The Year's Greatest Science Fiction & Fantasy 4

THE COMEDIAN’S CHILDREN by Theodore Sturgeon

There is very little remaining to be said by any editor or anthologist about Theodore Sturgeon, whose stories have been so thoroughly collected and so assiduously introduced that every scrap of biographical information has been worked thin.

And I have found, in the course of introducing my own share of Sturgeoniana, that his stories are seldom susceptible to summing-up or finger-pointing. You can’t say, “Here’s what it’s about.” It’s about too many things. . . .

The quiet third of the Twenty-First Century came to an end at ten o’clock on the morning of May 17, 2034, with the return to earth of a modified Fafnir space cruiser under the command of Capt. Avery Swope. Perhaps in an earlier or a later day, the visitation which began on the above date might have had less effect. But the earth was lulled and content with itself, and for good reason—international rivalries having reverted to the football fields and tennis courts, an intelligent balance of trade and redistribution of agriculture and industry having been achieved.

Captain Swope’s mission was to accomplish the twelfth off-earth touchdown, and the body on which he touched was Iapetus (sometimes Japetus), the remarkable eighth satellite of Saturn. All Saturn’s satellites are remarkable, each for a different reason. Iapetus’ claim to fame is his fluctuating brilliance; he always swings brightly around the eastern limb of the ringed planet, and dwindles dimly behind the western edge. Obviously the little moon is half bright and half dark, and keeps one face turned always to its parent; but why should a moon be half bright and half dark?

It was an intriguing mystery, and it had become the fashion to affect all sorts of decorations which mimicked the fluctuations of the inconstant moonlet: cuff links and tunic clasps which dimmed and brightened, bread-wrappers and book-jackets in dichotomous motley. Copies were reproduced of the mid-century master Pederson’s magnificent oil painting of a space ship aground on one of Saturn’s moons, with four suited figures alighting, and it became a sort of colophon for news stories about Swope’s achievement and window displays of bicolored gimcrackery—with everyone marveling at the Twentieth Century artist’s unerring prediction of a Fafnir’s contours, and no one noticing that the painting could not possibly have been of Iapetus, which has no blue sky nor weathered rocks, but must certainly have been the meticulous Pederson’s visualization of Titan. Still, everyone thought it was Iapetus, and since it gave no evidence as to why Iapetus changed its brightness, the public embraced the painting as the portrait of a mystery. They told each other that Swope would find out.

Captain Swope found out, but Captain Swope did not tell. Something happened to his Fafnir on Iapetus. His signals were faintly heard through the roar of an electrical disturbance on the parent world, and they were unreadable, and they were the last. Then, voiceless, he returned, took up his braking orbit, and at last came screaming down out of the black into and through the springtime blue. His acquisition of the tail-down attitude so very high—over fifty miles—proved that something was badly wrong. The extreme deliberation with which he came in over White Sands, and the constant yawing, like that of a baseball bat balanced on a fingertip, gave final proof that he was attempting a landing under manual control, something never before attempted with anything the size of a Fafnir. It was superbly done, and may never be equaled, that roaring drift down and down through the miles, over forty-six of them, and never a yaw that the sensitive hands could not compensate, until that last one.

What happened? Did some devil-imp of wind, scampering runt of a hurricane, shoulder against the Fafnir? Or was the tension and strain at last too much for weary muscles which could not, even for a split second, relax and pass the controls to another pair of hands? Whatever it was, it happened at three and six-tenths miles, and she lay over bellowing as her pilot made a last desperate attempt to gain some altitude and perhaps another try.

She gained nothing, she lost a bit, hurtling like a dirigible gone mad, faster and faster, hoping to kick the curve of the earth down and away from her, until, over Arkansas, the forward section of the rocket liner—the one which is mostly inside the ship—disintegrated and she blew off her tail. She turned twice end over end and thundered into a buckwheat field.

Two days afterward a photographer got a miraculous picture. It was darkly whispered later that he had unforgivably carried the child—the three-year-old Tresak girl from the farm two miles away—into the crash area and had inexcusably posed her there; but this could never be proved, and anyway, how could he have known? Nevertheless, the multiple miracles of a momentary absence of anything at all in the wide clear background, of the shadows which mantled her and of the glitter of the many-sharded metal scrap which reared up behind her to give her a crown—but most of all the miracle of the child herself, black-eyed, golden-haired, trusting, fearless, one tender hand resting on some jagged steel which would surely shred her flesh if she were less beautiful—these made one of the decade’s most memorable pictures. In a day she was known to the nation, and warmly loved as a sort of infant phoenix rising from the disaster of the roaring bird; the death of the magnificent Swope could not cut the nation quite as painfully because of her, as that cruel ruin could not cut her hand.

The news, then, that on the third day after her contact with the wreck of the ship from Iapetus, the Tresak child had fallen ill of a disfiguring malady never before seen on earth, struck the nation and the world a dreadful and terrifying blow. At first there was only a numbness, but at the appearance of the second, and immediately the third cases of the disease, humanity sprang into action. The first thing it did was to pass seven Acts, an Executive Order and three Conventions against any further off-earth touchdowns; so, until the end of the iapetitis epidemic, there was an end to all but orbital space flight.

“You’re going to be all right,” she whispered, and bent to kiss the solemn, comic little face. (They said it wasn’t contagious; at least, adults didn’t get it.) She straightened up and smiled at him, and Billy smiled his half-smile—it was the left half—in response. He said something to her, but by now his words were so blurred that she failed to catch them. She couldn’t bear to have him repeat whatever it was; he seemed always so puzzled when people did not understand him, as if he could hear himself quite plainly. So to spare herself the pathetic pucker which would worry the dark half of his face, she only smiled the more and said again, “You’re going to be all right,” and then she fled.

Outside in the corridor she leaned for a moment against the wall and got rid of the smile, the rigid difficult hypocrisy of that smile. There was someone standing there on the other side of the scalding blur which replaced the smile; she said, because she had to say it to someone just then: “How could I promise him that?”

“One does,” said the man, answering. She shook away the blur and saw that it was Dr. Otis. “I promised him the same thing myself. One just. . . does,” he shrugged. “Heri Gonza promises them, too.”

“I saw that,” she nodded. “He seems to wonder ‘How could I?’ too.”

“He does what he can,” said the doctor, indicating, with a motion of his head, the special hospital wing in which they stood, the row of doors behind and beyond, doors to laboratories, doors to research and computer rooms, store rooms, staff rooms, all donated by the comedian. “In a way he has more right to make a promise like that than Billy’s doctor.”

“Or Billy’s sister,” she agreed tremulously. She turned to walk down the corridor, and the doctor walked with her. “Any new cases?”

“Two.”

She shuddered. “Any—”

“No,” he said quickly, “no deaths.” And as if to change the subject, he said, “I understand you’re to be congratulated.”

“What? Oh,” she said, wrenching her mind away from the image of Billy’s face, half marble, half mobile mahogany. “Oh, the award. Yes, they called me this afternoon. Thank you. Somehow it. . . doesn’t mean very much right now.”

They stood before his office at the head of the corridor. “I think I understand how you feel,” he said. “You’d trade it in a minute for—” he nodded down the corridor toward the boy’s room.

“I’d even trade it for a reasonable hope,” she agreed. “Good night, Doctor. You’ll call me?”

“I’ll call you if anything happens. Including anything good. Don’t forget that, will you? I’d hate to have you afraid of the sound of my voice.”

“Thank you, Doctor.”

“Stay away from the trideo this once. You need some sleep.”

“Oh, Lord. Tonight’s the big effort,” she remembered.

“Stay away from it,” he said with warm severity. “You don’t need to be reminded of iapetitis, or be persuaded to help.”

“You sound like Dr. Horowitz.”

His smile clicked off. She had meant it as a mild pleasantry; if she had been less tired, less distraught, she would have had better sense. Better taste. Horowitz’ name echoed in these of all halls like a blasphemy. Once honored as among the greatest of medical researchers, he had inexplicably turned his back on Heri Gonza and his Foundation, had flatly refused research grants, and had publicly insulted the comedian and his great philanthropy. As a result he had lost his reappointment to the directorship of the Research Institute and a good deal of his professional standing. And like the sullen buffoon he was, he plunged into research—”real research,” he inexcusably called it—on iapetitis, attempting single-handedly not only to duplicate the work of the Foundation, but to surpass it: “the only way I know,” he had told a reporter, “to pull the pasture out from under that clod and his trained sheep.” Heri Gonza’s reply was typical: by deft sketches on his programs, he turned Horowitz into an improper noun, defining a horowitz as a sort of sad sack or poor soul, pathetic, mildly despicable, incompetent and always funny—the kind of subhuman who not only asks for, but justly deserves, a pie in the face. He backed this up with a widely publicized standing offer to Dr. Horowitz of a no-strings-attached research grant of half a million; which Dr. Horowitz, after his first unprintable refusal (his instructions to the comedian as to what he could do with the money were preceded by the suggestion that he first change it into pennies), ignored.

Therefore the remark, even by a Nobel prizewinner, even by a reasonably handsome woman understandably weary and upset, even by one whose young brother lay helpless in the disfiguring grip of an incurable disease—such a remark could hardly be forgiven, especially when made to the head of the Iapetitis Wing of the Medical Center and local chairman of the Foundation. “I’m sorry, Dr. Otis,” she said. “I . . . probably need sleep more than I realized.”

“You probably do, Dr. Barran,” he said evenly, and went into his office and closed the door.

“Damn,” said Iris Barran, and went home.

No one knew precisely how Heri Gonza had run across the idea of an endurance contest cum public solicitation of funds, or when he decided to include it in his bag of tricks. He did not invent the idea; it was a phenomenon of early broadcasting, which erupted briefly on the marriage of video with audio in a primitive device known as television. The performances, consisting of up to forty continuous hours of entertainment interspersed with pleas for aid in one charity or another, were headed by a single celebrity who acted as master of ceremonies and beggar-in-chief. The terminologically bastardized name for this production was telethon, from the Greek root tele, to carry, and the syllable thon, meaningless in itself but actually the last syllable of the word marathon. The telethon, sensational at first, had rapidly deteriorated, due to its use by numbers of greedy publicists who, for the price of a phone call, could get large helpings of publicity by pledging donations which, in many cases, they failed to make, and the large percentage of the citizenry whose impulse to give did not survive their telephoned promises. And besides, the novelty passed, the public no longer watched. So for nearly eighty years there were no telethons, and if there had been, a disease to hang one on would have been hard to find. Heart disease, cancer, multiple sclerosis, muscular dystrophy—these, and certain other infirmities on which public appeals had been based, had long since disappeared or were negligibly present. Now, however, there was iapetitis.

