The Lovers

'Exactly,' replied Fobo to Hal's strangled question. 'These creatures are a superb example of parasitical mimicry. Though quasi-insectal, they look much like us. They live among us and earn their room and board by furnishing us with a cheap and smooth alcoholic drink. You noticed its enormous belly, shib? It is there that they so rapidly manufacture the alcohol and so easily upchuck it. Simple and natural, yes? Duroku has two others working for him, but it is their night off, and doubtless they are in some neighborhood tavern, getting drunk. A sailor's holiday–'

Hal burst out, 'Can't we buy a quart and get out? I feel sick. It must be the closeness of the air. Or something.'

'Something, probably.' Fobo murmured.

He sent a waitress after two quarts. While they were waiting for her, they saw a short wog in a mask and blue cloak enter. The newcomer stood in the door way, black boots widespread and the long tubular projection of the mask pointing this way and that like a sub's periscope peering for prey.

Hal gasped and said, 'Pornsen! I can see his uniform under the cloak!'

'Shib,' replied Fobo. 'That drooping shoulder and the black boots also give him away. Who does he think he's fooling?'

Hal looked wildly around. 'I've got to get out of here!'

The waitress returned with the bottles. Fobo paid her and gave one to Hal, who automatically put it in the inside pocket of his cloak.

The gapt saw them through the doorway, but he must not have recognized them. Yarrow wore his mask, while the empathist probably looked to Pornsen like any other wog. Methodical as always, Pornsen evidently was determined to make a thorough search. He brought up his sloping shoulder in a sudden gesture and began parting the curtains of the booths along the walls. Whenever he saw a wog with his or her mask still on, he lifted the grostesque covering and looked behind.

Fobo chuckled, and he said, in American, 'He won't keep that up long. What does he think we Siddo are? A bunch of mouses?'

What he had been waiting for happened. A burly wog suddenly stood up as Pornsen reached for his mask and instead lifted the gapt's. Surprised at seeing the non-Ozagenian features, the wog stared for a second. Then, he gave a screech, yelled something, and punched the Earthman in the nose.

At once, there was bedlam. Pornsen staggered back into a table, knocking it and its steins over, and fell to the floor. Two wogs jumped him. Another hit a fourth. The fourth struck back. Duroku, carrying a short club, ran up and began thumping his fighting customers on the backs and legs. Somebody threw beetlejuice in his face.

And, at that moment, Fobo threw the switch that plunged the tavern into darkness.

Hal stood bewildered. A hand seized his. 'Follow me!' The hand tugged. Hal turned and allowed himself to be led, stumbling, toward what he thought was the back door.

Any number of others must have had the same idea. Hal was knocked down and trampled upon. Fobo's hand was torn from his. Yarrow cried out for the wog, but any possible answer was drowned out in a chorus of Beat it! Get off my back; you dumb son-of-a-bug! Great Larva, we're piled up in the doorway!

Sharp reports added to the noise. A foul stench choked Hal as the wogs, under nervous stress, released the gas in their madbags. Gasping, Hal fought his way through the door. A few seconds later, his mad scrambling over twisting bodies earned him his freedom. He lurched down an alleyway. Once on the street, he ran as fast as he could. He didn't know where he was going. His one thought was to put as much distance as possible between himself and Pornsen.

Arc lights on top of tall, slender iron poles flashed by. He ran with his shoulder almost scraping the buildings. He wanted to stay in the shadows thrown by the many balconies jutting out from above. After a minute, he slowed down at a narrow passageway. A glance showed him it wasn't a blind alley. He darted down it until he came to a large square can, one that by its odor must have been used for garbage. Squatting behind it, he tried to lessen his gaspings. Presently, his lungs regained their balance; he no longer had to sob for air. He could listen without having his heart thudding in his ears.

He heard no pursuer. After a while, he decided it was safe to rise. He felt the bottle in his cloak pocket. Miraculously, it had not been broken. Jeanette would get her liquor. What a story he would have to tell her! After all he had gone through for her, he would surely get just a reward...

He shivered with goose pimples at the thought and began to walk briskly down the alley. He had no idea where he was, but he carried a map of the city in his pocket. It had been printed in the ship and bore street names in Ozagen with American and Icelandic translations beneath. All he had to do was read the street signs under one of the many lamps, orient himself with the map, and return home. As for Pornsen, the fellow had no real evidence against him and would not be able to accuse him until he got some. Hal's golden lamedh made him above suspicion. Pornsen...

Pornsen! No sooner had he muttered the name than the flesh appeared. There was a click of hard boot heels behind him. He turned. A short, cloaked figure was coming down the alley. A lamp's glow outlined the droop of a shoulder and shone on black leather boots. His mask was off.

'Yarrow!' shrilled the gapt, truimphantly. 'No use running! I saw you in that tavern. You won't be able to save yourself now!'

He click-clacked up to his ward's tall rigid form. 'Drinking! I know you were drinking!'

'Yeah?' Hal croaked. 'What else?'

'Isn't that enough?' screamed the gapt. 'Or are you hiding something in your apartment? Maybe you are! Maybe you've got the place filled with bottles. Come on! Let's get back to your apartment. We'll go over it and see what we see. I wouldn't be surprised to find all sorts of evidence of your unreal thinking.'

Hal hunched his shoulders and clenched his fists, but he said nothing. When he was told by the gapt to precede him back to Fobo's building, he walked without a sign of resistance. Like conqueror and conquered, they marched from the alley into the street. Yarrow, however, spoiled the picture by reeling a little and having to put his hand to the wall to steady himself.

Pornsen sneered. 'You drunken joat! You make me sick to my stomach!'

Hal pointed ahead. 'I'm not the only one who's sick. Look at that fellow.'

He was not really interested, but he had a wild hope that anything he said or did, however trivial, might put off the final and fatal moment when they would return to his apartment. He was pointing at a large and evidently intoxicated wogglebug hanging onto a lamppost to keep from falling on his needle-shaped nose. He might have been a nineteenth- or twentieth-century drunk, complete to top hat, cloak, and lamppost. Now and then, the creature groaned as if he were deeply disturbed.

'Perhaps we'd better stop to see if he's hurt,' said Hal.

He had to say something, anything to delay Pornsen. Before his captor could protest, he went up to the wog. He put his hand on the free arm – the other was wrapped around the post – and spoke in Siddo.

'Can we help you?'

The big wog looked as if he, too, had been in a brawl. His cloak, besides being ripped down the back, was spotted with dried green blood. He kept his face away from Hal, so that the Earthman had a hard time understanding his muttering.

Pornsen jerked at his arm. 'Come on, Yarrow. He'll get by all right. What's one sick bug more or less?'

'Shib,' agreed Hal tonelessly. He let his hand drop and started to walk on. Pornsen, behind, took one step and then bumped into Hal as Hal stopped.

'What are you stopping for, Yarrow?' The gapt's voice was suddenly apprehensive.

And then the voice was screaming in agony.

Hal whirled – to see in grim actuality what had flashed across his mind and caused him to stop in his tracks. When he had put his hand on the wog's arm, he had felt, not warm skin, but hard and cool chitin. For a few seconds, the meaning of that had not cleared the brain's switchboard. Then it had come through, and he had remembered the talk he and Fobo had had on the way to the tavern, and why Fobo wore a sword. Too late, he had wheeled to warn Pornsen.

Now the gapt was holding both hands to his eyes and shrieking. The big thing that had been leaning against the lamppost was advancing toward Hal. Its body seemed to grow huger with every step. A sac across its chest swelled until it looked like a palpitating gray balloon and a wheezing sound accompanied its deflation. The hideous insectal face, with two vestigial arms waving on each side of its mouth and the funnel-shaped proboscis below the mouth, was pointed at him. It was that proboscis which Hal had mistakenly thought was a wog's nose. In reality, the thing must have breathed through tracheae and two slits below the enormous eyes. Normally, its breath must saw loudly through the slits, but it must have suppressed the sound in order not to warn its victims.

Hal yelled with fright. At the same time he grabbed his cloak and threw it up before his face. His mask might have saved him, but he did not care to take the chance.

Something burned the back of his hand. He yelped with pain but leaped forward. Before the thing could breathe in air to bloat the sac again and expel the acid through the funnel, Hal rammed his head against its paunch.

The thing said, 'Oof!' and fell backward where it lay on its back and thrashed its legs and arms like a giant poisonous bug – which it was. Then, as it recovered from the shock and rolled over and tried to get back on its feet, Hal kicked hard. His leather toe drove with a crunching sound through the thin chitin.

The toe withdrew; blood, dark in the lamplight, oozed out; Hal kicked again in the open place. The thing screamed and tried to crawl away on all fours. The Terran leaped upon it with both feet and drove it sprawling to the cement. He pressed his heel against its thin neck and shoved with all the strength of his leg. The neck cracked, and the thing lay still. Its lower jaw dropped open and exposed two rows of tiny needle teeth. The mouth's rudimentary arms wigwagged feebly for a while and then drooped.

Hal's chest heaved in agony. He couldn't get enough air. His guts quivered and threatened to force their way through his throat. Then they did, and Hal bent over, retching.

All at once, he was sober. By that time Pornsen had quit screaming. He was lying huddled on his side in the gutter. Hal turned him over and shuddered at what he saw. The eyes were partly burned out, and the lips were gray with large blisters. The tongue, sticking from the mouth, was swollen and lumpy. Evidently, Pornsen had swallowed some of the venom.

Hal straightened up and walked away. A wog patrol would find the gapt's body and turn it over to the Earthmen. Let the hierarchy figure out what had happened. Pornsen was dead, and now that he was, Yarrow admitted to himself what he had never allowed himself to admit before this time. He had hated Pornsen. And he was glad that he was dead. If Pornsen had suffered horribly, so what? His pains were brief, but the pain and grief he had caused Hal had lasted for almost thirty years.

A sound behind him made him whirl around.

'Fobo?'

There was a moan, followed by pain-garbled words.

'Pornsen? You can't be... you're... dead.'

But Pornsen was alive. He was standing up, swaying.

He held his hands out before him to feel his way and took a few weak, exploratory steps.

For a moment, Hal was so panicked he thought of running away. But he forced himself to remain rooted and to think rationally.

If the wogs did find Pornsen, they'd turn him over to the doctors of the Gabriel. And the doctors would give Pornsen new eyes from the meat bank and would inject regeneratives into him. In two weeks, Pornsen's tongue would grow out again. And he'd talk. Forerunner, how he'd talk!

Two weeks? Now! There was nothing to prevent Pornsen from writing.

Pornsen groaned with physical pain; Hal, with mental.

There was only one thing to do.

He went up to Pornsen and seized his hand. The gapt flinched and said something unintelligible.

'It's Hal,' said Yarrow.

Pornsen reached out his free hand and pulled a notebook and pen from his pocket. Hal released the other hand. Pornsen wrote on the paper and then handed the notebook to Hal.

The moonlight was bright enough to read by. The handwriting was a scrawl, but, even blind, Pornsen could write legibly.

Take me to the Gabriel, son. I swear by the Forerunner I won't say a word about the liquor to anybody. I'll be eternally grateful. But don't leave me here in my pain at the mercy of monsters. I love you.

Hal patted Pornsen on the shoulder and said, 'Take my hand. I'll lead you.'

At the same time, he heard a noise from down the street. A group of noisy wogs was heading his way.

He pulled Pornsen into the nearby park, guiding the stumbling man around the trees and bushes. After they'd walked a hundred yards, they came to an especially thick grouping of trees. Hal halted. Unfamiliar sounds were coming from the center of the grove – clicking and wheezing sounds.

He peered around a tree and saw the origin of the noise. The bright moonlight fell on the corpse of a wog, or, rather, on what was left of it. The upper part was stripped of flesh. Around it and on it were many silvery-white insects. These resembled ants but were at least a foot high. The clicking came from their mandibles working on the corpse. The wheezing came from the air sacs on their heads breathing in and out.

Hal had thought he was hidden, but they must have detected him. Suddenly, they had disappeared into the shadows of the trees on the side of the grove opposite him.

He hesitated, then decided that they were scavengers and would give a healthy person no trouble. Probably, the wog was a drunk who had passed out and been killed by the ants.

He led Pornsen to the corpse and examined it because this was his first chance to inspect the bone structure of the indigenes. The spinal column of the wog was located in the anterior of the torso. It rose from unhumanly shaped hips in a curve that was the mirror image of the curve of a man's spine. However, two sacs of the intestinal tract lay on each side of the spine, forward of the hips. They made a stomach with a hollow in its center. The stomach of a live wog concealed the depression, for the skin stretched tightly over it.

Such an internal construction was to be expected in a being that had developed from the ancestors similar to those of the insects. Hundreds of millions of years ago, the ancestors of the wogs had been unspecialized, wormlike prearthropods. But evolution had intended to make a sentient being from the worm. And, realizing the limitations of true arthropods, evolution had split the wogs' Nth-great-grandfather from the phylum of Arthropoda. When the crustacea, arachnida, and insecta had formed exoskeletons and many legs, Grandfather Wog the Nth had not gone along with them. He had refused to harden his delicate cuticle skin into chitin. Instead, he had erected a skeleton inside the flesh. But his central nervous system was still ventral, and the feat of shifting spinal nerves and spine from front to back was beyond him. So, he had formed the spine where it had to be. And the rest of his skeleton had to go along. The inner parts of a wog were unmistakably different from a mammal's. But if the form was different, the function was similar.

Hal would have liked to investigate further, but he had work to do.

Work which he hated.

Pornsen wrote something in the notebook and handed it to Hal.

Son, I am in terrible pain. Please don't hesitate about taking me to the ship. I will not betray you. Have I ever broken a promise to you? I love you.

