Strangers on Paradise

Paradise was the name of the planet. Once it had been called something else, but nobody knew what.

From this distance, it was a warm blue cloud-speckled globe turning in darkness. Selby viewed it in a holotube, not directly, because there was no porthole in the isolation room, but he thought he knew how the first settlers had felt ninety years ago, seeing it for the first time after their long voyage. He felt much the same way himself; he had been in medical isolation on the entryport satellite for three months, waiting to get to the place he had dreamed of with hopeless longing all his life: a place without disease, without violence, a world that had never known the sin of Cain.

Selby (Howard W., Ph.D.) was a slender, balding man in his forties, an Irishman, a reformed drunkard, an unsuccessful poet, a professor of English literature at the University of Toronto. One of his particular interests was the work of Eleanor Petryk, the expatriate lyric poet who had lived on Paradise for thirty years, the last ten of them silent. After Petryk’s death in 2106, he had applied for a grant from the International Endowment to write a definitive critical biography of Petryk, and in two years of negotiation he had succeeded in gaining entry to Paradise. It was, he knew, going to be the peak experience of his life.

The Paradisans had pumped out his blood and replaced it with something that, they assured him, was just as efficient at carrying oxygen but was not an appetizing medium for microbes. They had taken samples of his body fluids and snippets of his flesh from here and there. He had been scanned by a dozen machines, and they had given him injections for twenty diseases and parasites they said he was carrying. Their faces, in the holotubes, had smiled pityingly when he told them he had had a clean bill of health when he was checked out in Houston.

It was like being in a hospital, except that only machines touched him, and he saw human faces only in the holotube. He had spent the time reading and watching canned information films of happy, healthy people working and playing in the golden sunlight. Their faces were smooth, their eyes bright. The burden of the films was always the same: how happy the Paradisans were, how fulfilling their lives, how proud of the world they were building.

The books were a little more informative. The planet had two large continents, one inhabited, the other desert (although from space it looked much like the other), plus a few rocky, uninhabitable island chains. The axial tilt was seven degrees. The seasons were mild. The planet was geologically inactive; there were no volcanoes, and earthquakes were unknown. The low, rounded hills offered no impediment to the global circulation of air. The soil was rich. And there was no disease.

This morning, after his hospital breakfast of orange juice, oatmeal, and toast, they had told him he would be released at noon. And that was like a hospital, too; it was almost two o’clock now, and he was still here.

“Mr. Selby.”

He turned, saw the woman’s smiling face in the holotube. “Yes?”

“We are ready for you now. Will you walk into the anteroom?”

“With the greatest of pleasure.”

The door swung open. Selby entered; the door closed behind him. The clothes he had been wearing when he arrived were on a rack; they were newly cleaned and, doubtless, disinfected. Watched by an eye on the wall, he took off his pajamas and dressed. He felt like an invalid after a long illness; the shoes and belt were unfamiliar objects.

The outer door opened. Beyond stood the nurse in her green cap and bright smile; behind her was a man in a yellow jumpsuit.

“Mr. Selby, I’m John Ledbitter. I’ll be taking you groundside as soon as you’re thumbed out.”

There were three forms to thumbprint, with multiple copies. “Thank you, Mr. Selby,” said the nurse. “It’s been a pleasure to have you with us. We hope you will enjoy your stay on Paradise.”

“Thank you.”

“Please.” That was what they said instead of “You’re welcome”; it was short for “Please don’t mention it,” but it was hard to get used to.

“This way.” He followed Ledbitter down a long corridor in which they met no one. They got into an elevator. “Hang on, please.” Selby put his arms through the straps. The elevator fell away; when it stopped, they were floating, weightless.

Ledbitter took his arm to help him out of the elevator. Alarm bells were ringing somewhere. “This way.” They pulled themselves along a cord to the jump box, a cubicle as big as Selby’s hospital room. “Please lie down here.”

They lay side by side on narrow cots. Ledbitter put up the padded rails. “Legs and arms apart, please, head straight. Make sure you are comfortable. Are you ready?”

“Yes.”

Ledbitter opened the control box by his side, watching the instruments in the ceiling. “On my three,” he said. “One … two…”

Selby felt a sudden increase in weight as the satellite accelerated to match the speed of the planetary surface. After a long time the control lights blinked; the cot sprang up against him. They were on Paradise.