A disorder of the midbrain and central nervous system, it attacked children between the ages of three and seven, affecting only one hemisphere, with no statistical preference for either side. Its mental effects were slight (which in its way was one of the most tragic aspects of the disease), being limited to aphasia and sometimes a partial alexia. It had more drastic effects on the motor system, however, and on the entire cellular regeneration mechanisms of the affected side, which would gradually solidify and become inert, immobile. The most spectacular symptom was on the superficial pigmentation. The immobilized side turned white as bleached bone, the other increasingly dark, beginning with a reddening and slowly going through the red-browns to a chocolate in the later stages. The division was exactly on the median line, and the bicoloration proceeded the same way in all cases, regardless of the original pigmentation.

There was no known cure.

There was no known treatment.

There was only the Foundation—Heri Gonza’s Foundation—and all it could do was install expensive equipment and expensive people to operate it . . . and hope. There was nothing anyone else could do which would not merely duplicate Foundation efforts and, besides, with one exception the Foundation already had the top people in microbiology, neurology, virology, internal medicine, and virtually every other discipline which might have some bearing on the disease. There were, so far, only 376 known cases, every one of which was in a Foundation hospital.

Heri Gonza had been associated with the disease since the very beginning, when he visited a children’s hospital and saw the appalling appearance of the first case, little Linda Tresak of Arkansas. When four more cases appeared in the Arkansas State Hospital after she was a patient there for some months, Heri Gonza moved with characteristic noise and velocity. Within forty-eight hours of his first knowledge of the new cases, all five were ensconced in a specially vacated wing of the Medical Center, and mobilization plans were distributed to centers all over the world, so that new clinics could be set up and duplicate facilities installed the instant the disease showed up. There were at present forty-two such clinics. Each child had been picked up within hours of the first appearance of symptoms, whisked to the hospital, pampered, petted, and . . . observed. No treatment. No cure. The white got whiter, the dark got darker, the white side slowly immobilized, the dark side grew darker but was otherwise unaffected; the speech difficulty grew steadily (but extremely slowly) worse; the prognosis was always negative. Negative by extrapolation: any organism in the throes of such deterioration might survive for a long time, but must ultimately succumb.

In a peaceful world, with economy stabilized, population growing but not running wild any longer, iapetitis was big news. The biggest.

The telethon was, unlike its forbears, not aimed at the public pocket. It was to serve rather as a whip to an already aware world, information to the informed, aimed at earlier and earlier discovery and diagnosis. It was one of the few directions left to medical research. The disease was obviously contagious, but its transmission method was unknown. Some child, somewhere, might be found early enough to display some signs of the point of entry of the disease, something like a fleabite in spotted fever, the mosquito puncture in malaria—some sign which might heal or disappear soon after its occurrence. A faint hope, but it was a hope, and there was little enough of that around.

So, before a wide gray backdrop bearing a forty-foot insigne in the center, the head and shoulders of a crying child vividly done in half silver, half mahogany, Heri Gonza opened his telethon.

Iris Barran got home well after it had started; she had rather overstayed her hospital visit. She came in wearily and slumped on the divan, thinking detachedly of Billy, thinking of Dr. Otis. The thought of the doctor reminded her of her affront to him, and she felt a flash of annoyance, first at herself for having done it, and immediately another directed at him for being so touchy—and so unforgiving. At the same time she recalled his advice to get some sleep, not to watch the telethon; and in a sudden, almost childish burst of rebellion she slapped the arm of the divan and brought the trideo to life.

The opposite wall of the room, twelve feet high, thirty feet long, seemed to turn to smoke, which cleared to reveal an apparent extension of the floor of the room, back and (farther back, to Heri Gonza’s great gray backdrop. All around were the sounds, the smells, the pressure of the presence of thousands of massed, rapt people. “. . . so I looked down and there the horse had caught its silly hoof in my silly stirrup. ‘Horse,’ I says, ‘if you’re gettin’ on, I’m gettin’ off!’”

The laugh was a great soft booming explosion, as usual out of all proportion to the quality of the witticism. Heri Gonza had that rarest of comic skills, the ability to pyramid his effects, so that the mildest of them seemed much funnier than it really was. It was mounted on a rapidly stacked structure of previous quips and jokes, each with its little store of merriment and all merriment suppressed by the audience for fear of missing not only the next joke, but the entire continuity. When the pyramid was capped, the release was explosive. And yet in that split instant between capper and explosion, he always managed to slip in a clear three or four syllables. “On my way here—” or “When the president—” or “Like the horowitz who—” which, repeated and completed after the big laugh, turned out to be the base brick for the next pyramid.

Watching his face during the big laughs—yocks, the knowledgeable columnists and critics called them—had become a national pastime. Though the contagion of laughter was in his voice and choice of phrase, he played everything deadpan. A small, wiry man with swift nervous movements, he had a face-by-the-million: anybody’s face. Its notable characteristics were three: thin lips, masked eyes, impenetrable as onyx, and astonishing jug-handle ears. His voice was totally flexible, capable of almost any timbre, and with the falsetto he frequently affected, his range was slightly over four octaves. He was an accomplished ventriloquist, though he never used the talent with the conventional dummy, but rather to interrupt himself with strange voices. But it was his ordinary, unremarkable, almost immobile face which was his audience’s preoccupation. His face never laughed, though in dialogue his voice might. His voice could smile, too, even weep, and his face did not. But at the yock, if it was a big yock, a long one, his frozen waiting face would twitch; the thin lips would fill out a trifle: he’s going to smile, he’s going to smile! Sometimes, when the yock was especially fulsome, his mouth actually would widen a trifle; but then it was always time to go on, and, deadpan, he would. What could it matter to anyone whether or not one man in the world smiled? On the face of it, nothing: yet millions of people, most of whom were unaware of it, bent close to their trideo walls and peered raptly, waiting, waiting to see him smile.

As a result, everyone who heard him, heard every word.

Iris found herself grateful, somehow—able to get right out of herself, sweep in with that vast unseen crowd and leave herself, her worrying self, her angry, weary, logical, Nobel-prizewinning self asprawl on the divan while she hung on and smiled, hung on and tittered, hung on and exploded with the world.

He built, and he built, and the trideo cameras crept in on him until, before she knew it, he was standing as close to the invisible wall as belief would permit; and still he came closer, so that he seemed in the room with her; and this was a pyramid higher than most, more swiftly and more deftly built, so that the ultimate explosion could contain itself not much longer, not a beat, not a second. . . .

And he stopped in mid-sentence, mid-word, even, and, over at the left, fell to one knee and held out his arms to the right. “Come on, honey,” he said in a gentle, tear-checked purr.

From the right came a little girl, skipping. She was a beautiful little girl, a picture-book little girl, with old-fashioned bouncing curls, shiny black patent-leather shoes with straps, little white socks, a pale-blue dress with a very wide, very short skirt.

But she wasn’t skipping, she was limping. She almost fell, and Heri was there to catch her.

Holding her in his arms, while she looked trustingly up into his face, he walked to center stage, turned, faced the audience. His eyes were on her face; when he raised them abruptly to the audience, they were, by some trick of the light (or of Heri Gonza) unnaturally bright.

And he stood, that’s all he did, for a time, stood there with the child in his arms, while the pent-up laughter turned to frustrated annoyance, directed first at the comedian, and slowly, slowly, with a rustle of sighs, at the audience itself by the audience. Ah, to see such a thing and be full of laughter: how awful I am. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.

One little arm was white, one pink. Between the too-tiny socks and the too-short skirt, the long thin legs were one white, one pink.

“This is little Koska,” he said after an age. The child smiled suddenly at the sound of her name. He shifted her in his elbow so he could stroke her hair. He said softly, “She’s a little Esthonian girl, from the far north. She doesn’t speak very much English, so she won’t mind if we talk about her.” A huskiness crept into his voice. “She came to us only yesterday. Her mother is a good woman. She sent her to us the minute she noticed.”

Silence again, then he turned the child so their faces were side by side, looking straight into the audience. It was hard to see at first, and then it became all too plain—the excessive pallor of the right side of her face, the too-even flush on the left, and the sharp division between them down the center.

“We’ll make you better,” he whispered. He said it again in a foreign language, and the child brightened, smiled trustingly into his face, kept her smile as she faced the audience again: and wasn’t the smile a tiny bit wider on the pink side than on the white? You couldn’t tell . . .

“Help me,” said Heri Gonza. “Help her, and the others, help us. Find these children, wherever in the world they might be, and call us. Pick up any telephone in the world and say simply, I . . . F. That’s IF, the Iapetitis Foundation. We treat them like little kings and queens. We never cause them any distress. By trideo they are in constant touch with their loved ones.” Suddenly, his voice rang. “The call you make may find the child who teaches us what we need to know. Your call—yours!—may find the cure for us.”

He knelt and set the child gently on her feet. He knelt holding her hands, looking into her face. He said, “And whoever you are, wherever you might be, you doctors, researchers, students, teachers ... if anyone, anywhere, has an inkling, an idea, a way to help, any way at all—then call me. Call me now, call here—” He pointed upward and the block letters and figures of the local telephone floated over his head—”and tell me. I’ll answer you now, I’ll personally speak to anyone who can help. Help, oh, help.”

The last word rang and rang in the air. The deep stage behind him slowly darkened, leaving the two figures, the kneeling man and the little golden girl, flooded with light. He released her hands and she turned away from him, smiling timidly, and crossed the wide stage. It seemed to take forever, and as she walked, very slightly she dragged her left foot.

When she was gone, there was nothing left to look at but Heri Gonza. He had not moved, but the lights had changed, making of him a luminous silhouette against the endless black behind him . . . one kneeling man, a light in the universal dark . . . hope . . . slowly fading, but there, still there . . . no? Oh, there . . .