Hal thought, The only promise you ever made to me was to whip me.

He looked at the shadows between the trees. The pale bodies of the ants were like a forest of mushrooms. Waiting until he left.

Pornsen mumbled something and sat down on the grass. His head drooped.

'Why do I have to do this?' murmured Hal.

He thought, Idon't have to. Jeannette and I could throw ourselves on the mercy of the wogs. Fobo would be the one to go to. The wogs could hide us. But would they do it? If I could be sure, But I can't. They might surrender us to the Uzzites.

'No use putting it off,' he murmured.

He groaned, and he said, 'Why must I do this? Why couldn't he have died back there?

He drew a long knife from a sheath in his boot.

At that moment, Pornsen raised his head and looked upward with scarred eyes. His hand groped for Hal. A ghastly caricature of a smile formed on his burned lips.

Hal raised his knife until its point was about six inches from Pornsen's throat.

'Jeannette, I am doing this for you!' Hal said loudly.

But the knifepoint did not move, and, after a few seconds, it dropped.

'I can't do it,' Hal said. 'Can't.'

Yet, he must do something, something which would either keep Pornsen from informing on him or would remove him and Jeannette from the scene of danger.

Moreover, he had to see that Pornsen was given medical care. The suffering of the man was making him sick, making him writhe with empathy. If he could have killed Pornsen, he would have put an end to that suffering. But he could not do it.

Pornsen, mumbling with burned lips, took a few steps forward, his hands held out at chest level and rotating as he felt for Hal. Hal stepped to one side. He was thinking furiously. There was only one course of action. That was to get Jeannette and make a run for it. His first thought to get a wog to take Pornsen to the ship was discarded. Pornsen would have to be in agony for a while. Hal needed every second of time he could get, and to try to ease the gapt's pain quickly would be treachery to Jeannette – not to mention himself.

Pornsen had been walking slowly forward, exploring the air with his hands, shuffling his feet across the grass so he wouldn't stumble over an obstacle. Presently, his foot came into contact with the bones of the native. He halted, and he stopped to feel. When he closed his hands around the ribs and pelvis, he froze. For several seconds, he kept his stance, then he began feeling the length of the skeleton. His fingers touched the skull, moved around it, tested the fragments of flesh clinging to it.

Abruptly, seemingly terrified, perhaps realizing that whatever had stripped the wog of flesh might be close and that he was helpless, he straightened up and ran headlong. A choking scream came from him as he sped across the glade. The high-pitched ululation ended abruptly. He had rammed into a tree trunk and fallen on his back.

Before he could rise, he was overwhelmed by a wheezing and clicking horde of mushroom-white bodies.

Hal did not think of the fact that he was not behaving rationally. Instead, giving a cry, he ran toward the ants. Halfway across the glade, Hal saw them disappear into the shadows, but not so far that he could not discern their massed whiteness.

Reaching Pornsen, Hal sank down to one knee and examined him.

In those few moments, the man's clothing had been torn to shreds and his flesh bitten in many places.

His eyes stared straight upward; his jugular vein had been severed.

Hal, moaning, rose and walked swiftly from the grove. Behind him was a rustling and wheezing as the ants surged forward from the protection of the trees. Hal did not look back.

And, when he stepped under the light of the street-lamp, the pressure inside him found vent. Tears ran down his cheeks. His shoulders shook with sobs. He staggered like a drunk. His intestines felt as if they were being pulled apart.

He did not know if it was grief or if it was hate at last finding expression because the cause of his hate could no longer retaliate against him. Perhaps, it was both grief and hate. Whatever it was, it was working out of his body like a poison; his body was expelling it. At the same time, it was boiling him alive.

Yet, it was coming out. Though he felt he was dying, by the time he had walked to his home, he was rid of the poison. Fatigue leadened his arms and legs, and he could scarcely find the energy to walk up the flight of steps to the front door of the building.

At the same time, his heart felt light. It was strong, pumping unimpeded as if a hand around it had released its clutch.

A tall ghost in a light blue shroud was waiting for the Terran in the false dawn. It was Fobo, the empathist, standing in the hexagonal-shaped arch that led into his building. He threw back the hood and exposed a face that was scratched on one cheek and blackened around the right eye.

He chuckled and said, 'Some son-of-a-bug pulled my mask off and plowed me good. But it was fun. It helps if you blow off steam now and then. How did you come out? I was afraid you might have been picked up by the police. Normally, that wouldn't worry me, but I know your colleagues at the ship would frown upon such activities.'

Hal smiled wanly.

'Frown misses it by a mile.'

He wondered how Fobo knew what the hierarch's reactions would be. How much did these wogs know about the Terrestrials? Were they onto the Haijac game and waiting to pounce? If so, with what? Their technology, as far as could be determined, was far behind Earth's. True, they seemed to know more of psychic functions than the Terrans did, but that was understandable. The Sturch had long ago decreed that the proper psychology had been perfected and that further research was unnecessary. The result had been a standstill in the psychical sciences.

He shrugged mentally. He was too tired to think of such things. All he wanted was to go to bed.

'I'll tell you later what happened.'

Fobo replied, 'I can guess. Your hand. You'd better let me fix that burn. Nightlifer venom is nasty.'

Like a little child, Hal followed him to the wog's apartment and let him put a cooling salve on it.

'Shib as shib,' Fobo said. 'Go to bed. Tomorrow you can tell me all about it.'

Hal thanked him and walked down to his floor. His hand fumbled with the key. Finally, after using Sigmen's name in vain, he inserted the key. When he had shut and locked the door, he called Jeannette. She must have been hiding in the closet-within-a-closet in the bedroom, for he heard two doors bang. In a moment she was running to him. She threw her arms around him.

'Oh, maw пит, maw пит! What has happened? I was so worried. I thought I would scream when the night went by, and you didn't return.'

Though he was sorry he had caused her pain, he could not help a prickling of pleasure because she cared enough about him to worry. Mary, perhaps, might have been sympathetic, but she would have felt duty-bound to repress it and to lecture him on his unreal thinking and the resulting injury to himself.

'There was a brawl.'

He had decided not to say anything about the gapt or the nightlifer. Later, when the strain had passed, he'd talk.

She untied his cloak and hood and took off his mask. She hung them up in the front room closet, and he sank into a chair and closed his eyes.

A moment later, they were opened by the sound of liquid pouring into a glass. She was standing in front of him and filling a large glass from the quart. The odor of beetlejuice began to turn his stomach, and the Picture of a beautiful girl about to drink the nauseating stuff spun it all the way around.

She looked at him. The delicate brackets of her brows rose. 'Kyetil?'

'Nothing's the matter!' he groaned. 'I'm all right.'

She put down the glass, picked up his hand, and led him into the bedroom. There she gently sat him down, pressed on his shoulders until he lay down, and then took off his shoes. He didn't resist. After she unbuttoned his shirt, she stroked his hair.

'You're sure you're all right?'

'Shib. I could lick the world with one hand tied behind my back.'

'Good.'

The bed creaked as she got up and walked out of the room. He began to drift into sleep, but her return awakened him. Again, he opened his eyes. She was standing with a glass in her hand.

She said, 'Would you like a sip now, Hal?'

'Great Sigmen, don't you understand?' Fury roused him and he sat up.

'Why do you think I got sick? I can't stand the stuff! I can't stand to see you drink it. It makes me sick. You make me sick. What's the matter with you? Are you stupid?'

Jeannette's eyes widened. Blood drained from her face and left the pigment of her lips a crimson moon in a white lake. Her hand shook so that the liquor spilled.

'Why – why–' she gasped – 'I thought you said you felt fine. I thought you were all right. I thought you wanted to go to bed with me.'

Yarrow groaned. He shut his eyes and lay back down. Sarcasm was lost on her. She insisted on taking everything literally. She would have to be reeducated. If he weren't so exhausted, he would have been shocked by her open proposal – so much like that of the Scarlet Woman in The Western Talmud when she had tried to seduce the Forerunner.

But he was past being shocked. Moreover, a voice on the edge of his conscience said that she had merely put into hard and unrecallable words what he had planned in his heart all this time. But when they were spoken!

A crash of glass shattered his thoughts. He jerked upright. She was standing there, face twisted, lovely red mouth quivering, and tears flowing. Her hand was empty. A large wet patch against the wall, still dripping, showed what had become of the glass.

'I thought you loved me!' she shouted.

Unable to think of anything to say, he stared. She spun and walked away. He heard her go into the front room and begin to sob loudly. Unable to endure the sound, he jumped out of bed and walked swiftly after her. These rooms were supposed to be soundproof, but one never knew. What if she were overheard?

Anyway, she was twisting something inside him, and he had to straighten it out.

When he entered the front room, he saw she was looking downcast. For a while, he stood silent, wanting to say something but utterly unable to because he had never been forced to solve such a problem before. Haijac women didn't cry often, and if they did, they wept alone in privacy.

He sat down by her and put his hand on her soft shoulder. 'Jeannette.'

She turned quickly and laid her dark hair against his chest. She said, between sobs, 'I thought maybe you didn't love me. And I couldn't stand it. Not after all I've been through!'

'Well, Jeannette, I didn't – I mean – I wasn't...'

He paused. He had had no intention of saying he loved her. He'd never told any woman he loved her, not even Mary. Nor had any woman ever told him. And here was this woman on a faraway planet, only half-human at that, taking it for granted that he was hers, body and self.

He began speaking in a soft voice. Words came easily because he was quoting Moral Lecture AT-16:

' ". . .all beings with their hearts in the right place are brothers... Man and woman are brother and sister... Love is everywhere... but love... should be on a higher plane... Man and woman should rightly loathe the beastly act as something the Great Mind, the Cosmic Observer, has not yet eliminated in man's evolutionary development... The time will come when children will be produced through thought alone. Meanwhile, we must recognize sex as necessary for only one reason: children..." '

Slap! His head rang, and points of fire whirled off into the blackness before his eyes.

It was a moment before he could realize that Jeannette had leaped to her feet and slammed him hard with the palm of her hand. He saw her standing above him with her eyes slitted and her red mouth open and drawn back in a snarl.

Then, she whirled and ran into the bedroom. He got up and followed her. She was lying on the bed, sobbing.

'Jeannette, you don't understand!'

'Fva tuh fe fu!'

When he understood that, he blushed. Then he became furious. He grabbed her by the shoulder and turned her over so that she faced him.

Suddenly he was saying, 'But I do love you, Jeannette. I do.'

He sounded strange, even to himself. The concept of love, as she meant it, was alien to him – rusty, perhaps, if it could be put that way. It would need much polishing. But it would, he knew, be polished. Here in his arms was one whose very nature and instinct and education were pointed toward love.

He had thought he had drained himself of grief earlier that night; but now, as he forgot his resolve not to tell her what had happened, and as he recounted, step by step, the long and terrible night, tears ran down his face. Thirty years made a deep well; it took a long time to pump out all the weeping.

Jeannette, too, cried, and said that she was sorry that she had gotten angry at him. She promised never again to do so. He said it was all right. They kissed again and again until, like two babies who have wept themselves and loved themselves out of frustration and fury, they passed gently into sleep.

At 0900 Ship's Time, Yarrow walked into the Gabriel, the scent of morning dew on the grass in his nostrils. As he had a little time before the conference, he looked up Turnboy, the historian joat. Casually, he asked Turnboy if he knew anything of a space flight emigration from France after the Apocalyptic War. Turnboy was delighted to show off his knowledge. Yes, the remnants of the Gallic nation had gathered in the Loire country after the Apocalyptic War and had formed the nucleus of what might have become a new France.

But the swiftly growing colonies sent from Iceland to the northern part of France, and from Israel to the Southern part, had surrounded the Loire. New France found itself squeezed economically and religiously. Sigmen's disciples invaded the territory in waves of missionaries. High tariffs strangled the little state's trade. Finally, a group of Frenchmen, seeing the inevitable absorption or conquest of their state, religion, and tongue, had left in six rather primitive spaceships to find another Gaul rotating about some far-off star. It was highly improbable that they had succeeded.

Hal thanked Turnboy and walked to the conference room. He spoke to many. Half of them, like him, had a Mongolian tinge to their features. They were the English-speaking descendants of Hawaiian and Australian survivors of the same war which had decimated France. Their many-times great-grandfathers had repopulated Australia, the Americas, Japan, and China.

Almost half of the crew spoke Icelandic. Their ancestors had sailed from the grim island to spread across northern Europe, Siberia, and Manchuria.

About a sixteenth of the crew knew Georgian as their native tongue. Their foreparents had moved down from the Caucasus Mountains and resettled depopulated southern Russia, Bulgaria, nothern Iran, and Afghanistan.

The conference was a memorable one. First, Hal was moved from twentieth place to the Archurielite's left to sixth from his right. The lamedh on his chest made the difference. Second, there was little difficulty about Pornsen's death. The gapt was considered a casualty of the undeclared war. Everyone was warned, again, about the nightlifers and other things that sometimes prowled Siddo after dusk. It was not, however, suggested that the Haijacs quit their moonlit espionage.

Macneff ordered Hal, as the dead gapt's spiritual son, to arrange for the funeral the following day. Then he pulled down a huge map from a long roller on the wall. This was the representation of Earth that would be given to the wogs.

It was a good example of the Haijacs' subtlety and Chinese box-within-a-box thinking. The two hemispheres of Earth were depicted on the map with colored political boundaries. It was correct as far as the Bantu and Malay states were concerned. But the positions of the Israeli and Haijac nations had been reversed. The legend beneath the map indicated that green was the color of the Forerunner states and yellow the Hebrew states. The green portion, however, was a ring around the Mediterranean, and a broad band covering Arabia, the southern half of Asia Minor, and northern India.