The jump boxes, more properly Henderson-Rosenberg devices, had made interplanetary and interstellar travel amost instantaneous—not quite, because vectors at sending and receiving stations had to be matched, but near enough. The hitch was that you couldn’t get anywhere by jump box unless someone had been there before and brought a receiving station. That meant that interstellar exploration had to proceed by conventional means: the Taylor Drive at first, then impulse engines; round trips, even to nearby stars, took twenty years or more. Paradise, colonized ninety years ago by a Geneite sect from the United States, had been the first Earthlike planet to be discovered; it was still the only one, and it was off-limits to Earthlings except on special occasions. There was not much the governments of Earth could do about that.

A uniformed woman, who said she had been assigned as his guide, took him in tow. Her name was Helga Sonnstein. She was magnificently built, clear-skinned and rosy, like all the other Paradisans he had seen so far.

They walked to the hotel on clean streets, under monorails that swooped gracefully overhead. The passersby were beautifully dressed; some of them glanced curiously at Selby. The air was so pure and fresh that simply breathing was a pleasure. The sky over the white buildings was a robin’s-egg blue. The disorientation Selby felt was somehow less than he had expected.

In his room, he looked up Karen McMorrow’s code. Her face in the holotube was pleasant, but she did not smile. “Welcome to Paradise, Mr. Selby. Are you enjoying your visit?”

“Very much, so far.”

“Can you tell me when you would like to come to the Cottage?”

“Whenever it’s convenient for you, Miss McMorrow.”

“Unfortunately, there is some family business I must take care of. In two or three days?”

“That will be perfectly fine. I have some other people to interview, and I’d like to see something of the city while I’m here.”

“Until later, then. I’m sorry for this delay.”

“Please,” said Selby.

That afternoon Miss Sonnstein took him around the city. And it was all true. The Paradisans were happy, healthy, energetic, and cheerful. He had never seen so many unlined faces, so many clear eyes and bright smiles. Even the patients in the hospital looked healthy. They were accident victims for the most part—broken legs, cuts. He was just beginning to understand what it was like to live on a world where there was no infectious disease and never had been.

He liked the Paradisans—they were immensely friendly, warm, outgoing people. It was impossible not to like them. And at the same time he envied and resented them. He understood why, but he couldn’t stop.

On his second day he talked to Petryk’s editor at the state publishing house, an amiable man named Truro, who took him to lunch and gave him a handsomely bound copy of Petryk’s Collected Poems.

During lunch—lake trout, apparently as much a delicacy here as it was in North America—Truro drew him out about his academic background, his publications, his plans for the future. “We would certainly like to publish your book about Eleanor,” he said. “In fact, if it were possible, we would be even happier to publish it here first.”

Selby explained his arrangements with Macmillan Schuster. Truro said, “But there’s no contract yet?”

Selby, intrigued by the direction the conversation was taking, admitted that there was none.

“Well, let’s see how things turn out,” said Truro. Back in the office, he showed Selby photos of Petryk taken after the famous one, the only one that had appeared on Earth. She was a thin-faced woman, fragile-looking. Her hair was a little grayer, the face more lined—sadder, perhaps.

“Is there any unpublished work?” Selby asked.

“None that she wanted to preserve. She was very selective, and of course her poems sold quite well here—not as much as on Earth, but she made a comfortable living.”

“What about the silence—the last ten years?”

“It was her choice. She no longer wanted to write poems. She turned to sculpture instead—wood carvings, mostly. You’ll see when you go out to the Cottage.”

Afterward Truro arranged for him to see Potter Hargrove, Petryk’s divorced husband. Hargrove was in his seventies, white-haired and red-faced. He was the official in charge of what they called the New Lands Program: satellite cities were being built by teams of young volunteers—the ground cleared and sterilized, terrestrial plantings made. Hargrove had a great deal to say about this.

With some difficulty, Selby turned the conversation to Eleanor Petryk.

“How did she happen to get permission to live on Paradise, Mr. Hargrove? I’ve always been curious.”

“It’s been our policy to admit occasional immigrants, when we think they have something we lack. Very occasional. We don’t publicize it. I’m sure you understand.”

“Yes, of course.” Selby collected his thoughts. “What was she like, those last ten years?”

“I don’t know. We were divorced five years before that. I remarried. Afterward, Eleanor became rather isolated.”

When Selby stood up to leave, Hargrove said, “Have you an hour or so? I’d like to show you something.”

They got into a comfortable four-seat runabout and drove north, through the commercial district, then suburban streets. Hargrove parked the runabout, and they walked down a dirt road past a cluster of farm buildings. The sky was an innocent blue; the sun was warm. An insect buzzed past Selby’s ear; he turned and saw that it was a honeybee. Ahead was a field of corn.

