The Frederik Pohl Omnibus

1

Nobody moaned: ‘Buddy, please listen to me! I’m hungry. Couldn’t you at least give me something to eat?’

We paid no attention.

‘Oliver,’ she said, ‘I love you.’

I stopped and kissed her. Nobody sobbed and drifted away in the mist

All of Grendoon was down by the Wallow. Torches inflamed the fog like living lips of fire, kissing each other as they blended. The noise of the big jungle machines boomed in the background, but it was almost drowned out by the crowd, a constant bull’s bellow of noise. ‘Listen to them, Diane,’ I said. ‘They’re happy.’

‘And so am I,’ she whispered.

‘You don’t miss the plantation?’

‘No.’

‘Nor-’

‘Nor Albert,’ she said, remembering. ‘Especially not Albert.’

I felt her shiver in spite of the fact that the temperature was one hundred and ten.

Nobody clutched at my arm, looming out of the mist, but I shook him off and he stumbled, muttering, away.

I stopped, looking at Diane. Suddenly she was tense. ‘What’s the matter?’

She said in a small voice: ‘Did you recognize that one?’

It was embarrassing. I shook my head. She said: ‘I did, Oliver. He used to work for Albert too. And he crossed him, and now -’

The joy froze in me. I said roughly: ‘Snub Albert! Let’s get down to the Wallow. This is our night, Diane - don’t let anything spoil it.’

But behind us in the fog, nobody was sniffling wretchedly.

It was sundown, you see.

Not that we ever see the sun on Venus. But it makes a difference. During ‘day’ we stay indoors as much as we can, and when we go out we wear not only thermosuits and hoods, but portable air - at least at ‘noon.’ Towards twilight we can breathe the ambient air; at dusk we can leave off the hoods. At ‘night,’ sometimes, you can go out without even a thermosuit, but it was a long way from night.

It is also at night that the fog begins to condense. For about two months right around ‘midnight’ the ceiling climbs, sometimes to a thousand feet, and all that water has to go somewhere; and it does.

It makes a nice celebration.

Grendoon has nearly eighteen hundred people living in it, and I don’t think a hundred stayed to mind the store. Everybody else was laughing and joking and wandering around, carrying the torches, waiting for the water. The kids always get an enormous lick out of it; so do most of the grownups.

‘It’s coming,’ whispered Diane.

‘I see.’

Already the bottom of the Wallow was sticky with red mud, like the blood that runs out of a prime roast of beef. We were at the town end of the Wallow now, following the tapewalks to the deep part towards the hills. ‘Here you are, buddy!’ shouted a grinning vendor and thrust a pair of torches at me. I paid him, handed one to Diane and walked on.

There’s a reason for the torches too. The English knew about it; in the old wars, before aircraft bothered much with radar, the English were plagued by fog. They dug trenches around their landing strips and filled them with oil; when the planes came in and the fog was too thick they touched off the trenches of oil and the curtain of flame burned off the fog. That’s what our torches were for.

First we could see only outlines, then bright beads of light from the torches themselves, and by the time a thousand torches were all aburn, we could see for more than fifty yards. We didn’t need tapewalks then; we hurried down the bank towards the cheering, jostling throng.

There was a roar from the northern end of the Wallow, where the sludgy creek drained thick juices from the hills. ‘It’s coming!’

Diane took her hand off my forearm. I released her hand. We both pressed forward, looking.

In the licking light of the torches the first thin trickle of water was coming down into the Wallow. Although it happened every few months, every time slow Venus completed a spin on its axis relative to the sun, it was like a miracle. It always was. Even inside my thermosuit I felt cooler, more comfortable. It was like Iowa in October, it was like the first freeze-up on the stream that went by everybody’s home long ago. The water was coming down!

I whispered! ‘It’s a wonderful time to be in love.’

But Diane wasn’t beside me.

I bawled: ‘Diane! Where are you?’

And then I saw her.

She had been separated in the crowd, but she was only a couple of yards away, stumbling back towards me. I couldn’t see her face, only the hooded neck and line of the right mandible of her jaw, obscured by the transparent mantle of the thermosuit. But it was enough.

Diane was terrified.

A huge hulking cow of a man with a face like a footprint in mud and an expression like a stepped-on lizard was bellowing angrily at her: “Wassamatta thew? Whyntcha watchwatcha doing?’

Diane turned to me, white-faced. ‘Olivier,’ she sobbed, ‘this gentleman says I stepped on his foot.’

‘What?’

‘I - I didn’t, Olivier! You believe me, don’t you?’

‘Of course.’ But it was like a knell tolling.

‘You’ve got to believe me!’

‘I believe you.’ But it didn’t matter; nothing mattered; we both knew the score then.

I said to the stepped-on lizard: ‘Sir, my fiancée is deeply apologetic. The crowd ... the excitement... all the confusion…’

He stared at me, glowering. He glanced around from under shaggy eyebrows, gauging the mood of the crowd around us. It didn’t satisfy him. He shrugged and moved off.

‘Come on, dear,’ I said, and urgently hurried her along.

She said: ‘Olivier. They won’t give up. They’ll try again.’

‘It won’t do them any good!’

‘But it will, Olivier,’ she said reasonably. ‘You know Albert. He never gives up. That was just one of his bullies. He’ll have others.’

I took her by the elbows and turned her to face me. In the red and shuddering light of the torches her eyes were dark, but luminous; her face was sad and calm. Her beauty wrung my heart.

‘We can take care of ourselves, Diane,’ I promised. But it was a lie. I knew it was a lie. Albert Quayle hadn’t given up, not that easily. He wasn’t going to let me have his wife without a fight.

He was out to get her - with hired assassins, no doubt.

And when she was gone, he would be coming after me. I remembered how nobody had whimpered in the fog.

‘Will we whimper, do you think?’ Diane asked suddenly. It was no more than I was asking myself. I caught her arm and turned her again towards the Wallow. Our torches were getting low. I threw them into the first few inches of silted water, and we watched without words as they choked and died.

2

The world had begun for me six months before.

I came down on the ship from Earth like a newborn baby, all pink and squally, tied my deceleration-proof bassinet, crushed with the parturition pains of landing by rocket on an alien planet.

What did I know? The ads said: ‘Venus, the New Frontier!’ ‘Venus, the planet where every man can start over!’ ‘Own 1,000 Acres! Be Your Own Boss on Venus!’

Naturally I fell for it. So did thousands of others. It wasn’t any lie. It was all there.

I got out of the ship at Grendoon and got on line at Customs. It wasn’t a long line. ‘Immigrant?’ they asked.