In other words, if, by an inconceivable chance, the Ozagen succeeded in capturing the Gabriel and built ships with it as a model, and used the navigational data aboard to find Sol, they would still attack the wrong country. Undoubtedly, they would not bother to contact personally the people of Earth, for they would want to use the element of surprise. Thus, the Israeli would never get a chance to explain before the bombs went off. And the Haijac Union, warned, would hurl its space fleet against the invaders.

'However,' said Macneff, 'I do not think that the pseudofuture I have just suggested could ever become reality. Not unless the Backrunner is more powerful than I believe. Of course, you could take the attitude that this course might be best. What better shape could the future take than to wipe out our Israeli enemies through means of these nonhumans?

'But, as you all know, our ship is well guarded against attack by open assault or stealth. Our radar, lasers, audiodetection equipment, and starlight scopes are operating at all times. Our weapons are ready. The wogs are inferior in technology; they have nothing to bring against us that we could not easily crush.

'Nevertheless, if the Backrunner were to inspire them to superhuman cunning, and they did get into the ship, they would fail. If the wogs should reach a certain point in the ship, one of two officers always on duty on the bridge will press a button. This will wipe out all navigational data in the memory banks; the wogs will never be able to locate Sol.

'And if the wogs – Sigmen forbid – should reach the bridge, then the officer on duty there will press another button.'

Macneff paused and looked at those around the conference table. Most of them were pale, for they knew what he was going to say.

'An H-bomb will utterly destroy this ship. It will also annihilate the city of Siddo. And we will be honored forever in the eyes of the Forerunner and the Sturch.

'Naturally, we would all prefer that this not happen.

And I wish I could warn Siddo so that they would not dare to attack. However, to do so would spoil our present good relations with them and might result in our having to launch Project Ozagenocide before we are ready.'

After the conference, Hal gave orders for the funeral arrangements. Other duties kept him till dark, when he returned home.

When Hal locked the door behind him, he heard the shower running. He hung his coat up in the closet; the water stopped splashing. As he went towards his bedroom door, Jeannette stepped out from the bathroom. She was drying her hair with a big towel, and she was naked.

She said, 'Baw yoo, Hal,' and walked into the bedroom, unselfconsciously. Feebly, Hal replied. He turned and went back into the front room. He felt foolish because of his timorousness and, at the same time, vaguely wicked, unreal, because of the pounding of his heart, his heavy breathing, the hot and fluid fingers that wrapped themselves, half-pain, half-delight, around his loins.

She came out dressed in a pale green robe which he had bought for her and which she had recut and resewn to fit her figure. Her heavy black hair was piled on her head in a Psyche knot. She kissed him and asked if he wanted to come into the kitchen while she cooked. He said that would be fine.

She began making a sort of spaghetti. He asked her to tell him about her life. Once started, she was not hard to keep going.

'. . . and so my father's people found a planet like Earth and settled there. It was a beautiful planet; that is why they called it Wuhbopfey, the beautiful land.

'According to my father, there are about thirty million living there on one continent. My father was not content to live the life his grandfathers had lived – tilling the soil or running a shop and raising many children. He and some other young men like him took the only spaceship left of the original six that had come there, and they sailed off to the stars. They came to Ozagen. And crashed. No wonder. The ship was so old.'

'Is the wreck still around?'

'Fi. Close to where my sisters and aunts and cousins live.'

'Your mother is dead?'

She hesitated, then nodded. 'Yes. She died giving birth to me. And my sisters. My father died later. Or rather, we think he did. He went on a hunting party and never came back.'

Hal frowned, and he said, 'You told me that your mother and aunts were the last of the native human beings on Ozagen. That isn't so. Fobo told me that there are at least a thousand small isolated groups in the back-lands. And you said once before that Rastignac was the only Earthman to get out alive from the wreck. He was your mother's husband, naturally... and incredible as it sounds, their union – one of the terrestrial and an extraterrestrial – was fertile! That alone would rock my colleagues on their heels. It's completely contrary to accepted science that their body chemistry and chromosomes should match! But – what I'm getting at is that your mother's sisters had children, too. if the last human male of your group died years before Rastignac crashed, who was their father?'

'My father, Jean-Jacques Rastignac. He was the husband of my mother and my three aunts. They all said that he was a superb lover, very experienced, very virile.'

Hal said, 'Oh.'

Until she had the spaghetti and salad ready, he watched her in silence. By then he had regained some of his moral perspective. After all, the Frenchman was not too much worse than he himself was. Maybe not as bad. He chuckled. How easy it was to condemn somebody else for giving way to temptation until you yourself faced the same situation. He wondered what Pornsen would have done if Jeannette had contacted him.

'... and so, after we'd been going down that jungle river,' she was saying, 'they quit watching me so closely. We'd taken two months to get from my home, near where they'd captured me, so they thought I'd never dare to try to get home alone. There are too many deadly things in the jungle. They make the nightlifer look like a minor nuisance.'

She shuddered.

'When we got to a village which was on the very edge of their civilization, they let me wander around in the enclosure. By then I'd learned some of their language and they some of mine. But our conversation was on a very simple level. One of their party, a scientist named 'Asa"atsi, put me through all sorts of examinations and tests, physical and mental. There was a machine at the village hospital which took photographs of my insides. My skeleton, my organs. Maw tyuh! My everything.

'They said it was most interesting. Imagine that! I am exposed as no woman has ever been exposed, and to them I am just most interesting. Indeed!'

'Well.' Hal laughed. 'You can't expect them to take the viewpoint of a male mammal toward a female mammal... that is...'

She looked archly at him. 'And am I a mammal?'

'Obviously, unmistakably, indisputably, and enthusiastically.'

'For that, you get a kiss.'

She leaned over him and placed her mouth over his. He stiffened, reacting as he had when his ex-wife had offered to kiss him. But she must have anticipated this, for she said, 'You are a man, not a pillar of stone. And I am a woman who loves you. Kiss me back; don't just take my kisses.'

'Oh, not so hard,' she murmured. 'Kiss me. Don't try to ram your lips through mine. Go soft, melt, merge your lips with mine. See.'

She vibrated the tip of her tongue against his. Then she stood back, smiling, her eyes half-closed, her red lips wet. He was shaking and breathing hard.

'Do your people think the tongue is only to talk with? Do they think that what I did is wicked, unreal?'

'I don't know. Nobody ever discussed that.'

'You liked it, I know. Yet this is the same mouth with which I eat. The one I must hide behind a veil when I sit across the table from you.'

'Don't put the cap on.' he blurted. 'I have been thinking about that. There is no rational reason why we should be veiled when we eat. The only reason is that I have been taught it is disgusting. Pavlov's dog salivated when it heard the bell; I get sick when I see food go into a naked mouth.'

'Let's eat. Then we will drink and we will talk of us. And later do whatever we feel like doing.' He was learning fast. He didn't even blush.

After the meal she diluted a pitcher of beetlejuice with water, poured in a purplish liquid which made the drink smell like grapes, and dropped sprigs of an orange plant on the surface. Placed into a glass of ice cubes, it was cool and even tasted like grapes. It did not gag him at all.

'Why did you pick me instead of Pornsen?'

She sat on his lap, one arm around his neck, the other on the table, drink in hand.

'Oh, you were so good – looking, and he was so ugly. Besides, I could feel that you could be trusted. I knew I had to be careful. My father had told me about Earthmen. He said they couldn't be trusted.'

'How true. But you must have an intuition for doing the right thing, Jeannette. If you had antennae, I'd say you could detect nervous emanations. Here, let's see!' He went to run his fingers through her hair, but she ducked her head and laughed.

He laughed with her and dropped his hand to her shoulder, rubbing the smooth skin. 'I was probably the only person on the ship who wouldn't have betrayed you. But I'm in a quandary now – You see, your presence here raises the Backrunner. It puts me in grave danger – but a danger I wouldn't miss for anything else in the world.

'However, what you tell me of the X-ray machines worries me. So far, we've seen none. Are the wogs hiding them? If so, why? We know that they have electricity, and that they're theoretically capable of inventing X-ray machines. Perhaps, they're hiding them only because they're indications of an even more developed technology.

'But that doesn't seem reasonable. And, after all, we don't know too much of Siddo culture. We've not been here long enough; we don't have enough men to do extensive investigation.

'Maybe I'm being too suspicious. That's more than likely. Nevertheless, Macneff should be informed. But I can't tell him how I found out; I wouldn't even dare make up a lie about my source of information.

'I'm on the horns of a dilemma.'

'A dilemma? A beast I never heard of before.'

He hugged her and said, 'I hope you never do.'

'Listen,' she said, looking eagerly at him with her beautiful brown eyes, 'Why bother to tell Macneff? If the Siddo should attack the Haijac – or, as you say their enemies call them so aptly, Highjackers – and conquer them, why not? Couldn't we make our way to my homeland and live there?'

Hal was shocked. 'Those are my people, my countrymen! They – we – are Sigmenites. I couldn't betray them!'

'You are doing just that now by keeping me here,' she said gravely.

'I know that," said Hal slowly. 'But it's not a gross betrayal, not a real betrayal at all. How am I hurting them by having you?'

'I don't worry at all about what you may be doing to them. I do worry about what you may be doing to yourself.'

'To myself? I am doing the best thing I ever did!' She laughed delightedly and gave him a light kiss on the lips.

But he frowned, and he said, 'Jeannette, it's serious. Sooner or later, and probably sooner, we have to do something definite. By that, I mean find a hiding place deep underground. Later, after it's all over, we can come out. And we'll have at least eighty years to ourselves, which will be more than enough. Because it will take that long for the Gabriel to return to Earth and for the colonizing ships to come back. We'll be like Adam and Eve, just us two and the beasts.'

'What do you mean?' she said, her eyes widening.

'This. Our specialists are working night and day on samples of blood the wogs gave us. They hope to make an artificial semivirus that will attach itself to the copper in the wog's blood cells and change the cells' electrophoretic properties.'

' 'Ama?'

'I'll try to explain even if I have to use a mixture of American, French, and Siddo to get it across.

'A form of this artificial semivirus is what killed most of Earth's people during the Apocalyptic War. I won't go into the historical details; it's enough to say that the virus was desseminated secretly from outside the Earth's atmosphere by the ships of Martian colonists. The descendants of Earthmen on Mars, who considered themselves true Martians, were led by Sigfried Russ, as evil a man as ever lived. Or so say the history books.'

'I do not know what you are talking about,' she said.

Her face was grave, her eyes fixed upon his face.

'You can pick up the gist of it. The four Martian ships, pretending to be merchant vessels orbiting before entry, dropped billions of these viruses. Invisible knots of protein molecules that drifted through the atmosphere, spreading throughout the world, covering it in a very tenuous mist. These molecules, once they penetrated a human being's skin, locked onto the hemoglobin in the red blood cells and gave them a positive charge. This charge caused one end of a globin molecule to bind with the end of the other. And the molecule would go into a kind of crystallization. This would twist the doughnut shaped cells into scimitars and thus cause an artificial sickle-cell anemia.

'The lab-created anemia was much swifter and more certain than the natural anemia, because every blood cell in the body would be affected, not just a small percentage. Every cell would soon break down. No oxygen would be carried through the human organism; the body died.

'The body did die, Jeannette – the body of humanity. Almost an entire planet of human beings perished from lack of oxygen.'

'I think I understand most of what you have told me,' said Jeannette. 'But everybody, they did not die?'

'No. And at the beginning, the governments of Earth found out what was going on. They launched missiles toward Mars; and the missiles, designed to cause earthquakes, destroyed most of the Martian underground colonies.

'On Earth, perhaps a million survived on each continent. With the exception of certain areas where almost the entire population was untouched. Why? We don't really know. But something, perhaps favorable wind currents, bent the fall of virus away until the virus had fallen to the ground. After a certain time outside of a human body, the virus died.

'Anyway, the islands of Hawaii and Iceland were left with organized governments and a full population. Israel, too, was left untouched, as if the hand of God had covered it during the deadly fall. And southern Australia and the Caucasus Mountains were spared.

'These groups spread out afterward, resettling the world, absorbing the survivors in the areas which they took over. In the jungles of Africa and the Malayan peninsula, enough were left alive to venture out. These reestablished themselves in their native lands before colonies from the islands and Australia could take over.

'And what happened to Earth is destined to happen here on this planet. When the order is given, missiles will leave the Gabriel, missiles laden with the same deadly cargo. Only, the viruses will be fitted for the blood cells of the Ozagen. And the missiles will circle and circle and drop their invisible rain of death. And... everywhere ... the skulls–'

'Hush!' Jeannette put her finger on his quivering lips. 'I don't know what you mean by proteins and molecules and those – those electrofrenetic charges! They're way above my head. But I do know that the longer you've been talking, the more scared you've been getting. Your voice was getting higher, and your eyes were growing wider.

'Somebody has frightened you in the past. No! Don't interrupt! They've scared you, and you've been man enough to hide most of your fear. But they've done such a horribly efficient job that you haven't been able to get over it.

'Well–' and she put her soft lips to his ear and whispered – 'I'm going to wipe that fear out. I'm going to lead you out of that valley of fright. No! Don't protest! I know it hurts your ego to think that a woman could know you're afraid. But I don't think any the less of you. I admire you all the more because you've conquered so much of it. I know what courage it took to face the 'Meter. I know you did it because of me. I'm proud that you did. I love you for it. And I know what courage it takes to keep me here, when at any time a slip would send you to certain disgrace and death. I know what it all means. It's my nature and instinct and business and love to know.

