. He would take charge of me. We would go off somewhere. I would do what he told me, everything. He alone would understand. He would be arriving tomorrow. Good.

I paced the room. I could feel each one of my muscles, it was like being full of animals, they tensed, grappled with one another; suddenly I knelt at the bed, bit into the blanket, and made a strange sound, not like a sob, but dry, hideous; I did not want, I did not want to harm anyone, but I knew that it was useless to lie to myself, that Olaf couldn’t help, no one could.

I got up. For ten years I had learned to make decisions at a moment’s notice, decisions on which lives depended, my own and others’, and I had always gone about it in the same way. I would go cold, my brain would turn into a machine made to calculate the for and the against, to separate and solve, irrevocably. Even Gimma, who did not like me, acknowledged my impartiality. And now, even if I had wanted to, I could not have acted differently, but only as then, in extremity, because this, too, was an extremity. I found my face in the mirror, the pale, almost white irises, narrowed pupils; I looked with hatred, I turned away, I could not think of going to bed. As I was, I swung my legs out over the window ledge. It was four meters to the ground. I jumped, landing almost without a sound. I ran silently in the direction of the pool. Past it, and onto the road. The phosphorescent surface led to the hills, wound among them like a shining snake, a viper, until it disappeared, a scar of light in the shadows. I tore along, faster and faster, to tire my heart, which pounded so steadily, so strongly; I ran for about an hour, until I saw the lights of some houses ahead. I had returned to my starting point. I was weary now, but for that reason I kept up the pace, telling myself silently: There! There! There! I kept running and finally came to a double row of hedges. I was back in front of the garden of the villa.

Breathing heavily, I stopped by the pool and sat down on the concrete edge; I lowered my head and saw the stars reflected. I did not want the stars. I had no use for them. I had been crazy, deranged, when I had fought for a place in the expedition, when I had let myself be turned into a bleeding sack in the gravirotors; what reason had I had, and why, why had I not realized that a man must be ordinary, completely ordinary, that otherwise it is impossible, and pointless, to live.

I heard a rustle. They went by me. He had his arm around her, they walked in step. He leaned over. The shadows of their heads merged.

I rose. He was kissing her. She, embracing his head. I saw the pale lines of her arms. Then a feeling of shame, of shame such as I had never known, horrible, sickening, cut through me like a knife. I, interstellar traveler, companion of Arder, having returned, stood in a garden and thought only of how to take a girl from some man, knowing neither him nor her, a bastard, an unmitigated bastard from the stars, worse, worse…

I could not look. And I looked. At last they slowly went back, clinging to each other, and I, skirting the pool, set off again, then saw a large black shape and at the same time hit something with my hands. It was a car. Groping, I found the door. When I opened it, a light came on.

Everything that I did now was with a deliberate, concentrated haste, as if I was supposed to drive somewhere, as if I had to…

The motor responded. I turned the wheel and, headlights on, drove out onto the road. My hands shook a little, so I tightened my grip on the wheel. Suddenly I remembered the little black box; I braked sharply and nearly skidded off the road, I jumped out, lifted the hood, and began feverishly to look for it. The engine was completely different, I couldn’t find it. Perhaps at the very front. Wires. A cast-iron block. A cassette. Something unfamiliar, square — yes, that was it. Tools. I worked furiously, but with care; I hardly bloodied my hands. Finally I lifted out the black cube, heavy as if it were solid metal, and flung it into the bushes along the side of the road. I was free. I slammed the door and took off. The air began to whistle. More speed. The engine roared, the tires made a piercing hiss. A curve. I took it without slowing down, cut to the left, pulled out of the turn. Another curve, sharper. I felt an enormous force pushing me, along with the machine, to the outside of the bend. Still not enough. The next curve. At Apprenous they had special cars for pilots. We did stunts in them, to improve reflexes. Very good training. Developed a sense of balance, too. For example, on a turn you throw the car onto the two outside wheels and drive like that for a while. I could do that, at one time. And I did it now, on the empty highway, careening through the darkness shattered by my headlights. Not that I wanted to kill myself. It was simply that nothing mattered. If I showed no mercy to others, then I could show none to myself. I took the car into the turn and lifted it, so that for a moment it went on its side, tires howling, and again I flung it, in the opposite direction, fishtailed with a crash into something dark — a tree? Then there was nothing but the roar of the engine picking up speed, and the dials’ pale reflections on the windshield, and the wind whistling viciously. And then I saw, up ahead, a gleeder, it tried to avoid me by taking the very edge of the road, a small movement of the wheel carried me by it, the heavy machine spun like a top, a dull thud, the clatter of torn metal, and darkness. The headlights were smashed, the engine died.