And I said: ‘Sure. I’m going to spend the rest of my life here.’

It was true. But I didn’t know why they laughed. I didn’t know there wasn’t any choice. I didn’t know that, once you were conditioned for Venus, you couldn’t ever live on Earth again.

They let you wear the brassard for two weeks - everybody knows what it means; everybody gives you plenty of leeway. That’s so you can find your way around. You find a place to live. You get a job. You make your plans. You make up your mind.

Then - if you want to stay - you get conditioned.

If not, there’s the return rocket waiting.

It was before I was conditioned, while I was still under the brassard, that I met Albert Quayle. And his wife, Diane.

Grendoon was the steam chamber outside the gates of Hell. They sold me a thermosuit and pinned a brassard on it, with the sparkling word Visitor brightly picked out in diamonds. They gave me a card with Quayle’s name and address on it, and turned me loose to hit him up for a job. I stepped out into the hot, penetrating fog.

Albert Quayle’s address was on Breezy Point, overlooking the Wallow. I struggled along the tapewalks; even inside the thermosuit I was wringing wet. It was a hot day. The fog was whitely bright, a flour of soggy pearls that I stirred as I walked. I sucked a tube of suit air, but my face was exposed to the steam; I felt as if I were being gently boiled. Voices spoke to me out of the fog, begging; I couldn’t help them so I ignored them, as might any citizen of Grendoon.

Then I came to Albert Quayle’s house. Enormous blowers ripped the fog to tendrils around it. I could see it through a wavering haze. A big place of pink aluminium with picture windows to look out on fog. A big place for a big shot; and that was Albert Quayle.

I walked up the cinderblock path. It was like a Japanese garden back on Earth. Out of the condensation sumps in the walls a stream of hot water pulsed. It flowed through cement-walled troughs across a cactus garden; the path became a little arched bridge over one of the gently steaming brooks. With such an expensive layout you couldn’t blame him for spending enough on blowers to give it a chance to be seen. The water, of course, came out of the sluice from the air-conditioning. It had to go somewhere. But the garden, the little stream, the bridge - that took money.

That was what Quayle had - and he had something more than money... he had Diane.

I rang. The door opened. There she was.

I glanced at the card in my gauntleted fingers. ‘Mrs. Quayle?’

‘I’m Mrs. Quayle.’

‘I’m looking for a job,’ I mumbled. A figure like a night-club moaner. Eyes like the sad pits of Hell. Lips that tragically invited. I tore my eyes off her and dashed them against the card again. ‘Your husband - they said at the office he could help me.’

‘Help you?’ Her voice was like a bitter lullaby. ‘He’ll help himself. But he’ll give you a job, if that’s what you want.’

And then I knew I was in love. And I knew what it meant. Because even then, not twenty-four hours on Venus, I knew who Albert Quayle was. I knew he wasn’t a man to tangle with, not in Grendoon, not if you wanted to stay alive.

But I tangled with him after all. Oh, yes. I took from him the one possession he did not care to lose.

Diane caught my hand. She was shaking. ‘Oliver, Oliver. It’s him.’

‘I know.’

‘That fat man - he was working for Albert.’

‘I know.’

‘He’s out to get us. Both of us! Oliver, I shouldn’t have let you do this. It’s the end.’

‘I know.’

‘Quit saying “I know!” ‘ she screamed.

I patted her hand through the gauntlet to show that I understood. Gently I led her along the banks of the Wallow, down to where the crowd was thickest.

‘I’m sorry, Oliver,’ she whispered suddenly. ‘I’d like to kill him.’

‘You can’t.’

‘I know I can’t, but I’d like to. If only we weren’t conditioned-‘

I said: ‘Forget it. We’re through with him. As soon as your divorce is final, we’ll get married. That’s that.’ I glanced at my watch, under the transparent gauntlet of the thermosuit. ‘Only another hour,’ I told her.

‘Oh, Oliver!’

That was more like it. Her expression was like a candy bride’s beaming from the top of a white frosted wedding cake. Only another hour, and then the statutory waiting period would be over. It was hard to believe that already eleven hours had passed since we confronted Quayle with our love.

Almost gaily we moved among the rejoicing throng. It was a festival; the Grendoonians were laughing, singing, like happy children. It was like Iowa when I was a boy. There, when the creeks froze over, the whole town would come down to the lake - the grownups to watch, the teenagers to skate, the old ones and the babies to walk stiff-legged across the ice, everyone enjoying what the weather had done. Here it turned fog into water -water enough to fill the Wallow and make a pond of it for a few months of each year. There it had been water into ice, but the principle was the same; it was a carnival time.

Nobody came sniffling up to us. Abjectly he asked: ‘Mister, please. I’m hungry! Couldn’t you help me out?’ Diane shivered and clutched my arm. For an instant I was tempted to speak, but the instant passed. And then there was a confused clamour, and the nobody suddenly turned. ‘An Earthie!’ he gasped, and darted away from us.

Diane stood on tiptoe, peering. ‘It is,’ she said. ‘Look, Oliver!’

And there he was, an Earthman, tall and darkfaced with the UV tan of a sunny planet but his face was crimson with anger now. He was backed against the margin of the Wallow surrounded by a dozen nobodies, imploring, clamouring, begging unashamed for food, for help - for everything. His gold brassard shone clearly, with the word Visitor glittering an invitation in diamond ink to every shunned nobody in Grendoon, for only an Earthie would fall so low as to talk to them. Short of grubbing for roots in the jungle and taking their chances with swamp, disease and the giant sapoaurs, the only way a nobody could live was by finding a Terrestrial to help them.

But this Terrestrial was making hard work of it. He was offering them money, which was foolish - what good was money to them? And he was striking at them irritably, which was even worse. It was bringing him down to the level of the nobodies, almost.

‘I’ll have to help him,’ I told Diane.

She nodded.

I walked sternly over to him. The nobodies scattered like mist before me.

They fled, whimpering, as I began to talk to him.

He said angrily: ‘Thanks. What kind of a place is this?’

‘I’m sorry you were bothered. Don’t pay any attention to them. They’ll go away.’

‘But why?’

‘It’s the way we do things here,’ I explained.

‘Humph.’ He looked at me irritably. In a high, shrill voice, his face pouting like a fish out of water, he complained: ‘I don’t think much of Venus. What a gyp! I spent twenty-five hundred bucks on this trip. I might as well have gone to the Moon.’

‘You’re a tourist?’