'Now! Drink with me. We're not outside these walls where we have to worry ourselves about such things and be scared. We're in here. Away from everything except ourselves. Drink. And love me. I'll love you,. Hal, and we'll not see the world outside nor need to. For the time being. Forget in my arms.'

They kissed and ran their hands over each other and said the things lovers have always said.

Between kisses, Jeannette poured more of the purplish liquor, and they drank this. Hal had no trouble swallowing it. He decided that it wasn't the idea of drinking alcohol so much as it was the odor that sickened him. When his nose was deceived, his stomach was also. And every drink made it easier for the next one.

He downed three tall glasses and then rose and lifted Jeannette in his arms and carried her into the bedroom. She was kissing the side of his neck, and it seemed to him that an electric charge was passing from her lips to his skin and on up to his brain and on down through his beating chest and warming stomach and swelling genital and on down through the soles of his feet, which, strangely, had become ice. Certainly, holding her did not make him want to withdraw as when he had carried out his duty toward Mary and the Sturch.

Yet, even in his ecstasy of anticipation, there was a stronghold of retreat. It was small, but it was there, dark in the middle of the fire. He could not completely forget himself, and he doubted, wondering if he would fail as he had sometimes when he had crawled into bed in the dark and reached out for Mary.

There was also a black seed of panic, dropped by the doubt. If he failed, he would kill himself. He would be done forever.

Yet, he told himself, it could not possibly happen, must not. Not when he had his arms around her and her lips were on his.

He put her on the bed and then turned off the ceiling light. But she turned on the lamp over the bed.

'Why are you doing that?' he said, standing at the foot of the bed, feeling the rise of panic and the fall of his passion. At the same time he wondered how she could so swiftly, unseen by him, have unclothed herself.

She smiled and said, 'Remember what you told me the other day? That beautiful passage: God said, Let there be light.'

'We do not need it.'

'I do. I must see you at every moment. The dark would take away half of the pleasure. I want to see you in love.'

She reached upward to adjust the angle of the bedlamp, her breasts rising with the movement and sending an almost intolerable pang through him.

'There. Now I can see your face. Especially, at the moment when I will know best that you love me.'

She extended a foot and touched his knee with her toe. Skin upon skin... it drew him forward as if it were the finger of an angel gently directing him toward destiny. He knelt upon the bed, and she drew back her leg with her toe still placed upon his leg as if it had grown roots into his flesh and could not be dislodged.

'Hal, Hal,' she murmured. 'What have they done to you? What have they done to all your men? I know from what you have told me that they are like you. What have they done? Made you hate instead of love, though they call hate love. Made you half-men so you will turn your drive into yourself and then outward against the enemy. So you will become fierce warriors because you are such timid lovers.'

'That's not true,' he said. 'Not true.'

'I can see you. It is true.'

She removed her foot and placed it beside his knee and said, 'Come closer,' and when he had moved closer, still on his knees, she reached up and pulled him down against her breasts.

'Place your mouth here. Become a baby again. And I will raise you so you forget your hate and know only love. And become a man.'

'Jeannette, Jeannette,' he said hoarsely. He put out his hand to pull the cord of the bedlamp and said, 'Not the light.'

But she put her hand on his and said, 'Yes, the light.'

Then she took her hand away and said, 'All right, Hal. Turn it off. For a little while. If you must go back into the darkness, go far back. Far back. And then be reborn... for a little while. Then, the light.'

'No! let it stay on!' he snarled. 'I am not in my mother's womb. I do not want to go back there; I do not need to. And I will take you as an army takes a city.'

'Don't be a soldier, Hal. Be a lover. You must love me, not rape me. You can't take me, because I will surround you.'

Her hand closed gently on him, and she arched her back slightly, and suddenly he was surrounded. A shock ran through him, comparable to that he had felt when she kissed his neck, but comparable only in kind and not in intensity.

He started to bury his face against her shoulder, but she put both hands on his chest and with surprising strength, half-raised him.

'No. I must see your face. Especially at the time I must, for I want to see you lose yourself in me.'

And she kept her eyes wide open throughout as if she were trying to impress forever upon every cell of her body her lover's face.

Hal was not disconcerted, for he would not have paid attention to the Archurielite himself knocking on the door. But he noticed, though he did not think of it, that the pupils of her eyes had contracted to a pencil point.

The Alcoholics in the Haijac Union were sent to H. Therefore, no psychological or narcotic therapies had been worked out for addicts. Hal, frustrated by this fact in his desire to wipe out Jeannette's weakness, went for medicine to the very people who had given her the disease. But he pretended that the cure was for himself.

Fobo said, 'There is widespread drinking on Ozagen, but it is light. Our few alcoholics are empathized into normality with the help of medicine, of course. Why don't you let me empathize you?'

'Sorry. My government forbids that.'

He had given Fobo the same excuse for not inviting the wog into his apartment.

'You have the most forbidding government,' said Fobo and went into one of his long, howling laughs.

When he recovered, he said, 'You're forbidden to touch liquor, too, but that doesn't hold you back. Well, there's no accounting for inconsistency. Seriously, though, I have just the thing for you. It's called Easyglow. We put it into the daily ration of liquor, slowly increasing the Easyglow and diminishing the alcohol. In two or three weeks, the patient is drinking from a fluid ninety-six percent Easyglow. The taste is much the same; the drinker seldom suspects. Continued treatment eases the patient from his dependence on the alcohol. There is only one drawback.'

He paused and said, 'The drinker is now addicted to Easyglow!'

He whooped and slapped his thigh and shook his head until his long cartilaginous nose vibrated, and laughed until the tears came.

When he managed to quit laughing and had dried his tears with a starfish-shaped handkerchief, he said, 'Really, the perculiar effect of Easyglow is that it opens the patient for discharge of the strains that have driven him to drink. He may then be empathized and at the same time weaned from the stimulant. Since I have no opportunity to slip the stuff to you secretly, I'm taking the chance that you are seriously interested in curing yourself. When you're ready for therapy, tell me.'

Hal took the bottle to his apartment. Every day, its contents went quietly and carefully into the beetlejuice he got for Jeannette. He hoped that he was psychologist enough to cure her once the Easyglow took effect.

Although he didn't know it, he was himself being 'cured' by Fobo. His almost daily talks with the empathist instilled doubts about the religion and science of the Haijacs. Fobo read the biographies of Isaac Sigmen and the Worfo: the Pre-Torah, The Western Talmud, the Revised Scriptures, the Foundations of Serialism, Time and Theology, The Self and the World Line. Calmly sitting at his table with a glass of juice in his hand, the wog challenged the mathematics of the dunnologists. Hal proved; Fobo disproved. He pointed out that the mathematics was based mainly on false-to-fact assumptions; that Dunne's and Sigmen's reasoning was buttressed by too many false analogies, metaphors, and strained interpretations. Remove the buttresses, and the structure fell.

'Moreover and to continue,' Fobo said, 'allow and permit me to point out one more in a score of contradictions embodied in your theology. You Sigmenites believe that every person is responsible for any event happening to him, that no one else but the self may be blamed. If you, Hal Yarrow, stumbled on a toy left by some careless child – happy, happy infant with no responsibilities! – and skinned your elbow, you did so because you really wanted to hurt yourself. If you are seriously hurt in an 'accident,' it was no accident; it was you agreeing to actualize a potentiality. Contrarily, you could have agreed with your self not to be involved, and so actualized a different future.

'If you commit a crime, you wish to do so. If you get caught, it is not because you were stupid in the commission of the crime or because the Uzzites were more clever or because circumstances worked out to make you fall into the hands of – what is your vernacular for them, the uzz? No, it was because you wished to be caught; you, somehow, controlled the circumstances.

'If you die, it is because you wanted to die, not because someone pointed a gun at you and pulled the trigger. You died because you willed to intercept the bullet; you agreed with the killer that you could be killed.

'Of course, this philosophy, this belief, is very shib for the Sturch, for it relieves them of any blame if they have to chastise or execute or unjustly tax you or in any way take uncivil liberties with you. Obviously, if you did not wish to be chastised or executed or taxed or dealt with in an unfair way, you would not permit it.

'Of course, if you do disagree with the Sturch or try to defy it, you do so because you are trying to realize a pseudofuture, one condemned by the Sturch. You, the individual, can't win.

'Yet, hear and listen to this: You also believe that you yourself have perfect free will to determine the future. But the future has been determined because Sigmen had gone ahead in time and arranged it. Sigmen's brother, Jude Changer, may temporarily disarrange the future and the past, but Sigmen will eventually restore the desired equilibrium.

'Let me ask and question you, how can you yourself determine the future when the future has been determined and forecast by Sigmen? One state or the other may be correct, but not both.'

'Well,' Hal said, his face hot, his chest feeling as if a heavy weight were on it, his hands shaking, 'I have thought of that very question.'

'Did you ask anyone?'

'No,' Hal said, feeling trapped. 'We were allowed to ask questions, of course, of our teachers. But that question was not on the list.'

'You mean to tell me that your questions were written out for you and you were confined to those?'

'Well, why not?' Hal said angrily. 'Those questions were for our benefit. The Sturch knew from long experience what questions students ask, so it listed them for the less bright.'

'Less bright is right,' said Fobo. 'And I suppose that any questions not on the list were considered too dangerous, too conducive to unrealistic thinking?'

Hal nodded miserably.

Fobo went on in his relentless dissection. Worse, far worse than anything he had said were his next words, for they were a personal attack on the sacrosanct self of Sigmen himself.

He said that the Forerunner's biographies and theological writings revealed him to an objective reader as a sexually frigid and woman-hating man with a Messiah complex and paranoid and schizophrenic tendencies which burst through his icy shell from time to time in religious-scientific frenzies and fantasies.

'Other men,' Fobo said, 'must have stamped their personalities and ideas upon their times. But Sigmen had and advantage over those great leaders who came before him. Because of Earth's rejuvenation serums, he lived long enough, not only to set up his kind of society, but also to consolidate it and weed out its weaknesses. He didn't die until the cement of his social form had hardened.'

'But the Forerunner didn't die,' Yarrow protested. 'He left in time. He is still with us, traveling down the fields of presentation, skipping here and there, now to the past, now to the future. Always, whereever he is needed to turn pseudotime into real time, he is there.'

'Ah, yes,' Fobo smiled. 'That was the reason you went to the ruins, was it not? To check up on a mural which hinted that the Ozagen humans had once been visited by a man from another star? You thought it might have been the Forerunner, didn't you?'

'I still think so,' said Hal. 'But my report showed that though the man resembled Sigmen somewhat, the evidence was too inconclusive. The Forerunner may or may not have visited this planet a thousand years ago.'

'Be that as it may, I maintain your theses are meaningless. You claim that his prophecies came true. I say, first, that they were ambiguously stated. Second, if they have been realized it is because your powerful state-church – which you economically term the Sturch – has made strenuous efforts to fulfill them.

'Furthermore, this pyramidal society of yours – this guardian-angel administration – where every twenty-five families have a gapt to supervise their most intimate and minute details, and every twenty-five family-gapts have a block-gapt at their head, and every fifty block-gapts are directed by a supervisor-gapt, and so on – this society is based on fear and ignorance and suppression.'

Hal, shaken, angered, shocked, would get up to leave. Fobo would call him back and ask him to disprove what he'd said. Hal would let loose a flood of wrath. Sometimes, when he had finished, he would be asked to sit down and continue the discussion. Sometimes, Fobo would lose his temper; they would shout and scream insults. Twice, they fought with fists; Hal got a bloody nose, and Fobo a black eye. Then the wog, weeping, would embrace Hal and ask for his forgiveness, and they would sit down and drink some more until their nerves were calmed.

Hal knew that he should not listen to Fobo, should not allow himself to be in a situation where he could hear such unrealism. But he could not stay away. And, though he hated Fobo for what he said, he derived a strange satisfaction and fascination from the relationship. He could not cut himself off from this being whose tongue cut and flayed him far more painfully than Pornsen's whip ever had.

He told Jeannette of these incidents. She encouraged him to tell them over and over again until he had talked away the stress and strain of grief and hate and doubt. Afterward, there was always love such as he had never thought possible. For the first time, he knew that man and woman could become one flesh. His wife and he had remained outside the circle of each other, but Jeannette knew the geometry that would take him in and the chemistry that would mix his substance with hers.

Always, too, there was the light and the drink. But they did not bother him. Unknown to her, she was now drinking a liquor almost entirely Easyglow. And he had gotten used to the light above their bed. It was one of her quirks. Fear of the dark wasn't behind it, because it was only while making love that she required that the lamp be left on. He didn't understand it. Perhaps she wanted to impress his image on her memory, always to have it if she ever lost him. If so, let her keep the light.

By its glow he explored her body with an interest that was part sexual and part anthropological. He was delighted and astonished at the many small differences between her and Terran women. There was a small appendage of skin on the roof of her mouth that might have been the rudiment of some organ whose function had been long ago cast aside by evolution. She had twenty-eight teeth; the wisdom teeth were missing. That might or might not have been a characteristic of her mother's people.

He suspected that she had either an extra set of pectoral muscles or else an extraordinarily well developed normal set. Her large and cone-shaped breasts did not sag. They were high and firm and pointed slightly upward: the ideal of feminine beauty so often portrayed through the ages by male sculptors and painters and so seldom existing in nature.

She was not only a pleasure to look at; she was pleasing to be with. At least once a week she would greet him with a new garment. She loved to sew; out of the materials he gave her she fashioned blouses, skirts, and even gowns. Along with the change in dress went new hairdos. She was ever new and ever beautiful, and she made him realize for the first time that a woman could be beautiful. Or perhaps she made him realize that a human being could be beautiful. And a thing of beauty was a joy, if not forever, then for a long time.