A sound of singing, the palest of pale blue stains in deep center. The singing up, a powerful voice from the past, an ancient, all but forgotten tape of one of the most moving renditions the world has ever known, especially for such a moment as this: Mahalia Jackson singing The Lord’s Prayer, with the benefit of such audio as had not been dreamed of in her day . . . with a cool fresh scent, with inaudible quasi-hypnotic emanations, with a whispering chorus, a chorus that angels might learn from.

Heri Gonza had not said, “Let us pray.” He would never do such a thing, not on a global network. There was just the kneeling dimness, and the blue glow far away in the black. And if at the very end the glow looked to some like the sign of the cross, it might have been only a shrouded figure raising its arms; and if this was benediction, surely it was in the eye of the beholder. Whatever it was, no one who saw it completely escaped its spell, or ever forgot it. Iris Barran, for one, exhausted to begin with, heart and mind full to bursting with the tragedy of iapetitis; Iris Barran was wrung out by the spectacle. All she could think of was the last spoken word: Help!

She sprang to her phone and waved it active. With trembling fingers she dialed the number which floated in her mind as it had on the trideo wall, and to the composed young lady who appeared in her solido cave, saying, “Trideo, C. A. O. Good evening,” she gasped, “Heri Gonza —quickly.”

“One moment, please,” said the vision, and disappeared, to be replaced instantly by another, even more composed, even lovelier, who said, “I.F. Telethon.”

“Heri Gonza.”

“Yes, of course. Your name?”

“I-Iris Barran. Dr. Iris Barran.”

The girl looked up sharply. “Not the—”

“Yes, I won the Nobel prize. Please—let me speak to Heri Gonza.”

“One moment, please.”

The next one was a young man with curly hair, a belllike baritone, and an intensely interested face. He was Burcke of the network. He passed her to a jovial little fat man with shrewd eyes who was with Continuity Acceptance. Iris could have screamed out loud. But a worldwide appeal for calls would jam lines and channels for hours, and obviously a thorough screening process was essential. She was dimly aware that her name and face, only today in all the news, had already carried her to the top. Consciously, she thought of none of this; she held on and drove, wanting only to help . . . help ... A snatch of the conversation she had had with Dr. Otis drifted across her mind: I guess you’d trade it all for ... and then a heart-rending picture of Billy’s face, trying to smile with half a mouth. I’d trade it all for a reasonable hope . . . and suddenly she was staring into the face of Heri Gonza. Reflexively she glanced over her shoulder at the trideo wall; Heri Gonza was there too, with a solidophone pillar in center stage, its back to the audience so that only the comedian could see its cave. Light from it flickered on his face.

“I’d know that face anywhere!” he said raspingly.

“Oh,” she said faintly, “Mr. . . . uh . . .” and then remembered that one of his public affectations was never to permit anyone to call him Mister. She said, “Heri Gonza, I . . . I’m Iris B-Barran, and I—” She realized that her voice could not be heard over the trideo. She was grateful for that.

He said, just as stridently, “I know who you are. I know the story of your life too.” Switching to a comic quack, he said, “So-o-o?”

“You know I just won the Nobel award. M—uh, Heri Gonza, I want to help, more than anything in the world, I want to help. My brother has it. W-would you like me to give the award money to you ... I mean, to the Foundation?”

She did not know what she expected in exchange for this stunning offer. She had not thought that far ahead. What she did not expect was . . .

“You what?” he yelled, so loud she drew her head down, gracelessly, turtlelike. “Listen, you, I got along without you before and I can get along without you now. You’re getting from me, see, and I’m giving. What you got I don’t want. I’m not up here to do you no good. I tell you what you got, you got a wrong number, and you are, s-s-s-s-so,” he hissed in a hilarious flatulent stutter, “s-s-so long.” And before she could utter another sound he waved her off and her phone cave went black.

Numb with shock, she slowly turned to the trideo wall, where Heri Gonza was striding downstage to the audience. His expressionless face, his gait, his posture, the inclination of his head, and his tone of voice all added to an amused indignation, with perhaps a shade more anger than mirth. He tossed a thumb at the phone and said, “Wits we got calling, can you imagine? At a time like this. We got dim wits, half wits, and—” exactly the right pause; there was one bleat of laughter somewhere in the audience and then a thousand voices to chorus with him—”horowitz!”

Iris sank back in the phone chair and covered her face, pressing so hard against her tired eyes that she saw red speckles. For a time she was shocked completely beyond thought, but at last she was able to move. She rose heavily and went to the divan, arrested her hand as she was about to click off the trideo. Heri Gonza was back at the stage phone talking eagerly to someone, his voice honey and gentleness. “Oh, bless you, brother, and thank you. You may have an idea there, so I tell you what you do. You call the I.F. at Johannesburg and arrange a meeting with the doctors there. They’ll listen. . . . No, brother, collect of course. What’s-amatta, brother, you broke? I got news for you, for you-ee are-ee a-ee good-ee man-ee yes-ee indeedy-dee: you ain’ta broka no mo. A man like you? I got a boy on the way this very minute with a bag o’ gold for the likes of you, brother. . .. Oh now, don’t say thanks, you mak-a me mad. ‘By.”

He waved off, and turned to the audience to intone, “A man with an idea—little one, big one, who knows? But it’s to help ... so bless him.”

Thunderous applause. Iris let her hand finish the gesture and switched off.

She went and washed her face, and that gave her strength enough to shower and change. After that she could think almost normally. How could he?

She turned over impossible alternatives, explanations. His phone was a dummy: he couldn’t see her, didn’t know who was on the phone. Or: it was his way of being funny, and she was too tired to understand. Or ... or ... it was no use: it had really happened, he had known what he was doing, he had a reason.

But what reason? Why? Why?

In her mind she again heard that roar from the audience: Horowitz. With difficulty, because it still stung, she pieced together the conversation and then, moving her forefinger toward her phone and the trideo, back and forth, puzzled out what had gone out over the air and what had not. Only then did she fully understand that Heri Gonza had done what he had done to make it seem that his first call was from Dr. Horowitz. But if he needed that particular gag at that time, why didn’t he fake it to a dead phone? Why actually converse with her, cut her down like that?

And he hadn’t let her help. That was worse than any of the rudeness, the insult. He wouldn’t let her help.

What to do? Making the gesture she had made had not been hard; having it refused was more than she could bear. She must help; she would help. Now of all times, with all this useless money coming to her; she didn’t need it, and it might, it just might somehow help, and bring Billy back home.

Well then, expose Heri Gonza. Give him back some of his own humiliation. Call in the newsmen, make a statement. Tell them what she had offered, tell them just who was on the line. He’d have to take the money, and apologize to boot.

She stood up; she sat down again. No. He had known what he was doing. He had known who she was; he must have a telltale on his phone to get information on his callers from that screening committee. She knew a lot about Heri Gonza. He seemed so wild, so impulsive; he was not. He ran his many enterprises with a steel fist; he took care of his own money, his own bookings. He did not make mistakes nor take chances. He had refused her and the Foundation would refuse her: the Foundation was Heri Gonza. He had his reasons, and if she had any defense at all against “ what he had done, he would not have done it.

She wasn’t allowed to help.

Unless—

She suddenly ran to the phone. She dialed 5, and the cave lit up with the floating word DIRECTORY. She dialed H, O, R, and touched the Slow button until she had the Horowitzes. There were pathetically few of them. Almost everyone named Horowitz had filed unlisted numbers: many had gone so far as to change their names.

George Rehoboth Horowitz, she remembered.

He wasn’t listed.

She dialed Information and asked. The girl gave her a pitying smile and told her the line was unlisted. And of course it would be. If Dr. Horowitz wasn’t the most hated man on earth, he was the next thing to it. A listed phone would be useless to him, never silent.

“Has he screening service?” Iris asked suddenly.

“He has,” said the girl, company-polite as always, but now utterly cold. Anyone who knew that creature to speak to . . . “Your name, please?”

Iris told her, and added, “Please tell him it’s very important.”

The cave went dark but for the slowly rotating symbol of the phone company, indicating that the operator was doing her job. Then a man’s head appeared and looked her over for a moment, and then said, “Dr. Barran?”

“Dr. Horowitz.”

She had not been aware of having formed any idea of the famous (infamous?) Horowitz; yet she must have. His face seemed too gentle to have issued those harsh rejoinders which the news attributed to him; yet perhaps it was gentle enough to be taken for the fumbler, the fool so many people thought he was. His eyes, in some inexplicable way, assured her that his could not be clumsy hands. He wore old-fashioned exterior spectacles; he was losing his hair; he was younger than she had thought, and he was ugly. Crags are ugly, tree-trunks, the hawk’s pounce, the bear’s foot, if beauty to you is all straight lines and silk. Iris Barran was not repulsed by this kind of ugliness. She said bluntly, “Are you doing any good with the disease?” She did not specify: today, there was only one disease.

He said, in an odd way as if he had known her for a long time and could judge how much she would understand, “I have it all from the top down to the middle, and from the bottom up to about a third. In between—nothing, and no way to get anything.”

“Can you go any further?”

“I don’t know,” he said candidly. “I can go on trying to find ways to go further, and if I find a way, I can try to move along on it.”

“Would some money help?”

“It depends on whose it is.”

“Mine.”

He did not speak, but tilted his head a little to one side and looked at her.

She said, “I won ... I have some money coming in. A good deal of it.”

“I heard,” he said, and smiled. He seemed to have very strong teeth, not white, not even, just spotless and perfect “It’s a good deal out of my field, your theoretical physics, and I don’t understand it. I’m glad you got it. I really am. You earned it.”

She shook her head, denying it, and said, “I was surprised.”

“You shouldn’t have been. After ninety years of rather frightening confusion, you’ve restored the concept of parity to science—” he chuckled—”though hardly in the way anyone anticipated.”

She had not known that this was her accomplishment; she had never thought of it in those terms. Her demonstration of gravitic flux was a subtle matter to be communicated with wordless symbols, quite past speech. Even to herself she had never made a conversational analogue of it; this man had, though, not only easily, but quite accurately.