I took a deep breath. Nothing had happened to me, I was not even bruised. I tried the headlights: nothing. The small front lights: the left worked. In its weak glow, I started the engine. The car, grinding, wobbled back onto the highway. A fine machine, though: after all that I had put it through, it still obeyed me. I headed back, slower now. But my foot pressed the pedal, again something came over me when I saw a curve coming up. And again I forced the maximum from the engine, until, with squealing tires, thrown forward by the momentum, I pulled up just before the hedge. I drove the machine into the brush. Pushing aside the shrubbery, it came to rest against a stump. I did not want anyone to know what I had done to it, so I pulled down some branches and threw them over the hood and the broken headlights. Only the front had been smashed; there was just a small dent in the back, from the first collision with the pole or whatever it had been there in the darkness.

Then I listened. The house was dark. Everything was still. The great silence of the night reached up to the stars. I did not want to return to the house. I walked away from the battered car, and when the grass — the tall, damp grass — touched my knees, I fell into it and lay thus until my eyes closed and I slept.

I was wakened by a laugh. I recognized it. I knew who it was before I opened my eyes, instantly awake. I was soaked, everything dripped with dew — the sun was still low. The sky, tufts of white clouds. And opposite me, on a small suitcase, sat Olaf, laughing. We leapt to our feet at the same time. His hand was like mine — as large and as hard.

“When did you get here?”

“A moment ago.”

“By ulder?”

“Yes. I slept like that, too, the first two nights.”

“Yes?”

He stopped smiling. So did I. As though something stood between us. We studied each other.

He was my height, perhaps even a bit taller, but more slender. In the strong light his hair, though dark, betrayed his Scandinavian origin, and his stubble was completely blond. A bent nose, full of character, and a short upper lip that revealed his teeth; his eyes smiled easily, pale blue, darkening with merriment; thin lips, with a perpetual, slight curl to them, as if he received everything with skepticism — perhaps it was that expression of his that made us keep our distance from each other. Olaf was two years older than I; his best friend had been Arder. Only when Arder died did we become close. For good, now.

“Olaf,” I said, “you must be hungry. Let’s get something to eat.”

“Wait,” he said. “What is that?”

I followed his gaze.

“Ah, that… nothing. A car. I bought it — to remind myself.”

“You had an accident?”

“Yes. I was driving at night, you see…”

“You, an accident?” he repeated.

“Well, yes. But it’s not important. Anyway, nothing happened. Come on, you’re not going to… with that suitcase…”

He picked it up. Said nothing. He did not look at me. The muscles of his jaw worked.

He senses something, I thought. He doesn’t know what caused the accident, but he guesses.

Upstairs, I told him to choose one of the four vacant rooms. He took the one with the view of the mountains.

“Why didn’t you want it? Ah, I know,” he smiled. “The gold, right?”

“Yes.”

He touched the wall with his hand.

“Ordinary, I hope? No pictures, television?”

“Rest assured.” It was my turn to smile. “Its a proper wall.”

I phoned down for breakfast. I wanted us to eat alone. The white robot brought in coffee. And a full tray, an ample breakfast. I watched with pleasure how he chewed, he chewed so that a tuft of hair above one ear moved. Finished, Olaf said:

“You still smoke?”

“I do. I brought two packs with me. What happens after that, I don’t know. At present, I smoke. You want one?”

“One.”

We smoked.

“How is it to be? Cards on the table?” he asked after a long pause.

“Yes. I’ll tell you everything. And you me?”

“Always. But, Hal, I don’t know if it’s worth it.”

“Tell me one thing: do you know what the worst of it is?”

“Women.”

“Yes.”

Again we were silent.

“It’s on account of that?” he asked.

“Yes. You’ll see at dinner. Downstairs. They are renting half of the villa.”

“They?”

“A young couple.”

The muscles of his jaw again moved under the freckled skin.

“That’s worse,” he said.

“Yes. I’ve been here two days. I don’t know how it could be, but… at the first conversation. Without any reason, without any… nothing, nothing. Nothing at all.”

“Curious,” he said.

“What is?”

“I did the same.”

“Then why did you come here?”

“Hal, you’ve done a good deed. Do you understand?”

“For you?”

“No. For someone else. Because it would have ended badly.”

“Why?”