His enjoyment of her, and hers of him, was hastened and strengthened by her linguistic fluency. She seemed to have switched from her French to American almost overnight. Within a week she was speaking, within her limited but quickly increasing vocabulary, faster and more expressively than he.

However, his delight in her company made him neglect his duties. His progress in learning to read Siddo slowed down.

One day, Fobo asked him how he was doing with the books he'd loaned him. Hal confessed that they were too difficult for him – so far. Fobo then gave him a book on evolution which was used in the wog elementary schools.

'Try these. They're two volumes, but they're rather slim in text. The many pictures will enable you to grasp the text more quickly. It's an abridgement for the youngsters by a famous educator, We'enai.'

Jeannette had much more time to study than Hal, since she had little to do in the apartment while he was gone during the day. She tackled the new boob, and so Hal fell into the lazy habit of allowing her to translate for him. She would first read the Siddo aloud and then translate into American. Or, if her vocabulary failed her, into French.

One evening, she started out energetically enough. But she was sipping beetlejuice between paragraphs, and after a while she began to lose interest in the translating.

She went through the first chapter, which described the formation of the planet and the beginnings of life. In the second chapter, she yawned quite openly and looked at Hal, but he closed his eyes and pretended not to notice. So she read of the rise of the wogs from a prearthropod that had changed its mind and decided to become a chordate. We'enai made some heavy jests about the contrariness of the wogglebugs since that fateful day, and then took up, in the third chapter, the story of mammalian evolution on the other large continent of Ozagen which climaxed in man.

She quoted,' "But man, like us, had its mimical parasites. One was a different species of the so-called tavern beetle. It, instead of resembling a wog, looked like a man. Like its counterpart, it could fool no intelligent person, but its gift of alcohol made it very acceptable to man. It, too, accompanied its host from primitive times, became an integral part of his civilization, and, finally, according to one theory, a large cause of man's downfall.

' "Humanity's disappearance from the face of Ozagen is due not only to the tavern beetle, if it was at all. That creature can be controlled. Like most things, it can be abused or its purpose distorted so that it becomes a menace.

' "This is what man did with it.

' "He had, it must be noted, an ally to help him in the misuse of the insect. This was another parasite, one of a somewhat different kind; one that was, indeed, our cousin, in a manner speaking.

' "One thing, however, distinguishes it from us, and from man, and from any other animal on this planet with the exception of some very low species. That is, that from the very first fossil evidence we have of it, it was wholly– " '

Jeannette put the book down. 'I don't know the next word. Hal, do I have to read this? It's so boring.'

'No. Forget it. Read me one of those comics that you and the Gabriel's sailors like so much.'

She smiled, a beautiful sight, and she began reading Volume 1037, Book 56, The Adventures of Leif Magnus, Beloved Disciple of the Forerunner, When He Met the Horror from Arcturus.

He listened to her efforts to translate the American into the vernacular wog until he grew tired of the banalities of the comic and pulled her down to him.

Always, there was the light left on above them.

Yet, they had their misunderstandings, their disagreements, their conflicts.

Jeannette was neither puppet nor slave. When she did not like something Hal did or said, she was often quick to say so. And, if he replied sarcastically or violently, he was likely to find himself attacked verbally.

Not too long after he had hidden Jeannette in his puka, he returned after a long day at the ship with a heavy growth of stubble on his face.

Jeannette, after kissing him, made a face and said, 'That hurts; it is like a file. I'll get your cream and rub off your whiskers myself.'

'No, don't do that,' he said.

'Why not?' she said as she walked toward the unmentionable. 'I love to do things for you. And I especially love to make you look nice.'

She returned with the can of depilatory in her hand.

'Now, you sit down, and I will do all your work for you. You can think of how much I love you while I'm removing those so-scratchy wires on your face.'

'You don't understand, Jeannette. I can't shave. I am a lamedhian now, and lamedhians must wear beards.'

She stopped walking toward him and said, 'You must? You mean that it is the law, that you will be a criminal if you don't?'

'No, not exactly,' he said. 'The Forerunner himself never said a word about it, nor has any law been passed making it compulsory. But – it is the custom. And it is a sign of honor, for only a man worthy to wear a lamedh is allowed to grow a beard,'

'What would happen if a non-lamedhian grew one?'

'I don't know,' he said, annoyance apparent in his voice. 'It has never happened. It's – just one of those things you take for granted. Something only an outsider would think about.'

'But a beard is so ugly,' she said. 'And it scratches my face. I would as soon kiss a pile of bedsprings.'

'Then,' he said angrily, 'you'll either have to learn to kiss bedsprings or learn to get along without kisses. Because I have to have a beard!'

'Listen to me,' she said, going up close to him. 'You don't have to! What is the use of being a lamedhian if you don't have any more freedom than before, if you must do what is expected of you? Why can't you just ignore the custom?'

Hal began to feel both fury and panic. Panic because he might alienate her so far she would leave and because he knew that if he gave in to her he would be regarded suspiciously by the other lamedhians on the Gabriel.

As a result, he accused her of being a stupid fool. She replied with equal heat and harshness. They quarreled; the night was half over before she made the first movement toward a reconciliation. Then, it was dawn before they were through proving they loved each other.

In the morning, he shaved. Nothing happened at the Gabriel for three days, nobody made any remarks, and he put down to guilt and imagination the strange looks he saw – or thought he saw. Finally, he began to think that either nobody had noticed or else they were so busy with their duties that they did not think it worthwhile to comment. He even began wondering if there were other annoyances connected with being a lamedhian which he could do away with.

Then, the morning of the fourth day, he was called to the office of Macneff.

He found the Sandalphon sitting behind his desk and fingering his own beard. Macneff stared with his pale blue eyes at Hal for some time before replying to Hal's greeting.

'Perhaps, Yarrow,' he said, 'you have been too concerned with your researches among the wogs to think about other things. It is true we live in an abnormal environment here, and we are all concentrating on the day we start the project.'

He rose and began pacing back and forth before Hal.

'You surely must know that as a lamedhian, you not only have privileges, you have responsibilities?'

'Shib, abba.'

Macneff suddenly wheeled on Hal and pointed a long bony finger at him.

'Then, why aren't you growing a beard?' he said loudly. And he glared.

Hal felt himself grow cold, as he had so often when he was a child and his gapt, Pornsen, had made this same maneuver toward him. And he felt the same mental confusion.

'Why, I-I-'

'We must strive not only to attain the lamedh, we must strive to continue to be worthy of it. Purity and purity alone will make us succeed, unending effort to be pure!'

'Your pardon abba,' said Hal, his voice quivering. 'But I am making a never-ending effort to be pure.'

He dared to look the Sandalphon in the eyes when he said that, though where he got the courage he did not know. To lie so outrageously, he who was living in unreality, to lie in the presence of the great and pure Sandalphon!

'However,' Hal continued, 'I did not know that shaving would have anything to do with my purity. There is nothing in The Western Talmud or any of the Forerunner's books about the reality or unreality of a beard.'

'Are you telling me what is in the scriptures?' shouted Macneff.

'No, of course not. But, what I said is true, isn't it?'

Macneff resumed his pacing, and he said, 'We must be pure, must be pure. And even the slightest hint of pseudofuture, the smallest departure from reality, may dirty us. Yes, Sigmen never said anything about this. But it has long been recognized that only the pure are worthy to emulate the Forerunner by having a beard. Therefore, to be pure, we must look pure.'

'I agree with you wholeheartedly,' said Hal.

He was beginning to find courage in himself, a firmness. It had suddenly occurred to him that he felt so shaken because he was reacting to Macneff as he had to Pornsen. But Pornsen was dead, defeated, his ashes thrown to the wind. And it had been Hal himself who had scattered them at the ceremony.

'Under ordinary circumstances, I would let my whiskers grow,' he said. 'But I am living among the wogs now so I may do more effective espionage, besides conducting my researches. And I have found out that the wogs regard a beard as an abomination; they have no beards themselves, you know. They do not understand why we let ours grow if we have means to remove them. And they feel uneasy and disgusted when in the presence of a bearded man. I can't gain their confidence if I have one.

'However, I plan to grow one the moment the project is begun.'

'Hmm!' sid Macneff, fingering the hairs on his face. 'You may have something there. After all, these are unusual circumstances. But why didn't you tell me?'

'You are so busy, from morning to bedtime, that I did not want to bother you,' said Hal. He was wondering if Macneff would take the time and trouble to investigate the truth of his statement. For the wogs had never said one word to Hal about beards. He had been inspired to make his excuse when he remembered having read about the initial reactions of the American Indians to the facial growth of white men.

Macneff, after a few more words on the importance of keeping pure, dismissed Hal.

And Hal, shaking from the reaction of the lecture, went home. There, he had a few drinks to calm himself, then a few more to uninhibit himself for the supper with Jeannette. He had discovered that if he drank enough, he could overcome the disgust he felt on seeing food go into her naked mouth.

One day, Yarrow, returning from the market with a large box, said, 'You've really been putting away the groceries lately. You're not eating for two? Or maybe three?'

She paled. 'Maw choo! Do you know what you're saying?'

He put the box on a table and grabbed her shoulders.

'Shib. I do. Jeannette, I've been thinking about that very thing for a long time, but I haven't said anything. I didn't want to worry you. Tell me, are you?'

She looked him straight in the eye, but her body was shaking. 'Oh, no. It is impossible!'

'Why should it be?'

'Fi. But I know – don't ask me how – that it cannot be. But you must never say things like that. Not even joking. I can't stand it.'

He pulled her close and said over her shoulder, 'Is it because you can't? Because you know you'll never bear my children?'

Her thick, faintly perfumed hair nodded.

T know. Don't ask me how I know.'

He held her at arm's length again.

'Listen, Jeannette. I'll tell you what's been troubling you. You and I are of different species. Your mother and father were, too. Yet they had children. However, you may know that the ass and the mare have young, too, but the mule is sterile. The lion and the tigress may breed, but the liger or tigon can't. Isn't that right? You're afraid you're a mule!'

She put her head on his chest; tears fell on his shirt.

He said, 'Let's be real about this, honey. Maybe you are. So what? Forerunner knows that our situation is bad enough without a baby to complicate it. We'll be lucky if you are... uh... well, we have each other, haven't we? That's all I want. You.'

He couldn't keep from being reflective as he dried her tears and kissed her and helped her put the food in the refrigerator.

The quantities of groceries and milk she had been consuming were more than a normal amount, especially the milk. There had been no telltale change in her superb figure. She could not eat that much without some kind of effect. A month passed. He watched her closely, she ate enormously. Nothing happened.

Yarrow put it down to his ignorance of her alien metabolism.

Another month. Hal was just leaving the ship's library when Turnboy, the historian joat, stopped him.

'The rumor is that the techs have finally made the globin-locking molecule,' the historian said. 'I think that this time the grapevine's right. A conference is called for fifteen hundred.'

'Shib.'

Hal kept his despair out of his voice.

When the meeting broke up at 1650, it left him with sagging shoulders. The virus was already in production. In a week, a large enough supply would be made to fill the disseminators of six prowler torpedoes. The plan was to release them to wipe out the city of Siddo. The prowlers would fly in spirals whose range would expand until a large territory was covered. Eventually, as the prowlers returned for reloading and then went out again, the entire planet of wogs would be slain.

When he got home, he found Jeannette lying in bed, her hair a black corona on the pillow. She smiled weakly.

He forgot his mood in a thrill of concern.

'What's the matter, Jeannette?'

He laid his hand on her forehead. The skin was dry, hot, and rough.

'I don't know. I haven't been feeling really well for two weeks, but I didn't complain. I thought I'd get over it. Today, I felt so bad I just had to go back to bed after breakfast.'

'We'll get you well,'

He sounded confident. Inside himself, he was lost. If she had contracted a serious disease, she could get no doctor, no medicine.

For the next few days she continued to lie in bed. Her temperature fluctuated from 99.5 in the morning to 100.2 at night. Hal attended her as ably as he could. He put wet towels and ice bags on her head and gave her aspirin. She had stopped eating so much food; all she wanted was liquid. She was always asking for milk. Even the beetlejuice and the cigarettes were turned down.

Her illness was bad enough, but her silences stung Yarrow into a frenzy. As long as he had known her, she had chattered lightly, merrily, amusingly. She could be quiet, but it was with an interested wordlessness. Now she let him talk; and when he quit, she did not fill his silence with questions or comments.

In an effort to arouse her, he told her of his plan to steal a gig and take her back to her jungle home. A light came into her dulled eyes; the brown looked shiny for the first time. She even sat up while he put a map of the continent on her lap. She indicated the general area where she had lived, and then she described the mountain range that rose from the jungle and the tableland on its top where her aunts and sisters lived in the ruins of an ancient metropolis.

Hal sat down at the little hexagon-shaped tabletop by the bed and worked out the coordinates from the maps.

Now and then, he glanced up. She was lying on her side, her white and delicate shoulder rising from her nightgown, her eyes large in the shadows around them.

'All I have to do is steal a little key,' he said. 'You see, the meter gauge on a gig is set at zero before every flight from the field. The boat will run fifty kilometers on manual. But, once the tape passes fifty, the gig automatically stops and sends out a location signal. That's to keep anybody from running away. However, the autos can be unlocked and the signal turned off. A little key will do it. I can get it. Don't worry.'

'You must love me very much.'

'You're shib as shib I do!'

He rose and kissed her. Her mouth, once so soft and dewy, felt dry and hard. It was almost as if the skin were turning to horn.

He returned to his calculations. An hour later, a sigh from her made him look up. Her eyes were closed and her lips were slightly open. Sweat ran down her face.