She thought, if this isn’t his field, and he grasps it like that—just how good must he be in his own? She said, “Can you use the money? Will it help?”

“God,” he said devoutly, “can I use it. . . . As to whether it will help, Doctor, I can’t answer that. It would help me go on. It may not make me arrive. Why did you think of me?”

Would it hurt him to know? she asked herself, and answered, it would hurt him if I were not honest. She said, “I offered it—to the Foundation. They wouldn’t touch it. I don’t know why.”

“I do,” he said, and instantly held up his hand. “Not now,” he said, checking her question. He reached somewhere off-transmission and came up with a card, on which was lettered, AUDIO TAPPED.

“Who—”

“The world,” he overrode her, “is full of clever amateurs. Tell me, why are you willing to make such a sacrifice?”

“Oh—the money. It isn’t a sacrifice. I have enough: I don’t need it. And—my baby brother. He has it.”

“I didn’t know,” he said, with compassion. He made a motion with his hands. She did not understand. “What?”

He shook his head, touched his lips, and repeated the motion, beckoning, at himself and the room behind him. Oh. Come where I am.

She nodded, but said only, “It’s been a great pleasure talking with you. Perhaps I’ll see you soon.”

He turned over his card; obviously he had used it many times before. It was a map of a section of the city. She recognized it readily, followed his pointing finger, and nodded eagerly. He said, “I hope it is soon.”

She nodded again and rose, to indicate that she was on her way. He smiled and waved off.

It was like a deserted city, or a decimated one; almost everyone was off the streets, watching the telethon. The few people who were about all hurried, as if they were out against their wills and anxious to get back and miss as little as possible. It was known that he intended to go on for at least thirty-six hours, and still they didn’t want to miss a minute of him. Wonderful, wonderful, she thought, amazed (not for the first time) at people—just people. Someone had once told her that she was in mathematics because she was so apart from, amazed at, people. It was possible. She was, she knew, very unskilled with people, and she preferred the company of mathematics, which tried so hard to be reasonable, and to say what was really meant. . . .

She easily found the sporting-goods store he had pointed out on his map, and stepped into the darkened entrance. She looked carefully around and saw no one, then tried the door. It was locked, and she experienced a flash of disappointment of an intensity that surprised her. But even as she felt it, she heard a faint click, tried the door again, and felt it open. She slid inside and closed it, and was gratified to hear it lock again behind her.

Straight ahead a dim, concealed light flickered, enough to show her that there was a clear aisle straight back through the store. When she was almost to the rear wall, the light flickered again, to show her a door at her right, deep in an ell. It clicked as she approached, and opened without trouble. She mounted two flights of stairs, and on the top landing stood Horowitz, his hands out. She took them gladly, and for a wordless moment they stood like that, laughing silently, until he released one of her hands and drew her into his place. He closed the door carefully and then turned and leaned against it.

“Well!” he said. “I’m sorry about the cloak and dagger business.”

“It was very exciting.” She smiled. “Quite like a mystery story.”

“Come in, sit down,” he said, leading the way. “You’ll have to excuse the place. I have to do my own housekeeping, and I just don’t.” He took a test-tube rack and a cracked bunsen tube from an easy chair and nodded her into it. He had to make two circuits of the room before he found somewhere to put them down. “Price of fame,” he said sardonically, and sat down on a rope-tied stack of papers bearing the flapping label Proceedings of the Pan-American Microbiological Society. “Where that clown makes a joke of Horowitz, other fashionable people make a game of Horowitz. A challenge. Track down Horowitz. Well, if they did, through tapping my phone or following me home, that would satisfy them. Then I would be another kind of challenge. Bother Horowitz. Break in and stir up his lab with a stick. You know.”

She shuddered. “People are . . . are so . . .”

“Don’t say that, whatever it was,” said Horowitz. “We’re living in a quiet time, Doctor, and we haven’t evolved too far away from our hunting and tracking appetites. It probably hasn’t occurred to you that your kind of math and my kind of biology are hunting and tracking too. Cut away our science bump and we’d probably hunt with the pack too. A big talent is only a means of hunting alone. A little skill is a means of hunting alone some of the time.”

“But. . . why must they hunt you?”

“Why must you hunt gravitic phenomena?”

“To understand it.”

“Which means to end it as a mystery. Cut it down to your size. Conquer it. You happen to be equipped with a rather rarefied type of reason, so you call your conquest understanding. The next guy happens to be equipped with fourteen inches of iron pipe and achieves his conquest with it instead.”

“You’re amazing,” she said openly. “You love your enemies, like—”

“Love thine enemies as thyself. Don’t take any piece of that without taking it all. How much I love people is a function of how much I love Horowitz, and you haven’t asked me about that. Matter of fact, 1 haven’t asked me about that and I don’t intend to. My God, it’s good to talk to somebody again. Do you want a drink?”

“No,” she said. “How much do you love Heri Gonza?”

He rose and hit his palm with his fist and sat down again, all his gentleness folded away and put out of sight. “There’s the exception. You can understand anything humanity does if you try, but you can’t understand the inhumanity of a Heri Gonza. The difference is that he knows what is evil and what isn’t, and doesn’t care. I don’t mean any numb by-rote moral knowledge learned at the mother’s knee, the kind that afflicts your pipe-wielder a little between blows and a lot when he gets his breath afterward. I mean a clear, analytical, extrapolative, brilliantly intelligent knowledge of each act and each consequence. Don’t underestimate that devil.”

“He . . . seems to ... I mean, he does love children,” she said fatuously.

“Oh, come on now. He doesn’t spend a dime on his precious Foundation that he wouldn’t have to give to the government in taxes. Don’t you realize that? He doesn’t do a thing he doesn’t have to do, and he doesn’t have to love those kids. He’s using those kids. He’s using the filthiest affliction mankind has known for a long time just to keep himself front and center.”

“But if the Foundation does find a cure, then he—”

“Now you’ve put your finger on the thing that nobody in the world but me seems to understand—why I won’t work with the Foundation. Two good reasons. First, I’m way ahead of them. I don’t need the Foundation and all those fancy facilities. I’ve got closer to the nature of iapetitis than any of ‘em. Second, for all my love for and understanding of people, I don’t want to find out what I’m afraid I would find out if I worked there and if a cure was found.”

“You mean he’d—he’d withhold it?”

“Maybe not permanently. Maybe he’d sit on it until he’d milked it dry. Years. Some would die by then. Some are pretty close as it is.” She thought of Billy and bit her hand.

“I didn’t say he would do that,” Horowitz said, more gently. “I said I don’t want to be in a position to find out. I don’t want to know that any member of my species could do a thing like that. Now you see why I work by myself, whatever it costs. If I can cure iapetitis, I’ll say so. I’ll do it, I’ll prove it. That’s why I don’t mind his kind of cheap persecution. If I succeed, all that harassment makes it impossible for him to take credit or profit in any way.”

“Who are you going to cure?”

“What?”

“He’s got them all. He’s on trideo right now, a telethon, the biggest show of the last ten years, hammering at people to send him every case the instant it’s established.” Her eyes were round.

“The logician,” he whispered, as round-eyed as she. “Oh, my God, I never thought of that.” He took a turn around the room and sat down again. His face was white. “But we don’t know that. Surely he’d give me a patient. Just one.”

“It might cost you the cure. You’d have to, you’d just have to give it to him, or you’d be the one withholding it!”

“I won’t think about it now,” he said hoarsely. “I can’t think about it now. I’ll get the cure. That first.”

“Maybe my brother Billy—”

“Don’t even think about it!” he cried. “He’s already got it in for you. Don’t get in his way any more. He won’t let your Billy out of there and you know it. Try anything and he’ll squash you like a beetle.”

“What’s he got against me?”

“You don’t know? You’re a Nobel winner—one of the newsiest things there is. A girl, and not bad-looking at all. You’re in the public eye, or you will be by noon tomorrow when the reporters get to you. Do you think for a minute he’d let you or anybody climb on his publicity? Listen, iapetitis is his sole property, his monopoly, and he’s not going to share it. What’d you expect him to do, announce the gift on his lousy telethon?”

“I—I c-called him on his telethon.”

“You didn’t!”

“He pretended the call was from you. But . . . but at the same time he told me ... ah yes, he said, ‘What you got I don’t want. I’m not up here to do you no good.’”

Horowitz spread his hands. “Q.E.D.”

“Oh,” she said, “how awful.”

At that point somebody kicked the door open.

Horowitz sprang to his feet, livid. A big man in an open, flapping topcoat shouldered his way in. He had a long horse-face and a blue jaw. His eyes were extremely sad. He said, “Now just relax. Relax and you’ll be all right.” His hands, as if they had a will of their own, busied themselves about pulling off a tight left-hand glove with wires attached to it and running into his side pocket.

“Flannel!” Horowitz barked. “How did you get in?” He stepped forward, knees slightly bent, head lowering. “You’ll get out of here or so help me—”

“No!” Iris cried, clutching at Horowitz’s forearm. The big man outreached and outweighed the biologist, and certainly would fight rougher and dirtier.

“Don’t worry, lady,” said the man called Flannel sleepily. He raised a lazy right hand and made a slight motion with it, and a cone-nosed needier glittered in his palm. “He’ll be good—won’t you, boy? Or I’ll put you to bed for two weeks an’ a month over.”

He sidled past and, never taking his gaze from Horowitz for more than a flickering instant, opened the three doors which led from the laboratory—a bathroom, a bedroom, a storage closet.

“Who is he? You know him?” Iris whispered.

“I know him,” growled Horowitz. “He’s Heri Gonza’s bodyguard.”

“Nobody but the two of them,” said Flannel.

“Good,” said a new voice, and a second man walked in, throwing off a slouch hat and opening the twin to the long, loose topcoat Flannel wore. “Hi, chillun,” said Heri Gonza.

There was a long silence, and then Horowitz plumped down on his pile of Proceedings, put his chin in his hands, and said in profound disgust, “Ah, for God’s sake.”

“Dr. Horowitz,” said Heri Gonza pleasantly, nodding, “and Dr. Barran.”

Iris said shakily, “I th-thought you were doing a sh-show.”