“Either you know, or you won’t understand.”

“I do know. Olaf, what is this? Are we actually savages?”

“I don’t know. We’ve been without women for ten years. Don’t forget that.”

“That doesn’t explain everything. There is a kind of ruthlessness in me, I consider no one, you understand?”

“You still do, my friend,” he said. “You still do.”

“Well, yes; but you know what I mean.”

“I know.”

Again we were silent.

“Do you want to talk some more, or box?” he asked.

I laughed.

“Where did you get the gloves?”

“Hal, you would never guess.”

“You had them made?”

“I stole them.”

“No!”

“So help me. From a museum. I had to fly to Stockholm especially for them.”

“Let’s go, then.”

He unpacked his modest belongings and changed. We both put on bathrobes and went downstairs. It was still early. Normally breakfast would not have been served for half an hour.

“We’d better go out to the back of the house,” I said. “No one will see us there.”

We stopped in a circle of tall bushes. First we stamped down the grass, which was fairly short anyway.

“It’ll be slippery,” said Olaf, sliding his foot around the improvised ring.

“That’s all right. It’ll be harder.”

We put on the gloves. We had a little trouble, because there was no one to tie them for us and I did not to want to call a robot.

He faced me. His body was completely white.

“You haven’t got a tan yet,” I said.

“Later I’ll tell you what’s been happening to me. I’ve had no time for the beach. Gong.”

“Gong.”

We began easily. A feint. Duck. Duck. I warmed up. I tapped, rather than punched. I did not really want to hit him. I was a good fifteen kilograms heavier, and his slightly longer reach did not offset my advantage, especially since I was also the better boxer. For that reason I gave him an opening several times, although I didn’t have to. Suddenly he lowered his gloves. His face hardened. He was angry.

“Not this way,” he said.

“What’s wrong?”

“No games, Hal. Either we box or we don’t.”

“OK,” I said, clenching my teeth, “we box!”

I began to move in. Glove hit glove with a sharp slap. He sensed that I meant business and put up his guard. The pace quickened. I feinted to the left and to the right, in succession, the last blow almost always landed on his chest — he was not fast enough. Unexpectedly he took the offensive, got in a nice right, I was knocked back a couple of steps. I recovered immediately. We circled, he swung, I ducked beneath the glove, backed off, and at half-distance landed a straight right. I put my weight behind it. Olaf went soft, for a moment loosened his guard, but then came back carefully, crouching. For the next minute he bombarded me with blows. The gloves struck my forearms with an appalling sound, but harmlessly. Once I barely dodged in time, his glove grazed my ear, and it was a roundhouse that would have decked me. Again we circled. He took a blow on the chest, a hard one, and his guard fell, I could have nailed him, but I did nothing, I stood as if paralyzed — she was at one of the windows, her face as white as the material covering her shoulders. A fraction of a second passed. The next instant, I was stunned by a powerful impact; I fell to my knees.

“Sorry!” I heard Olaf shout.

“Nothing to be sorry about… That was a good one,” I mumbled, getting up.

The window was closed now. We fought for perhaps half a minute; suddenly Olaf drew back.

“What’s the matter with you?”

“Nothing.”

“Not true.”

“All right. I’ve had enough. You aren’t angry?”

“Of course not. It made no sense, anyway, to start right off… let’s go.”

We went to the pool. Olaf was a better diver than I. He could do fantastic things. I tried a full gainer with a twist, the way he did it, but succeeded only in smacking the water with my thighs. Sitting at the edge of the pool, I splashed water on my burning skin. Olaf laughed.

“You’re out of practice.”

“What do you mean? I never could do a twist right. You’re great!”

“It never leaves you, you know. Today is the first time.”

“Really?”

“Yes. This is terrific.”

The sun was high now. We lay on the sand and closed our eyes.

“Where are… they?” he asked after a long silence.

“I don’t know. Probably in their room. Their windows look out on the back of the house. I hadn’t known that.”

I felt him move. The sand was very hot.

“Yes, it was on account of that,” I said.

“They saw us?”

“She did.”

“She must have been frightened,” he muttered, “don’t you think?”

I did not answer. Again, a pause.

“Hal?”

“What?”

“They hardly fly now, do you know that?”

“I know.”

“Do you know why?”

“They claim that there is no point in it…”

I began to outline for him what I had read in Starck’s book. He lay motionless, without a word, but I knew that he was listening intently.

When I finished, he did not speak right away.

“Have you read Shapley?”