He hoped her fever had broken. No. The mercury had risen to 100.3.

She said something.

He bent down.

'What?'

She was muttering in an unknown language, the speech of her mother's people. Delirious.

Hal swore. He had to act. No matter what the consequences. He ran into the bathroom, shook from a bottle a ten-grain rockabye tablet, returned, and propped Jeannette up. With difficulty he managed to get her to wash the pill down with a glass of water.

After he locked her bedroom door, he put on a hood and cloak and walked fast to the nearest wog pharmacy. There he purchased three 20-gauge needles, three syringes, and some anti-coagulant. Back in his apartment, he tried to insert the needle in her arm vein. The point refused to go in until the fourth attempt when, in a fit of exasperation, he pressed hard.

During none of the jabbings did she open her eyes or jerk her arm.

When the first fluid crept into the glass tube, he gasped with relief. Though he hadn't known it, he had been biting his lip and holding his breath. Suddenly, he knew that he had for the last month been pushing a horrible suspicion back to the outlands of his mind. Now, he realized the thought had been ridiculous.

The blood was red.

He tried to arouse her in order to get a specimen of urine. She twisted her mouth over strange syllables, then lapsed back into sleep or a coma – he didn't know which. In an anguish of despair, he slapped her face, again and again, hoping he could bring her to. He swore once more, for he realized all at once that he should have gotten the specimen before giving her the rockabye. How stupid could he get! He wasn't thinking straight; he was too excited over her condition and what he had to do at the ship.

He made some strong coffee and managed to get part of it down her. The rest dribbled down her chin and soaked her gown.

Either the caffeine or his desperate tone awoke her, for she opened her eyes long enough to look at him while he explained what he wanted her to do and where he was going afterward. After he had gotten the urine into a previously boiled jar, he wrapped the syringes and jar in a‹ handkerchief and dropped them into the cloak pocket.

He had wristphoned the Gabriel for a gig. A horn beeped outside. He took another look at Jeannette, locked the bedroom door, and ran down the stairs. The; gig hovered above the curb. He entered, sat down, and punched the GO button. The boat rose to a thousand feet and then flashed at an 11-degree angle toward the park where the ship squatted.

The medical section was empty, except for one orderly. The fellow dropped his comic and jumped to his feet.

'Take it easy,' said Hal. 'I just want to use the Labtech. And I don't want to be bothered with making out triplicate forms. This is a little personal matter, see?'

Hal had taken off his cloak, so the orderly could see the bright golden lamedh.

'Shib,' the orderly grunted.

Hal gave him two cigarettes.

'Geez, thanks,' The orderly lit a cigarette, sat down, and picked up The Forerunner and Delilah in the Wicked City of Gaza.

Yarrow went around the corner of the Labtech, where the orderly couldn't see him, and set the proper dials. After he inserted his specimens, he sat down. Within a few seconds, he jumped up and began pacing back and forth. Meanwhile, the huge cube of the Labtech purred like a contented cat as it disgested its strange food. A half-hour later, it rumbled once and then flashed a green light: ANALYSIS COMPLETE.

Hal pressed a button. Like a tongue out of a metal mouth, a long tape slid out. He read the code. Urine was normal. No infection there. Also normal were the pH and the blood count.

He hadn't been sure the 'eye' would recognize the cells in her blood. However, the chances had been strong that her red cells would be Terranlike. Why not? Evolution, even on planets separated by light years, follows parallel paths; the biconcave disk is the most efficient form for carrying the maximum of oxygen.

Or at least he'd thought so until he'd seen the corpuscles of an Ozagenian.

The machine chattered. More tape. Unknown hormone! Similar in molecular structure to the parathyroid hormone primarily concerned in the control of calcium metabolism.

What did that mean? Could the mysterious substance loosed in her bloodstream be the cause of her trouble?

More clicks. The calcium content of the blood was 40 miligram percent.

Strange. Such an abnormally high percentage should mean that the renal threshold was passed and that an excess of calcium should be 'spilling' into the urine. Where was it going?

The Labtech flashed a red light: FINISHED.

He took a hematology textbook down from the shelf and opened it to the Ca section. When he quit reading, he straightened his shoulders. New hope? Perhaps. Her case sounded as if she had a form of hypercalcemia, which was manifested by any number of diseases ranging from rickets and steomalacia to chronic hypertropic arthritis. Whatever she had, she was suffering from a malfunction of the parathyroid glands.

The next move was to the Pharm machine. He punched three buttons, dialed a number, waited for two minutes, and then lifted a little door at waist level. A tray slid out. On it was a cellophane sheath containing a hypodermic needle and a tube holding 30 cubic centimeters of a pale blue fluid. It was Jesper's serum, a 'one-shot' readjustor of the parathyroid.

Hal put on his cloak, stuck the package in the inside pocket, and strode out. The orderly didn't even look up.

The next step was the weapons room. There he gave the storekeeper an order-made out in triplicate-for one 1 mm. automatic and a clip of one hundred explosive cartridges. The keeper only glanced over the forged signatures – he, too, was awed by the lamedh – and unlocked the door. Hal took the gun, which he could easily hide in the palm of his hand, and stuck it in his pants pocket.

At the key room, two corridors away, he repeated the crime. Or rather, he tried to.

Moto, the officer on duty, looked at the papers, hesitated, and said, 'I'm sorry. My orders are to check on any requests with the Chief Uzzite. That won't be possible for about an hour, though. He's in conference with the Archurielite.'

Hal picked up his papers.

'Never mind. My business'll hold. Be back in the morning,'

On the way home, he planned what he would do. After injecting Jesper's serum into Jeannette, he would move her into the gig. The floor beneath the gig's control panel would have to be ripped up, two wires would be unhooked, and one connected to another lead. That would remove the fifty-mile limit. Unfortunately, it would also set off an alarm back in the Gabriel.

He hoped that he could take off straight up, level off, and dive behind the range of hills to the west of Siddo. The hills would deflect the radar. The autopilot could be set long enough for him to demolish the box that would be sending out the signal by which the Gabriel might track him down.

After that, with the gig hedgehopping, he could hope to be free until daybreak. Then, he'd submerge in the nearest lake or river deep enough until nightfall. During the darkness, he could rise and speed toward the tropics. If his radar showed any signs of pursuit, he could plunge again into a body of water. Fortunately, there was no sonar equipment on the Gabriel.

He left the long needle-shaped gig parked by the curb. His feet pounded the stairs. The key missed the hole the first two tries. He slammed the door without bothering to lock it again.

'Jeannette!'

Suddenly, he was afraid that she might have gotten up while delirious and somehow opened the doors and wandered out.

A low moan answered him. He unlocked the bedroom door and shoved it open. She was lying with her eyes wide.

'Jeannette. Do you feel better?'

'No. Worse. Much worse.'

'Don't worry, baby. I've got just the medicine that'll put new life in you. In a couple of hours you'll be sitting up and yelling for steaks. And you won't even want to touch that milk. You'll be drinking your Easyglow by the gallon. And then–'

He faltered as he saw her face. It was a stony mask of distress, like the grotesque and twisted wooden masks of the Greek tragedians.

'Oh, no... no! ' she moaned. 'What did you say? Easyglow?' Her voice rose. 'Is that what you've been giving me?'

'Shib, Jeannette. Take it easy. You liked it. What's the difference? The point is that we're going–'

'Oh, Hal, Hal! What have you done?'

Her pitiful face tore at him. Tears were falling; if ever a stone could weep, it was weeping now.

He turned and ran into the kitchen where he took out the sheath, removed the contents, and inserted the needle in the tube. He went back into the bedroom. She said nothing as he thrust the point into her vein. For a moment, he was afraid the needle would break. The skin was almost brittle.

'This stuff cures Earthpeople in a jiffy,' he said, with what he hoped was a cheery beside manner.

'Oh, Hal, come here. It's – it's too late now.'

He withdrew the needle, rubbed alcohol on the break, and put a pad on it. Then he dropped to his knees by the bed and kissed her. Her lips were leathery.

'Hal, do you love me?'

'Won't you ever believe me? How many times must I tell you?'

'No matter what you'll find out about me?' 'I know all about you.'

'No, you don't. You can't. Oh, Great Mother, if only I'd told you! Maybe you'd have loved me just as much, anyway. Maybe–'

'Jeannette! What's the matter?'

Her lids had closed. Her body shook in a spasm. When the violent trembling passed, she whispered with stiff lips. He bent his head to hear her.

'What did you say? Jeannette! Speak!'

He shook her. The fever must have died, for her shoulder was cold. And hard.

The words came low and slurring.

'Take me to my aunts and sisters. They'll know what to do. Not for me . . . but for the–'

'What do you mean?'

'Hal, will you always love–'

'Yes, yes. You know that! We've got more important things to do than talk about that.'

If she heard him, she gave no sign. Her head was tilted far back with her exquisite nose pointed at the ceiling. Her lids and mouth were closed, and her hands were her side, palms up. The breasts were motionless. Whatever breath she might have was too feeble to stir them.

Hal pounded on Fobo's door until it opened.

The empathist's wife said, 'Hal, you startled me!'

'Where's Fobo?'

'He's at a college board meeting.' 'I've got to see him at once.'

Abasa yelled after him, 'If it's important, go ahead! Those meetings bore him, anyway!'

By the time Yarrow had taken the steps three at a time and beelined across the nearby campus, his lungs were on fire. He didn't slacken his pace; he hurtled up the steps of the administration building and burst into the board room.

When he tried to speak, he had to stop and suck in deep breaths.

Fobo jumped out of his chair. 'What's up?'

'You – you've – got to come. Matter – life – death!'

'Excuse me, gentlemen,' Fobo said.

The ten wogs nodded their heads and resumed the conference. The empathist put on his cloak and skull-cap with its artificial antennae and led Hal out.

'Now, what is it?'

'Listen, I've got to trust you. I know you can't promise me anything. But I think you won't turn me in to my people. You're a real person, Fobo.'

'Get to the point, my friend.'

'Listen. You wogs are as advanced as we in endocrinology, even, if you lag way behind in other sciences. And you've got an advantage. You have made some medical examinations and tests on her. You should know something about her anatomy and physiology and metabolism. You–'

'Jeannette? Oh, Jeannette Rastignac! The lalitha!'

'Yes. I've been hiding her in my apartment.'

'I know.'

'You know? But how? I mean–'

The wog put his hand on Hal's shoulder.

'There's something you should know. I meant to tell you tonight after I got home. This morning a man named Art Hunah Pukui rented an apartment in a building across the street. He claimed he wanted to live among us so he could learn our language and our mores more swiftly.

'But he's spent most of his time in this building carrying around a case which I imagine contains various devices to enable him to hear from a distance the sounds in your apartment. However, the landlord kept an eye on him, so he wasn't able to plant any of his devices.'

'Pukui is an Uzzite.'

'If you say so. Bight now he's in his apartment watching this building through a powerful telescope.'

'And he could be listening to us right now, too,' Hal said. 'His instruments are extremely sensitive. Still, the walls are heavily soundproofed. Anyway, forget about him!'

Fobo followed him into his rooms. The wog felt Jeannette's forehead and tried to lift her lid to look at her eye. It would not bend.

'Hmm! Calcification of the outer skin layer is far advanced.'

With one hand he threw the sheet from her figure and with the other he grabbed her gown by the neckline and ripped the thin cloth down the middle. The two parts fell to either side. She lay nude, as silent and pale and beautiful as a sculptor's masterpiece.

Her lover gave a little cry at what seemed like a violation. But he said nothing because he realized that Fobo's move was medical. In any case, the wog would not have been sexually interested.

Puzzled, he watched. Fobo had tapped his fingertips against her flat belly and then put his ear against it. When he stood up, he shook his head.

'I won't deceive you, Hal. Though we'll do the best we can, we may not be good enough. She'll have to go to a surgeon. If we can cut her eggs out before they hatch, that, plus the serum you gave her, may reverse the effect and pull her out.'

'Eggs?'

'I'll tell you later. Wrap her up. I'll run upstairs and phone Dr. Kuto.'

Yarrow folded a blanket around her. Then he rolled her over. She was as stiff as a show-window dummy. He covered her face. The stony look was too much for him.

His wristphone shrilled. Automatically, he reached to flick the stud and just in time drew his hand back. It shrilled loudly, insistently. After a few seconds of agony, he decided that if he didn't answer, he would stir up their suspicion far faster.

'Yarrow!'

'Shib?'

'Beport to the Archurielite. You will be given fifteen minutes.'

'Shib.'

Fobo came back in and said, 'What're you going to do?'

Hal squared his mouth and said, 'You take her by the shoulders, and I'll carry her feet. Rigid as she is, we won't need a stretcher.'

As they carried her down the steps, he said, 'Can you hide us after the operation, Fobo? We won't be able to use the gig now.'

'Don't worry,' the wog said enigmatically over his shoulder. 'The Earthmen are going to be too busy to run after you.'

It took sixty seconds to get her into the gig, hop to the hospital, and get her out.

Hal said, 'Let's put her on the ground a minute. I've got to set the gig on auto and send her back to the Gabriel. That way, at least, they won't know where I am.'

'No. Leave it here. You may be able to use it afterward.'

'After what?'

'Later. Ah, there's Kuto.'

In the waiting room, Hal paced back and forth and puffed Merciful Seraphim out in chains of smoke. Fobo sat on a chair and rubbed his bald pate and the thick golden corkscrew fuzz on the back of his head.

'All of this might have been avoided,' he said unhappily. 'If I had known the lalitha was living with you, I might have guessed why you wanted the Easyglow. Though not necessarily so. Anyway, I didn't find out until two days ago that she was in your apartment. And I was too busy with Project Earthman to think much about her.'