“Oh, I am, I am. All things are possible if you only know how. At the moment Chitsie Bombom is doing a monologue, and she’s good for two encores. After that there’s a solido of me sitting way up on the flats in the left rear, oh so whimsically announcing the Player’s Pub Players. They have a long one-acter and a pantomime. I’ve even got a ballet company, in case this takes that long.”

“Phony to the eyeballs, even when you work,” said Horowitz. “In case what takes that long?”

“We’re going to talk.”

“You talk,” said Horowitz. “Quickly and quietly and get the hell out of here. ‘Scuse me, Dr. Barran.”

“Oh, that’s all right,” she murmured.

“Please,” said the comedian softly, “I didn’t come here to quarrel with you. I want to end all that. Here and now, and for good.”

“We’ve got something he wants,” said Horowitz in a loud aside to Iris.

Heri Gonza closed his eyes and said, “You’re making this harder than it has to be. What can I do to make this a peaceful talk?”

“For one thing,” said Horowitz, “your simian friend is breathing and it bothers me. Make him stop.”

“Flannel,” said Heri Gonza, “get out.”

Glowering, the big man moved to the door, opened it, and stood on the sill. “All the way,” said the comedian. Flannel’s broad back was one silent mass of eloquent protest, but he went out and shut the door.

Deftly, with that surprising suddenness of nervous motion which was his stock in trade, Heri Gonza dropped to one knee to bring their faces on a level, and captured Iris’s startled hands. “First of all, Dr. Barran, I came to apologize to you for the way I spoke on the telephone. I had to do it —there was no alternative, as you’ll soon understand. I tried to call you back, but you’d already gone.”

“You followed me here! Oh, Dr. Horowitz, I’m sorry!”

“I didn’t need to follow you. I’ve had this place spotted since two days before you moved into it, Horowitz. But I’m sorry I had to strongarm my way in.”

“I yield to curiosity,” said Horowitz. “Why didn’t my locks alarm when you opened them? I saw Flannel’s palm-print eliminator, but dammit, they should have alarmed.”

“The locks were here when you rented the place, right? Well, who do you think had them installed? I’ll show you where the cutoff switch is before I leave. Anyhow—grant me this point. Was there any other way I could have gotten in to talk with you?”

“I concede,” said Horowitz sourly.

“Now, Dr. Barran. You have my apology, and you’ll have the explanation to go with it. Believe me, I’m sorry. The other thing I want to do is to accept, with thanks from the bottom of my heart, your very kind offer of the prize money. I want it, I need it, and it will help more than you can possibly realize.”

“No,” said Iris flatly. “I’ve promised it to Dr. Horowitz.”

Heri Gonza sighed, got to his feet, and leaned back against the lab bench. He looked down at them sadly.

“Go on,” said Horowitz. “Tell us how you need money.”

“The only two things I have never expected from you are ignorance and stupidity,” said Heri Gonza sharply, “and you’re putting up a fine display of both. Do you really think, along with all my millions of ardent fans, that when I land a two-million-dollar contract I somehow put two million dollars in the bank? Don’t be childish. My operation is literally too big to hide anything in. I have city, county, state and federal tax vultures picking through my whole operational framework. I’m a corporation and subject to outside accounting. I don’t even have a salary; I draw what I need, and I damn well account for it, too. Now, if I’m going to finish what I started with the disease, I’m going to need a lot more money than I can whittle out a chip at a time.”

“Then take it out of the Foundation money—that’s what it’s for.”

“I want to do the one thing I’m not allowed to do with it. Which happens to be the one thing that’ll break this horrible thing—it has to!”

“The only thing there is like that is a trip to Iapetus.”

To this, Heri Gonza said nothing—absolutely nothing at all. He simply waited.

Iris Barran said, “He means it. I think he really means it.”

“You’re a big wheel,” said Horowitz at last, “and there are a lot of corners you can cut, but not that one. There’s one thing the government—all governments and all their armed forces—will rise up in wrath to prevent, and that’s another landing and return from any place off earth—especially Iapetus. You’ve got close to four hundred dying kids on your hands right now, and the whole world is scared.”

“Set that aside for a moment.” The comedian was earnest, warm-voiced. “Just suppose it could be done. Horowitz, as I understand it you have everything you need on the iapetitis virus but one little link. Is that right?”

“That’s right. I can synthesize a surrogate virus from nucleic acids and exactly duplicate the disease. But it dies out of its own accord. There’s a difference between my synthetic virus and the natural one, and I don’t know what it is. Give me ten hours on Iapetus and half a break, and I’ll have the original virus under an electron mike. Then I can synthesize a duplicate, a real self-sustaining virus that can cause the disease. Once I have that, the antigen becomes a factory process, with the techniques we have today. We’ll have shots for those kids by the barrel lot inside of a week.”

Heri Gonza spread his hands. “There’s the problem, then. The law won’t allow the flight until we have the cure. We won’t have the cure unless we make the flight.”

Iris said, “A Nobel prize is an awful lot of money, but it won’t buy the shell of a space ship.”

“I’ve got the ship.”

For the first time Horowitz straightened up and spoke with something besides anger and hopelessness. “What kind of a ship? Where is it?”

“A Fafnir. You’ve seen it, or pictures of it. I use it for globe-trotting mostly, and VIP sightseeing. It’s a deepspace craft, crew of twelve, and twelve passenger cabins. But it handles like a dream, and I’ve got the best pilot in the world. Kearsarge.”

“Kearsarge, God yes. But look, what you call deepspace is Mars and Venus. Not Saturn.”

“You don’t know what’s been done to that ship. She’ll sleep four now. I have a lab and a shop in her, and all the rest is nothing but power-plant, shielding and fuel. Hell, she’ll make Pluto!”

“You mean you’ve been working on this already?”

“Man, I’ve been chipping away at my resources for a year and a half now. You don’t know what kind of footsie I’ve been playing with my business managers and the banks and all. I can’t squeak out another dime without lighting up the whole project. Dr. Barran, now do you see why I had to treat you like that? You were the godsend, with your wonderful offer and your vested interest in Billy. Can you astro-gate?”

“I—oh dear. I know the principles well enough. Yes, I could, with a little instruction.”

“You’ll get it. Now look, I don’t want to see that money. You two will go down and inspect the ship tomorrow morning, and then put in everything you’ll need beyond what’s already there. You’ve got food, fuel, water and air enough for two trips, let alone one.”

“God,” said Horowitz.

“I’ll arrange for your astrogation, Dr. Barran. You’ll have to dream up a story, secret project or long solitary vacation or some such. Horowitz, you can drop out of sight without trouble.”

“Oh, sure, thanks to you.”

“Dammit, this time you’re welcome,” said the comedian, and very nearly smiled. “Now, you’ll want one more crew member: I’ll take care of that before flight time.”

“What about the ship? What will you say?”

“Flight test after overhaul. Breakdown in space, repair, return—some such. Leave that to Kearsarge.”

“I freely admit,” said Horowitz, “that I don’t get it. This is one frolic that isn’t coming out of taxes, and it’s costing you a packet. What’s in it, mountebank?”

“You could ask that,” said the comedian sadly. “The kids, that’s all.”

“You’ll get the credit?”

“I won’t, I can’t, I don’t want it. I can’t tie in to this jaunt —it would ruin me. Off-earth landings, risking the lives of all earth’s kids—you know how they’d talk. No, sir: this is your cooky, Horowitz. You disappear, you show up one day with the answer. I eat crow like a hell of a good sport. You get back your directorship if you want it. Happy ending. All the kids get well.” He jumped into the air and clicked his heels four times on the way down. “The kids get well,” he breathed with sudden sobriety.

Horowitz said gently, “Heri Gonza, what’s with you and kids?”

“I like ‘em.” He buttoned his coat. “Good night, Dr. Barran. Please accept my apologies again, and don’t think too badly of me.”

“I don’t,” she said smiling, and gave him her hand.

“But why do you like kids that much?” asked Horowitz.

Heri Gonza shrugged easily and laughed his deadpan laugh. “Never had none,” he chuckled. He went to the door and stopped, facing it, suddenly immobile. His shoulders trembled. He whirled suddenly, and the famous carven face was wet, twisted, the mouth tortured and crooked. “Never can,” he whispered, and literally ran out of the room.

The weeks went by, the months. Iapetitis cases underwent some strange undulations, and a hope arose that the off-world virus was losing its strength. Some of the older cases actually improved, and a blessing that was, too; for although overall growth was arrested, there was a tendency for the mobile side to grow faster than the other, and during the improvement phase, the sides seemed to equalize. Then, tragically the improvement would slow; and stop.

Incidence of the disease seemed to be slackening as well. At the last, there had been only three new cases in a year, though they caused a bad flurry, occurring as they did simultaneously in a Belgian village which had had no hint of the disease before.

Heri Gonza still did his weekly stint (less vacation) and still amazed his gigantic audiences with his versatility, acting, singing, dancing, clowning. Sometimes he would make quiet appearances, opening and closing the show and turning it over to a theater or ballet group. During the Old Timer’s Celebration he learned to fly a perfect duplicate of a century-old light aircraft with an internal combustion engine, and daringly took his first solo during the show, with a trideo camera occupying the instructor’s seat.

At other times he might take up the entire time-segment alone, usually with orchestra and props, once—possibly his most successful show—dressed in sloppy practice clothes on a bare stage, without so much as a chair, and with no assistance but lights and cameras and an occasional invisible touch from the hypnos and the scent generators. Single-handedly he was a parade, a primary schoolroom, a zoo in an earthquake, and an old lady telling three children, ages five, ten, and fifteen, about sex, all at the same time.

And in between (and sometimes during) his shows, he faithfully maintained I.F. He visited his children regularly, every single one of the more than four hundred. He thrilled with their improvements, cheered them in their inevitable relapses. The only time he did not make one of his scheduled shows at all was the time the three cases appeared in Belgium, and then the slot was filled with news-items about the terrifying resurgence, and a world tour of I.F. clinics. He was a great man, a great comic, no question about it, right up to his very last show.

He didn’t know it was his last show, which in its way was a pity, because with that knowledge he would have been more than good; he’d have been great. He was that kind of performer.