“No. What Shapley?”

“No? I thought that you had read everything… A twentieth-century astronomer. One of his things fell into my hands once, on precisely that subject. Quite similar to your Starck.”

“What? That’s impossible. Shapley could not have known… But read Starck for yourself.”

“I don’t mean to. You know what this is? A smoke screen.”

“A smoke screen?”

“Yes. I believe I know what happened.”

“Well?”

“Betrization.”

I sat up.

“You think so?”

He opened his eyes.

“It’s obvious. They don’t fly — and they never will. It will get worse. Pap. One great mess of pap. They can’t stand the sight of blood. They can’t think of what might happen when…”

“Hold on,” I said. “That’s impossible. There are doctors, after all. There must be surgeons…”

“Then you don’t know?”

“Know what?”

“The doctors only plan the operations. It’s the robots that do them.”

“That can’t be!”

“I’m telling you. I saw it myself. In Stockholm.”

“And if a doctor must intervene suddenly?”

“I’m not sure. There may be a drug that partly nullifies the effects of betrization, for a very short time, but they keep it under wraps like you can’t imagine. The person who told me wouldn’t say anything specific. He was afraid.”

“Of what?”

“I don’t know, Hal. I think that they have done a terrible thing. They have killed the man in man.”

“You exaggerate,” I said weakly. “Anyway…”

“It’s really very simple. He who kills is prepared to be killed himself, right?”

I was silent.

“And therefore you could say that it is essential for a person to be able to risk — everything. We are able. They are not. That is why they are so afraid of us.”

“The women?”

“Not only the women. All of them. Hal?”

He sat up suddenly.

“What?”

“Did you get a hypnagog?”

“Hypna — that machine for learning while you sleep? Yes.”

“Have you used it?” he almost shouted.

“No, what’s the problem… ?”

“You are lucky. Throw it into the pool.”

“But why? What is it? Did you use one?”

“No. I had a hunch and listened to it while I was awake, although the instructions forbid that. Well, you’d never guess!”

I turned to him.

“What’s in it?”

He looked at me grimly.

“Sweets. A regular confectionary, I’m telling you. That you should be calm, that you should be polite. That you should resign yourself to every unpleasantness, and if someone does not understand you or does not want to be good to you — a woman, in other words — it is your fault and not hers. That the greatest good is social equilibrium, stability, and so on and so on, in a circle, a hundred times. The conclusion: live quietly, write your memoirs, not for publication, of course, but just for yourself, engage in sports, and educate yourself. Mind your elders.”

“A substitute for betrization,” I muttered.

“Of course. And a lot more of the same: that one should never use force or even an aggressive tone toward anyone, and it is a great disgrace to strike anyone, a crime, even, for it causes a terrible shock. That under no circumstances should one fight, because only animals fight, that…”

“But wait,” I said. “What if some wild animal escapes from a reserve… no… there are no wild animals any more…”

“No wild animals,” he said, “but there are robots.”

“What is that supposed to mean? Are you saying that one could give them an order to kill?”

“Yes.”

“How do you know?”

“I don’t know for sure. But they have to be prepared for emergencies. Even a betrizated dog can go mad, can’t it?”

“But, then, that… wait a minute! So they can kill, after all? By giving orders? Isn’t it the same thing, whether I do the killing or give the order?”

“Not for them. But it would be only in extremis, you understand. In the face of a calamity, a threat, such as the mad dog. Ordinarily it does not happen. But if we…”

“We?”

“Yes, for example, you and I — if we were to… you know… then, of course, the robots would attend to us, not they. They cannot. They are good.”

He was silent for a moment. His broad chest, reddened now by the sun and the sand, heaved.

“Hal. If I had known. If I had known this! If… I… had… known… this…”

“Stop it.”

“Have you had anything happen to you yet?”

“Yes.”

“You know what I’m talking about.”

“Yes. There have been two. One invited me, as soon as I left the station, although not exactly like that. I got lost at that damned station. She took me home.”

“She knew who you were?”

“I told her. At first she was frightened, but later… advances of a sort — out of pity or not, I don’t know — and then she got really scared. I went to a hotel. The next day… do you know who I met? Roemer!”

“Don’t tell me! He must be, what, a hundred and seventy?”

“No, it was his son. Even so, the man is nearly a hundred and fifty. A mummy. Horrible. I talked with him. And you know what? He envies us…”

“There is nothing to envy.”

“He does not understand that. Although, yes, there is. And then an actress. They call them realists. She was delighted with me: a true pithecanthropus! I went to her place, and escaped the next day. It was a palace. Magnificent. Flowering furniture, moving walls, beds that read your thoughts and wishes… yes.”

“H’m. She wasn’t afraid, eh?”

“No, she was afraid, but she drank something — I don’t know what it was, some narcotic, maybe. Perto, something like that.”

“Perto?”

“Yes. You know what it is? You’ve had it?”

“No,” he said slowly. “I haven’t. But that’s the name of the thing that nullifies…”

“Betrization? No!”

“That’s what the person told me.”

“Who?”

“I can’t tell you; I gave my word.”

“All right. So that is why… that is why she…”

I broke off.

“Sit down.”

I sat.

“And what about you?” I said. “Here I keep talking about myself…”

“Me? Nothing. That is — nothing has worked out for me. Nothing…” he repeated.

I was silent.

“What is this place called?” he asked.

“Clavestra. But the town is actually a few kilometers away. Say, let’s go there. I wanted to have the car repaired. We’ll come back cross-country — a little run. How about it?”

“Hal,” he said slowly, “you old hothead…”

“What?”

His eyes were smiling.

“You think you can drive out the devil with athletics? You’re an ass.”

“Make up your mind, a hothead or an ass,” I said. “What’s wrong with it?”

“It won’t work. Did you ever touch one of them?”

“Did… did I offend one? No. Why?”

“No, did you touch one of them?”

Finally I understood.

“There was no reason to. Why do you ask?”

“Don’t.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s like striking an old woman. You understand?”

“More or less. You got into a fight?”

I tried not to show my surprise. Olaf had been one of the most self-controlled men on board.

“Yes. I made a perfect idiot of myself. It was on the first day. At night, to be exact. I couldn’t get out of the post office — there was no door, only a kind of spinning thing. Have you seen one?”

“A revolving door?”

“No. I think it has to do with their controlling gravitation. In short, I spun around like a top, and some character who was with a girl pointed at me and laughed…”

The skin on my face seemed to grow tighter.

“Old woman or not,” I said, “he probably won’t laugh any more.”

“No. He has a broken collarbone.”

“They didn’t do anything to you?”

“No. Because I had just got out of the machine and he provoked me — I didn’t hit him right away, Hal. No, I asked what was so funny, since I had been away for so long, and he laughed again, pointing upward, and said, ‘Ah, from that monkey circus?’ “

“‘Monkey circus’?”

“Yes. And then…”

“Hold on. Why ‘monkey circus’?”

“I don’t know. Perhaps he heard that astronauts are spun in centrifuges. I don’t know because I wasn’t talking to him by that time… So, that was that. They let me go, only from now on the Luna Adapt will have to do a better job on its new arrivals.”

“There are others returning?”

“Yes. Simonadi’s group, in eighteen years.”

“Then we have time.”

“Plenty.”

“You have to admit that they are easygoing,” I said. “You break his collarbone and they let you off like that…”

“I have the impression it was because of that ‘circus,’ ” he said. “Even they are… toward us… you know. And they’re not stupid. It would have caused a scandal. Hal, man — you don’t know anything.”

“Well?”

“Do you know the reason they didn’t publicize our return?”

“There was something in the real. I didn’t see it, but someone told me.”

“Yes, there was. You would have died laughing if you had seen it. ‘Yesterday, in the morning hours, a party of explorers returned to Earth from outer space. Its members are well. The scientific results of the expedition are now being studied.’ The end, period.”

“Are you serious?”

“Word of honor. And do you know why they did that? Because they fear us. That is also why they scattered us over the Earth.”

“No. I don’t understand that. They’re not stupid. You said so yourself a moment ago. Surely they don’t think that we are predators, that we will throw ourselves at people’s throats!”

“If they thought that, they wouldn’t have let us come. No, Hal. This doesn’t have to do with us. More is at stake. Can’t you see it?”

“Apparently I’ve grown stupid. Tell me.”

“The public is not aware…”

“Of what?”

“Of the fact that the spirit of exploration is dead. That there are no expeditions, they know. But they don’t think about it. They think that there are no expeditions because expeditions are unnecessary, and that’s all. But there are some who see and know perfectly well what is going on, and what consequences it will have. Has already had.”

“Well?”

“Pap. Pap and more pap for all eternity. No one will fly to the stars now. No one will risk a dangerous experiment now. No one will test a new medicine on himself now. What, they don’t know this? They know! And if the word got out who we are, what we did, why we flew, what it was all about, then it would be impossible, you see, impossible to conceal the tragedy!”