'Project Earthman?' said Hal. 'What's that?'

Fobo's V-in-V lips parted m a smile to reveal the sharp serrated ridges of bone.

'I can't tell you now because your colleagues on the Gabriel might, just possibly, learn about it from you before it takes effect. However, I think I can safely tell you that we know about your plan for spreading the deadly globin-locking molecule through our atmosphere.'

'There was a time when I would have been horrified to learn that,' Hal said. 'But now it doesn't matter.'

'You don't want to know how we found out about it?'

'I suppose so,' Hal said dully.

'When you asked us for samples of blood, you aroused our suspicion.'

He tapped the end of his absurdly long nose.

'We can't read your thoughts, of course. But concealed in this flesh are two antennae. They are very sensitive; evolution has not dulled our sense of smell as it has among you Terrans. They allow us to detect, through odor, very slight changes in the metabolism of others. When we were asked by one of your emissaries to donate blood for their scientific research, we smelled a – shall I call it furtive? – emanation. We finally did give you the blood. But it was that of a barnyard creature which uses copper in its blood cells. We wogs use magnesium as the oxygen-carrying element in our blood cells.'

'Our virus is useless!'

'Yes. Of course, in time, when you'd learned to read our writing and got hold of our textbooks, you'd have discovered the truth. But before that happened it would be too late, I trust, hope, and pray, for the truth to be of any importance or consequence.

'Meanwhile, we've determined just what you were up to. I'm sorry to say that we had to use force to do it, but since our survival was at stake and you Earthmen were the aggressor, the means justified the ends. A week ago we finally found an opportunity to catch a biochemist and his gapt while they were visiting a laboratory in the college. We injected a drug and hypnotized them. It was difficult getting the truth out of them but only because of the language barrier. However, I've learned a certain amount of American.

'We were horrified. But not really surprised. In fact, because we suspected something was afoot that we wouldn't like, and from the very first contact, we were ready to take action. So, from the first day your ship landed, we've been busy. The vessel, as you know, is directly–'

'Why didn't you hypnotize me?' Hal said. 'You could have done it easily and a long time ago.'

'Because we doubted that you'd be privy to anything that had to do with our blood. Anyway, we needed someone who had necessary technical knowledge. However, we've been watching you, though not so successfully, since you managed to sneak in the lalitha past us.'

'How did you find out about Jeannette?' Hal said. 'And may I see her?'

'I am sorry; I must say no to your second question,' said Fobo. 'As for the first, it was not until two days ago that we managed to develop a listening device sensitive enough to justify installing it in your rooms. As you know, we are far behind you in some departments.'

'I searched the puka every day for a long time,' said Hal. 'Then, when I learned of the stage of development of your electronics, I quit.'

'Meanwhile, our scientists have been busy,' said Fobo. 'The visit of you Earthmen has stimulated us to research in several fields.'

A nurse entered and said, 'Phone, Doctor.'

Fobo left.

Yarrow paced back and forth and smoked another cigarette. Within a minute, Fobo returned.

He said, 'We're going to have company. One of my colleagues, who is watching the ship, tells me Macneff and two Uzzites left in a gig. They should be arriving at the hospital any second now.'

Yarrow stopped in midstride. His jaw dropped. 'Here? How'd they find out?'

'I imagine they have means about which they failed to inform you. Don't be afraid.'

Hal stood motionless. The cigarette, unnoticed, burned until it seared his fingers. He dropped it and crushed it beneath his sole.

Boot heels clicked in the corridor.

Three men entered. One was a tall and gaunt ghost – Macneff, the Archurielite. The others were short and broad-shouldered and clad in black. Their meaty hands, though empty, were hooked, ready to dart into their pockets. Their heavy-lidded eyes stabbed at Fobo and then at Hal.

Macneff strode up to the joat. His pale blue eyes glared; his lipless mouth was drawn back in a skull's smile.

'You unspeakable degenerate!' he shouted.

His arm flashed, and the whip, jerked out of his belt, cracked. Thin red marks appeared on Yarrow's white face and began oozing blood.

'You will be taken back to Earth in chains and there exhibited as an example of the worst pervert, traitor, and – and–!'

He drooled, unable to find words.

'You – who have passed the Elohimeter, who are supposed to be so pure – you have lusted after and lain with an insect!'

'What!'

'Yes. With a thing that is even lower than a beast of the field! What even Moses did not think of when he forbade union between man and beast, what even the Forerunner could not have guessed when he affirmed the law and set the utmost penalty for it – you have done! You, Hal Yarrow, the pure, the Lamedh-wearer!'

Fobo rose and said in a deep voice, 'Might I suggest and stress that you are not quite right in your zoological classification? It is not the class of Insecta but the class of the Chordata pseudarthropoda, or words to that effect.'

Hal said, 'What?' He could not think.

The wog growleld, 'Shut up. Let me talk.'

He swung to face Macneff. 'You know about her?'

'You are shib that I know her! Yarrow thought he was getting away with something. But, no matter how clever these unrealists are, they're always tripped up. In this case, it was his asking Turnboy about those Frenchmen that fled Earth. Turnboy, who is very zealous in his attitude toward the Sturch, reported the conversation. It lay among my papers for quite a while. When I came across it, I turned it over to the psychologists. They told me that the joat's question was a deviation from the pattern expected of him; a thing totally irrelevent unless it was connected to something we didn't know about him.

'Moreover, his refusal to grow a beard was enough to make us suspicious. A man was put on his trail. He saw Yarrow buying twice the groceries he should have. Also, when you wogs learned the tobacco habit from us and began making cigarettes too, he bought them from you. The conclusion was obvious. He had a female in his apartment.

'We didn't think it'd be a wog female, for she wouldn't have to stay hidden. Therefore, she must be human. But we couldn't imagine how she got here on Ozagen. It was impossible for him to have stowed her away on the Gabriel. She must either have come here in a different ship or be descended from people who had.

'It was Yarrow's talk with Turnboy that furnished the clue. Obviously, the French had landed here and she was a descendant. We didn't know how the joat had found her. It wasn't important. We'll find out, anyhow.'

'You're due to find out some other things, too,' Fobo said calmly. 'How did you discover she wasn't human?'

Yarrow muttered, 'I've got to sit down.'

He swayed to the wall and sank into a chair. One of the Uzzites started to move toward him. Macneff waved the man back and said, 'Turnboy got a wog to read to him a book on the history of man on Ozagen. He came across so many references to the lalitha that the suspicion was bound to rise that the girl might be the one.

'Last week one of the wog physicians, while talking to Turnboy, mentioned that he had once examined a lalitha. Later, he said, she had run away. It wasn't hard for us to guess where she was hiding!'

'My boy,' said Fobo, turning to Hal, 'didn't you read We'enai's book?'

Hal shook his head. 'We started it, but Jeannette mislaid it.'

'And doubtless saw to it that you had other things to think of... they are good at diverting a man's mind. Why not? That is their purpose in life.

'Hal, I'll explain. The lalitha are the highest example of mimetic parasitism known. Also, they are unique among sentient beings. Unique in that all are female.

'If you'd read on in We'enai, you'd have found that fossil evidence shows that about the time that Ozagenian man was still an insectivorous marmoset-like creature, he had in his family group not only his own females but the females of another phylum. These animals looked and probably stank enough like the females of prehomo marmoset to be able to live and mate with them. They seemed mammalian, but dissection would have indicated their pseudoarthropodal ancestry.

'It's reasonable to suppose that these precursors of the lalitha were man's parasites long before the marmosetoid stage. They may have met him when he first crawled out of the sea. Originally bisexual, they became female. And they adapted their shape, through an unknown evolutionary process, to that of the reptile's and primitive mammal's. And so on.

'What we do know is that the lalitha was Nature's most amazing experiment in parasitism and parallel evolution. As man metamorphosed into higher forms, so the lalitha kept pace with him. All female, mind you, depending upon the male of another phylum for the continuance of the species.

'It is astonishing the way they become integrated into the prehuman societies, the pithecanthropoid and neanderthaloid steps. Only when Homo sapiens developed did their troubles begin. Some families and tribes accepted them; others killed them. So they resorted to artifice and disguised themselves as human women. A thing not hard to do – unless they became pregnant.

'In which case, they died.'

Hal groaned and put his hands over his face.

'Painful but real, as our acquaintance Macneff would say,' said Fobo. 'Of course – such a condition required a secret sorority. In those societies where the lalitha was forced to camouflage, she would, once pregnant, have to leave. And perish in some hidden place among her kind, who would then take care of the nymphs' – here Hal shuddered – 'until they were able to go into human cultures. Or else be introduced as foundlings or changelings.

'You'll find quite a tribal lore about them – fables and myths make them central or peripheral characters quite frequently. They were regarded as witches, demons, or worse.

'With the introduction of alcohol in primitive times, a change for the better came to the lalitha. Alcohol made them sterile. At the same time, barring accident, disease, or murder, it made them immortal.'

Hal took his hands off his face. 'You – you mean Jeannette would have lived – forever? That I cost her – that?'

'She could have lived many thousands of years. We know that some did. What's more, they did not suffer physical deterioration but always remained at the physiological age of twenty-five. Let me explain all this. In due order. Some of what I'm going to tell you will distress you. But it must be said.

'The long lives of the lalitha resulted in their being worshipped as goddesses. Sometimes, they lived so long they survived the downfall of mighty nations that had been small tribes when the lalitha first joined their groups. The lalitha, of course, became the repositories of wisdom, wealth, and power. Beligions were established in which the lalitha was the immortal goddess, and the ephemeral kings and priests were her lovers.

'Some cultures outlawed the lalitha. But these either directed the nations they ruled into conquering the people that rejected them or else infiltrated and eventually ruled as powers behind the throne. Being always very beautiful, they became the wives and mistresses of the most influential men. They competed with the human female and beat them at their own game, hands down. In the lalitha, Nature wrought the complete female.

'And so they gained mastery over their lovers. But not over themselves. Though they belonged to a secret society in the beginning, they soon enough split up. They began to identify themselves with the nations they ruled and to use their countries against the others. Moreover, their long lives resulted in younger lalitha becoming impatient. Besult: assassinations, struggles for power, and so on.

'Also, their influence was technologically too stabilizing. They tried to keep the status quo in every aspect of culture, and as a result the human cultures had a tendency to eliminate all new and progressive ideas and the men that espoused them.'

Fobo paused, then said, 'You must realize that most of this is speculative. It's based largely on what the very few human natives we've captured in the jungle have told us. However, we recently discovered some pictographs in a long-buried temple that gave us additional information. So we think our reconstruction of the history of the lalitha is valid.

'Oh, by the way, Jeannette didn't have to run away from us. After we'd learned all we could from her, we'd have returned her to her family. We told her we would, but she didn't believe us.'

A wog nurse came out of the operating room and said something to the empathist in a low voice.

Macneff walked by her and obviously tried to eavesdrop. But as the nurse was speaking in Ozagenian, which he did not understand, he continued pacing back and forth. Hal wondered why he, Hal, had not been dragged away at once, why the priest had waited to hear Fobo out. Then, a flash of insight told Hal that Macneff wanted him to hear all about Jeannette and realize the enormity of his deeds.

The nurse went back into the operating room. The Archurielite said loudly, 'Is the beast of the fields dead yet?'

Hal shook as if he had been struck when he heard the word dead. But Fobo ignored the priest.

He spoke to Hal. 'Your larv – that is, your children, have been removed. They are in an incubator. They are...' he hesitated - 'eating well. They will live.'

Hal knew from his tone that it was no use asking about the mother.

Big tears rolled from Fobo's round blue eyes.

'You won't understand what has happened, Hal, unless you comprehend the lalitha's unique method of reproduction. Three things the lalitha needs to reproduce. One thing must precede the other two. That primary event is to be infected at the age of puberty by another adult lalitha. This infection is needed to transmit genes.'

'Genes?' said Hal. Even in his shock, he could feel interest and amazement at what Fobo was telling him.

'Yes. Since lalitha receive no genes from the human males, they must exchange hereditary material between each other. Yet – they must use man as a means.

'Allow and permit me to elucidate. An adult lalitha has three so-called banks of genes. Two are duplicates of each other's chromosomal stuff.

'The third, I will explain in a moment.

'A lalitha's uterus contains ova, the genes of which are duplicated in the bodies of microscopic wrigglers formed in the giant salivary glands in a lalitha's mouth. These wrigglers – salivary ova – are continually released by the adult.

'The adult lalitha pass genes by means of these invisible creatures; they infect each other as if the carriers of heredity were diseases. They cannot escape it; a kiss, a sneeze, a touch, will do it.

'Preadolescent lalitha, however, seem to have a natural immunity against being infected by these wrigglers.

'The adult lalitha, once infected, then builds up antibodies against reception of salivary ova from a second lalitha.

'Meanwhile, the first wrigglers she is exposed to have made their way through the bloodstream, the intestinal tract, the skin, boring, floating, until they arrive at the uterus of the host.

'There, the salivary ovum unites with the uterine ovum. Fusion of the two produces a zygote. At this point, fertilization is suspended. True, all genetic data needed to produce a new lalitha is provided. All except the genes for the specific features of the face of the baby. This data will be given by the male human lover of the lalitha. Not, however, until the conjunction of two more events.

'These two must occur simultaneously. One is excitation by orgasm. The other is stimulation of the photo-kinetic nerves. One cannot take place without the other. Neither can the last two come about unless the first happens. Apparently, fusion of the two ova causes a chemical change in the lalitha which then makes her capable of orgasm and fully develops the photokinetic nerves.'