‘That’s what they said when they sold me the ticket,’ he said disagreeably.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘It isn’t your fault,’ he admitted. Then he tried to be a little more friendly. ‘Look,’ he said confidentially, ‘is this all there is to it? I mean, the Coming of the Water, and the spirit of Mardi Gras that runs through the town and all, like they said in the travel agency?’

‘This is all.’

‘Man!’ He shook his head ruefully. ‘But isn’t there, well, some place where I can find a little more excitement? I came millions of miles. I’ve been saving up for this vacation for years.’

‘Not the kind of excitement you want, mister,’ I told him, and turned to look for Diane.

But she wasn’t there.

‘Diane!’ I shouted, and heard my voice drowned out in the multitudinous cries of the crowd around the Wallow. ‘Diane, where are you?’

No answer.

‘Something wrong, buddy?’ asked the Earthie. But I didn’t have any answer for him. There was something wrong - plenty was wrong, but there wasn’t anything he could do about it.

She was gone. Search as I did, I couldn’t find her. Quayle. It had to be Quayle. Somehow, in the minutes when I left her out of my sight, he had begun his revenge.

3

Frantic, I hurried back to the hotel. Where else was there to go?

The room clerk looked at me funny. I don’t know how else to say it. It was the kind of look I got from everybody when I first came to Venus, but I hadn’t seen it since I got conditioned to live here and took off the brassard.

I went up in the elevator, and the room clerk’s look went out of my mind like a nobody vanishing into the fog. There wasn’t room for it. The only thing I had space for in my mind was Diane, Diane gone. I hurried down the corridor and unlocked the door, my fingers shaking. ‘Diane!’ I cried.

But there was no answer.

She wasn’t there. The room was empty - our room. We had checked into it that morning, then gone out to file for her divorce, eaten, wasted a little time, then decided to visit the Wallow since we were in a holiday mood.

But that mood was gone. It had been the slimmest of hopes, that she might have come back to the hotel, but now even that hope was gone…

And then I took a longer look at the room. It was incredible, as if someone had struck me.

The cigarette butts were still in the ashtrays.

A soggy towel hung sloppily across a rack.

Across the back of a chair Diane’s afternoon thermosuit lay slackly, its empty arms reaching out to the wastebasket.

The room had not been cleaned.

I turned slowly and looked at the back of the door, but I knew before I looked what I would see.

There was a pink slip taped on the door - pink, the colour of the complaint forms of the Maids, Butlers and Domestics. I read it with cold attention, though I knew what it would say.

Grievance Report

Re: Room 1635, Mr. and Mrs. Oliver Sawyer.

From: Joyce Trulove, 16th Floor Chambermaid.

As of this date, above persons spoke rudely to the undersigned on the phone, demanding service. Said: ‘This room is a disgusting mess.’ Also: ‘Get the hell up here and clean it up.’

The undersigned intends to prefer charges before the Grievance Committee, pending which time undersigned refuses to deal with persons again.

Signed:

J. Trulove, MB&D 886

I opened the door and went back down to the lobby, fast.

The desk clerk was all smiles, with a sneer folded into every one of them. ‘Yes, Mr. Sawyer. The room? Oh, I’m sorry, Mr. Sawyer. That Grievance Report - some sort of mistake, I’m sure. But the chambermaid...’

I said tightly: ‘What about the chambermaid?’

‘Oh, you know, Mr. Sawyer. They don’t like to be ordered around. You can’t blame them.’

I got a grip on myself: ‘Look. We didn’t even speak to the chambermaid. Don’t you understand? We were getting married. We came in, dropped the suitcases; grabbed something to eat down here in the dining hall, and that’s it Outside of that we weren’t even in the hotel.’

‘Oh. The dining hall, yes.’

I stopped short. ‘What about the dining hall?'

He shrugged faintly. ‘You know, Mr. Sawyer. I’m sorry to have to tell you, but there’s been a complaint in the dining room too.’

‘It isn’t possible!’

The clerk whispered thoughtfully: ‘Mr. Sawyer, are you telling me that I lie?’

I said fast: ‘It’s just a mistake, I mean. I remember everything that happened in the dining room. The waitress was perfectly wonderful. Why, we talked to her! And I left her a big tip! And-’

‘Excuse me, Mr. Sawyer. I’m rather busy.’

I took the warning.

There seemed to be only one thing to do.

I walked across the lobby of the hotel. It was like walking through a mushy daiquiri - ice floated on all sides of me. The atmosphere was congealed. The bellboys looked but saw me not; the elevator men glanced through me at the room clerk, but never realized I was alive. At the entrance to the dining room, the hostess sucked a tooth and stared at the wall and hummed quietly to herself.

I walked right past her. She didn’t blink.

I found a table and sat down.

In about fifteen minutes a waitress came up to my table. ‘Miss,’ I said eagerly, ‘I -’

But she checked the setting with a practised eye and walked away again.

I stared at her. More minutes passed.

I cleared my throat. ‘Miss,’ I said again to the waitress as she came to the table next to mine to take an order. ‘Miss!’

But she didn’t respond and, after one quick, curious glance, neither did the customers at the table.

It was the deep-freeze, all right; they were cutting me dead.

I turned back to the table, and just caught a glimpse of the back of another waitress. For a moment I had the crazy notion that she had been about to serve me. But that notion was wrong. She had been to my table, all right; the proof was on the table before me, a sheet of bright green paper.

I read it.

It was bad.

The pink slip from the chambermaid had been bad enough. It meant that no member of the local would ever clean a room for me in a hotel while the Grievance Report was outstanding. But all that meant was that I couldn’t live in a hotel, and there were, after all, other places to live if I worked at finding them. It wasn’t fatal.

But the green one was more serious. It was on the stationery of the Cooks, Waiters and Restaurant Workers:

Complaint

Re: Oliver Sawyer

Offense: Deliberate undertipping

Miss Gina Sortini of this restaurant served the above mentioned Customer luncheon. Customer seemed well satisfied with the service and made no complaint. Nor, according to affidavit of headwaiter, hostess and cashier, had Customer any just cause for complaint.

After Customer left, Waitress found two pennies under plate. It was not absentmindedness. Waitress distinctly remembers seeing Customer put money under plate, whereupon Customer’s Guest, a young woman, commented upon said gratuity and both Customer and Guest laughed and made several joking remarks.

Matter referred to Grievance Adjuster this date.

And that meant that eat I could or starve I might, but I would do neither of them in any public restaurant in Grendoon.

I remembered Diane’s comment and how we had laughed - it was true! But it had been because the tip was large; I was extravagant, she said.

There was no mistake here. It was deliberate. There was no longer any possible doubt.