The waves of green rolled away from them to the horizon, rippling in the wind. Every stalk, every leaf, was perfect.

“No weeds,” said Selby. Hargrove smiled with satisfaction. “That’s the beautiful part,” he said. “No weeds, because any Earth plant poisons the soil for them. Not only that, but no pests, rusts, blights. The native organisms are incompatible. We can’t eat them, and they can’t eat us.”

“It seems very antiseptic,” Selby said.

“Well, that may seem strange to you, but the word comes from the Greek sepsis, which means ‘putrid’. I don’t think we have to apologize for being against putrefaction. We came here without bringing any Earth diseases or parasites with us, and that means there is nothing that can attack us. It will take hundreds of thousands of years for the local organisms to adapt to us, if they ever do.”

“And then?”

Hargrove shrugged. “Maybe we’ll find another planet.”

“What if there aren’t any other suitable planets within reach? Wasn’t it just luck that you found this one?”

“Not luck. It was God’s will, Mr. Selby.”

Hargrove had given him the names of four old friend of Petryk’s who were still alive. After some parleying on the holo, Selby arranged to meet them together in the home of Mark Andrevon, a novelist well known on Paradise in the sixties. (The present year, by Paradisan reckoning, was A.L. 91.) The others were Theodore Bonwait, a painter; Alice Orr, a poet and ceramicist; and Ruth-Joan Wellman, another poet.

At the beginning of the evening, Andrevon was pugnacious about what he termed his neglect in the English-Speaking Union; he told Selby in considerable detail about his literary honors and the editions of his works. This was familiar talk to Selby; he gathered that Andrevon was now little read even here. He managed to soothe the disgruntled author and turn the conversation to Petryk’s early years on Paradise.

“Poets don’t actually like each other much, I’m sure you know that, Mr. Selby,” said Ruth-Joan Wellman. “We got along fairly well, though—we were all young and unheard of then, and we used to get together and cook spaghetti, that sort of thing. Then Ellie got married, and…”

“Mr. Hargrove didn’t care for her friends?”

“Something like that,” said Theodore Bonwait. “Well, there were more demands on her time, too. It was a rather strong attachment at first. We saw them occasionally, at parties and openings, that sort of thing.”

“What was she like then, can you tell me? What was your impression?”

They thought about it. Talented, they agreed, a little vague about practical matters (“which was why it seemed so lucky for her to marry Potter,” said Alice Orr, “but it didn’t work out”), very charming sometimes, but a sharp-tongued critic. Selby took notes. He got them to tell him where they had all lived, where they had met, in what years. Three of them admitted that they had some of Petryk’s letters, and promised to send him copies.

After another day or so, Truro called him and asked him to come to the office. Selby felt that something was in the wind.

“Mr. Selby,” Truro said, “you know visitors like yourself are so rare that we feel we have to take as much advantage of them as we can. This is a young world, we haven’t paid as much attention as we might to literary and artistic matters. I wonder if you have ever thought of staying with us?”

Selby’s heart gave a jolt. “Do you mean permanently?” he said. “I didn’t think there was any chance—”

“Well, I’ve been talking to Potter Hargrove, and he thinks something might be arranged. This is all in confidence, of course, and I don’t want you to make up your mind hurriedly. Think it over.”

“I really don’t know what to say. I’m surprised—I mean, I was sure I had offended Mr. Hargrove.”

“Oh, no, he was favorably impressed. He likes your spice.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Don’t you have that expression? Your, how shall I say it, ability to stand up for yourself. He’s the older generation, you know—son of a pioneer. They respect someone who speaks his mind.”

Selby, out on the street, felt an incredulous joy. Of all the billions on Earth, how many would ever be offered such a prize?

Later, with Helga Sonnstein, he visited an elementary school. “Did you ever have a cold?” a serious eight-year-old girl asked him.

“Yes, many times.”

“What was it like?”

“Well, your nose runs, you cough and sneeze a lot, and your head feels stuffy. Sometimes you have a little fever, and your bones ache.”

“That’s awful,” she said, and her small face expressed something between commiseration and disbelief.

Well, it was awful, and a cold was the least of it—“no worse than a bad cold,” people used to say about syphilis. Thank God she had not asked about that.

He felt healthy himself, and in fact he was healthy—even before the Paradisan treatments, he had always considered himself healthy. But his medical history, he knew, would have looked like a catalog of horrors to these people—influenza, mumps, cerebrospinal meningitis once, various rashes, dysentery several times (something you had to expect if you traveled). You took it for granted—all those swellings and oozings—it was part of the game. What would it be like to go back to that now?