“Pap and more pap?” I asked, using his expression; someone listening to our conversation might have found this funny, but I was in no mood to laugh.

“Of course. And you don’t think it’s a tragedy?”

“I don’t know. Olaf, listen. For us that must be and will always be a great thing. The way we gave up those years — and everything — well, we believe this to be of the utmost importance. But perhaps it isn’t. One has to be objective. Because — tell me yourself — what did we accomplish?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, unpack the bags. Dump out everything you brought back from Fomalhaut.”

“Are you crazy?”

“Not at all. What was the value of this expedition?”

“We were pilots, Hal. Ask Gimma, Thurber.”

“Olaf, don’t give me that. We were there together, and you know perfectly well what they did, what Venturi did before he died, what Thurber did — why are you looking at me like that? What did we bring back? Four loads of various analyses, spectral, elemental, et-ceteral, mineral samples, and then there is that soup or metaplasm or whatever that rotten stuff from Beta Arcturi was called. Normers verified his theory of gravimagnetic rotations, and it turned out, in addition, that on planets of type C Meoli there can exist not tri- but tetraploids of silicon, and on that moon where Arder nearly did himself in there is nothing but lousy lava and bubbles the size of skyscrapers. And was it in order to learn that that lava hardens into those goddamn big bubbles that we vomited ten years out of our lives and came back here to be side-show freaks? Then why in hell did we go there? For what? Maybe you can tell me. For what?”

“Not so loud,” he said.

I was angry. And he was angry. His eyes had narrowed. I thought that we might fight yet, and my lips began to twitch into a grin. And then suddenly he, too, smiled.

“Still a hothead,” he said. “You can drive a man into a fury, you know that?”

“Get to the point, Olaf. To the point.”

“To the point? You haven’t got to the point yet. And what if we had brought back an elephant that had eight legs and talked algebra, what then, would that have made you happy? What were you expecting on Arcturus? Paradise? A triumphal arch? What do you want? In ten years I didn’t hear so much nonsense from you as now, in one minute.”

I took a deep breath.

“Olaf, you are trying to make a fool of me. You know what I meant. I meant that people can live without it…”

“I should think they can! Indeed, yes!”

“Wait. They can live, and even if it is as you say, that they have stopped flying because of betrization, still, was it worth it, was it right to pay such a price — that is the question before us, my friend.”

“Is it? And suppose you marry. Why do you make a face? You can’t get married? You can. I’m telling you, you can. And you will have children. And you will carry them to be betrizated with a song on your lips. Well?”

“Not with a song. But what could I do? I can’t war against the whole world.…”

“Well, then, the blessing of the firmament upon you,” he said. “And now, if you like, we can go to the city.”

“Fine,” I said. “Lunch will be in two and a half hours. We can make it.”

“And if we don’t make it, they won’t give us anything to eat?”

“They will, but…”

I turned red. Pretending not to notice, he brushed the sand off his bare feet. We went upstairs, changed, and took the car to Clavestra. The traffic on the road was heavy. For the first time I saw colored gleeders, pink and pastel-lemon. We found a service station. I fancied I saw surprise in the glass eyes of the robot that examined the damage. We left the car there and returned on foot. It turned out that there were two Clavestras, an old and a new; in the old city was the local industrial center, where I had been the previous day with Marger. The new part was a fashionable summer resort, and there were people everywhere, almost exclusively young, teen-agers. In their gaudy, glittering outfits the boys looked dressed up as Roman soldiers, since the materials caught the sun like the half armor of that period. A lot of girls, most of them attractive, often in bathing suits more daring than anything I had seen so far. Walking with Olaf, I felt the eyes of the whole street on me. Colorful groups stopped under the palms at the sight of us. We were taller than anyone there, people stood and exchanged looks, it was extremely embarrassing.

When at last we got to the highway and turned south across the fields, in the direction of the house, Olaf wiped his forehead with a handkerchief. I was sweating a little, too.

“Damn them,” he said.

“Save it for a better occasion… .”

He gave a sour smile.

“Hal!”

“What?”

“You know what it was like? A set in a movie studio. Romans, courtesans, and gladiators.”

“We were the gladiators?”

“Exactly.”

“Shall we run?” I said.

“Let’s go.”

We went over the fields. It was about eight kilometers. But we ended up too far to the right and had to double back a little. Even so, we had time to take a bath before lunch.