I got up and walked slowly away from the table. I was the Invisible Man. I went out into the lobby, hesitated, crossed it to the door. I was still wearing my thermosuit; I hadn’t stayed in my room long enough to take it off. I walked hopelessly out of the door and into the hot grey night.

There was a pile of luggage on the broad steps outside the double-paned door. I tripped over it, hesitated, then looked more closely.

It was mine.

4

I rented an armoured car and raced out to the spaceport. Thank heaven it was only the hotels and restaurants so far!

But it would be more - Quayle would never stop - I would have to face it some day and find an answer or live through the total extinction of my personality that came with being shunned like any other nobody. But I wouldn’t face it now, no, not until I had found Diane.

It was only desperation that drove me to the spaceport. Cryptic roarings from the side of the taped road told us that the giant machines were at work in the Ag fields. I turned at an intersection and eased cautiously into the right-hand transverse road, the sonic feeler sending out beeps into the fog to search for oncoming cars. Abruptly there was a sodden flare of white, and the giant blast of an industrial explosive behind it.

It was like that everywhere, outside of Grendoon and the other little cities. You don’t remake a planet without using power.

And, of course, power can be dangerous ... wherefore the conditioning.

I drove into the spaceport through a flaming fence of natural gas jets. A rocket was coming in. The buildings loomed queerly tall in the faint residual mist - it was strange to see the top of a two-storey building. But though I could see much, I could not see Diane.

Nobody came weeping up to me in the walk outside the parking lot, I took a closer look, and it was Vince Borton.

I knew him - had known him - when he was alive, but the time was coming when I would no longer be able to make that distinction. He was typical of the kind that hangs around the docks, begging handouts from the tourist. He was a farmer before. In fact, he farmed with me. In fact, he came in from Earth on the rocket with me. And went to work for Quayle with me; and it was because he had been caught stealing money from Quayle’s pension fund that he was shunned. He sobbed: ‘Mister, please! If I don’t get something to eat, I’ll -’

‘I can’t help you, Vince,’ I said.

I left him staring after me, a shabby nobody with a flatfooted stance and an expression of horror and surprise.

People didn’t talk to nobodies.

But when somebody did, they didn’t refuse help.

And the only explanation of behaviour like mine was the true one – I was in process of becoming a nobody myself.

A high, confidential voice behind me said: ‘What’s the matter, buddy? You don’t look as happy as you did last time I saw you.’

I turned. I saw a bright gold brassard, with the word Visitor picked out in diamond ink.

It was the Earthie I had seen down by the Wallow.

‘Hello,’ I said shortly.

An enormous roaring seeped out of the overhead mist. Jets bellowing, the Earth rocket settled in on the landing pad, pointing a finger of flame at Venus to destroy it and then embracing it.

And then it started again.

There was a crowd, as there always is when a rocket’s coming in. A tall, lean fellow in a thermosuit of Agricultural yellow almost bumped into me. He nodded politely and started to turn away.

‘Hershool’ I sneezed, and so did the Earthie - two mighty thundering sneezes. The Aggie whirled on us. His face was mottled and raging - oh, much more so than the offence justified!

He demanded: ‘What’s the matter with you?’

I said quickly: ‘I’m sorry. Very sorry. Excuse me.... Us,’ I added, though the Earthie hadn’t much to lose. I pulled the Earthie away after me.

He looked at me with eyes like question marks!

‘Sneeze powder,’ I told him softly.

‘What?’

‘To make me sneeze on him.’

‘What?’

‘I’m sorry I got you into it, but the brassard will keep you out of trouble. Now you’d better leave me alone.’

He stared at me with doubting eyes and pouty lips. ‘Look. I’m just a stranger here, but I don’t get it. Why the sneeze powder?’

‘To make trouble.’

‘Trouble.’ He thought, and then admitted: ‘I heard about this kind of thing. You Venusians have your own systems. Not like Earth.’

‘No.’

‘No violence, eh?’

‘We can’t afford it.’

He nodded. ‘I know. They explained it to me, back at the travel agency. Something about conditioning. Venus is a frontier planet and all frontiers are the same. Everybody is likely to kill everybody else. Especially because weapons are so powerful nowadays.’

‘They have to be here, because of the sapoaurs. But not just weapons.’

‘No, I know about that. Explosives. Big machines that could shred a man into confetti. So they condition you against violence, eh? No matter what happens, once you’re through with the conditioning you can’t kill anybody. And if somebody is really out to get somebody else -’

‘He cuts him dead.’ I nodded. ‘You have the picture. That’s what’s happening to me now. Now you better stay away from me-’

‘Dunlap.’

‘Whatever your name is. I don’t want to get you into trouble.’

I turned and left him. The world was hot and empty without Diane; I didn’t want to share it with him.

But I didn’t have much of a world to share.

Even less than I’d thought.

I marched out towards the parking lot, and there was the Aggie again. He was on the taped path. The jets were off and the fog beginning to settle in again. I thought of swinging around him, but the path was narrow.

I nodded politely. ‘Sorry,’ I said formally.

He looked at me with recognition, then with annoyance.

And then his eyes opened wide, and the expression became utter rage - contempt - hatred.

‘What-what’s the matter?’ I faltered.

He turned away without a word, as icy as the waitress in the hotel, as completely as any person had ever cut a nobody.

It didn’t figure.

Even if he was one of Quayle’s men, there was no reason for this. I watched, incredulous.

In the haze of five yards of thickening fog I saw him stop to talk to one of the field police. Then the Aggie walked on and the policeman came slowly towards me. I nodded politely.

The policeman looked through me. He saw my face and memorized it, but he also didn’t see it; not at all. He looked at my chest for a thoughtful second, then turned and moved back towards the parking lot.

I followed.

He went to my car, produced an official electroseal, locked it. On the entrance door he slapped a sticker with the glowing scarlet word: Impounded.

‘Hey!’ I yelled. ‘What’s the matter?’ There was no reason for that! That was the sort of treatment reserved for the gravest offenders - thieves like Vince, accidental murderers, those who used the shunning services without reason....

And one other category.

I touched my chest.

A sharp metal star point scraped my finger. Pinned to my thermosuit was a badge - no, a brassard. The brassard. In diamond ink the word Visitor flared.

I was wearing the brassard without right. It was the worst crime in the world.

I had been framed.

5

I rushed back along the tapewalks like a ghost put to flight with bell, book and candle, seeking help. The only help in all the world for me just then was the Earthie.

Vince Borton clutched at me out of the fog as I passed. ‘Oliver! You too?’

‘Me too.’

‘But why?’