Miss Sonnstein took him to the university, introduced him to several people, and left him there for the afternoon. Selby talked to the head of the English department, a vaguely hearty man named Quincy; nothing was said to suggest that he might be offered a job if he decided to remain, but Selby’s instinct told him that he was being inspected with that end in view.

Afterward he visited the natural history museum and talked to a professor named Morrison who was a specialist in native life-forms.

The plants and animals of Paradise were unlike anything on Earth. The “trees” were scaly, bulbous-bottomed things, some with lacy fronds waving sixty feet overhead, others with cup-shaped leaves that tilted individually to follow the sun. There were no large predators, Morrison assured him; it would be perfectly safe to go into the boonies, providing he did not run out of food. There were slender, active animals with bucket-shaped noses climbing in the forests or burrowing in the ground, and there were things that were not exactly insects; one species had a fixed wing like a maple seedpod—it spiraled down from the treetops, eating other airborne creatures on the way, and then climbed up again.

Of the dominant species, the aborigines, Morrison’s department had only bones, not even reconstructions. They had been upright, about five feet tall, large-skulled, possibly mammalian. The eyeholes of their skulls were canted. The bones of their feet were peculiar, bent like the footbones of horses or cattle. “I wonder what they looked like,” Selby said.

Morrison smiled. He was a little man with a brushy black mustache. “Not very attractive, I’m afraid. We do have their stone carvings, and some wall pictures and inscriptions.” He showed Selby an album of photographs. The carvings, of what looked like weathered granite, showed angular creatures with blunt muzzles. The paintings were the same, but the expression of the eyes was startlingly human. Around some of the paintings were columns of written characters that looked like clusters of tiny hoofprints.

“You can’t translate these?”

“Not without a Rosetta stone. That’s the pity of it—if only we’d got here just a little earlier.”

“How long ago did they die off?”

“Probably not more than a few centuries. We find their skeletons buried in the trunks of trees. Very well preserved. About what happened there are various theories. The likeliest thing is plague, but some people think there was a climatic change.”

Then Selby saw the genetics laboratory. They were working on some alterations in the immune system, they said, which they hoped in thirty years would make it possible to abandon the allergy treatments that all children now got from the cradle up. “Here’s something else that’s quite interesting,” said the head of the department, a blonde woman named Reynolds. She showed him white rabbits in a row of cages. Sunlight came through the open door; beyond was a loading dock, where a man with a Y-lift was hoisting up a bale of feed.

“These are Lyman Whites, a standard strain,” said Miss Reynolds. “Do you notice anything unusual about them?”

“They look very healthy,” said Selby.

“Nothing else?”

“No.”

She smiled. “These rabbits were bred from genetic material spliced with bits of DNA from native organisms. The object was to see if we could enable them to digest native proteins. That has been only partly successful, but something completely unexpected happened. We seem to have interrupted a series of cues that turns on the aging process. The rabbits do not age past maturity. This pair, and those in the next cage, are twenty-one years old.”

“Immortal rabbits?”

“No, we can’t say that. All we can say is that they have lived twenty-one years. That is three times their normal span. Let’s see what happens in another fifty or a hundred years.”

As they left the room, Selby asked, “Are you thinking of applying this discovery to human beings?”

“It has been discussed. We don’t know enough yet. We have tried to replicate the effect in rhesus monkeys, but so far without success.”

“If you should find that this procedure is possible in human beings, do you think it would be wise?”

She stopped and faced him. “Yes, why not? If you are miserable and ill, I can understand why you would not want to live a long time. But if you are happy and productive, why not? Why should people have to grow old and die?”

She seemed to want his approval. Selby said, “But, if nobody ever died, you’d have to stop having children. The world wouldn’t be big enough.”

She smiled again. “This is a very big world, Mr. Selby.”

Selby had seen in Claire Reynolds’s eyes a certain guarded interest; he had seen it before in Paradisan women, including Helga Sonnstein. He did not know how to account for it. He was shorter than the average Paradisan male, not as robust; he had had to be purged of a dozen or two loathsome diseases before he could set foot on Paradise. Perhaps that was it: perhaps he was interesting to women because he was unlike all the other men they knew.

He called the next day and asked Miss Reynolds to dinner. Her face in the tube looked surprised, then pleased. “Yes, that would be very nice,” she said.