However, he was good, and was in and out of a vastly amusing variety show, using his old trick of standing offstage and singing with perfect mimicry while top vocalists stood center stage and mouthed the words. He turned out to be one of the Japanese girls who built body-pyramids on their bicycles, and, powered by a spring device under the water, joined a succession of porpoises leaping to take fish out of a keeper’s hand.

He played, as he preferred to do, in a large studio without an audience, but playing to the audience-response sound supplied to him. He made his cues well, filled in smoothly with ad-libs when a girl singer ran a chorus short on her arrangement, and did his easy stand-up comedy monologue to close. A pity he didn’t smile on that show. When the on-the-airs went out and the worklights came on, he threw a sweatshirt around his shoulder and ambled into the wings, where, as usual, the network man, Burcke, waited for him.

“How’d it look, Burckee ol’ turkey?”

“Like never before,” said Burcke.

“Aw, you’re cute yourself,” said the comedian. “Let’s have a look.” One of his greatest delights—and one reason for his fantastic polish—was the relaxed run-through afterward, where he lounged in the projection room and looked at the show he had just finished from beginning to end. He and Burcke and a few interested cast-members, backstage people, and privileged strangers got arranged in the projection room. Beer was passed around and the small-talk used up. As usual they all deferred to Heri Gonza, and when he waved a negligent hand everybody shut up and the projectionist threw the switch.

Title and credits with moving cloud-blanket background. Credits fade, camera zooms toward clouds, which thin to show mountain range. Down through clouds, hover over huge misty lake. Water begins to heave, to be turbulent, suddenly shores rush together and water squirts high through the clouds in a thick column. Empty lake rises up out of clouds, is discovered to be Heri Gonza’s open mouth. Pull back to show full face. Puzzled expression. Hand up, into mouth, extracts live goldfish.

Gonza: Welcome to the Heri Gonza show, this week “As you lake it.” (beat) Which is all you can expect when you open with a punorama. What ho is (beat) What ho is yonder? A mountain. What ho is on the mountain? A mountain goat. What ho is the goat mountain? Why, another moun— Fellers, keep the lens on me, things are gettin’ a little blue off camera. Now hear ye, Tom, now hear ye, Dick, now hear ye, hairy Harry, Heri’s here. Hee hee, ho ho, here comes the show.

Soft focus and go to black. Long beat.

Heri took his beer away from his mouth and glared at the wall. “God’s sake, you send all that black?”

“Sure did,” said Burcke equably.

“Man, you don’t do that for anything but the second coming. What you think they expect with all that black? It sucks ‘em in, but boy, you got to pay off.”

“We paid off,” said Burcke. “Here it comes.”

“The horse act, right?”

“Wrong,” said Burcke.

Dark stage. Desk, pool of light. Zoom in, Burcke, jaw clamped. In a face as sincere and interested as that, the clamped jaw is pretty grim.

Burcke: Tonight the Heri Gonza show brings you a true story. Although the parts are played by professional actors, and certain scenes are shortened for reasons of time, you may be assured that these are real events and can be proved in every detail.

“What the hell is this?” roared Heri Gonza. “Did you air this? Is this what went out when I was knocking myself out with that horse act?”

“Sit down,” said Burcke.

Heri Gonza sat down dazedly.

Burcke at desk. Lifts book and raps it.

Burcke: This is a ship’s rough log, the log of the Fafnir 203. How it comes to be on this desk, on your wall, is, I must warn you, a shocking story. The Fafnir is a twelve-cabin luxury cruiser with a crew of twelve, including stewards and the galley crew. So was the 203, before it was rebuilt. It was redesigned to sleep four with no room over, with two cabins rebuilt as a small-materials shop and a biological laboratory, and all the rest taken up with power-plant, fuel and stores. The ship’s complement was Dr. Iris Barran, mathematician—

Fade in foredeck of Fafnir, girl standing by computer.

Dr. George Rehoboth Horowitz, microbiologist—

Bespectacled man enters, crosses to girl, who smiles.

Yeager Kearsarge, pilot first class—

Kearsarge is a midget with a long, bony, hardbitten face. He enters from black foreground and goes to control console’.

Sam Flannel, supercargo.

Widen lighting to pass cabin bulkhead, discovering large man strapped in acceleration couch, asleep or unconscious.

“I got it,” said Heri Gonza in the projection room. “A rib. It’s a rib. Pretty good, fellers.”

“It isn’t a rib, Heri Gonza,” said Burcke. “Sit down, now.”

“It’s got to be a rib,” said Heri Gonza in a low voice. “Slip me a beer, I should relax and enjoy the altogether funny joke.”

“Here. Now shush.”

Burcke : . . . mission totally contrary to law and regulation. Destination: Iapetus. Purpose: collection of the virus, or spores, of the dreaded children’s affliction iapetitis, on the theory that examination of these in their natural habitat will reveal their exact internal structure and lead to a cure, or at the very least an immunization. Shipowner and director of mission: (long beat) Heri Gonza.

Fourteen hours out. . .

Fade Burcke and desk and take out. Dolly in to foredeck.

Horowitz crosses to side cabin, looks in on Flannel. Touches Flannel’s face. Returns to computer and Iris.

Horowitz: He’s still out cold. The tough boy is no spaceman.

Iris: I can’t get over his being here at all. Why ever did Heri want him along?

Horowitz: Maybe he’ll tell us.

Small explosion. High whine.

Kearsarge: A rock! a rock!

Iris: (frightened) What’s a rock?

Kearsarge waddles rapidly to friction hooks on bulkhead, snatches off helmets, throws two to Horowitz and Iris, sprints with two more into cabin. Gets one on Flannel’s lolling head, adjusts oxygen valve. Puts on his own. Returns to assist Iris, then Horowitz.

Iris: What is it?

Kearsarge: Nothing to worry you, lady. Meteorite. Just a little one. I’ll get it patched.

From control console, sudden sharp hiss and cloud of vapor.

Iris: Oh! And what’s that?

Kearsarge: Now you got me.

Kearsarge goes to console, kneels, peers underneath. Grunts, fumbles.

Horowitz: What is it?

Kearsarge: Ain’t regulation, ‘sall I know.

Horowitz kneels beside him and peers.

Horowitz: What’s this?

Kearsarge: Bottom of main firing lever. Wire tied to it, pulled that pin when we blasted off.

Horowitz: Started this timing mechanism. . . . What time did it pop?

Kearsarge: Just about 14:30 after blastoff.

Horowitz: Think you can get it off there? I’d like to test for what was in it.

Kearsarge gets the device off, gives it to Horowitz, who takes it into lab.

Cut to cabin, closeup of Flannel’s helmeted face. He opens his eyes, stares blankly. He is very sick, pale, insane with dormant fear. Suddenly fear no longer dormant. With great difficulty raises head, raises strapped-down wrist enough to see watch. Suddenly begins to scream and thrash around. The releases are right by his hands but he can’t find them. Iris and Kearsarge run in. Kearsarge stops to take in the situation, then reaches out and pulls releases. Straps fall away; Flannel, howling, leaps for the door, knocking the midget flat and slamming Iris up against edge of door. She screams. Kearsarge scrambles to his feet, takes off after Flannel like a Boston terrier after a bull. Flannel skids to a stop by the lifeboat blister, starts tugging at it.

Kearsarge: What the hell are you doing?

Flannel (blubbering): 14:30 . . . 14:30 ... I gotta get out, gotta get out . . . (screams)

Kearsarge: Don’t pull on that, y’damn fool! That’s not the hatch, it’s the release! We got spin on for gravity—y’ll pitch the boat a hundred miles off!

Flannel: Oh, lemme out, it’s too late!

Kearsarge punches upward with both hands so unexpectedly that Flannel’s grip is broken and he pitches over backward. Kearsarge leaps on him, twists his oxygen valve, and scuttles back out of the way. Flannel lumbers to his feet, staggers over to the boat blister, gets his hands on the wrong lever again, but his knees buckle. Inside the helmet, his face is purpling. Horowitz comes running out of the lab. Kearsarge puts out an arm and holds him back, and together they watch Flannel sag down, fall, roll, writhe. He puts both hands on helmet, tugs at it weakly.

Horowitz: Don’t for God’s sake let him take off that helmet!

Kearsarge: Don’t worry. He can’t.

Flannel slumps and lies still. Kearsarge goes to him and opens valve a little. He beckons Horowitz and together they drag him back to the cabin and with some difficulty get him on the couch and strapped down.

Horowitz: What happened? I had my hands full of reagents in there.

Kearsarge: Space nutty. They get like that sometimes after blackout. He wanted out. Tried to take the boat.

Horowitz: He say anything?

Kearsarge: Buncha junk. Said, 14:30, 14:30. Said it was too late, had to get out.

Horowitz: That snivvy under the console popped at 14:30. He knew about it.

Kearsarge: Did he now. What was it?

Horowitz: Cyanide gas. If we hadn’t been holed and forced to put the helmets on, we’d’ve had it.

Kearsarge: Except him. He figured to be up an’ around lookin’ at his watch, and when she popped, he’d be in the boat headed home and we’d keep blasting till the pile run dry, som’res out t’ords Algol.

Horowitz: Can you fix those releases so he can’t reach them?

Kearsarge: Oh, sure.

Fade. Light picks up Burcke at the side.

Burcke (as narrator): They got an explanation out of Flannel, and it satisfied none of them. He said he knew nothing of any cyanide. He said that Heri, knowing he was a bad spaceman, had told him that if it got so bad he couldn’t stand it, he could always come back in the lifeboat. But if he did that, he’d have to do it before 14:30 after blastoff or there wouldn’t be fuel enough to decelerate, start back, and maneuver a landing. He insisted that that was all there was to it. He would not say what he was doing aboard, except to state that Heri Gonza wanted him to look out for Heri’s interests.

No amount of discussion made anything clearer. Heri certainly could not have wanted the expedition to fail, nor his ship hurled away from the solar system. They reluctantly concluded that some enemy of Heri Gonza’s must have sabotaged them—someone they simply didn’t know.

The weeks went by—not easy ones, by any means, in those close quarters, without any event except Iris Barran’s puzzling discovery that the ship required no astrogator after all: what the veteran Kearsarge couldn’t handle in his head was easily treated in the computer. Why, then, had Heri Gonza insisted on her cramming on astrogation?

Zoom in to Saturn until it fills a quadrant. String out the moons.

Heri Gonza watched the bridge sequence, as Saturn swept close and the moons rolled by like broken beads, and little Iapetus swam close. Iapetus is not a moon like most, round or oblate, but a rock, a drifting mountain some 500 miles in diameter. And before them was the solution to the mystery of the changing moonlight. Some unknown cataclysm has cloven Iapetus, so that it has one sheer face, nearly four hundred square miles of flat plain (or cliff, depending on how you look at it) made of pale gray basaltic material. Since Iapetus always maintains one face to Saturn, it always appears brighter as it rounds the eastern limb, and dimmer as it goes west, the albedo of the flat face being much higher than the craggy ruin of the rest of its surface.

“Burckee, Burckee, Burckee ol’ turkey,” murmured the comedian in accents of wonder, “who the hell writes your stuff? Who writes your lousy, lousy stuff?”

Stock shot, Fafnir putting down tail-first on rocky plain, horizon washed out and black space brought down close. Rocks sharp-cornered, uneroded. Long shot, stabilizing jacks extending widest. Ladder out. Two suited figures ride it down, the other two climb down.

Closeup, all four at tail-base.

Horowitz: (filter mike) Check your radios. Read me?

All : Check. Read you fine.

Horowitz: Each take a fin. Walk straight out with the fin as a guide, and when you’ve passed our scorch area, get a rock scraping every five feet or so until you’re far enough away that the horizon’s a third of the way up the hull. Got that? No farther. (Beat) And I can almost tell you now, we aren’t going to find one blessed thing. No virus, no spore, no nothing. My God, it’s no more than twelve, thirteen degrees K in the shadows here. Anyway ... let’s go.

Burcke: (off) Scratch and hop, scratch and hop. In this gravity, you don’t move fast or push hard, or you’ll soar away and take minutes to come down again. Shuffle and scratch, scratch and sweep, scratch and hop. It took them hours.

Closeup, Kearsarge, looking down.

Kearsarge: Here’s something.

Closeups, each of the other three, looking up, turning head at the sound of Kearsarge’s voice.

Horowitz: What is it?

Kearsarge: Scorch. A regular mess of it. Hell, you know what? Swope toppled his ship. I can see where he came down, then where he took off, scraping along to the big edge there.

Flannel: Wonder he didn’t wreck her.

Kearsarge: He did. He couldn’t hurt the hull any in this gravity, but he sure as hell wiped off his antennae, because there they are: landing, range, transmission—every one, by God. No wonder he came barreling in the way he did. You can’t land a Fafnir on manual, but you can try, and he tried. Poor ol’ Swopie.

Horowitz: Everybody over there by Kearsarge. Maybe Swope picked up something where he scraped.

Long shot of the four working around long scorch and scrape marks.

Burcke: (off, narrating) They filled their specimen sacks and brought them aboard, and then for seventy-two hours they went through their dust and stones with every test Horowitz could devise. ... He had been quite right in his first guess. The moonlet Iapetus is as devoid of life as the inside of an autoclave.

Cut to foredeck set, but up-ended, the controls at highest point, the floor what was the after bulkhead. Iris moving around with slow shuffle; setting out magnetized plates on steel table, each one hitting loudly. In background, Flannel fusses with small electron mike, watching screen and moving objective screws. Lifeboat blister open, Kearsarge inside, working.

Airlock cycles, opens, and Horowitz comes in, suited, with sack. He is weary. Iris helps with helmet.

Horowitz: I’ve had it. Let’s get home. We can get just so duty-bound.

Iris: What’s this ‘home’? I don’t remember.

Horowitz: You for home, Kearsarge?

Kearsarge: Any time you’re through hoein’ this rock.

Horowitz: What are you doing in there?

Kearsarge: Just routine. Figured you might want to buzz around the other side with the boat.

Horowitz: No, sir. I came close enough on foot. I say we’re done here. A man could sit home with a pencil and paper and figure out the density of sub-microscopic growth this place would have to have to bring any back on the hull. We’d be hip deep in it. The iapetitis virus didn’t come from Iapetus, and that, friends, is for sure and official.

Kearsarge: (off) Oh, my holy mother. (He pops out, putty-colored.) George, get over here.

Iris: (curiously) What is it?

She goes over and disappears for a moment inside the boat, with Kearsarge and Horowitz. Off, she gasps. Then, one by one they climb out and stand looking at Flannel.

Flannel: What I got, blue horns or something?

Horowitz: Show him, Kearsarge.

Kearsarge beckons. There is a strange pucker of grim amusement on his craggy face.

Kearsarge: Come look, little feller. Then you can join our club.

Reluctantly, the big man goes over to the blister and follows Kearsarge into the lifeboat. Dolly after them, swing in to the instrument panel, under it and look up.

Lashed to the projecting lower end of the main thrust control is a silver can with a small cylinder at the near end.

Flannel: (pointing stupidly) Is that . . . that the same thing that—

Kearsarge: A little smaller, but then you don’t need as much cyanide for a boat.

Flannel: (angry) Who the hell put it there? You?

Kearsarge: Not me, feller. I just found it.

Horowitz: It’s been there all along, Flannel. Kearsarge is right: you belong to the club too. You sure it was Heri Gonza told you to take the boat?

Flannel: Sure it was. He couldn’t have nothing to do with this. (Suddenly it hits him) Jesus! I mighta—

Horowitz: We’ll have plenty of time to talk this over. Let’s pack up the testing stuff and haul out of here.

Flannel: (to no one) Jesus.

Heri Gonza lay back in the projection room and sipped his beer and watched the stock shot of a Fafnir taking off from a rock plain. “You really get all that glop out of that book, Burcke, m’boy?”

“Every bit of it,” said Burcke, watching the screen.

“You know how it is in space, a fellow’s got to do something with his time. Sometimes he writes, and sometimes it’s fairy tales, and sometimes you can get a pretty good show out of a fairy tale. But when you do that, you call it a fairy tale. Follow me?”

“Yup.”

“This was really what went out on the air tonight?”

“Sure is.”

Very, very softly, Heri Gonza said, “Poor Burcke. Poor, poor ol’ Burcke.”

Closeup, hands turning pages in rough logbook. Pull back to show Burcke with book. He looks up, and when he speaks his voice is solemn.

Burcke: Time to think, time to talk it over. Time to put all the pieces in the same place at the same time, and push them against each other to see what fits.

Fade to black; but it is not black after all: instead, starry space. Pan across to pick up ship, a silver fish with a scarlet tail. Zoom in fast, dissolve through hull, discovering fore-deck. The four lounge around, really relaxed, willing to think before speaking, and to speak carefully. Horowitz and Kearsarge sit at the table ignoring a chessboard. Iris is stretched on the deck with a rolled-up specimen sack under her head. Flannel kneels before a spread of Canfield solitaire. Horowitz is watching him.

Horowitz: I like to think about Flannel.

Flannel: Think what?

Horowitz: Oh ... the alternatives. The ‘ifs.’ What would Flannel do if this had been different, or that.

Flannel: There’s no sense in that kind of thinkin’—if this, if that. This happened, or that happened, and that’s all there is to it. You got anything special in mind?

Horowitz: I have, as a matter of fact. Given that you had a job to do, namely to cut out and leave us with our cyanide bomb at the start of the trip—

Flannel: (aroused) I tol’ you and tol’ you that wasn’t a job. I didn’t know about the damn cyanide.

Horowitz: Suppose you had known about it. Would you have come? If you hadn’t come, would you have tipped us off about it? And here’s the question I thought of: if the first bomb had failed—which it did—and there had been no second bomb to tell you that you were a member of the Exit Club, would you have tried to do the job on the way home?

Flannel: I was thinkin’ about it, about what to do.

Horowitz: And what did you decide?

Flannel: Nothin’. You found the bomb in the boat so I just stopped thinkin’.

Iris: (suddenly) Why did that really make a difference?

Flannel: All the diff’nce in the world. Heri Gonza tol’ me to get in the lifeboat before fourteen an’ a half hours and come back and tell him how things went. Now if there was just your bomb, could be that Heri Gonza wanted you knocked off. There was an accident and it din’t knock you off, and here I am working for him and wonderin’ if I shoon’t take up where the bomb left off.

Iris: Then we found the second bomb, and you changed your mind. Why?

Flannel: (exasperated) Whata ya all, simple or somepin? Heri Gonza, he tol’ me to come back and tell him how it went. If he tells me that an’ then plants a bomb on me, how could I get back to tell him? A man’s a fool to tell a guy to do somethin’ an’ then fix it so he can’t. He’s no fool, Heri Gonza I mean, an’ you know it. Well then: if he din’t plant my bomb, he din’t plant your bomb, because anyone can see they was planted by the same guy. An’ if he din’t plant your bomb, he don’t want you knocked off, so I stopped thinkin’ about it. Is that simple enough for ya?

Iris: I don’t know that it’s simple, but it sure is beautiful.

Horowitz: Well, one of us is satisfied of Heri Gonza’s good intentions. Though I still don’t see what sense it made to go to all the trouble of putting you aboard just to have you get off and go back right at the start.

Flannel: Me neither. But do I have to understand everything he tells me to do? I done lots of things for him I didn’t know what they was about. You too, Kearsarge.

Kearsarge: That’s right. I drive this can from here to there, and from there to yonder, and I don’t notice anything else, but if I notice it I forget it, but if I don’t forget it I don’t talk about it. That’s the way he likes it and we get along fine.

Iris: (forcefully) I think Heri Gonza wanted us all killed.

Horowitz: What’s that—intuition? And . . . shouldn’t that read “wants”?

Iris: “Wants,” yes. He wants us all killed. No, it’s not intuition. It formulates. Almost. There’s a piece missing.

Flannel: Ah, y’r out of y’r mind.

Kearsarge: Doubled.

Horowitz: (good-naturedly) Shut up, both of you. Go on with that, Iris. Maybe by you it formulates, but by me it intuits. Go on.

Iris: Well, let’s use as a working hypothesis that Heri Gonza wants us dead—us four; He wants more than that: he wants us to disappear from the cosmos—no bodies, no graves, no nothing.

Kearsarge: But why?

Horowitz: Just you listen. We start with the murders and finish with the why. You’ll see.

Iris: Well then, the ship will do the removal. The cyanide —both cyanides—do the actual killing, and it hits so fast that the ship keeps blasting, out and out until the fuel is gone, and forever after that. We three are on it; Flannel crashes in a small craft and if anybody wonders about it, they don’t wonder much. Is there any insignia on that boat, by the way, Kearsarge?

Kearsarge: Always.

Iris: Go look, will you? Thanks. Now, what about the traces we leave behind us? Well, we took off illegally so notified no one and filed no clearances. You, George, were already in hiding from Heri Gonza’s persecutions; Kearsarge here is so frequently away on indeterminate trips of varying lengths that he would soon be forgotten; Flannel here— no offense, Flannel—I don’t think anyone would notice that you’re gone for good. As for me, Heri Gonza himself had me plant a story about going off secretly for some solitary research for a year or so. What’s the matter, Kearsarge?

Kearsarge: I wouldn’ta believed it. No insignia. Filed off and sanded smooth and painted. Numbers off the thrust block. Trade-name off the dash, even. I... I wouldn’ta believed it.

Horowitz: Now you’d better listen to the lady.

Iris: No insignia. So even poor Flannel’s little smashup is thoroughly covered. Speaking of Flannel, I say again that it was stretching credibility to put him aboard that way— unless you assume that he was put aboard like the rest of us, to be done away with. I certainly came under false pretenses: Heri Gonza not only told me he needed an astro-gator for the trip, which he didn’t, but had me bone up on the subject.

Now we can take a quick look at motive. George Horowitz here is the most obvious. He has for a long time been a thorn in the flesh of that comedian. Not only has he concluded that Heri Gonza doesn’t really want to find a cure for iapetitis—he says so very loudly and as often as he can. In addition, George is always on the very verge of whipping the disease, something that frightens Heri Gonza so much that he’s actually hoarding patients so George can’t get to them. Also, he doesn’t like George.

Why kill Flannel? Is he tired of you, Flannel? Did you boggle something he asked you to do?

Flannel: He don’t have to kill me, Miss Iris. He could fire me any time. I’d feel real bad, but I wouldn’t bother him none. He knows that.

Iris: Then you must know too much. You must know something about him so dangerous he won’t feel safe until you’re dead.

Flannel: So help me, lady, there ain’t a single thing like that I know about him. Not one. Not that I know of.

Horowitz: There’s the key, Iris. He doesn’t know he knows it.

Kearsarge: Then that’s me too, because if there’s a single thing I know that he’d have to kill me for then I don’t know what it is.

Iris: You said “key.” Lock and key. A combination of things. Like if you put what Flannel knows with what Kearsarge knows, they will be dangerous to Heri Gonza.

Flannel and Kearsarge gape at each other blankly and simultaneously shrug.

Horowitz: I can give you one example of a piece of knowledge we all have that would be dangerous to him. We now know that the disease virus does not originate on Iapetus. Which means that poor Swope was not responsible for bringing it to earth, and, further, the conclusion that the little Tresak girl—the first case—caught it from the wreckage of the space ship, was unwarranted.

Flannel: I brung that picture of that little girl standing in the wreck, I brung it to Heri Gonza. He liked it.

Iris: What made you do that?

Flannel: I done it all the time. He told me to.

Horowitz: Bring him pictures of little girls?

Flannel: Girls, boys . . . but pretty ones. I got to know just the ones he would like. He liked to use ‘em on his show.

Iris and Horowitz lock glances for one horrified second, and then pounce all but bodily on Flannel.

Iris: Did you ever show him a picture of any child who later contracted the disease?

Flannel: (startled) Wh ... I dunno.

Iris: (shouting) Think! Think!

Horowitz: (also shouting) You did! You did! The Tresak girl—that photograph of her was taken before she had the disease!

Flannel: Well, yeah, her. And that little blond one he had on the telethon that din’t speak no English from Est’-onia, but you’re not lettin’ me think.

Horowitz: (subsiding) And you didn’t know what it was you had on him that he considered dangerous.

Flannel: What?

Kearsarge: I remember that little blond girl. I flew her from Esthonia.

Iris: Before or after she had the disease?

Kearsarge: (shrugging) The kind of thing I never noticed. She . . . she looked all right to me. Real pretty little kid.

Iris: How long before the telethon was that?

Kearsarge: Week or so. Wait, I can tell you to the day. (He rises from the chess table and goes to a locker, from which he brings a notebook. He leafs.) Here it is. Nine days.

Iris: (faintly) He said, on the telethon, three days . . . first symptoms.

Horowitz: (excitedly) May I see that? (Takes book, riffles it, throws it on the table, runs to lab, comes back with cardboard file, fans through it, comes up with folder.) Iris, take Kearsarge’s book. Right. Now did he fly to Belem on the ninth of May?

Iris: The sixth.

Horowitz: Rome, around March twelfth.

Iris: March twelfth, March—here it is. The eleventh.

Horowitz: One more. Indianapolis, middle of June.

Iris: Exactly. The fifteenth. What is that you have there?

He throws it down in front of her.

Horowitz: Case files. Arranged chronologically by known or estimated date of first symptom, in an effort to find some pattern of incidence. No wonder there was never any pattern. God in Heaven, if he wanted a clinic in Australia, cases would occur in Australia.

Flannel: (bewildered) I don’t know what you all are talkin’ about.

Kearsarge: (grimly) I think I do.

Iris: Now do you think you’re worth murdering—you who can actually place him on the map, at the time some child was stricken, every single time?

Kearsarge: (huskily) I’m worth murdering. I. . . didn’t know.

Flannel: (poring over the case file) Here’s that one I seen in Bellefontaine that time, she had on a red dress. And this little guy here, he got his picture in a magazine I found on the street in Little Rock and I had to go clear to St. Louis to find him.

Kearsarge hops up on a chair and kicks Flannel in the head.

Flannel: (howling) Hooo—wow! What you wanna hafta do that for? Ya little—

Horowitz: Cut it out, you two. Cut it out! That’s better. We don’t have room for that in here. Leave him alone, Kearsarge. His time will come. Heaven help me, Iris, it’s been in front of my nose right from the start, and I didn’t see it. I even told you once that I was so close because I could synthesize a virus which would actually cause the disease—but it wouldn’t maintain it. I had this idée fixe that it was an extraterrestrial disease. Why? Because it acted like a synthetic and no natural terran virus does. Serum from those kids always acted that way—it would cause a form of iapetitis which would fade out in three months or less. All you have to do to cure the damn thing is to stop injecting it!

Iris: Oh, the man, the lovely clever man and his family all over the world, the little darlings, the prettiest ones he could find, whom he never, never failed to visit regularly. . . . (Suddenly, she is crying) I was so s-sorry for him! Remember the night he . . . tore himself open to tell us he c-couldn’t have k-kids of his own?

Kearsarge: Who you talking about—Heri Gonza? For Pete’s sake, he got an ex-wife and three kids he pays money to keep ‘em in Spain, and another ex-wife in Paris, France with five kids, three his, and that one in Pittsburgh—man, that comedian’s always in trouble. He hates kids—I mean really hates ‘em.

Iris begins to laugh. Probably hysteria.

Dissolve to black, then to starry space. To black again, bring up pool of light, resolve it into:

Burcke, sitting at desk. He closes log book.

Burcke: This is, I regret to say, a true story. The Fafnir 203 came in at night six days ago at a small field some distance from here, and Dr. Horowitz phoned me. After considerable discussion it was decided to present this unhappy story to you in the form written up by the four people who actually experienced it. They are here with me now. And here is a much maligned man, surely one of the greatest medical researchers alive—Dr. Horowitz.

Horowitz: Thank you. First, I wish to assure everyone within reach of my voice that what has been said here about iapetitis is true: it is a synthetic disorder which is, by its very nature, harmless, and which, if contracted, will pass away spontaneously in from two to twelve weeks. Not a single child has died of it, and those who have been its victims the longest—some up to two years—have unquestionably been lavishly treated. A multiple murder was attempted upon my three companions and myself, of course, but it is our greatest desire to see to it that that charge is not pressed.

Burcke: I wish to express the most heartfelt apologies from myself and all my colleagues for whatever measure of distress this network and its affiliates may have unwittingly brought you, the public. It is as an earnest of this that we suffer, along with you, through the following film clip, taken just two days ago in the I.F. clinic in Montreal. What you see in my hand here is a thin rubber glove, almost invisible on the hand. Fixed to its fingertips is a microscopic forest of tiny sharp steel points, only a few thousandths of an inch long. And this metal box, just large enough to fit unobtrusively in a side pocket, contains a jellied preparation of the synthetic virus.

Fade to:

Wild hilarity in a hospital ward. Children in various stages of iapetitis, laughing hilariously at the capering, growling, gurgling, belching funny man as he moves from bed to bed, Peep! at you, peep-peep at you, and one by one ruffling the little heads at the nape, dipping the fingertips in the side jacket pocket between each bed.

Dissolve, and bring up Burcke.

Burcke: Good night, ladies, gentlemen, boys and girls . . . and . . . I’m sorry.

The lights came up in the projection room. There was nobody there with Heri Gonza but Burcke: all the others had quietly moved and watched the last few scenes from the doorway, and slipped away.

“You did air it?” asked the comedian, making absolutely sure.

“Yes.”

Heri Gonza looked at him without expression and walked toward the stage door. It opened as he approached and four people came in. Flannel, Kearsarge, Horowitz, Iris Barran.

Without a word Flannel stepped up to the comedian and hit him in the stomach. Heri Gonza sank slowly to the floor, gasping.

Horowitz said, “We’ve spent a lot of time deciding what to do about you, Heri Gonza. Flannel wanted just one poke at you and wouldn’t settle for anything else. The rest of us felt that killing was too good for you, but we wanted you dead. So we wrote you that script. Now you’re dead.”

Heri Gonza rose after a moment and walked through the stage door and out to the middle of acres and acres of stage. He stood there alone all night, and in the morning was gone.