I said grimly, too full of hate and fear to answer: ‘Arthur Quayle, that’s all. Good-bye.’ But he followed.

I found Dunlap talking angrily to another new Earthie just pinning on his brassard. ‘... lousy place not worth the plutonium to blow it to hell! Take my advice, Mac. Turn around. Get right back on that rocket, and -’

‘Dunlap.’

He turned and looked at me. ‘Oh. You.’

‘Can you help me?’

Suspiciously: ‘What do you mean? All I want is out, buddy. I don’t want to get in any trouble here.’

‘You can’t. You’re wearing the brassard.’

‘Maybe.’

‘There’s no risk involved! Remember? We Venusians can’t use violence. That’s the first thing we do, before we take off the brassard. We get conditioned against it. And you’re immune to anything else. That’s what the brassard’s for.’

‘Well. You didn’t tell me what you want.’

‘I want you to come see how the other half lives. The Terra Club.’

‘What’s at the Terra Club?’

‘Albert Quayle,’ I said.

Vince hit us up for a ride back to town - in Dunlap’s car, of course. I let him, provided he sat in the back seat.

He grinned at me wryly.

But I couldn’t apologize, because the fission-blasts were going off again and the noise drowned everything out for a moment.

Dunlap demanded aggressively: ‘What is all that?’

‘That’s the reason, Dunlap.’

‘Blasting? The reason for what?’

‘The reason for the conditioning. Every man a Titan. This is Venus. You’ve heard of the saposaurs?’

‘Saposaurs?’ He nodded. ‘Sort of intelligent lizards, eh? But they don’t like people. They stay in the back lands.’

‘Most of the time. Not always. Look.’ I pointed to the built-in machine-guns on the car. ‘They’re needed, Dunlap. It isn’t safe to travel on Venus without plenty of weapons. And the tools! Plutonium built the Wallow. All of Venus was marsh. Most of it still is. Without the atomic explosives to drain it off, we’d be living in jellied mud.’

He said hoarsely: ‘There isn’t any danger from the saposaurs in the car, is there?’

‘Not unless one shows up.’

He said, ‘Oh.’

Vince Borton volunteered eagerly from the back seat - it must have been a joy for him to talk again - ‘There are plenty of them out in the fields. Not so much at night. They come in the daylight months, when there’s plenty of fog.’

‘Why?’

‘They like knives,’ Borton told him. ‘They’re not really smart - sort of like gorillas plus twenty-five per cent. But they’re smart enough to know that steel will outlast their teeth and claws. They never had fire and don’t much want it. Steel is something else. They’ll break up a car if they can just to take the jagged pieces of metal for weapons.’

Dunlap said slowly: ‘But - all right, granted you have to have strong safeguards against violence with all that plutonium around, and guns for protection against the saposaurs. What about this business of ignoring people to death?’

‘Shunning them,’ I corrected him. ‘Cutting them dead. There has to be some way, Dunlap. The community can’t tolerate anti-social behaviour! Why, if somebody insults my wife, I can’t hit him - I don’t know how. The community has to have protection against - against -’

‘Against you and me, Oliver,’ said Vince mournfully from the back seat.

We dropped Vince at the edge of the city and followed the tapewalks to the Terra Club.

Dunlap complained: ‘It’s hot. I don’t like it so hot.’

‘You came here all by yourself.’

‘But I can’t stand this heat!’ He was fretful and irritable because he didn’t like what he was getting into, I was sure.

‘Watch the tape,’ I ordered. Lights were ahead, bobbing like pastel ghosts in the fog. A man loomed up. He glanced at me, then through me and he nodded to Dunlap.

‘Already,’ I said.

‘What?’

‘Forget it.’ But it was a blow. The police weren’t like the locals of the unions: they didn’t content themselves with filing a protest and letting it get around to their own members. Now I was shunned by everyone; everyone in Grendoon would have seen my picture on the tri-V. ‘Turn in here, Dunlap,’ I told him, with my heart a solid load inside me.

The sign hanging from the tape wheeped faintly as we came close and its scanners picked us up, then blazed with the orange letters:

Terra Club

We went in the door.

The maitre-de greeted us affably - glad-to-see-you-tonight and all that. I moved into the light where he could get a better look at me and I was a ghost. He couldn’t see me at all.

I skinned off my thermosuit, and Dunlap out of his. The check girl took his, but there was nothing to do with mine but sling it over my shoulder. ‘Ask for a table for two, Dunlap,’ I said tightly.

‘I’d like a table…For two.’

‘The gentleman is expecting someone,’ the maitre-de inquired politely.

‘Say yes, Dunlap.’

‘Yes.’

‘Very well, sir.’ The maitre-de led Dunlap down to a table right at the side of the dance floor. It was for me, that table, not for Dunlap, but Dunlap didn’t know that. The maitre-de wanted it that way. He wanted me to be seen. I mean not seen, but not-seen by everybody. So that everybody who was not-seeing me could get a good look. Good enough so that they would know enough never to see me again.

The table was for two, all right, but it was only one chair that the maitre-de pulled out. I had to pull out my own. And when the waiter came, he only turned one glass right-side up, spread one napkin and offered one menu.

I said: ‘Thank God for your brassard. Order me some Scotch, Dunlap. And a sandwich.’

‘Two Scotches and a sandwich,’ Dunlap looked at me. ‘Ham?’

‘Anything.’

‘Ham, or whatever you’ve got.’

The waiter looked at him, then shrugged.

He brought the two Scotches, and lined them both up in front of Dunlap.

I didn’t mind leaning across the table to get mine. I wolfed the sandwich; already I was hungry. Later it would be worse, but I wasn’t looking that far ahead. I lifted my glass.

‘Confusion to our enemies.’

Dunlap was acting more and more nervous. He said sullenly: ‘But I don’t know. I mean, it’s more your enemy, isn’t it? I wonder if I really should get involved in what is, essentially, a private disagreement.’

‘A private murder.’

‘All right, damn it! But this isn’t much fun, Oliver. And it’s costing me money.’

‘Money?’ I reached in my pocket and dumped my wallet in front of him. He stared at me. ‘Keep it. It’s no good to me. Literally. There isn’t a man in Grendoon with something to sell who’ll take money from me.’

He looked thoughtful. He opened the wallet and whistled.

‘There’s a lot of dough here, Oliver.’

‘What? Well, why not.’ I swallowed the drink. ‘I worked for Quayle nearly six months. Out in the boon-docks. Hard work, fighting off saposaurs, handling the plutonium. Ask Vince Borton, he was there with me. Then -’

‘What then?’