An hour later he had a call from Karen McMorrow; she was free now to welcome him to the Cottage, and would be glad to see him that afternoon. Selby recognized the workings of that law of the universe that tends to bring about a desired result at the least convenient time; he called the laboratory, left a message of regret, and boarded the intercity tube for the town where Eleanor Petryk had lived and died.

The tube, a transparent cylinder suspended from pylons, ran up and over the rolling hills. The crystal windows were open; sweet flower scents drifted in, and behind them darker smells, unfamiliar and disturbing. Selby felt a thrill of excitement when he realized that he was looking at the countryside with new eyes, not as a tourist but as someone who might make this strange land his home.

They passed mile after mile of growing crops—corn, soybeans, then acres of beans, squash, peas; then fallow fields and grazing land in which the traceries of buried ruins could be seen.

After a while the cultivated fields began to thin out, and Selby saw the boonies for the first time. The tall fronded plants looked like anachronisms from the Carboniferous. The forests stopped at the borders of the fields as if they had been cut with a knife.

Provo was now a town of about a hundred thousand; when Eleanor Petryk had first lived there, it had been only a crossroads at the edge of the boonies. Selby got off the tube in late afternoon. A woman in blue stepped forward. “Mr. Selby.”

“Yes,”

“I’m Karen McMorrow. Was your trip pleasant?”

“Very pleasant.”

She was a little older than she had looked on the holotube, in her late fifties, perhaps. “Come with me, please.” No monorails here; she had a little impulse-powered runabout. They swung off the main street onto a blacktop road that ran between rows of tall maples.

“You were Miss Petryk’s companion during her later years?”

“Secretary. Amanuensis.” She smiled briefly.

“Did she have many friends in Provo?”

“No. None. She was a very private person. Here we are.” She stopped the runabout; they were in a narrow lane with hollyhocks on either side.

The house was a low white-painted wooden building half-hidden by evergreens. Miss McMorrow opened the door and ushered him in. There was a cool, stale odor, the smell of a house unlived in.

The sitting room was dominated by a massive coffee table apparently carved from the cross section of a tree. In the middle of it, in a hollow space, was a stone bowl, and in the bowl, three carved bones.

“Is this native wood?” Selby asked, stooping to run his hand over the polished grain.

“Yes. Redwood, we call it, but it is nothing like the Earth tree. It is not really a tree at all. This was the first piece she carved; there are others in the workroom, through there.”

The workroom, a shed attached to the house, was cluttered with wood carvings, some taller than Selby, others small enough to be held in the palm of the hand. The larger ones were curiously tormented shapes, half human and half tree. The smaller ones were animals and children.

“We knew nothing about this,” Selby said. “Only that she had gone silent. She never explained?”

“It was her choice.”

They went into Petryk’s study. Books were in glass-fronted cases, and there were shelves of books and record cubes. A vase with sprays of cherry blossoms was on a windowsill.

“This is where she wrote?”

“Yes. Always in longhand, here, at the table. She wrote in pencil, on yellow paper. She said poems could not be made on machines.”

“And all her papers are here?”

“Yes, in these cabinets. Thirty years of work. You will want to look through them?”

“Yes. I’m very grateful.”

“Let me show you first where you will eat and sleep, then you can begin. I will come out once a day to see how you are getting on.”

In the cabinets were thousands of pages of manuscript—treasures, including ten drafts of the famous poem Walking the River. Selby went through them methodically one by one, making copious notes. He worked until he could not see the pages, and fell into bed exhausted every night.

On the third day, Miss McMorrow took him on a trip into the boonies. Dark scents were all around them. The dirt road, such as it was, ended after half a mile; then they walked. “Eleanor often came out here, camping,” she said. “Sometimes for a week or more. She liked the solitude.” In the gloom of the tall shapes that were not trees, the ground was covered with not-grass and not-ferns. The silence was deep. Faint trails ran off in both directions. “Are these animal runs?” Selby asked.

“No. She made them. They are growing back now. There are no large animals on Paradise.”

“I haven’t even seen any small ones.”

Through the undergrowth he glimpsed a mound of stone on a hill. “What is that?”

“Aborigine ruins. They are all through the boonies.”

She followed him as he climbed up to it. The cut stones formed a complex hundreds of yards across. Selby stooped to peer through a doorway. The aborigines had been a small people.

At one corner of the ruins was a toppled stone figure, thirty feet long. The weeds had grown over it, but he could see that the face had been broken away, as if by blows of a hammer.

“What they could have taught us,” Selby said.

“What could they have taught us?”