Fobo paused and cocked his head as if he were listening for something outside. Hal, who knew from familiarity with the wogs what their facial expressions meant, felt that Fobo was waiting for something important to happen. Very important. And, whatever it was, it involved the Earthmen.

Suddenly, he thrilled to the knowledge that he was on the wogs' side! He was no longer an Earthman, or, at least, not a Haijac.

'Are you sufficiently confused?' said Fobo.

'Sufficiently,' Hal replied. 'For instance, I have never heard of the photokinetic nerves.'

'The photokinetic nerves are the exclusive property of the lalitha. They run from the retina of the eye, along with the optic nerves, to the brain. But the photokinetic nerves descend the spinal column and leave its base to enter the uterus. The uterus is not that of the human female. Do not even compare them. You might say that the lalitha uterus is the darkroom of the womb. Where the photograph of the father's face is biologically developed. And, in a manner of speaking, attached to the daughters' faces.

'You must have noticed during your intercourse with her, for I'm sure she insisted you keep your eyes open, that her pupils contracted to a pinpoint. That contraction was an involuntary reflex which would narrow her field of vision to your face. Why? So the photokinetic nerves could receive data from only your face. Thus, the information about the specific color of your hair could be passed on to the bank of photogenes. We don't know the exact manner in which the photokinetic nerves transmit this data. But they do it.

'Your hair is auburn. Somehow, this information becomes known to the bank. The bank then rejects the other genes controlling other colors of hair. The 'auburn' gene is duplicated and attached to the zygote's genetic makeup. And so with the other genes that fix the other features of the face-to-be. The shape of the nose-modified to be feminine-is selected by choosing the correct combination of genes in the bank. This is duplicated, and the duplicates are then incorporated into the zygote–'

'You hear that?' shouted Macneff in an exultant voice. 'You have begat larvae! Monsters of an unholy unreal union! Insect children! And they will have your face as witness of this revolting carnality–'

'Of course, I am no connoisseur of human features, Fobo interrupted. 'But the young man's strike me as vigorous and handsome. In a human way, you understand.'

He turned to Hal. 'Now you see why Jeannette desired light. And why she pretended alcoholism. As long as she had enough liquor before copulation, the photokinetic nerve – very susceptible to alcohol – would be anesthetized. Thus, orgasm but no pregnancy. No death from the life within her. But when you diluted the beetlejuice with Easyglow... unknowing, of course–'

Macneff burst into a high-pitched laughter. 'What irony! Truly it has been said that the wages of unrealism are death!'

Fobo spoke loudly. 'Go ahead, Hal. Cry, if you like. You'll feel better. You can't, eh? I wish you could.

'Very well, I continue. The lalitha, no matter how human she looks, cannot escape her arthropod heritage. The nymphs that develop from the larvae can easily pass for babies, but it would pain you to see the larvae themselves. Though they are not any uglier than a five months' human embryo. Not to me, anyway.

'It is a sad thing that the lalitha mother must die. Hundreds of millions of years ago, when a primitive pseudoarthropod was ready to hatch the eggs in her womb, a hormone was released in her body. It calcified the skin and turned her into a womb-tomb. She became a shell. Her larvae ate the organs and the bones, which were softened by the draining away of their calcium. When the young had fulfilled the function of the larva, which is to eat and grow, they rested and became nymphs. Then they broke the shell in its weak place in the belly.

'That weak point is the navel. It alone does not calcify with the epidermis but remains soft. By the time the nymphs are ready to come out, the soft flesh of the navel has decayed. Its dissolution lets loose a chemical which decalcifies an area that takes in most of the abdomen. The nymphs, though weak as human babies and much smaller, are activated by instinct to kick out the thin and brittle covering.

'You must understand, Hal, that the navel itself is both functional and mimetic. Since the larvae are not connected to the mother by an umbilical cord, they would have no navel. But they grow an excrescence that resembles one.

'The breasts of the adult also have two functions. Like the human female's, they are both sexual and reproductive. They never produce milk, of course, but they are glands. At the time the larvae are ready to hatch from the eggs, the breasts act as two powerful pumps of the hormone which carries out the hardening of the skin.

'Nothing wasted, you see – Nature's economy. The things that enable her to survive in human society also carry out the death process.'

'I can understand the need for photogenes in the humanoid stage of evolution,' Hal said. 'But when the lalitha were in the animal stage of evolution, why should they need to reproduce the characteristics of the father's face? There isn't much difference between the face of a male animal and a female animal of the same species.'

'I do not know,' said Fobo. 'Perhaps, the prehuman lalitha did not utilize the photokinetic nerves. Perhaps, those nerves are an evolutionary adaptation of an existing structure which had a different function. Or a vestigial function. There is some evidence that photokinesis was the means by which the lalitha changed her body to conform with the change in the human body as it passed up the evolutionary ladder. It seems reasonable to suppose that the lalitha needed such a biological device. If the photokinetic nerves were not involved, some other organ may have been. It is unfortunate that by the time we were advanced enough to scientifically study the lalitha, we had no specimens available. Finding Jeannette was pure luck. We did discover in her several organs whose functions remain a mystery to us. We need many of her kind for fruitful research.'

'One more question,' said Hal. 'What if a lalitha had more than one lover? Whose features would her baby have?'

'If a lalitha were raped by a gang, she would not have an orgasm because the negative emotions of fear and disgust would bar it. If she had more than one lover – and she weren't drinking alcohol – she would reproduce young whose features would be those of the first lover. By the time she lay with her second lover – even if it were immediately afterward – the complete fertilization would have already been initiated.'

Sorrowfully, Fobo shook his head.

'It is a sad thing, but it has not changed in all these epochs. The mothers must give their lives for their young. Yet Nature, as a sort of recompense, has given them a gift. On the analogy of reptiles, which, it is said, do not stop growing larger as long as they are alive, the lalitha will not die if they remain unpregnant. And so–'

Hal leaped to his feet and shouted, 'Stop it!'

'I'm sorry,' Fobo said softly. 'I'm just trying to make you see why Jeannette felt that she couldn't tell you what she truly was. She must have loved you, Hal. She possessed the three factors that make love: a genuine passion, a deep affection, and the feeling of being one flesh with you, male and female so inseparable it would be hard to tell where one began and the other ended. I know she did, believe me, for we empathists can put ourselves into somebody else's nervous system and think and feel as they do.

'Yet, Jeannette must have had a bitter leaven in her love. The belief that if you knew she was of an utterly alien branch of the animal kingdom, separated by millions of years of evolution, barred by her ancestry and anatomy from the true completion of marriage-children-you would turn from her with horror. That belief must have shot with darkness even her brightest moments–'

'No! I would have loved her anyway! It might have been a shock. But I'd have gotten over it. Why, she was human; she was more human than any woman I've known!'

Macneff sounded as if he were going to retch. When he had recovered himself, he howled, 'You abysmal thing! How can you stand yourself now that you know what utterly filthy monster you have lain with! Why don't you try to tear out your eyes, which have seen that vile filth! Why don't you bite off your lips, which have kissed that insect mouth! Why don't you cut off your hands, which have pawed with loathsome lust that mockery of a body! Why don't you tear out by the roots those organs of carnal–'

Fobo spoke through the storm of wrath. 'Macneff! Macneff!'

The gaunt head swiveled toward the empathist. His eyes stared, and his lips had drawn back into what seemed to be an impossibly large smile; a smile of absolute fury.

'What? What?' he muttered, like a man waking from sleep.

'Macneff, I know your type well. Are you sure you weren't planning on taking the lalitha alive and using her for your own sensual purposes? Doesn't most of your fury and disgust result from being balked in your desires? After all, you've not had a woman for a year, and...'

The Sandalphon's jaw fell. Bed flooded his face and became purple. The violent color faded, and a corpselike white replaced it.

He screeched like an owl.

'Enough! Uzzites, take this – this thing that calls itself a man to the gig!'

The two men in black circled to come at the joat from front and back. Their approach was based on training, not caution. Years of taking prisoners had taught them to expect no resistance. The arrested always stood cowed and numb before the representatives of the Sturch. Now, despite the unusual circumstances and the knowledge that Hal carried a gun, they saw nothing different in him.

He stood with bowed head and hunched shoulders and dangling arms, the typical arrestee.

That was one second; the next, he was a tiger striking.

The agent in front of him reeled back, blood flowing from his mouth and spilling on his black jacket. When he bumped into the wall, he paused to spit out teeth.

By then, Yarrow had whirled and rammed a fist into the big soft belly of the man behind him.

'Whoof!' went the Uzzite.

He folded. As he did so, Hal brought his knee up against the unguarded chin. There was a crack of bone breaking, and the agent fell to the floor.

'Watch him!' Macneff yelled. 'He's got a gun!'

The Uzzite by the wall shoved his hand under his jacket, feeling for the weapon in his armpit holster. Simultaneously, a heavy bronze bookend, thrown by Fobo, struck his temple. He crumpled.

Macneff screamed, 'You are resisting, Yarrow! You are resisting!'

Hal bellowed, 'You're damn shib I am!'

Head down, he plunged at the Sandalphon.

Macneff slashed with his whip at his attacker. The seven lashes wrapped themselves around Hal's face, but he rammed into the purple-clad form and knocked it down on the floor.

Macneff got to his knees; Hal, also on his knees, seized Macneff by the throat and squeezed.

Macneffs face turned blue, and he grabbed Hal's wrists and tried to tear them away. But Hal squeezed harder.

'You... can't do... this!' said Macneff, wheezing. 'Can't... impossi–'

T can! I can!' screamed Hal. 'I've always wanted to do this, Pornsen! I mean... Macneff!'

At that moment, the floors shook, the windows rattled. Almost immediately, a tremendous boom! blew in the windows. Glass flew; Hal was hurled to the floor.

Outside, the night became day. Then, night again.

Hal rose to his feet. Macneff lay on the floor, his hands feeling his neck.

'What was that?' Hal said to Fobo.

Fobo went to the broken window and looked out. He was bleeding from a cut on his neck, but he did not seem to notice it.

'It's what I've been waiting for,' Fobo said.

He turned to face Hal.

'From the moment the Gabriel landed, we've been digging under it, and–'

'Our sound-detection equipment–'

'–caught the noise of the underground trains directly below the ship. But we dug only when the trains were moving through so the digging would be covered up. Normally, a train would go through the tunnels every ten minutes. But we routed them through every two minutes or so and made sure that they were long freight trains.

'Only a few days ago we completed filling the hole under the Gabriel with gunpowder. Believe me, we all breathed easier after it was done, for we'd feared we might be heard despite our precautions or that our shorings might break under the great weight of the ship. Or that, for some reason, the captain might decide to move the ship.'

'Then you blew it up?' Hal said dazedly.

Things were going too fast for him.

'I doubt that. Even with the tons of explosives we set off, they could not damage too much a vessel built as solidly as the Gabriel. As a matter of fact, we did not wish to damage it, for we want to study it.

'But our calculations showed that the shock waves going through the metal plates of the ship would kill every man in the ship.'

Hal went to the window and looked out. Against the moon-bright sky was a pillar of smoke; soon, the entire city would be covered with it.

'You had better get your men aboard at once,' Hal said. 'If the explosion only knocked out the officers on the bridge, and they regain consciousness before you reach them, they will press a button that will trigger an H-bomb.

'This will blow everything up for miles around. Its explosion will make your powder charge seem a baby's breath. Far worse, it will release a deadly radioactivity that will kill millions more – if the winds go inland.'

Fobo turned pale, though he tried to smile.

'I imagine our soldiers are on board by now. But I'll phone them just to make sure.'

He returned after a minute. Now, he did not have to make an effort to smile.

'Everyone on board the Gabriel died instantly, including the personnel on the bridge. I've told the captain of the boarding party not to tamper with any mechanisms or controls.'

'You've thought of everything, haven't you?' Hal said.

Fobo shrugged, and he said, 'We are fairly peaceful. But, unlike you Terrans, we are really 'realists.' If we have to take action against vermin, we do our best to exterminate them. On this insect-ridden planet we have had a long history of battling killers.'

He looked at Macneff, who was on all fours, eyes glazed, shaking his head like a wounded bear.

Fobo said, 'I do not include you in the vermin, Hal. You are free to go where you want, do what you want.'

Hal sat down in a chair. He said, in a grief-husked voice, 'I think that all my life I've wanted just that. Freedom to go where I wanted, do what I wanted. But, now, what is there left for me? I have no one–'

'There is much for you, Hal,' said Fobo. Tears ran down his nose and collected at the end.

'You have your daughters to care for, to love. In a short time, they will be through with their feeding in the incubator – they survived the premature removal quite well – and will be beautiful babies. They will be yours as much as any human infants could be.

'After all, they look like you – in a modified feminine way, of course. Your genes are theirs. What's the difference whether genes act by cellular or photonic means?

'Nor will you be without women. You forget that she has aunts and sisters. All young and beautiful. I'm sure that we can locate them.'

Hal buried his face in his hands, and he said, 'Thanks, Fobo, but that's not for me.'

'Not now,' Fobo said softly. 'But your grief will soften; you will think life worth living again.'

Someone came into the room. Hal looked up to see a nurse.

'Doctor Fobo, we are bringing the body out. Does the man care for one last look?'

Hal shook his head. Fobo walked over to him and put his hand on his shoulder.

'You look faint,' he said. 'Nurse, do you have some smelling salts?'

Hal said, 'No, I won't need them.'

Two nurses wheeled a carrier out. A white sheet was draped over the shell. Black hair cascaded from beneath the sheet and fell over the pillow.

Hal did not rise. He sat in the chair, and he moaned, 'Jeannette! Jeannette! If you had only loved me enough to tell me...'