‘I got to talking to Quayle’s wife. You saw her.... Down at the Wallow.’

Dunlap looked at me with a certain expression on his face.

‘All right,’ I said. ‘She was his wife. But you don’t know him, Dunlap! A rat. Made life hell for her. Rough to work for - you wouldn’t think he was conditioned, the language he used. In town, he’d be shunned himself, but out on the fields customs are a little different about giving offence. Especially when the man giving offence is the boss.’

He grumbled nervously. ‘But I don’t even know this Quayle!’

‘Now you do,’ I told him, and pointed. ‘He’s just coming in.’

Quayle was a toad, with a toad’s face and features.

Three men were with him - overseers from the farms, big men, rough and mean men, the kind that seemed to seek him out. And there was a woman, a woman in a scarlet dress.

That would be Diane’s successor. Trust Quayle! He wouldn’t go long without a woman, and always a beauty. Diane had been far from the first - he’d been married to only three of them. She was one; the other two had died out on the boondocks. Not in-quotation-marks ‘died’; one got in the way of a saposaur and one disappeared in the swamps. That was how Quayle had got where he was, in fact - they had been rich, and he inherited from both.

His filmed toad’s eyes went mildly around the room.

He didn’t see me. It was very clear that he didn’t see me. After he was through not seeing me he whispered something to one of the men; and the man snapped a finger for a waiter, and whispered to the waiter, and the waiter whispered back.

Albert Quayle smiled a toadish smile. ‘Oh, go on, live a minute,’ that smile said. ‘Live a minute longer, let yourself be sheltered by an Earthman’s brassard. But he won’t stay forever. And then you’re dead.’

And he was right, unless I found a way to handle it.

The first thing was to get Dunlap on my side. I had to show him what I was up against.

‘Order two more Scotches,’ I told him.

While the waiter was gone I whispered: ‘Listen close. You don’t believe that this business can kill me, do you? You don’t think that simply ignoring a man can be fatal? Watch what happens.’

He scowled, making almost as toadish a face as Quayle’s. ‘Hold on, Oliver! What are you up to? If you kill this guy Quayle or something-’

‘If I only could!’ At that moment the waiter came back. I took one of the glasses out of the waiter’s hand. He blinked only once at the remaining glass and calmly set it in front of Dunlap. ‘Sorry, sir,’ he apologized. ‘You wanted two scotches, didn’t you? I’ll get another.’

‘Now watch what happens.’ I took the full glass and walked straight across the dance floor.

Nobody bumped into me, though the band was playing and the floor was full. Nobody noticed that I was there. They danced neatly around a moving vacuum, named me.

I got to Quayle’s table and I stood staring at him for a second. The woman moved nervously, but no one else gave any sign that a man was standing within a yard of them all. I shouted loudly: ‘Quayle!’

There was no response, none at all. Only the woman blinked.

‘Quayle,’ I cried, ‘you’re a rotten, stinking murderer! You’re shunning me to death because I took your wife away from you!’

And I threw the liquor in his face.

He blinked - raw alcohol was in his eyes - but that was all I could see. I fell writhing to the floor.

That’s the conditioning, you see. The muscles are there, and the brain can think murder; but once the thought becomes act, even if it is less than murder, if it is violence in any form - then the conditioned reflex begins. Think of a white-hot, iron maiden from Nuremberg, with her spikes closing in on you. Think of an epileptic fit. Think of being boiled alive. Combine them.

Unfortunately I did not lose consciousness, though the room spun madly around me and I couldn’t see anything but a tortured giant’s face, mottled and furious, with the liquor sloshing down the bridge of his nose.

After a few minutes I painfully got up.

The dancers had been all around me, but no foot had touched me; every person in the room must have seen and heard, but there was no sign. The music was playing. The Terra Club was gay and laughing. I walked shakily back to our table.

Vince Borton was standing there, pleading with Dunlap for something; but his eyes were on me. ‘You damned fool! What do you think you were trying to prove?’

‘More Scotch,’ I said hoarsely.

Dunlap pushed one of his glasses over. He looked shaken. ‘That was the conditioning?’

I nodded.

Vince said, ‘You’re crazy, Oliver! Come out of here. I came to tell you something, but -’

I cut in: ‘Imagine what it would have been if I’d tried to kill him.’

‘I can’t,’ Dunlap admitted.

‘It would have killed me.’

‘It should have killed you!’ Borton blazed. (And while we were shouting, all round us the Terra Club was having a party.)

I said: ‘Vince. Please.... Leave me alone.’

Suddenly he calmed. ‘All right’ Then he said thoughtfully, ‘Listen. Funny thing. You know when you threw liquor in Quayle’s face?’

‘Yes. I know.’

‘But do you know what he did?’ He nodded, satisfied at my expression. ‘He started to go for you.’

‘But surely, that’s not strange,’ Dunlap protested.

‘It isn’t? After you just saw what happened to Oliver?’

‘Mmm. I see,’ Dunlap said after a moment, but then he shrugged. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘You’ve convinced me. You deliberately let yourself in for that to prove a point, so I guess I have to say you’ve proved it. Now what?’

‘Help me, Dunlap.’

‘How?’

‘First I want to find Diane. I’ve got to. But I can’t talk to anyone, so you’ll have to -’

‘No he won’t,’ Borton interrupted. ‘That’s what I came to tell you.’

‘Tell me what?’

‘Where Diane is.’ Borton fingered his ragged cap. ‘I heard from one of the other nobodies. You know how it is - misery loves company. When somebody new gets shunned, we all know it right away.’

‘And Diane?’

He nodded. ‘Shunned. She’s over at the Wallow, on an island; and the water’s coming in, and she can’t get anybody to help her.’

6

Outside the Terra Club I said: ‘Now I’ve got him! Quayle’s in the palm of my hand!’

The hot fog closed in on all of us like a barber’s steamy towel. It seemed to make it difficult for Dunlap to breathe. He wheezed nervously: ‘What are you talking about?’

The doorman glanced at him with curiosity, then looked away. Borton was almost treading on the man’s shoes, but the doorman didn’t know he was alive.

‘I’m talking about Quayle! This is the end of the road for him, I promise you. I didn’t want to do this. But he doesn’t leave me any choice. Now that I know where Diane is, I’m going to blow the lid off. We’ll go get her, and then - it’s the end for Quayle.’

Dunlap clutched at his chest, knocking the brassard off his thermosuit. He bent and fumbled for it. When he stood up he seemed a little steadier.

‘How?’ he asked.

‘With a little help from the police, that’s how! Do you know what he’s been doing? He’s been smuggling steel knives to the saposaurs. Yes! I can prove it with Diane’s help. It’s our ace in the hole.’

‘But, look. What does that have to do with you?’

‘Everything! Why do you think we were shunned, Dunlap? He’s behind it. He’s afraid. Diane knew all about it. She had to. But she wouldn’t have talked. And neither would I, because that was the way she wanted it. But now -’

‘I know. Now you’re going to blow the lid off,’ he sneered.

‘You bet we are. Once we let truth out, he’s discredited - done. He’ll be a nobody then, not us. And then we can appeal our cases. The courts will listen. We’ll get the verdict reversed; they’ll believe me when I say I didn’t put the brassard on. The locals will let us off.’ I grinned as confidently as I could, although I was sweating even more than the hot fog could justify.

‘And the pity of it,’ I said, ‘is that Quayle didn’t have to have it this way. We were willing to buy him off if necessary.’

They both stood looking at me like saposaur chicks fresh out of the egg - puzzled, surprised, and ready for a fight.

‘Oliver, what the hell are you talking about?’ Vince Borton demanded. ‘You don’t have anything Quayle wants, except Diane.’

‘That’s where you’re wrong, Vince. I told you. He bribes the saposaurs with steel knives so they’ll go after the other plantations, but leave his alone. But it takes a lot of knives. There are lots of saposaurs. And it’s against the law, of course.’

‘So?’

‘So he can’t get all the knives he wants,’ I explained patiently. ‘But I can get them for him. Plenty! We talked about it, Diane and I; that was what we were going to offer him. But now - no. Now it’s war.’

Dunlap said tenaciously: ‘Explain that a little, will you? Where were you going to get them?’

‘I know where there’s a shipload! Did you ever hear of the Formidable? Old rocket ship - oh, twenty-five years back. It crashed. They did that, in those days. It missed Glendoon by twenty miles, smashes itself up and sank in forty feet of mud. But I know where it is.’ I let that sink in as the old rocket had sunk into the greasy mud. ‘I found it while I was working for Quayle, digging his own drainage ditches, blasting with his own plutonium. I thought of telling him about it. But I told Diane first, and then the two of us.... Well - anyway, we didn’t tell him. And it’s loaded with knives. That was twenty-five years ago, you see. They used to try to trade with the saposaurs then.’

Dunlap cleared his throat, ‘I, uh, I think I left my wallet at the table. Wait a minute, will you? I’ll be right back.’

Vince Borton stared after him. Then, lowering his voice so that the unhearing doorman would really not hear, he blazed: ‘Oliver, you idiot! What’s the use of telling him all those lies?’

‘No, Vince. Don’t get me wrong. They’re only part lies. I do know where the Formidable crashed - but it isn’t forty feet of mud, it’s four hundred and Quayle’s own thousand-acre drainage lake is right on top of it now. He’ll never recover it. But he’ll want those knives, as long as he thinks they can be had.’

‘So? Then why did you tell the Earthie about it? Why not tell Quayle?’

I stepped back to the entrance of the Terra Club. The noise of revelry was loud inside it, loud enough to drown out most of the distant full roll of blasting. But I could see clearly through the double glass door.

Even through the door, across the crowded dance floor, I could see someone bending to talk to Albert Quayle; I could see his look of worry, then the change of expression. Avarice gleamed out of his eyes, like golden glints from a pawnbroker’s sign.

‘Don’t worry, Vince, I said softly. ‘Quayle knows.’

It wasn’t far to the Wallow. Borton led us by the taped path to the water’s edge. We were quiet, especially Dunlap.

The torches were gone. Most of the people were gone. Only scattered couples and groups were left, many drunk, all invisible in the clotted fog. The thick water in the Wallow had risen to the very edge of the tapewalk.

‘Under here.’ Vince held the tape for us. We stepped off into sucking mud. The distant rumble of explosions was still drumming at the horizons. Venus is an enormous planet, bigger in land area than four Earths. There is much blasting to be done and the sound of plutonium carries.

But above the distant boom, suddenly I heard something else. A thin, distant voice cut like piano wire at my heart. Out in the middle of the Wallow, Diane, invisible, was moaning. ‘Help me! Please, the water’s getting higher.’

And there were people within the sound of her voice - a good many, though most had left - and they had boats if they chose to use them. But she wasn’t there for them. She was nobody. A ghost. If anyone knew she was alive, there was no sign shown.

‘Dunlap. Get a boat.’

He looked at me.

‘Go ahead, man. Ask someone - anybody. They’ll lend it to you because you’re wearing the brassard. But they won’t talk to Borton or me.’

He trudged off, muttering.

As soon as he had disappeared into the fog, I said: ‘All right, Vince. You remember what I told you in front of the Club. Now do it!’

‘Aw, Oliver! You’re crazy! Do you know what you’re getting into?’

‘Do you want to be shunned all the short rest of your life?’

He grunted once and walked away. But I knew he didn’t approve. That didn’t matter. What mattered was Diane and life.

So now I was all alone in the hot slimy fog with Diane’s distant sobs tearing at me. I wanted to call to her, but there was a reason for not doing it.

But time was passing.

The Wallow was filling rapidly now with the run-off from the hills. The air was twenty degrees colder. Still hot - terribly hot by Earth standards, but as our portion of Venus rolled into shadow, water was wrung out of the sodden air and it had to go somewhere. Now the Wallow was a hundred acres of steaming muddy water. All that was left of the red mud of six hours before was a few islands poking up. Diane was on one of them. But in a while, maybe a very short while, all of the islands would disappear. By full flood time the shallowest point in the Wallow would be sixty feet deep.

And it was not merely drowning that endangered her. That water was hot.

Time was passing...

Then I heard Dunlap’s wheezing breath, and a moment later the thunk of his oars moving blindly towards me in the fog.

‘Here!’I cried.

He found me a moment later.

I scrambled aboard, and we rowed clumsily out on the soupy lake, following the sound of Diane’s sobbing voice.

She cried out unbelievingly: ‘Oh god!’

I clutched at her in the mist. It was like Leander embracing Hero, still wet from the raging Hellespont; it was the meaning and purpose of all my life.

Then I felt her go suddenly tense.

She strained to see through the hot fog. In a voice that cracked a little she said: ‘It’s - it’s the Earthie.’

I looked around politely.

Dunlap was standing there in an awkward, embarrassed stance. His face was half turned away.

He cleared his throat. ‘I can explain,’ he apologized.

‘Explained what, Mr. Dunlap?’

He felt his throat. ‘I mean, I thought she’d take this attitude. I knew she wouldn’t understand about what happened. Here I am trying to help you, and -’

‘What did happen, Dunlap?’

Diane rasped furiously: ‘He’s the one! He got you away on purpose, I swear it! And then the fog closed in, remember? And somebody grabbed me. Grabbed me! ‘

‘I know, dear.’

‘But it was physical! Like an Earthie. It must have been him. He grabbed me, and brought me out here on a boat. And left me. And then some people came by and I called to them, and - they shunned me. He did it!’

‘But it wasn’t me, I swear. Ask your friend here! I was with him, wasn’t I?’

‘You were with me for about three minutes.’ I patted his arm with my free hand. ‘But you didn’t do it,’ I reassured him. ‘I know that. It wasn’t him, Diane.’

‘Then who?’

I stopped her. ‘Be patient, Diane. Just for a few moments.’

We stood there. Then there were voices in the fog... a canoe’s paddling ... and then a familiar whining voice, droning the nobody’s familiar whimpering cry. ‘Mister? Please, mister. I haven’t eaten in three days -’

‘Vince!’ I shouted. ‘Here we are.’

In a moment he came up out of the fog, looked us over and nodded. Behind him there were other figures in the fog.

‘Who the devil are they?’ Dunlap demanded, fingering his brassard.

‘Nobody,’ I told him. ‘Nobody at all.’

There were four of them, ghostly in the mist. In the fog they had no faces, only vague mottled shapes, and faint voices that agreed: ‘Nobody, mister. Nobody.’

‘But maybe,’ I said steadily, ‘they won’t be nobodies forever. Maybe some day they’ll be somebodies again.’

Dunlap shouted hoarsely: ‘I don’t know what you’re trying to pull, Oliver, but I don’t like it. I’m getting out of here!’

I stood in front of him. ‘How did you know my name was Oliver?’

He rocked back, staring. ‘What?’

‘I never told you my name.’

‘But-’

‘Never mind.’ I raised my voice. ‘Quayle! Come on out here. I know you’re on the island. You wouldn’t miss a chance to get knives - and besides, I heard your canoe.’

A moment, while Dunlap’s face turned to flabby butter.

Then there was a soft sludgy sound of footsteps in the mud. Albert Quayle walked steadily up to us, his fat toad’s face a mask. He glanced at Dunlap, and even in the drenching heat of that little island in the Wallow Dunlap shivered.

Then Quayle turned to me. He waited.

I said cheerfully: ‘We’re ready, I think. Quayle here. Dunlap here. Diane and myself, here. Borton and the witnesses –‘

‘Witnesses?’ Quayle’s lips didn’t move, only the word popped out of the fog and hung there between us.

‘To a murder, Albert. Yours. You’re going to die.’

‘Ha!’ He was contemptuous. ‘You can’t kill me. I’m an important man here, Oliver. Who’s going to shun me on your say-so?’

I paused. ‘There are other ways of killing,’ I said softly.

He didn’t move a muscle. I let him think for a second. Then I said, ‘Vince, have you got what I asked for?’

He passed me something cold and sharp. It was hard to make it out in the fog, but I knew what it was; and then I held it up and they all knew.

‘A knife, Quayle!’ I cried. It’s what you want, isn’t it? A knife to bribe a saposaur to wreck somebody else’s plantation. That’s what brought you here, and now you can have this one, at least!’

He stood frozen. I took a second turn to Diane. ‘Good-bye,’ I whispered. She didn’t know what I meant by it, but that was all right. If it turned out that she had to know, she would know.

And then I said loudly to Quayle: ‘I’m going to give you the knife - where it belongs. You put too much trust in conditioning, thinking I can’t use this. But maybe you’re wrong.’

He licked his lips.

‘Did you ever hear of a bribe?’ I demanded. ‘Ever hear of a man who was supposed to be conditioned - but wasn’t? Well, you’re looking at one - and now, Quayle, here’s your knife.’

And I tensed, and fought my own body to do it; and I jumped for him, the knife raised to plunge into his breast.

And that was the last I saw; I fell senseless to the ground; because, you see, what I had just told him had been a complete and utter lie.

I came to, very slowly, with much pain. A long time had passed. I hurt in places where I’d never known there was a nerve. I was weaker than any living man has a right to be.

But I was alive.

That was all I needed to know. If I was alive, everything was all right; that was the gamble I had taken. The conditioning doesn’t prevent, quite. It only punishes. I had sought out that punishment as a bluff, but it was a bluff that could easily have killed me.

Diane was leaning over me. Blearily I focused on her face. Her scent was musky, her expression calm and passionate. ‘Oliver,’-she murmured. ‘You’re all right. Don’t worry.’

‘I know,’ I whispered. ‘At least I lived through it. That was the hard part.’

I rubbed my face. There was heavy beard on It; I had been unconscious at least a full day. I was in a hospital room.

‘You didn’t kill Quayle with the knife.’

‘No. The attempt was bad enough. If I’d succeeded, there would have been no chance at all; the conditioning would have killed me.’

She looked at me with a glance of wonder and loving admiration. ‘You knew exactly what was going to happen, didn’t you? When you said all that about a man bribing the immigration people to get in without being conditioned, it was Quayle you were talking about, wasn’t it?’

I nodded.

‘You were right He wasn’t conditioned. He -’ She shuddered. ‘He killed his first two wives, Oliver. Did you know that? But I guess you did - for their inheritance. And he killed others to get them out of the way. He admitted it all, you see, once it was too late and they’d begun to shun him. And he was the one who grabbed me in the fog - from behind, so I couldn’t see his face. And then, when you went at him with the knife -’

‘I know.’ I nodded again, beginning to feel better. ‘He hit me, proving that he wasn’t conditioned.’

‘That’s right. And with Vince Borton and the others to see it, there was no doubt. The police listened to them. Vince was framed. Albert admitted it’

‘I know.’

‘And Dunlap? Did you know about him? He wasn’t an Earthie; he was from one of the South Pole cities, working for Quayle, running in knives for trade with the saposaurs.’

‘I know. When he called me Oliver I got suspicious, but I wasn’t really sure until I was in the Club. You see, he didn’t tell me what Quayle had done when I threw the drink in his face - tried to hit me then too - and he didn’t faint. It was suspicious. Vince Borton had to tell me about it. Then I began to think back. The brassard - Dunlap could have done it, and nobody else that I could think of.’

Diane leaned forward. ‘It’s all right now,’ she murmured huskily. ‘We can forget. Oliver, you’re wonderful!’

I said, reaching out to her: ‘I know.’