“What it is to be human, perhaps.”

“I think we have to decide that for ourselves.”

Six weeks went by. Selby was conscious that he now knew more about Eleanor Petryk than anyone on Earth, and also that he did not understand her at all. In the evenings he sometimes went into the workroom and looked at the tormented carved figures. Obviously she had turned to them because she had to do something, and because she could no longer write. But why the silence?

Toward the end, at the back of the last cabinet, Selby found a curious poem.

XC

Selby looked at it in puzzlement. It was a sonnet, of sorts, a form that had lapsed into obscurity centuries ago, and one that, to his knowledge, Petryk had never used before in her life. What was more curious was that it was an awkward poem, almost a jingle. Petryk could not possibly have been guilty of it, and yet here it was in her handwriting.

With a sudden thrill of understanding, he looked at the initial letters of the lines. The poem was an acrostic, another forgotten form. It concealed a message, and that was why the poem was awkward—deliberately so, perhaps.

He read the poem again. Its meaning was incredible but clear. They had bombed the planet—probably the other continent, the one that was said to be covered with desert. No doubt it was, now. Blast and radiation would have done for any aborigines there, and a brief nuclear winter would have taken care of the rest. And the title, “XC”—Roman numerals, another forgotten art. Ninety years.

In his anguish, there was one curious phrase that he still did not understand—“Hear the rings rustle,” where the expected word was “leaves.” Why rings?

Suddenly he thought he knew. He went into the other room and looked at the coffee table. In the hollow, the stone bowl with its carved bones. Around it, the rings. There was a scar where the tree had been cut into, hollowed out; but it had been a big tree even then. He counted the rings outside the scar: the first one was narrow, almost invisible, but it was there. Altogether there were ninety.

The natives had buried their dead in chambers cut from the wood of living trees. Petryk must have found this one on one of her expeditions. And she had left the evidence here, where anyone could see it.

That night Selby thought of Eleanor Petryk, lying sleepless in this house. What could one do with such knowledge? Her answer had been silence, ten years of silence, until she died. But she had left the message behind her, because she could not bear the silence. He cursed her for her frailty; had she never guessed what a burden she had laid on the man who was to read her message, the man who by sheer perverse bad fortune was himself?

In the morning he called Miss McMorrow and told her he was ready to leave. She said good-bye to him at the tube, and he rode back to the city, looking out with bitter hatred at the scars the aborigines had left in the valleys.

He made the rounds to say good-bye to the people he had met. At the genetics laboratory, a pleasant young man told him that Miss Reynolds was not in. “She may have left for the weekend, but I’m not sure. If you’ll wait here a few minutes, I’ll see if I can find out.”

It was a fine day, and the back door was open. Outside stood an impulse-powered pickup, empty.

Selby looked at the rabbits in their cages. He was thinking of something he had run across in one of Eleanor Petryk’s old books, a work on mathematics. “Fibonacci numbers were invented by the thirteenth-century Italian mathematician to furnish a model of population growth in rabbits. His assumptions were: 1) it takes rabbits one month from birth to reach maturity; 2) one month after reaching maturity, and every month thereafter, each pair of rabbits will produce another pair of rabbits; and 3) rabbits never die.”

As if in a dream, Selby unlatched the cages and took out two rabbits, one a buck, the other a doe heavy with young. He put them under his arms, warm and quivering. He got into the pickup with them and drove northward, past the fields of corn, until he reached the edge of the cultivated land. He walked through the undergrowth to a clearing where tender shoots grew. He put the rabbits down. They snuffed around suspiciously. One hopped, then the other. Presently they were out of sight.

Selby felt as if his blood were fizzing; he was elated and horrified all at once. He drove the pickup to the highway and parked it just outside town. Now he was frozen and did not feel anything at all.

From the hotel he made arrangements for his departure. Miss Sonnstein accompanied him to the jump terminal. “Good-bye, Mr. Selby. I hope you have had a pleasant visit.”

“It has been most enlightening, thank you.”

“Please,” she said.

It was raining in Houston, where Selby bought, for sentimental reasons, a bottle of Old Space Ranger. The shuttle was crowded and smelly; three people were coughing as if their lungs would burst. Black snow was falling in Toronto. Selby let himself into his apartment, feeling as if he had never been away. He got the bottle out of his luggage, filled a glass, and sat for a while looking at it. His notes and the copies of Petryk’s papers were in his suitcase, monuments to a book that he now knew would never be written. The doggerel of “XC” ran through his head. Two lines of it, actually, were not so bad: